Exhibition: ‘Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography’ at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York

Exhibition dates: 7th May, 2010 – 4th April 2011

Ilse Bing (American born Germany, 1899-1998)
Self-Portrait in Mirrors
1931
Gelatin silver print
10 1/2 x 12″ (26.8 x 30.8cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Joseph G. Mayer Fund
© 2010 The Ilse Bing Estate / Courtesy Edwynn Houk Gallery

How I wish I could have been in New York to see this exhibition!

Marcus

Many thankx to the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Frances Benjamin Johnston (American, 1864-1952)
Physiology. Class in emergency work
1899-1900
Platinum print
7 9/16 × 9 1/2″ (19.2 × 24.2cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Gift of Lincoln Kirstein

“It is wrong to regard photography as purely mechanical. Mechanical it is, up to a certain point, but beyond that there is great scope for individual and artistic expression.” ~ Frances Benjamin Johnston

After setting up her own photography studio in 1894, in Washington, D.C., Frances Benjamin Johnston was described by The Washington Times as “the only lady in the business of photography in the city.”1 Considered to be one of the first female press photographers in the United States, she took pictures of news events and architecture and made portraits of political and social leaders for over five decades. From early on, she was conscious of her role as a pioneer for women in photography, telling a reporter in 1893, “It is another pet theory with me that there are great possibilities in photography as a profitable and pleasant occupation for women, and I feel that my success helps to demonstrate this, and it is for this reason that I am glad to have other women know of my work.”2

In 1899, the principal of the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in Virginia commissioned Johnston to take photographs at the school for the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris. The Hampton Institute was a preparatory and trade school dedicated to preparing African American and Native American students for professional careers. Johnston took more than 150 photographs and exhibited them in the Exposition Nègres d’Amerique (American Negro Exhibit) pavilion, which was meant to showcase improving race relations in America. The series won the grand prize and was lauded by both the public and the press.

Years later, writer and philanthropist Lincoln Kirstein discovered a leather-bound album of Johnston’s Hampton Institute photographs. He gave the album to The Museum of Modern Art, which reproduced 44 of its original 159 photographs in a book called The Hampton Album, published in 1966. In its preface, Kirstein acknowledged the conflict inherent in Johnston’s images, describing them as conveying the Institute’s goal of assimilating its students into Anglo-American mainstream society according to “the white Victorian ideal as criterion towards which all darker tribes and nations must perforce aspire.”3 The Hampton Institute’s most famous graduate, educator, leader, and presidential advisor Booker T. Washington, advocated for black education and accommodation of segregation policies instead of political pressure against institutionalized racism, a position criticized by anti-segregation activists such as author W. E. B. Du Bois.

Johnston’s pictures neither wholly celebrate nor condemn the Institute’s goals, but rather they reveal the complexities of the school’s value system. This is especially clear in her photographs contrasting pre- and post-Hampton ways of living, including The Old Well and The Improved Well (Three Hampton Grandchildren). In both images, black men pump water for their female family members. The old well system is represented by an aged man, a leaning fence, and a wooden pump that tilts against a desolate sky, while the new well is handled by an energetic young boy in a yard with a neat fence, a thriving tree, and two young girls dressed in starched pinafores. Johnston’s photographs have prompted the attention of artists like Carrie Mae Weems, who has incorporated the Hampton Institute photographs into her own work to explore what Weems described as “the problematic nature of assimilation, identity, and the role of education.”4

Kristen Gaylord, Beaumont and Nancy Newhall Curatorial Fellow, Department of Photography, 2016

1/ “Washington Women with Brains and Business,” The Washington Times, April 21, 1895, 9
2/ Clarence Bloomfield Moore, “Women Experts in Photography,” The Cosmopolitan XIV.5 (March 1893), 586
3/ Lincoln Kirstein, “Introduction,” in The Hampton Album: 44 photographs by Frances B. Johnston from an album of Hampton Institute (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1966), 10
4/ Quoted in Denise Ramzy and Katherine Fogg, “Interview: Carrie Mae Weems,” Carrie Mae Weems: The Hampton Project (New York: Aperture, 2000), 78

Cindy Sherman (American, b. 1954)
Untitled #92
1981
Chromogenic colour print
24 x 47 15/16″ (61 x 121.9cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
The Fellows of Photography Fund
© 2010 Cindy Sherman

Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953)
Nan One Month After Being Battered
1984
Silver dye bleach print (printed 2008)
15 1/2 x 23 1/8″ (39.4 x 58.7cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Purchase
© 2010 Nan Goldin

JoAnn Verburg (American, b. 1950)
Still Life with Serial Killers
1991
Chromogenic print
19 9/16 × 27 11/16″ (49.7 × 70.4cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Horace W. Goldsmith Fund through Robert B. Menschel
© 2025 JoAnn Verburg

One day I went to the market in Spoleto, Italy, where my husband and I spent every summer and my flowers were wrapped up in a newspaper that I brought home and realised had a photograph of the serial killers, Charlie Manson and Jeffrey Dahmer, and an article in Italian that asked why these things happen in America. I knew immediately that I wanted to incorporate it into a photograph. And in our bedroom, I had leaned some jumbo postcards from the Courtauld Museum in London on the dresser.

Although the photograph could have a lot of traditional still life elements in it, you know, the bottle or the fruit, or the flowers, I like the fact that an aspect of the still life work that I’m able to bring in is the news that’s going on in another part of the world.

In my still lives, bringing in the newspaper allows me to connect these things that might seem very disparate, a fragment of a painting by a French painter from another century, put together with a news article about murder. But in fact, the nature of our contemporary lives is that we’re flipping the channels all the time. We’re experiencing so many things at once, and we’re not able to selectively engage only one thing at a time.

Text from the The Museum of Modern Art website

The Museum of Modern Art draws from its rich collection of photography to present the history of the medium from the dawn of the modern period to the present with the exhibition Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography, from May 7 to August 30, 2010. Filling the entire third-floor Edward Steichen Photography Galleries with photographs made exclusively by women artists, this installation comprises more than 200 works by approximately 120 artists, including a selection of exceptional recent acquisitions and works on view for the first time by such artists as Anna Atkins, Claude Cahun, Rineke Dijkstra, VALIE EXPORT, Nan Goldin, Helen Levitt, and Judith Joy Ross. The exhibition also includes masterworks by such luminaries as Berenice Abbott, Diane Arbus, Gertrude Käsebier, Dorothea Lange, Lisette Model, Tina Modotti, Cindy Sherman, and Carrie Mae Weems, as well as pictures, collages, video, and photography-based installations drawn from other curatorial departments by artists such as Hannah Höch, Barbara Kruger, Annette Messager, Yoko Ono, Lorna Simpson, Kiki Smith, and Hannah Wilke. The exhibition is organised by Roxana Marcoci, Curator; Sarah Meister, Curator; and Eva Respini, Associate Curator, Department of Photography, The Museum of Modern Art.

The Edward Steichen Photography Galleries comprise a circuit of six rooms devoted to a rotating selection of photographs from the Museum’s collection. The galleries featuring works from 1850 to the 1980s open on May 7, 2010, and remain on view through March 21, 2011. The most contemporary works in the exhibition are currently on view in The Robert and Joyce Menschel Gallery, and they remain on view through August 30, 2010.

For much of photography’s 170-year history, women have contributed to its development as both an art form and a means of communication, expanding its parameters by experimenting with every aspect of the medium. Self-portraits and representations of women by a variety of women practitioners are a recurring motif, as seen in works by artists ranging from Julia Margaret Cameron to Lucia Moholy, and from Germaine Krull to Katy Grannan. Significant groups of works by individual photographers are highlighted within this chronological survey, including in-depth presentations of the work of Frances Benjamin Johnston, Käsebier, Modotti, Lange, Levitt, Arbus, Goldin, and Ross.

Marking the entrance to The Edward Steichen Photography Galleries is a large-scale photographic wallpaper, Fluxus Wallpaper, realised by Yoko Ono and George Maciunas in the early 1970s. This work depicts the serial repetition of a set of buttocks, an image originating from a provocative Fluxus film made by Ono in 1966.

Pictures by Women opens with a gallery of nineteenth and early twentieth-century work, representing the variety of photography’s applications. The earliest photograph in the installation was made in the 1850s by British photographer Anna Atkins, who used the cyanotype process to record her many plant specimens. Presented side by side are in-depth groupings of work by American photographers Frances Benjamin Johnston and Gertrude Käsebier. In 1899 the Hampton Institute commissioned Johnston to take photographs at the school that were featured in an exhibition about contemporary African American life at the Paris Exposition of 1900. On view is a selection of pictures taken from a larger album of 156, which exemplify Johnston’s talent for balancing pictorial delicacy and classical composition with the demands of working on assignment. Käsebier – another woman who produced photographic works of art while operating a successful commercial studio – is best known for her portraits and symbolic, soft-focus pictures of the mother-and-child theme.

The rise of photographic modernism in the 1920s and 1930s is traced in the second gallery primarily with the work of European women artists. A wall of portraits of women showing the range of artistic expression and experimentation during this period includes Claude Cahun’s radical gender-bending self-portrait in drag (1921); Lucia Moholy’s striking portrait of fellow Bauhaus student Florence Henri (1927); and Hannah Höch’s Indian Dancer: From an Ethnographic Museum (1930), a collage evoking the modern woman. Included here is also a photocollage by the little known Japanese artist Toshiko Okanoue, titled In Love (1953). Cannibalising images from U.S. magazines such as Life and Vogue, this surreal collage represents a young Japanese woman’s perception of the Western way of life. A group of pictures taken in Mexico in the late 1920s by Italian photographer Tina Modotti possess an aesthetic clarity and beauty that reflect her increasing political involvement within her adopted country. Also included is Ilse Bing’s Self-Portrait in Mirrors (1931), a picture staging a complex mise-en-scène between two reflections – one in the mirror and the other in the camera’s eye – as well as similarly powerful works by Imogen Cunningham, Florence Henri, Germaine Krull, and Lee Miller, who experimented with mobile perspectives of the handheld camera and graphic compositions.

The third gallery features photographers who devoted themselves to the complex challenge of exploring the social world in the interwar and postwar periods. Largely comprising work by American women, this gallery includes comprehensive presentations of two of America’s leading photographers, Dorothea Lange and Helen Levitt. The breadth of Lange’s accomplishments is represented through a selection of approximately 20 photographs, all of women, including her iconic Depression-era picture Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California (1936); the memorable One Nation, Indivisible, San Francisco (1942); and pictures capturing the bustle of postwar life in America, such as Mother and Child, San Francisco (1952). Opposite these works is a wall of colour photographs taken by Levitt in the 1970s on the streets of New York City. These lively, spontaneous pictures are full of humour and drama, and continue the rich tradition of the American documentary genre that Levitt helped establish in the 1940s with her black-and-white photographs. The rest of the gallery includes a variety of work made during the period, including Berenice Abbott’s documents of the changing architecture and character of New York City in the 1930s, and Barbara Morgan’s elegant 1940 photograph of dancer Martha Graham performing her dramatic piece “Letter to the World,” based on the love life of American poet Emily Dickinson.

Photography’s documentary tradition in the postwar period continues in the fourth gallery, most notably with a selection of Diane Arbus’s portraits of women, such as A Widow in Her Bedroom, New York City (1963); Identical Twins, Roselle, New Jersey (1966); and Girl in Her Circus Costume, Maryland (1967). This gallery also includes work by artists of the 1960s and 1970s who embraced photography not just as a way of describing experience, but as a conceptual tool for appropriating and manipulating existing photographs. Examples include Martha Rosler’s collage Cleaning the Drapes (1969-1972), which juxtaposes images of domestic bliss taken from women’s magazines with news pictures of the war in Vietnam. The gallery also introduces several notable examples of acts performed for the camera, including Adrian Piper’s self-portrait series Food for the Spirit (1971), a meditation on transcendental being through an analysis of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason; and VALIE EXPORT’s provocative Action Pants: Genital Panic (1969). Presented as a set of posters, this work memorialised a performance in which the Austrian artist marched into an experimental art-film house in Munich wearing crotchless trousers, challenging mostly male viewers to “look at the real thing” instead of passively enjoying images of women on the screen.

The emergence of colour photography as a major force in the 1970s is seen in the fifth gallery, with large photographs, including Tina Barney’s Sunday New York Times (1982) and a picture from Cindy Sherman’s celebrated Centerfolds (1981) series. This gallery also includes the work of postmodern artists associated with The Pictures Generation, such as Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, Sherrie Levine, and Laurie Simmons, who played with photography’s potential to comment on the increasingly image-saturated world of the late twentieth century. Representing the other end of the photographic spectrum is the diaristic aesthetic of Nan Goldin. A group of Goldin photographs dating from 1978 to 1985 capture the shared experience of an artistic downtown New York community – a generation ravaged by drug abuse and AIDS. These pictures of the artist’s friends, lovers, and Goldin herself explore the highs and the lows of amorous relationships. These are presented opposite work by Gay Block, Sally Mann, and Sheron Rupp, who use the probing vision of straightforward photography to explore the world around us.

Concluding the installation in The Robert and Joyce Menschel Gallery are major groups of works that suggest the diversity of artistic strategies and forms in contemporary photography. A group of Judith Joy Ross portraits of very different women – a graduation guest (1993), a soldier (1990), a congresswoman (1987), and a visitor to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (1984) – invite us to reflect upon the relationship between social roles and the unique identities of the individuals who fulfil them. Presented on the same wall is Rineke Dijkstra’s ongoing series Almerisa, comprising 11 photographs made over a period of 14 years. Dijkstra first photographed Almerisa – a six-year-old Bosnian girl whose family had relocated from their war-torn native country to Amsterdam – as part of a project documenting children of refugees. Dijkstra continued to photograph her at one- or two-year intervals, chronicling not only her development from childhood through adolescence and into adulthood but also her cultural assimilation from Eastern to Western Europe. A selection from Carrie Mae Weems’s series From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried (1995) superimpose sand-blasted text over found photographs to dissect photography’s historical role in imposing stereotypes upon African Americans. Rounding out this gallery is a wall dedicated to portraits of women, including work by Valérie Belin, Tanyth Berkeley, Katy Grannan, and Cindy Sherman, suggesting the plasticity of photography and, indeed, of female identity itself.

Press release from the MoMA website

Julia Margaret Cameron (British born India, 1815-1879) 'Untitled' c. 1867

Julia Margaret Cameron (British, 1815-1879)
Untitled
c. 1867
Albumen silver print
13 3/16 x 11″ (33.5 x 27.9cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Gift of Shirley C. Burden

Gertrude Käsebier (American, 1852-1934)
The Manger
1899
Platinum print
12 13/16 x 9 5/8″ (32.5 x 24.4cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Gift of Mrs. Hermine M. Turner

Tina Modotti (Italian, 1896-1942) 'Campesinos (Workers' Parade)' 1926

Tina Modotti (Italian, 1896-1942)
Workers Parade
1926
Gelatin silver print
8 7/16 x 7 5/16″ (21.5 x 18.6cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Given anonymously

Lucia Moholy (British, 1894-1989)
Untitled (Florence Henri)
1927
Gelatin silver print
14 5/8 x 11″ (37.1 x 28cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Thomas Walther
© 2010 Lucia Moholy Estate/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

Hannah Höch (German, 1889-1978) 'Indian Dancer: From an Ethnographic Museum' 1930

Hannah Höch (German, 1889-1978)
Indian Dancer: From an Ethnographic Museum (Indische Tänzerin: Aus einem ethnographischen Museum)
1930
Cut-and-pasted printed paper and metallic foil on paper
10 1/8 x 8 7/8″ (25.7 x 22.4cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Frances Keech Fund
© 2019 Hannah Höch / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Germany

Through the cut-and-pasted elements of Indian Dancer, Höch assembled references to film, Central African sculpture, and the domestic sphere. Her collaged model is the actress Renée (Maria) Falconetti (also known simply as “Falconetti”), appearing in a publicity still for Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1928 film The Passion of Joan of Arc. Half of Falconetti’s face is replaced with the ear, eye, and mouth of a wooden dance mask from Cameroon. Atop her head rests a crown of cutlery: cutout shapes of spoons and knives, set against glinting metallic foil.

This work belongs to a series of photomontages called From an Ethnographic Museum (1924-1934), in which Höch juxtaposed images of women with reproductions of tribal art cut from magazines. The artist cited a visit to the ethnographic museum in Leiden, in the Netherlands, as an influence in the conception of this series; however, she used material from other cultures mostly as a point of departure for commentary on the status of women in contemporary German society. Invoking an androgynous fifteenth-century French martyr as embodied by a glamorous movie star, capping her with the finery of a domestic goddess, and aligning her with a cultural Other, this composite representation examines the complex facets of modern femininity.

Publication excerpt from MoMA Highlights: 375 Works from The Museum of Modern Art, New York (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2019)

Grete Stern (Argentine born Germany, 1904-1999)
Photomontage for Madí, Ramos Mejía, Argentina
1946-1947
Gelatin silver print
23 9/16 × 19 7/16″ (59.8 × 49.4cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Latin American and Caribbean Fund and partial gift of Mauro Herlitzka
© 2025 Galería Jorge Mara-La Ruche

Toshiko Okanoue (Japan, b. 1928)
In Love
1953
Cut-and-pasted printed papers on printed paper
14 x 9 5/8″ (35.6 x 24.4cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Committee on Photography Fund and Committee on Drawings Funds
© 2019 Toshiko Okanoue

Martha Rosler (American, b. 1943)
Cleaning the Drapes from the series House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home
c. 1967-1972
Pigmented inkjet print (photomontage), printed 2011
17 5/16 x 23 3/4″ (44 x 60.3cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Committee on Photography and The Modern Women’s Fund
© Martha Rosler

Rosler conceived Bringing the War Home during a time of increased intervention in Vietnam by the United States military. Splicing together pictures of Vietnamese citizens maimed in the war, published in Life magazine, with images of the homes of affluent Americans culled from the pages of House Beautiful, Rosler made literal the description of the conflict as the “living-room war,” so called in the USA because the news of ongoing carnage in Southeast Asia filtered into tranquil American homes through television reports. By urging viewers to reconsider the “here” and “there” of the world picture, these activist photomontages reveal the extent to which a collective experience of war is shaped by media images.

Gallery label from The Shaping of New Visions: Photography, Film, Photobook, April 16, 2012 – April 29, 2013

Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009)
New York
1977
Chromogenic print, printed c. 2005
17 15/16 × 11 15/16″ (45.6 × 30.4cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Gift of Marvin Hoshino
© 2025 Film Documents LLC

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Review: ‘Navigating Widely’ by Vanila Netto at Arc One Gallery, Melbourne

Exhibition dates: 1st March – 26th March 2011

Vanila Netto (Brazil, b. 1963)
Pole Relief
2011
50 x 50cm
Archival pigment ink on cotton rag paper

“There’s an odd diaristic quality to Vanila Netto’s photographic, still life, video and neon works. What at first might seem like a hotchpotch of gestures, assemblages and moments reveals a lateral narrative – still points on a fluid map.”

Dan Rule in The Age newspaper

Netto’s work moves from one place to another, Navigating Widely. Some elements are more successful than others. The grainy colour field photographs of extruded objects (foam packing, the detritus of cardboard) fail to impress lacking the fidelity that the subject matter requires and the ability to integrate successfully into the lateral narrative. The Super 8 film transferred to digital video It is time to bridge (2011) is excellent, evoking as it does the utopian ideals of industrialisation, planes and rockets becoming “permanent and sedentary residents” of an abandoned dream park. The diptych neon installation Elation, Deflation (Inner Tubes) (2011) is also effective in evoking the interface between human and machine.

The best work in the exhibition is the series of small square format, analogue colour photographs that have been printed digitally (see photographs below). There is a lovely spatial resistance in these photographs – hints of colour, slices, markings on walls, the collision of opposites – that elevates them above the rest of the exhibition. In these photographs, the punctum pricks our consciousness but is it enough? Although these are interesting photographs, are they photographs that you would remember in a week, a month or a year? More was needed to hang your hat on, perhaps an ambiguous sense of Time that stretched the frame of reference.

Overall, the hotchpotch of gestures, assemblages and moments needed a more substantial grounding and, for me, became points on a confused map: a collection of complexities, both global and personal, that needed a focusing of rationale and conceptualisation. Less is more! Drawing what are some good ideas and threads together in a simplified form would add to the strength of the work for there is talent here. Perhaps concentrating on one idea and exploring it more fully would be a step along the path. I look forward to the next literation.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thanxk to Angela Connor for her help and to Arc One Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photograph for a larger version of the image.

Vanila Netto (Brazil, b. 1963)
Colossus
2011
100 x 100cm
Archival pigment ink on cotton rag paper

Vanila Netto (Brazil, b. 1963)
Mir
2011
50 x 50cm
Archival pigment ink on cotton rag paper

Vanila Netto (Brazil, b. 1963)
Wheeling Consorts
2011
50 x 50cm
Archival pigment ink on cotton rag paper

Vanila Netto (Brazil, b. 1963)
Solaris
2011
50 x 50cm
Archival pigment ink on cotton rag paper

Vanila Netto (Brazil, b. 1963)
Air Buzzing
2011
50 x 50cm
Archival pigment ink on cotton rag paper

Arc One Gallery
45 Flinders Lane
Melbourne, 3000
Phone: (03) 9650 0589

Opening hours:
Wed – Sat 11am – 5pm

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Exhibition: ‘The Immortal Alexander the Great: The myth, the reality, his journey, his legacy’ at Hermitage Amsterdam

Exhibition dates: 18th September 2010 – 18th March 2011

Black-figure hydria: Achilles with Hector's body  c. 510 BC

Black-figure hydria: Achilles with Hector’s body
Attica, Leagros group, Antiopa Painter
c. 510 BC
Earthenware
h 49cm
© State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg

What beautiful artefacts!

Marcus

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

Head of Alexander (fragment of a figure)  175-150 BC

Head of Alexander (fragment of a figure)
Asia Minor, Bithynia (?)
Roman copy, 1st century BC, after Greek original
175-150 BC
Fine-grained marble
h 6cm
© State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg

Cameo. Twin portrait of Ptolemy II Philadelphos and Arsinoe II (Gonzaga Cameo) 3rd century BC

Cameo. Twin portrait of Ptolemy II Philadelphos and Arsinoe II (Gonzaga Cameo)
Alexandria
3rd century BC
Three-layer sardonyx
15.7 x 11.8cm
© State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg

Figure of Cleopatra VII
Egypt
51-30 BC
Basalt
h 104cm
© State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg

Cuirass breastplate
Italy
Late 16th century
Steel, bone, wrought and carved
h 42cm
© State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg

No other king from antiquity has such a powerful appeal to the imagination as Alexander the Great (356-323 BC). Nor other king has been so often cited and depicted as an example.

The exhibition The Immortal Alexander the Great will be on view from 18 September 2010 until 18 March 2011 in the Hermitage Amsterdam, with over 350 masterpieces, including the famous Gonzaga cameo from the State Museum the Hermitage in St Petersburg. This is the first time that any Dutch museum has devoted an exhibition to Alexander the Great, his journey to the East, and the influence of Hellenism. The exhibition spans a period of almost 2500 years. In the Hermitage Amsterdam, the ‘immortal’ Alexander will be brought to life for six months.

Alexander was born in 356 BC as the son of King Philip II of Macedonia. In boyhood he was taught by Aristotle, who would be an abiding influence on him. At twenty years of age Alexander succeeded to the throne, following his father’s assassination. Two years later he embarked on the great expedition that would seal his fame. His conquests brought him into contact with numerous countries and cultures: Syria, Egypt, Persia, Bactria, and India. He founded new cities wherever he went, naming many of them Alexandria. His arrival had a lasting impact on local architecture, art, language, and ways of life: in the course of time they assimilated and displayed Greek influence, a process that became known as Hellenism.

The Greek sphere of influence was vast: it extended from Asia Minor to India, from Egypt to Mongolia. Alexander’s name and fame has endured down to the present day.

The exhibition in the Hermitage Amsterdam gives a picture of Alexander himself and of the great cultural and artistic changes that followed in the train of his conquests.

The exhibition begins with the myth of Alexander. Images in paintings dating from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, tapestries, and decorative arts display his heroic deeds and conquests. Impressive examples include paintings by Pietro Antonio Rotari (Alexander the Great and Roxana) and Sebastiano Ricci (Apelles painting Campaspe), and a tapestry depicting The Family of Darius before Alexander the Great.

The exhibition then moves on to Alexander’s reality, his native Macedonia, his teachers, his heroes Achilles and Heracles, and his ideals. The lion’s share of this reality consists of his journey, the Great Expedition to the East: an unparalleled campaign of conquest lasting over ten years, with an army that was more than 50,000 strong. Objects from Egypt and Persia, from the nomads and the Babylonians, attest to the rich cultures that he encountered on his travels. Visitors can follow the route of his celebrated journey on interactive maps and computers.

This part of the exhibition also highlights the Greek influence on those other cultures. Terracotta figurines depicting men and women, gods and satyrs, musicians and Eros, and stone fragments of architecture, testify to the artistic wealth that characterised the Hellenistic territories from the fourth century BC to the first few centuries AD. While many of these works reflect the Greek spirit of cheerfulness and playfulness, the Greeks also took an interest in the atypical, such as disabilities and deformities.

Finally, the exhibition dwells on Alexander’s heritage. Fourth-century reliefs from Palmyra demonstrate the endurance of Greek traditions outside Greece, as do papyruses bearing texts in Greek, which were still being produced in the ninth century. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Alexander played a prominent role in Persian literature, in which he is known as Iskander. He is recognisable in finely executed miniatures.

Alexander the Great is still a topical figure in our own times. Very recently (2004) a broad international public became better acquainted with him thanks to Oliver Stone’s film of his life. Alexander is a phenomenon. He is immortal. And the exhibition on show at the Hermitage Amsterdam makes this abundantly clear.

Erwin Olaf was asked to make photographic interpretations of Alexander, which he did in a photographic series and a short film. By interlacing objects from the exhibition with photographs of an actual model, Olaf has succeeded in skilfully conveying Alexander’s character traits and his handsome features.

Press release from the Hermitage Amsterdam website [Online] Cited 13/03/2011 no longer available online

Figure of Bacchus/Dionysus Late 4th-early 3rd century BC

Figure of Bacchus/Dionysus
Roman copy, 2nd century AD, after Greek original
Late 4th-early 3rd century BC
Marble
h 207cm
© State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg

Heracles fighting the Nemaean lion
Rome
2nd-3rd century AD fragments with possible Italian additions 16th-17th century
Marble
h 65cm
© State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg

Bronze leg-protectors
Greece
4th century BC
Bronze
h right protector 41, h left protector 40cm
© State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg

Table clock: the vigil of Alexander the Great
Russia, St Petersburg (?), after original by Pierre Philippe Thomire
1830-40 (?)
Bronze, cast, chased and gilded
70 x 30 x 70cm
© State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg

Cameo: triumph of Dionysus
Alexandria
1st century BC
Sardonyx (on carnelian plaque)
4.2 x 2.7cm
© State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg

Dove-shaped pendant earrings
Greek goldsmithing, Alexandria (?), 2nd century BC
Gold, hessonite, glass
H 6.3/6.5cm
© State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg

Plaque: Combat between two warriors
Northern Black Sea region. 4th century BC
Gold
14 x 19cm
© State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg

Olive Wreath
Greek goldsmithing, Northern Black Sea region, Bosporus Kingdom. Mid-4th century BC
Gold
Ø approx. 32cm
© State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg

Earrings depicting Nike, goddess of victory
Greek goldsmithing. Mid-4th century BC
Gold
H4.8cm
© State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg

Tapestry: Alexander the Great and the Family of Darius, from the cycle Stories of Alexander the Great, after cartoons by Charles Le Brun
Flanders, Brussels, atelier of Jan Frans van den Hecke
1661-1695
Wool, silk, silver thread
451 x 690cm
© State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg

Statuette of a horseman with a bow
Iran. 5th-4th century BC
Gold
H 3.6cm
© State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg

Pietro Rotari (Italian, 1707-1762)
Alexander the Great and Roxane
1756
Oil on canvas
Height: 243cm (95.6 in)
Width: 202cm (79.5 in)

Pietro Antonio Rotari (30 September 1707 – 31 August 1762) was an Italian painter of the Baroque period. Born in Verona, he led a peripatetic career, and died in Saint Petersburg, where he had traveled to paint for the Russian court. His portraits, mostly of women, are renowned for being beautiful and realistic. Rotari’s works were generally limited to royal portraits held by notables such as emperors and court ladies.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Bernard Picart (French, 1673-1733), from Charles Le Brun
The Courage of Porus
1700-1733
Etching and engraving, 70.6 x 55 cm (second sheet of a series of three)
© State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg

Ring: Athena Nicephora
Greek goldsmithing, Northern Black Sea region, Pantikapeion (?). Late 4th century BC
Gold
Ring Ø 2.3cm
© State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg

Richard Brompton (English, 1734–1783)
Portrait of Grand Dukes Alexander Pavlovich and Constantin Pavlovich
1781
Oil on canvas
210 х 146.5см
© State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg

Brompton was a pupil of Benjamin Wilson. He then went to Italy, and spent some time in Rome, where he had lessons with Raphael Mengs. He was also introduced to the patronage of the Earl of Northampton, and accompanied the earl to Venice when he was appointed ambassador to the republic. At Venice Brompton painted a conversation-piece, in which he introduced the portraits of the Duke of York and several English gentlemen then on their travels. The picture was afterwards exhibited at the rooms in Spring Gardens in 1763, at which time he returned to England, and for some years practised portrait painting. Extravagant living and debtors brought him to the King’s Bench, but he was rescued by the Empress of Russia, at whose request he went to St. Petersburg, where he was appointed portrait painter to the empress, and where he met with much employment. During this time he was patronized by the empress favorite, Grigory Potemkin. He died in that city in 1783.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Statue of Heracles with the apples of the Hesperides
Roman copy, 2nd century AD, from a Greek original from the mid-4th century BC
Marble
H 201cm
© State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg

The Hermitage Amsterdam
Amstel 51, Amsterdam

Opening hours:
Daily from 10am – 5pm

Hermitage Amsterdam website

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Galleries this week and ‘The Lost Diggers’

March 2011

It has been a busy week!

On Tuesday I visited Australian Galleries in Smith Street to view the Drought Photographs by Sidney Nolan. A wonderful experience. Thursday night was the opening of Manstyle at NGV Australia, Federation Square, the new exhibition that “explores the extremes of masculine style and some of the most influential ideas that have pervaded menswear over the past three centuries.” A lively opening with lots of milliners, designers and fashionistas but only a modicum of style from many of the men in attendance.

Friday saw a trip up Flinders Lane to visit Arc One Gallery (review of Navigating Widely by Vanila Netto), Craft Victoria and drop in and say hello to Mary Lou Jelbart, director of fortyfivedownstairs and view the extensive renovations to the office and storage areas. Always good to catch up with Mary Lou. Then onward, battling terrible traffic, to the opening of New11 at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) where the work was a bit ‘thin’ with a couple of notable exceptions.

Saturday saw a drive to Albert Street, Richmond to catch up with the galleries there – mostly stable exhibitions. Wade Marynowsky’s The Hosts: A Masquerade Of Improvising Automatons at John Buckley Gallery were interesting for 10 minutes or so reminding me of evil, corseted, twirling, marionette Daleks. I then had a chat with the delightful Edwin at Sophie Gannon Gallery and saw the first stages of installation of the upcoming Daniela Federici exhibition that is part of L’Oréal Melbourne Fashion Festival. Looks to be an interesting show.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Antoinette or Louis Thuillier
No title (unknown Australian soldier wearing sheepskin jerkin)
c. 1916/17
Glass negative
France

This image is published under fair dealing for the purposes of criticism or review (Commonwealth of Australia Consolidated Acts: Copyright Act 1968 – Sect 41)

This is a truly amazing story – finding these large format glass slides of First World War soldiers in an attic!

The original farmhouse has so much atmosphere. The photographs themselves are funny, poignant, informal, beautifully shot (the photographer, either Antoinette or Louis Thuillier, had a generous eye) and exhibit wonderful camaraderie

To actually find the original backdrop and be standing in the very place where these photographs were taken sends goose bumps up the spine just looking at the video. Imagine actually being there.

Look at the details – the hands, wedding rings, muddied boots, the children clasped by diggers with smokes in their hands, the props (chairs, motorbikes, guns, plant stands), sheepskin jerkins and the signs – We will soon, be, home, All that is left of them, France, 1916-1918.

They were so young, stoic, handsome. They stare out at you across time.

As Barthes and Sontag would say, these photographs haunt you.

View the video of the remarkable story from the link The Lost Diggers.

Look at hundreds of wonderful photographs from the links below:

The Lost Diggers Facebook page
Australian and international soldiers – Part 1
Australian and international soldiers – Part 2
Australian and international soldiers – Part 3

Antoinette or Louis Thuillier
No title (unknown Australian soldier smoking a pipe)
c. 1916/17
Glass negative
France

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Review: ‘Stormy Weather: Contemporary Landscape Photography’ at NGV Australia, Melbourne

Exhibition dates: 24th September 2010 – 20th March 2011

Nici Cumpston (Australian / Barkindji, b. 1963)
Nookamka – Lake Bonney
2007
watercolour and coloured pencils on ink on canvas
74.2 x 203cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, Victorian Foundation for Living Australian Artists, 2008
© Nici Cumpston

“It is this irreversibly modified world, from the polar caps to the equatorial forests, that is all the nature we have.”

Simon Schama. Landscape and Memory 1

“The term “landscape” can be ambiguous and is often used to describe a creative interpretation of the land by an artist and the terrain itself. But there is a clear distinction: the land is shaped by natural forces while the artist’s act of framing a piece of external reality involves exerting creative control. The terms of this ‘control’ have be theorised since the Renaissance and, while representations of nature have changed over the centuries, a landscape is essentially a mediated view of nature.”

Dr Isobel Crombie 2

“And, finally, what of the vexed, interrelated matter of non-Aboriginal Australians’ sense of belonging? While the Australian historian Manning Clark speculated that European settlers were eternal outsiders who could never know ‘heart’s ease in a foreign land, because … there live foreign ancestral spirits’, it now seems plausible that non-Aboriginal Australians are developing their own form of attachment, not to land as such, but to place. Indeed, it has recently been argued that for contemporary non-Aboriginal Australians, belonging may have no connection with land at all. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why art photographs of the natural landscape have lost their currency and are now far outnumbered by photographs of urban and suburban environments – after all, it is ‘here’ that most Australians live and ‘there’ that the tourist industry beckons them to escape.”

Helen Ennis. Photography and Australia 3

This review took a lot of research, reading, thinking and writing, all good stuff – I hope you enjoy it!

Heavy Weather: Photography and the Australian Land(e)scape

There is nothing fresh about the work in this exhibition. If feels like all the oxygen has been sucked out of the term ‘landscape’, the land itself gasping for air, for life. What the exhibition does evince is an “undercurrent of disruption and contradiction that suggests that all is not as it may appear” (wall text) – and on this evidence the process of photographing the Australian landscape seems to have become an escape from the land, a fragmented and dislocated scoping, mapping and photographing of mental aspects of the land that have little to do with the landscape itself. Landscape as a site of psychological performance. In this sense, the title Stormy Weather should perhaps have been Heavy Weather for contemporary photographic artists seem to make heavy going of photographing our sense of belonging to land, to place.

Is it the artists or the curators that seek to name this work ‘landscape photography’ for it is about everything but the landscape – an escape from the land, perhaps even a denial of it’s very existence. I believe it is the framing of landscape and its imaging in terms of another subject matter. While I am not going to critique individual works in the exhibition, what I am interested in is this framing of the work as ‘landscape photography’.

Since colonial settlement there has been a rich history of photographing the Australian landscape. In the early colonial period the emphasis was on documenting the building of new cities and communities through realist photography and later more picturesque and panoramic vistas of the Australian land as settlers sought comfort in familiar surroundings and a sense of ‘belonging’ to the land (for example day trippers and photographers travelling to the Blue Mountains). Photographers rarely accompanied expeditions into the interior, unlike the exploration and mapping of the land from the East Coast to the West Coast in the United States. Unlike America there has been little tradition of photographing sublime places in Australia because they are not of the same scale as in the USA. It is very difficult to photograph the vast horizon line of the Australian outback and make it sublime. Photographing the landscape then ventured through Pictorialism in the interwar years, Modernism after WWII through to the emergence of art photography in the 1970s (for example see my posting on Dr John Cato), wilderness and tourist photography. An excellent book to begin to understand the history of photography in Australia is Photography and Australia by Helen Ennis (London: Reaktion Books, 2007) that contains the chapter “Land and Landscape.” As Ennis comments in this chapter, “… landscape photography has been the practice of settler Australians and the expression of a settler-colonial culture … The viewpoint in landscape photography has therefore been almost exclusively European”4 although this culture has been changing in recent years with the emergence of Indigenous photographers.

Ennis observes that contemporary landscape photographers embrace internationalist styles, showing a distaste for totalising nationalist narratives and a rejection of essentialist or absolutist viewpoints, noting that an overarching framework like multiculturalism has lost its currency in favour of transnationalism (which is a social movement grown out of the heightened interconnectivity between people and the loosening of boundaries between countries) that does not disavow colonial inequalities and asymmetrical relations between countries and continents.5 Photographers have developed a “photographic language that allows for the expression of the contradictions inherent in contemporary settler Australians’ relations with the land,”6 whilst offering visual artists a “non-linear, non-didactic way of dealing with the complexities of Australia history and experience, and the relationship between past and present.”7

This much then is a given. Let us now look at the framing of the work in the exhibition as ‘landscape photography’.

Simon Schama in his erudite book Landscape and Memory (New York: Vintage, 1996) believes that there can never be a natural or neutral landscape (even the brilliant meadow-floor [at Yosemite] which suggested to its first eulogists a pristine Eden was in fact the result of regular fire-clearances by its Ahwahneechee Indian occupants) and that it is our shaping perception that makes the difference between raw matter and landscape. There was also a recognition that ‘nature’ was neither neutral nor beyond ideology during the 1970s-1980s. Hence there is a double mediation – by both nature and the artist.

Despite the rejection of essentialist or absolutist viewpoints by contemporary photographers and an acknowledgment of the mediated view by/of nature one can say that there is not a single photograph in this exhibition that is just a ‘landscape’. Even the most sublime photographs in the exhibition, David Stephenson’s (Self-portrait), Reflected moon, Tasmania (1985) is cut up into a grid, or Murray Fredericks Salt photographs (2005, see below) where the photographer has waited agonisingly for weeks for just the right weather conditions to take his photographs which the general public, when visiting Lake Eyre, would have no chance of ever seeing. Through this mediation there seems to have emerged an abrogation or denial of landscape by the artists and curators conceptualisation of it, as though they are performing a particular condition, a style; working out a plan of what to do and say. Is it just a denial or is it an artistic strategy?

I believe that these are strategies that limit artists, not strategies that enable them. The curators are equally implicated in these strategies by their naming of these works ‘landscapes’. What purpose does this naming serve, in terms of the development of a sense of place, not nation, that people living in Australia seek to have? We can ask the question: Where do you stand in relationship to the landscape both philosophically and geographically?

After Butler, we can also ask: What forms of cultural myth making are “embedded” in the framing of landscape by the curators, the naming of such work as ‘landscape photography’?

Rarely is the framing recognised for what it is, when it is the viewer interpreting the interpretation that has been imposed upon us, that limits the visual discourse, producing a view of Australian landscape as fragmented norms enacted through visual narrative frames – that in this case efface the representation of land and place. This conceptual framing of what the work is about limits the grounds for discourse for a frame excludes as much as it corrals. The curators form an interpretative matrix of what is seen (or not seen, or withheld), reinforcing notions of landscape photography, the ‘landscape photography’ “that requires a certain kind of subject that actually institutes that conceptual requirement as part of its description and diagnosis.”8 In other words the description ‘landscape photography’ established by the curators becomes a limiting, self-fulfilling prophecy.

Personally, I think the problem with a landscape exhibition is that this is virtually an inane topic. Somehow “documentary” works as a topic because it is about a mental discipline. But “landscape” is no longer really a topic – it used to be a topic when landscape painters wanted to show the landscape (!) but does anyone really want to show this today? Even when the landscape painters wanted to show the sublime, the landscape was always treated with deference. No-one thinks of Minor White as a landscape photographer for he was a metaphysical photographer. And that’s what this exhibition needs – another word to give sense to a photographers efforts.

This is difficult subject matter. While artists may reject essentialist or absolutist viewpoints what has been substituted in their place is a framing, a definition that is post-nature, that undermines any sense of belonging to land, to place. The dissolutive pendulum has swung too far the other way; we look to theory to be inclusive and sometimes stand on our heads to achieve this to our detriment.

As of this moment we are not at the point where we can look back with some certainty and see that we have reached the beginning of the path of understanding. What I would propose to any artist is a photography that is broadly based, cumulative, offering a layered body of work that builds and refers back to an original body of work, much like the photographs of Robert Adams – photographs that do not make claims but ask questions and hint at a more responsive engagement with the landscape.

My hope is that a more broadly based view of place and our sense of belonging to the land emerges, one that challenges our contemporary understanding of the landscape, a viewpoint and line of sight that calm our troubled sense of reality. Robert Adams has written eloquently about photography and the art of seeing. Here is a quote from his seminal book Why People Photograph (Aperture Foundation, 1994) that aptly concludes this review.

“At our best and most fortunate we make pictures because of what stands in front of the camera, to honor what is greater and more interesting than we are. We never accomplish this perfectly, though in return we are given something perfect – a sense of inclusion. Our subject thus redefines us, and is part of the biography by which we want to be known.”9

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to Jemma Altmeier and the National Gallery of Victoria for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Addendum

Further to my argument above there is a session ‘Australian Identity: Australian Bio-diversity and the Landscape of the Imagination’ at the Festival of Ideas, Friday June 17th 2011 at the University of Melbourne where, in the details of the upcoming session, Ian Burn has been quoted about the loss of the landscape:

Details of the session: ‘The connection between landscape and national identity figures prominently in discussions of Australian experience. Recently the pairing of the two has taken a melancholic turn; artist Ian Burn has remarked that ‘A commitment to representing the landscape has come to be about the “loss” of the landscape’. Has the landscape that once supported the Australian legend disappeared? The landscape is represented not only in art but also through science, law and commerce. Are new landscapes and new identities now being imagined and discovered?’

Quotation: “The idea of landscape does not just invoke rival institutional discourses, but today attracts wider and more urgent reflections. A commitment to representing the landscape has become about the ‘loss’ of landscape in the twentieth century … that is about its necessity and impossibility at the same time. Seeing a landscape means focusing on a picture, implicating language in our seeing of the landscape.”

Burn, Ian quoted in Stephen, Ann (ed.,). Artists think: the late works of Ian Burn. Sydney: Power Publications in association with Monash University Gallery, Melbourne, 1996, p. 8.

Footnotes

1/ Schama, Simon. Landscape and Memory. New York: Vintage, 1996, p. 7

2/ Crombie, Isobel. Stormy Weather. Contemporary Landscape Photography (exhibition catalogue). Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 2010, p. 15

3/ Clark, Manning quoted by Peter Read in “A Haunted Land No Longer? Changing Relationships to a Spiritualised Australia,” in Australian Book Review CCLXV (October 2004) pp. 28-33 in Ennis, Helen. “Land and Landscape,” in Photography and Australia. London: Reaktion Books, 2007, pp. 71-72

4/ Ennis, Helen. “Land and Landscape,” in Photography and Australia. London: Reaktion Books, 2007, pp. 51-52

5/ Ennis, Helen. “Land and Landscape,” in Photography and Australia. London: Reaktion Books, 2007, p. 123, p. 133

6/ Ibid., “Land and Landscape,” pp. 71-72

7/ Ibid., “Localism and Internationalism,” p. 128

8/ Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? London: Verso, 2010, p. 161

9/ Adams, Robert. Why People Photograph. New York: Aperture Foundation, 1994, p. 179

Nici Cumpston (Australian / Barkindji, b. 1963)
Flooded Gum, Katarapko Creek, Murray River National Park
2007
Watercolour and pencil on inkjet print on canvas
74.5 x 202.5cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, Victorian Foundation for Living Australian Artists, 2008
© Nici Cumpston

Stephanie Valentin (Australian, b. 1962)
Earthbound
2009
from the Earthbound series
inkjet photograph
70 x 90cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased with funds donated by Phillip Ross and Sophia Pavlovski-Ross, 2009
© Stephanie Valentin

Harry Nankin (Australian, b. 1953)
Of Great Western tears / Duet 2
2006
From The rain series 2006-2007
Gelatin silver photographs
(a-b) 107.1 x 214.3cm (overall)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased NGV Foundation, 2007
© Harry Nankin

Stephanie Valentin (Australia, b. 1962)
Rainbook
2009
From the earthbound series 2009
Colour inkjet print
69.9 x 86.9cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased with funds donated by Philip Ross and Sophia Pavlovski-Ross, 2009
© Stephanie Valentin

Murray Fredericks (Australia, b. 1970)
Salt 154
2005
From the Salt series 2003-
Colour inkjet print
119.3 x 149.3cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, Victorian Foundation for Living Australian Artists, 2009
© Murray Fredericks

Siri Hayes (Australia, b. 1977)
Plein air explorers
2008
Type C photograph
104.3 x 134.8cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, Victorian Foundation for Living Australian Artists, 2009
© Siri Hayes

The work of the contemporary Australian photographers highlighted in this exhibition comes from a profound engagement with the lived landscape around them. The quiet intensity of their work comes from their close and sustained relationship to particular environments. These photographers may use that lived observation to reveal the layers of history in a landscape; to provoke ecological concerns; as the place for site specific performances; or to use the specific poetics of light to reveal the beauty of a place. However for all of them, the real world is the starting point for images of particularity.

Photographers’ interest in the landscape has increased in the last few years. Perhaps as a result of heightened environmental awareness, or an evolution in our engagement with Australian history, practitioners are again turning to the natural world as a site for critical practice and inspiration.

Drawn from the permanent collection the National Gallery of Victoria, the selected photographers in this exhibition have a particular focus that comes from their active relationship to various environments. The artists displayed here reveal history in a landscape; provoke ecological concerns; use the landscape as a site of performance; or reveal the distinctive beauty of a place.

Frequently underpinning these works of quiet intensity and considerable beauty is an undercurrent of disruption and contradiction that suggests all is not as it may first appear.

Text from the National Gallery of Victoria website [Online] Cited 26/02/2011 no longer available online

Rosemary Laing (Australia, b. 1959)
weather #9
2006
From the weather series 2006
Type C photograph
109.9 x 184.6cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, Victorian Foundation for Living Australian Artists, 2007
© Rosemary Laing and Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne

Jill Orr (Australia , b. 1952, lived in the Netherlands 1980-1984)
Southern Cross to bear and behold – Burning
2007
Colour inkjet print
65.5 x 134.9cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, Victorian Foundation for Living Australian Artists, 2010
Photographer: Naomi Herzog for Jill Orr
© Jill Orr

The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia
Federation Square
Corner of Russell and  Flinders Streets, Melbourne

Opening hours:
Open daily 10am – 5pm

National Gallery of Victoria website

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Exhibition: ‘ANALOG: trends in sound and picture’ at The Riflemaker Gallery, London

Exhibition dates: 10th January – 3rd March 2011

Richard Nicholson (British, b. 1968)
Peter Guest darkroom
2006
Courtesy of the artist and Riflemaker

I started my life as an artist as a black and white photographer. I spent many hours ensconced in the enveloping black and red safety light of the darkroom, listening to the sound of running water – a nurturing, womb-like environment despite the toxic nature of the chemicals involved. It was magical to see the image appear in the developing tray out of nothing, an alchemical process that never ceased to amaze me, a link to the early days of photography and the wonder that those first images would have generated. At that time the photography course at Phillip Institute (soon to become part of RMIT University) had 3 huge darkrooms; now they have one with only a couple of enlargers.

Working in those darkrooms did teach you a solid foundation for your art practice: for one thing, the value of developing a working methodology – choosing a good negative that you wanted to print, spending time with it, adjusting the enlarger to obtain optimum size and printing it beautifully – for in a good day I could only print one or possibly two negatives a day. Then there was the process of washing the chemicals out of the paper and drying the prints. The whole process taught you patience, precision and dedication to the task at hand so that the negative revealed in the print something else that might be present, some ‘other’ that photography has the ability to capture if you take time, are aware and receptive to this illumination. These disciplines have held me in good stead during the following years.

I still love analogue colour and black and white photographs. To me it is like the difference between an LP and a CD. The CD might have it all over the LP in terms of information captured but there is this ineffable feeling about an LP with it’s scratches and pops, it’s atmosphere. The same goes for an analogue print and it is something that you can’t quite put your finger on. I believe that there is still a place for analogue prints in the world – for the magical process, for their beauty, sensitivity and downright inspiration. Long may they live.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to The Riflemaker Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs and text in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Richard Nicholson (British, b. 1968)
Roy Bass darkroom, Michael Dyer Associates, Covent Garden
2006
Courtesy of the artist and Riflemaker

The End of Professional Photographic Darkrooms and Music Recording Studios

The impact of digital technology on print photography and music production is the subject of ANALOG at Riflemaker, Soho from 10 January 2011. The exhibition invites us inside the last of London’s photographic darkrooms as well as taking a visit to a working reel-to-reel music studio, courtesy of an installation by Lewis Durham of the band Kitty, Daisy & Lewis.

Richard Nicholson. “A Survey of London’s Remaining Professional Darkrooms 2006-2010”

1979. The year my father constructed a darkroom and introduced me to photography. I was immediately entranced by the printing process and cherished the long hours spent in this dark, private space; standing in the gloom of the red safelight, slowly rocking the print tray, watching the ghost-like image reveal itself through the gently lapping developer solution. As I experimented with the many formulas and techniques detailed in my father’s guidebooks, I often found the most interesting prints were the chemically stained accidents pulled from the bin at the end of a session. The darkroom became a bolt-hole for me; a private space where I could escape from the noise of family life. As I passed through school, university and various jobs, I often sought out a darkroom to escape from the crowd. But as I honed my skills – solarising, masking, bleaching, split-toning, hand-colouring – my prints began to attract public attention.

2006. I’m working in London as a photographer. I’m still shooting film, but digital is becoming ubiquitous. The photographic manufacturer Durst announces that it will no longer be producing enlargers. Annual sales have dropped from a peak of 107,000 units in 1979 to just a few hundred units in recent years. The darkroom has always been integral to my practice as a photographer. But for how much longer? Once bustling hire darkrooms have become eerily quiet, and London labs are dropping like flies. Joe’s Basement, Primary, Metro Soho, Keishi Colour, Ceta, Team Photographic, Sky – all gone. Polaroid has stopped making instant film and Kodak and Fuji are discontinuing one emulsion after another. The recently introduced Canon 5d camera has persuaded many diehard film photographers that digital is the future, and those who remain unconvinced are facing clients who no longer have the budgets for film, Polaroids, clip-tests, contact-sheets and prints. The darkroom’s days are numbered.

Against this backdrop, I begin to look at the darkroom in a new light. My enlarger (a handsomely engineered GeM 504) has been an invisible tool, but now it presents itself as a sad and lumpen creature in the face of extinction. With its long neck, heavy head and inviting focus handles, the thing has a human form which elicits sympathy – the surrounding matt black walls add an air of theatricality. Hearing tales of noble machines being unceremoniously dumped in skips when labs close down, I decide to document them before they all disappear.

I chose to photograph professional darkrooms because they are often shrouded in mystery; hidden behind the tidy glass facade of the lab’s front desk. As a keen printer myself, I was curious to see the workspaces of the master printers; craftsmen who had spent their working lives in darkness. The spaces I discovered were often haphazard and brimming with personal details; coffee cups, CD collections, family snapshots, unpaid invoices, curious knick-knacks brought back by globe-trotting photographers. These human elements transformed what might have been a detached typology of modernist industrial design into something more intimate and nuanced.

I photographed each darkroom on large format film. Working in total darkness, I carefully painted these normally dingy spaces with a flashgun, seeking to reveal the beauty of the machinery, and shed some light on the clutter stained with the patina of time. Some of the darkrooms were busy, whilst others were neglected (all attention being given to the new inkjet printer in the adjoining corridor). Many of the darkrooms were facing imminent closure. (The one with the slogan pinned to the wall, ‘I want to stay here forever’, was dismantled the day after I photographed it and is currently being converted into luxury apartments.)

Many of the iconic images of recent decades were crafted in these rooms. Mike Spry’s high contrast lith prints of U2 and Depeche Mode for music photographer Anton Corbijn, Peter Guest’s black and white prints of the Trainspotting cast for portrait photographer Lorenzo Agius, or Brian Dowling’s intricately masked colour prints for fashion photographer Nick Knight. Such commercial work is now routinely carried out in Photoshop and professional printers have had to seek out new avenues for their skills. The art market is perhaps the last bastion for traditional darkroom printing, but even this area is being taken over by digital machines – Lightjet, Lambda, and Chromira printers. But suddenly there is a resurgence of interest in analog processes amongst younger photographers who were brought up on digital. Left cold by the clinical nature of the virtual workspace, they seek depth and authenticity via the chemical ambience of the traditional darkroom. Alternative processes from the early history of photography are being rediscovered, Polaroid instant film has been relaunched, and the craze for poorly engineered Russian and Chinese film cameras (Lomo, Holga, Diana etc) continues unabated.

I wonder at this enthusiasm. Like many committed film photographers, I experienced a belated epiphany when I finally switched to digital. My darkroom skills were easily transferred to the digital realm, and I soon discovered that Photoshop offered creative printmaking possibilities that far exceeded what I could achieve in the darkroom. Whilst I don’t miss the chemistry of the darkroom – much of it highly toxic – I do miss the aura of the red safelight and the soothing sound of running water. I miss the excited sense of performance when making a complicated print (there’s no ‘undo’ button in the darkroom), and the physicality of dodging and burning – the manual shaping of the light. With film I had a network of contacts across London and felt embedded in the city, whereas with digital I feel disembodied. The history of photography is young and fast moving. The darkroom era was short lived. This collection of images represents its apotheosis.”

Richard Nicholson, November 2010

I would like to thank all the printers who kindly allowed me to photograph their darkrooms.

Nicholson, Richard. “A Survey of London’s Remaining Professional Darkrooms 2006-2010,” in Taylor, Tot (ed.,). ANALOG: trends in sound and picture book. London: Riflemaker, 2011, pp. 17-19. ISBN 978-0-9563571-6-8.

Richard Nicholson (British, b. 1968)
Roy Snell darkroom, Earlsfield
2006
Courtesy of the artist and Riflemaker

Richard Nicholson (British, b. 1968)
Gordon Bishop Associates, Paddington Street
2006
Courtesy of the artist and Riflemaker

The Riflemaker Gallery
79 Beak Street, Regent Street,
London W1

Opening hours:
Monday – Friday 10.00am – 6.00pm
Saturday 12.00pm – 6.00pm

Riflemaker website

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Vale Dr John Cato (1926-2011)

February 2011

It is with much sadness that I note the death of respected Australian photographer and teacher Dr John Cato (1926-2011). Son of Australian photographer Jack Cato, who wrote one of the first histories of Australian photography (The Story of the Camera in Australia (1955)), John was apprentice to his father before setting up a commercial studio with Athol Shmith that ran from 1950-1971. Dr Cato then joined Shmith at the fledgling Prahran College of Advanced Education photography course in 1974, becoming head of the course when Shmith retired in 1979, a position he held until John retired in 1991.

I was fortunate enough to get to know John and his vivacious wife Dawn. I worked with him and co-curatored his retrospective with William Heimerman, ‘…and his forms were without number’ at The Photographers’ Gallery, South Yarra, in 2002. My catalogue essay from this exhibition is reproduced below.

John was always generous with his time and advice. His photographs are sensitive, lyrical renditions of the Australian landscape. He had a wonderful ear for the land and for the word, a musical lyricism that was unusual in Australian photographers of the early 1970s. He understood how a person from European background could have connection to this land, this Australia, without being afraid to express this sense of belonging; he also imaged an Aboriginal philosophy (that all spirits have a physical presence and everything physical has a spiritual presence) tapping into one of the major themes of his personal work: the mirror held up to reveal an’other’ world – the language of ambiguity and ambivalence (the dichotomy of opposites e.g. black / white, masculine / feminine) speaking through the photographic print.

His contribution to the art of photography in Australia is outstanding. What are the precedents for a visual essay in Australian photography before John Cato? I ask the reader to consider this question.

It would be fantastic if the National Gallery of Victoria could organise a large exhibition and publication of his work, gathering photographs from collections across the land, much like the successful retrospective of the work of John Davis held in 2010. Cato’s work needs a greater appreciation throughout Australia because of it’s seminal nature, containing as it does the seeds of later development for Australian photographers. His educational contribution to the development of photography as an art form within Australia should also be acknowledged in separate essays for his influence was immense. His life, his teaching and his work deserves nothing less.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

‘… and his forms were without number’

John Cato: A Retrospective of the Photographic Work 1971-1991

This writing on the photographic work of Dr John Cato from 1971-1991 is the catalogue essay to a retrospective of his work held at The Photographers’ Gallery in Prahran, Melbourne in 2002. Dr Cato forged his voice as a photographic artist in the early 1970s when photography was just starting to be taken seriously as an art form in Australia. He was a pioneer in the field, and became an educator in art photography. He is respected as one of Australia’s preeminent photographers of the last century.

With the arrival of ‘The New Photography’1 from Europe in the early 1930’s, the formalist style of Modernism was increasingly adopted by photographers who sought to express through photography the new spirit of the age. In the formal construction of the images, the abstract geometry, the unusual camera angles and the use of strong lighting, the representation ‘of the thing in itself’2 was of prime importance. Subject matter often emphasised the monumentality of the factory, machine or body/landscape. The connection of the photographer with the object photographed was usually one of sensitivity and awareness to an external relationship that resulted in a formalist beauty.

Following the upheaval and devastation of the Second World War, photography in Australia was influenced by the ‘Documentary’ style. This “came to be understood as involved chiefly with creating aesthetic experiences … associated with investigation of the social and political environment.”3 This new movement of social realism, “… a human record intimately bound with a moment of perception,”4 was not dissimilar to Henri Cartier-Bresson’s ‘decisive moment’ (images a la sauvette) where existence and essence are in balance.5

The culmination of the ‘Documentary’ style of photography was The Family of Man exhibition curated by Edward Steichen that toured Australia in 1959.6 This exhibition, seen many times by John Cato,7 had a theme of optimism in the unity and dignity of man. The structure of the images in ‘Documentary’ photography echoed those of the earlier ‘New Photography’.

Max Dupain “stressed the objective, impersonal and scientific character of the camera; the photographer could reveal truth by his prerogative of selection.”8 This may have been an objective truth, an external vocalising of a vision that concerned itself more with exterior influences rather than an internal meditation upon the subject matter.

John Cato (Australian, 1926-2011)
Untitled from the series Essay I, Landscapes in a Figure
1971-1979
Silver gelatin photograph

In 1971, John Cato’s personal photographic work was exhibited for the first time as part of the group show Frontiers at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.9 Earth Song emerged into an environment of social upheaval inflamed by Australian involvement in the Vietnam War. It provided a group of enthusiastic people who were beginning to be interested in photography as art, an opportunity to see the world, and photography, through a different lens. The 52 colour photographic prints in Earth Song, were shown in a sequence that used melodic line and symphonic form as its metaphoric basis, standing both as individual photographs and as part of a total concept.10

In the intensity of the holistic vision, in the connection to the subconscious, the images elucidate the photographers’ search for a perception of the world. This involved an attainment of a receptive state that allowed the cracks, creases and angles inherent in the blank slate of creation to become meaningful. The sequence contained images that can be seen as ‘acts of revelation’,11confirmed and expanded by supporting photographs, and they unearthed a new vocabulary for the discussion of spiritual and political issues by the viewer. They may be seen as a metaphor for life.

The use of sequence, internal meditation and ‘revelation’, although not revolutionary in world terms,12 were perhaps unique in the history of Australian photography at that time. During the production of Earth Song, John Cato was still running a commercial studio in partnership with the photographer Athol Shmith and much of his early personal work was undertaken during holidays and spare time away from the studio. Eventually he abandoned being a commercial photographer in favour of a new career as an educator, but found this left him with even less time to pursue his personal work.13

Earth Song (1970-1971) was followed by the black and white sequences:

Tree – A Journey	18 images	1971-1973
Petroglyphs	14 images	1971-1973
Seawind	14 images	1971-1975
Proteus	18 images	1974-1977
Waterway	16 images	1974-1979

Together they form the extensive series Essay I, Landscapes in a Figure, parts of which are held in the permanent photography collection of the National Gallery of Victoria.14

John Cato (Australian, 1926-2011)
Untitled from the series Essay I, Landscapes in a Figure
1971-1979
Silver gelatin photograph

The inspiration for Essay I and later personal work came from many sources. An indebtedness to his father, the photographer Jack Cato, is gratefully acknowledged. Cato also acknowledges the influence of literature: William Shakespeare (especially the Sonnets, and As You Like It), William Blake, Walt Whitman (Leaves of Grass), Lewis Carroll (Through the Looking Glass), the Bible; and of music (symphonic form), the mythology of the Dreamtime and Aboriginal rock paintings.15 Each body of work in Essay I was based on an expression of nature, the elements and the Creation. They can be seen as Equivalents16 of his most profound life experiences, his life philosophy illuminated in physical form.

John Cato was able to develop the vocabulary of his own inner landscape while leaving the interpretation of this landscape open to the imagination of the viewer. Seeing himself as a photographer rather than an artist, he used the camera as a tool to mediate between what he saw in his mind’s eye, the subjects he photographed and the surface of the photographic negative.17 Photographing ‘in attention’, much as recommended by the teacher and philosopher Krishnamurti,18 he hoped for a circular connection between the photographer and the subject photographed. He then looked for verification of this connection in the negative and, eventually, in the final print.

Essay II, Figures in a Landscape, had already been started before the completion of Essay I and it consists of three black and white sequences:

Alcheringa	11 images	1978-1981
Broken Spears	11 images	1978-1983
Mantracks	22 images in pairs	1978-1983

The photographs in Essay II seem to express “the sublimation of Aboriginal culture by Europeans”19 and, as such, are of a more political nature. Although this is not obvious in the photographs of Alcheringa, the images in this sequence celebrating the duality of reality and reflection, substance and shadow, it is more insistent in the symbology of Broken Spears and Mantracks. Using the metaphor of the fence post (white man / black man in Broken Spears) and contrasting Aboriginal and European ‘sacred’ sites (in pairs of images in Mantracks), John Cato comments on the destruction of a culture and spirit that had existed for thousands of years living in harmony with the land.

In his imaging of an Aboriginal philosophy (that all spirits have a physical presence and everything physical has a spiritual presence) he again tapped one of the major themes of his personal work: the mirror held up to reveal an’other’ world. Cato saw that even as they are part of the whole, the duality of positive / negative, black / white, masculine / feminine are always in conflict.20 In the exploration of the conceptual richness buried within the dichotomy of opposites, Cato sought to enunciate the language of ambiguity and ambivalence,21 speaking through the photographic print.

The theme of duality was further expanded in his last main body of work, Double Concerto: An Essay in Fiction:

	Double Concerto (Pat Noone)	30 images	1984-1990
	Double Concerto (Chris Noone)	19 images	1985-1991

Double Concerto may be seen as a critique of the power of witness and John Cato created two ‘other’ personas, Pat Noone and Chris Noone, to visualise alternative conditions within himself. The Essay explored the idea that if you send two people to the same location they will take photographs that are completely different from each other, that tell a distinct story about the location and their self:

“For the truth of the matter is that people have mixed feelings and confused opinions and are subject to contradictory expectations and outcomes, in every sphere of experience.”22

This slightly schizophrenic confusion between the two witnesses is further highlighted by Pat Noone using single black and white images in sequence. Chris Noone, on the other hand, uses multiple colour images joined together to form panoramic landscapes that feature two opposing horizons. The use of colour imagery in Double Concerto, with its link to the colour work of Earth Song, can be seen to mark the closing of the circle in terms of John Cato’s personal work. In Another Way of Telling, John Berger states that …

“Photography, unlike drawing, does not possess a language. The photographic image is produced instantaneously by the reflection of light; its figuration is not impregnated by experience or consciousness.”23

But in the personal work of John Cato it is a reflection of the psyche, not of light, that allows a consciousness to be present in the figuration of the photographic prints. The personal work is an expression of his self, his experience, his story and t(his) language, is our language, if we allow our imagination to speak.

Dr Marcus Bunyan 2002

Footnotes

1/ Newton, Gael. Shades of Light: Photography and Australia 1839-1988. Sydney: Australian National Gallery, William Collins, 1988, p. 109

2/ Newton, Gael. Max Dupain. Sydney: David Ell Press,1980, p. 34

3/ Ibid., p. 32

4/ Greenough, Sarah (et al). On the Art of Fixing a Shadow: 150 Years of Photography. Boston: National Gallery of Art, Bullfinch Press, 1989, p. 256

5/ Ibid., p. 256

6/ Newton, Gael. Shades of Light: Photography and Australia 1839-1988. Sydney: Australian National Gallery, William Collins, 1988, p. 131

7/ Ibid., p. 131

8/ Newton, Gael. Max Dupain. Sydney: David Ell Press, 1980, p. 32

9/ Only the second exhibition by Australian photographers at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

10/ Shmith, Athol. Light Vision No.1. Melbourne: Jean-Marc Le Pechoux (editor and publisher), Sept 1977, p. 21

11/ Berger, John and Mohr, Jean. Another Way of Telling. New York: Pantheon Books, 1982, p. 118

12/ Hall, James Baker. Minor White: Rites and Passages. New York: Aperture, 1978

13/ Conversation with the photographer 29/01/1997, Melbourne, Victoria

14/ Newton, Gael. Shades of Light: Photography and Australia 1839-1988. Sydney: Australian National Gallery, William Collins, 1988, p. 135, Footnote 7; p. 149

15/ Conversation with the photographer 22/01/1997, Melbourne, Victoria

16/ Norman, Dorothy. Alfred Stieglitz. New York: Aperture, 1976, p. 5

17/ Ibid.,

18/ Krishnamurti. Beginnings of Learning. London: Penguin, 1975, p. 131

19/ Strong, Geoff. Review. The Age. Melbourne, 28/04/1982

20/ Conversation with the photographer 22/01/1997, Melbourne, Victoria

21/ The principal definition for ambiguity in Websters Third New International Dictionary is: “admitting of two or more meanings … referring to two or more things at the same time.”
That for ambivalence is “contradictory and oscillating subjective states.”
Quoted in Davis, Fred. Fashion, Culture and Identity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992, p. 21.

22/ Levine, Donald. The Flight From Ambiguity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985

23/ Berger, John and Mohr, Jean. Another Way of Telling. New York: Pantheon Books, 1982, p. 95

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Exhibition: ‘Acquisitions of Twentieth-Century Photography’ at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Exhibition dates: 7th December 2010 – 14th February 2011

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

Lewis Hine (American, 1874-1940)
Don’t Smoke, Visits Saloons
1910

Lewis Hine. May 1910. Wilmington, Delaware. “James Lequlla, newsboy, age 12. Selling newspapers 3 years. Average earnings 50 cents per week. Selling newspapers own choice. Earnings not needed at home. Don’t smoke. Visits saloons. Works 7 hours per day.”

Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
Bessie Fontenelle and Little Richard in bed, Harlem New York
1968
Gelatin silver print

Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009)
Squatting girl/spider girl, New York City
1980

From 7 December, the Rijksmuseum will display a selection of 20th-century photographic works acquired in recent years with the support of Baker & McKenzie. The sponsorship from the renowned law firm has already allowed the museum to purchase more than thirty photographs, including works by László Moholy-Nagy, Bill Brandt, Robert Capa and Helen Levitt, as well as photography books by Man Ray and others. When it reopens in 2013, the Rijksmuseum will be the only museum in the Netherlands able to provide an overview of the history of photography in the Netherlands and abroad.

The most recent acquisition sponsored by Baker & McKenzie and the independent art fund Vereniging Rembrandt is a monumental photograph by Bauhaus photographer László Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946). The photograph from 1929 is a key work that marks the transition into modernity. From atop a high bridge, the Pont Transbordeur in Marseille, Moholy-Nagy pointed his camera straight down, where an almost abstract pattern of metal beams contrasted with the sailing boat passing under the bridge. Metal, bridges, machines, aeroplanes and cars formed the icons of a new era for Moholy-Nagy’s generation of artists. They were faced with advancing technology, an enormous increase in scale and mechanisation, and a faster pace of life.

The other photographs to be displayed represent a range of movements in the history of photography. Two photographs by Emil Otto Hoppé (1878-1972) will be displayed. They are both studies of form focusing first and foremost on composition, just as in the Moholy-Nagy work. It was in around 1920 that Hoppé photographed the play of light on cobblestones in New York, and the building of a metal construction in Philadelphia.

The documentary aspects of photography will also be highlighted, with magnificent portraits of a black mother and her child in a report about Harlem in the late 1960s (by Gordon Parks), and a portrait of two men in the southern ‘Cotton States’ of America during the Great Depression of the 1930s (by Peter Sekaer). As early as 1909, Lewis Hine used photography as a weapon in the struggle against injustice. Commissioned by the National Child Labour Committee he documented the child labour industry, in this case a small boy standing on the street selling newspapers.

During the 1930s, Bill Brandt published a (now famous) book on life in London at the time, from which came the photograph Sky lightens over the suburbs, which is both a study of form and documentary in nature. It shows a forest of glistening roofs, depicted in a melancholy yet realistic manner.

In 1942, Piet Mondrian was photographed in his studio by Arnold Newman, a session from which the Rijksmuseum has acquired a range of photographs. There are few portraits of Mondrian in Dutch collections, making this series particularly special.

A work by Helen Levitt is one of the few colour photographs included in the exhibition. Until the 1980s, colour photography was simply ‘not done’ and Levitt was one of the first to experiment with the method. The photograph of a girl searching for something underneath a green car is a marvellous example of composition in colour.

Press release from the Rijksmuseum website

Arnold Newman (American, 1918-2006)
Piet Mondrian, New York
1942
Gelatin silver print

Emil Otto Hoppé (British born Germany, 1979-1942)
Steel construction, Philadelphia
1926
Gelatin silver print

László Moholy-Nagy (Hungary, 1895-1946)
View from Pont Transbordeur, Marseille
1929
Gelatin silver print

Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
Jan Luijkenstraat 1, Amsterdam

Opening hours:
Every day from 9.00 to 17.00

Rijksmuseum website

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Exhibition: ‘Artist’s jewels. From Modernisme to the avant-garde’ at Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, Barcelona

Exhibition dates: 27th October 2010 – 13th February 2011

Alexander Calder (American, 1898-1976) 'Still life' Various dates

Anyone who reads this archive regularly will know of my love of exceptional jewellery. This posting satiates my desire!

The Calder pieces are just outstanding.

Marcus

Many thankx to the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs to see a larger version of the image.

Hector Guimard (French, 1867-1942)
Brooch
1909
© 2010 Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence

Alexander Calder (American, 1898-1976)
Jewellery by US artist Alexander Calder from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, USA
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
© Calder Foundation New York/ VEGAP, Barcelona, 2010

Calder possessed an uncanny ability to synthesise a variety of influences from the world around him to create often simple, always meaningful, and ultimately modern jewellery. In the early 20th century, many avant-garde artists began to collect African tribal art and to reference it in their paintings and sculptures. Likewise, Calder’s brooches, tiaras, and necklaces have more in common with the pectorals, collars, diadems, and neckpieces made by ancient cultures than traditional western European jewellery. For example, Calder repeatedly incorporated the spiral – a typical motif in late Bronze Age artefacts – into his jewellery, as well as his wire figures, drawings, paintings, and other decorative arts. The artist’s personal collections, which included objects from African, Oceanic, and Precolumbian cultures, substantiate his eclectic taste.

Calder’s exploration of jewellery in the 1930s also coincided with his burgeoning interest in Surrealism. As his largest and most dramatic ornaments are unwieldy to wear, Calder’s jewellery may be seen as a Surrealistic strategy to entrap the wearer into participating in an art performance or being metamorphosed by the object. Among those who wore his jewellery were sophisticated art aficionados and artists, such as Peggy Guggenheim, Mary Rockefeller, French actress Jeanne Moreau, and Georgia O’Keeffe.

His sculptural art, regardless of category, has less to do with solidity than with lightness, air, motion, and graceful formal relationships. Calder’s sense of economy, balance, and adaptability, so characteristic of the artist’s much larger and more familiar mobiles and stabiles, extends to his jewellery. While Calder’s more diminutive avant-garde creations converged closely with the aesthetics of the modern age, they remain unmistakably Calder.

Anon. “Metropolitan Museum of Art features Alexander Calder – Inventive Jewelry” on Art Knowledge News website Nd. [Online] Cited 11/01/2011 no longer available online

Salvador Dalí (Spanish, 1904-1989)
Time’s Eye
Nd
© Salvador Dali, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dali, VEGAP, Barcelona, 2010

Salvador Dalí (Spanish, 1904-1989)
Ruby’s lips
1949
© Salvador Dali, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dali, VEGAP, Barcelona, 2010

Artist’s jewels. From Modernisme to the avant-garde explores the approach to the world of jewellery by leading artists of the main art movements in the first decades of the fertile 20th century. The exhibition gathers almost 350 works, chiefly jewels, that strike a dialogue with paintings, sculptures, photographs, fabrics and objets d’art, showing how jewellery made up the little universe of great artists.

Artist’s jewels. From Modernisme to the avant-garde reveals the relations between jewellery and the work of art. This exhibition, the first on this subject to be held in our country, shows the less well-known side of Auguste Rodin, Hector Guimard, Josef Hoffmann, Josep Llimona, Serrurier-Bovy, Henri Van de Velde, Manolo Hugué, Paco Durrio, Pau Gargallo, Max Ernst, Salvador Dalí, Georges Braque, Alexander Calder, Charlotte Perriand, Hans Arp, Pablo Picasso, Juli González, Henri Laurens and many others.

Painters and sculptors, since earliest times, have transferred their artistic forms to the world of jewellery, but it was not until the end of the 20th century, under the powerful influence of Art Nouveau, that artists approached this discipline more openly: ‘Carrying out a large work’, according to Otto Wagner, ‘means expressing beauty without distinguishing between large and small’.

The merger of arts that was a feature of Modernisme and the subsequent elimination of borders between the arts reached a crescendo in the 1920s and 1930s and crystallised in the numerous interesting incursions into the world of jewellery by the painters, sculptors and architects of the historic avant-garde. In producing these small-format objects (‘micro-sculptures’ or ‘painted jewels’), artists channelled their artistic thinking from different perspectives.

The exhibition opens with a selection of items produced by jeweller artists, who very often also cultivated multiple skills and who incorporated into their creations the offerings of the artistic movements of the time.

The high point of the first section of the exhibition are the jewels by René Lalique, which were purchased at the time of their production by European museums, rich amateurs and collectors. This is the case of the pendant purchased by the director of the Hamburg Museum at the Universal Exhibition in Paris in 1900, the jewels purchased by Calouste Gulbenkian and the unique pendant Antoni Amatller bought in Paris for his daughter Teresa. In a dialogue with these works are the ones with rich enamelling and varied ranges of colour made by the Barcelona jeweller Lluís Masriera, who played a key role in introducing the new style to Barcelona.

Making up the core of the exhibition are the jewels conceived by artists who were not jewellers, such as Hector Guimard, Paco Durrio, Manolo Hugué, Herich Heckel, Pau Gargallo, Juli González, Joaquim Gomis, Ramón Teixé, Anni Albers, Charlotte Perriand, Alexander Calder, Henri Laurens, Hans Arp, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and Salvador Dalí. This second section shows these artists’ production in relation to their usual work of painting, sculpture, photography and other creations, establishing parallels with the artistic disciplines they worked at and revealing the affinities and echoes between them.

The legacy of the Arts and Crafts movement and the Bauhaus, which were committed to integration between all the arts, can clearly be seen in the work of these artists, who opened the way to experimentation in the arts, questioning the very nature of jewellery, and who incorporated new materials into their production that were foreign to the tradition of precious metals. Examples of this are Ramon Teixé’s unusual creations in iron, glass, enamel and string and the jewellery by the sculptor Josep de Creeft made with bits of scrap metal from his motor car, not forgetting the jewellery by the architect and designer Charlotte Perriand or the ones produced by the photographer Joan Gomis in collaboration with Manuel Capdevila, which make use of shells and pebbles like real objets trouvées.

Alongside these hand-made items of jewellery that are often produced with non-precious materials, we are exhibiting the ones designed by Braque and Dalí and manufactured by professional jewellers using noble materials like rubies, sapphires or diamonds.

A third section of the exhibition explores the relationship between jewels and the body and shows a selection of clothes, mainly loaned by the Museo del Traje in Madrid, and photographs from the 1930s by Man Ray, Edward Steichen, George Hoyningen-Huené and Horst P. Horst.

The works presented in this exhibition come from public institutions and museums all over the world, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, the Musée d’Orsay and the Musée Rodin in Paris, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, the Institut d’Art Modern (IVAM) in Valencia, the Museo de Bellas Artes in Bilbao and the Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí in Figueres, who have generously made an exception in lending some of the most emblematic jewels in their collections, as well as from the MNAC itself and from numerous European and American private collections.”

Press release from the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya website

Alexander Calder (American, 1898-1976)
The jealous husband
c. 1940
Necklace
Brass wire
14″ x 16″
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
© Calder Foundation New York/ VEGAP, Barcelona, 2010

Manuel Capdevila / Ramon Sarsanedas. 'Spain falled back' Broooch Nd

Manuel Capdevila / Ramon Sarsanedas
Spain falled back
Nd
Brooch
Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya – MNAC

Erich Heckel (German, 1883-1970)
Drei Badende (Three bathers)
1912
Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg
© Erich Heckel, VEGAP, Barcelona, 2010

Boucheron, Paris (design by Lucien Hirtz) 'Corsage ornament' 1925

Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya
Palau Nacional
Parc de Montjuïc
08038 Barcelona

Opening hours:
Tues – Sat 10am – 7pm
Sunday and public holidays: 10am – 2.30pm

Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya website

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Exhibition: ‘Mark Morrisroe’ at Fotomuseum Winterthur, Zurich

Exhibition dates: 27th November 2010 – 13th February, 2011

Mark Morrisroe (American, 1959-1989) 'Untitled [Self-Portrait]' 1979 from the exhibition 'Mark Morrisroe' at Fotomuseum Winterthur

Mark Morrisroe (American, 1959-1989)
Untitled [Self-Portrait]
1979
T-108 Polaroid
8.5 x 10.7cm
Sammlung Matthew Marks
© Nachlass Mark Morrisroe (Sammlung Ringier) im Fotomuseum Winterthur

This is an emotional posting for me. I came out as a gay man in 1975, six short years after the Stonewall Riots in New York City that were the touchstone of the gay liberation movement. I partied hard in my youth in London and didn’t have my first HIV test until 1982/1983. We just didn’t know about the disease at all. Those two weeks waiting for the result of that first test, for that is how long it took to get the test results back in those days, seemed terribly long. Even worse was the time spent sitting outside the doctor’s office waiting to be called in to get the test results – literally life and death as there was no treatment, no drugs to help, no hope.

I lost many friends over the years to this terrible disease that continues to decimate human beings all around the world. It was only by pure luck that I survived. This posting shows the work of one artist who didn’t survive. He as experimenting with his sexuality (and documenting it) in Boston at much the same time that I was in London and so I feel an affinity with this beautiful and gifted man. What great images he made! How much poorer is the world without his presence and indeed the presence of all human beings who have succumbed to the disease.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

“You know, I’m going to be really famous, so you’re lucky to be meeting me.”

Mark Morrisroe, as quoted by Jack Pierson

Mark Morrisroe (American, 1959-1989) ' After the Laone (In the Home of a London Rubber Fetishist, Dec 82)' 1982 from the exhibition 'Mark Morrisroe' at Fotomuseum Winterthur

Mark Morrisroe (American, 1959-1989)
After the Laone (In the Home of a London Rubber Fetishist, Dec 82)
1982
C-Print von Sandwich-Negativ, bearbeitet mit Retuschefarben und Marker
39.5 x 50.6cm
© Nachlass Mark Morrisroe (Sammlung Ringier) im Fotomuseum Winterthur

Mark Morrisroe (American, 1959-1989) ' La Môme Piaf [Pat and Thierry]' 1982 from the exhibition 'Mark Morrisroe' at Fotomuseum Winterthur

Mark Morrisroe (American, 1959-1989)
La Môme Piaf [Pat and Thierry]
1982
C-Print von Sandwich-Negativ, bearbeitet mit Retuschefarben und Marker
50.7 x 40.5cm
© Nachlass Mark Morrisroe (Sammlung Ringier) im Fotomuseum Winterthur

Mark Morrisroe (American, 1959-1989) 'Pat as Kiki, fall 81 Paris' 1985 from the exhibition 'Mark Morrisroe' at Fotomuseum Winterthur

Mark Morrisroe (American, 1959-1989)
Pat as Kiki, fall 81 Paris
1985
Silbergelatine-Abzug von T-665 Polaroid Negativ, bearbeitet mit Retuschefarbe
25.2 x 20.2cm
© Nachlass Mark Morrisroe (Sammlung Ringier) im Fotomuseum Winterthur

Mark Morrisroe (American, 1959-1989) 'Still Life with Marble Figures (in the Home of Stephen Tashjian NYC)' 1985 from the exhibition 'Mark Morrisroe' at Fotomuseum Winterthur

Mark Morrisroe (American, 1959-1989)
Still Life with Marble Figures (in the Home of Stephen Tashjian NYC)
1985
Negative sandwich
40 x 50cm
© Nachlass Mark Morrisroe (Sammlung Ringier) im Fotomuseum Winterthur

Mark Morrisroe (American, 1959-1989) ' Blow Both of Us, Gail Thacker and Me, Summer 1978' 1986 from the exhibition 'Mark Morrisroe' at Fotomuseum Winterthur

Mark Morrisroe (American, 1959-1989)
Blow Both of Us, Gail Thacker and Me, Summer 1978
1986
C-Print, bearbeitet mit Marker
40.5 x 40.5cm
© Nachlass Mark Morrisroe (Sammlung Ringier) im Fotomuseum Winterthur

More than twenty years after Mark Morrisroe’s early death, Fotomuseum Winterthur is presenting the first comprehensive survey exhibition on his work – an extraordinarily diverse body of works that has usually been shown in group shows, mostly in connection with his famous Boston colleagues Nan Goldin and David Armstrong. The exhibition, curated by Beatrix Ruf and Thomas Seelig, is a collaboration between Fotomuseum Winterthur and the Estate of Mark Morrisroe (Ringier Collection).

In the Boston of the early 1980s, Mark Morrisroe was a well-known, charismatic figure, who often appeared in drag together with the artist friends he had met while studying and who performed in bars and clubs with Stephen Tashjian (alias Tabboo!) as the “Clam Twins.” As an artist and photographer he was also at the center of the lively Boston punk scene, whose most important protagonists were known well beyond the city. Like Nan Goldin and David Armstrong before him, Mark Morrisroe moved to New York in the mid-1980s to try his luck there. He died – far too early – in July 1989, at the age of just 30, from the consequences of AIDS.

References to Morrisroe’s origins and past are surrounded by a dense mist that makes it impossible to differentiate between truth and fantasy. By continually inventing and varying scenarios about himself, the settings for which extended from the past to the future, Morrisroe always understood how to collaborate actively in shaping his own myth, feeding it with fanciful layers of lies, or indeed letting it float into the void. His public presence could be engaging, and sometimes loud and disturbing, too, but silence fell after his death – both around the artist and his photography.

In retrospect, Morrisroe’s art studies in Boston and his years in the punk and art world of that city can in fact be seen as his most content and productive period. There he discovered a positive approach to his sexuality, and in the person of Jonathan “Jack” Pierson, who appears in many of his photographs and Polaroids, found his first great love. The first intimate portraits of close friends such as Lynelle White (with whom he published five editions of the collaged, photocopied and coloured-in Dirt fanzine in 1975-1976) were produced there, as were many of his first narcissistic self-scenarios in front of the camera. There Morrisroe shot the low-budget trash film Nymph-O-Maniac in the style of his idol John Waters, with Pia Howard as the main performer.

Mark Morrisroe’s short creative period, of barely ten years, was characterized by an amazing output of photographic experiments, and stands out for its constantly searching, inquisitive, and always individual aesthetic, as a glance at the photographer’s extensive estate reveals. The estate was acquired by the Ringier Collection in 2004 and was placed in the care of the Fotomuseum Winterthur in 2006. The estate comprises around 600 colour prints – a few of them duplicates – approximately as many gelatin silver prints, about 800 of the 2,000 known Polaroid shots by Morrisroe, all the negatives, contact prints, and some of his personal papers, giving some idea of the unbridled enjoyment and energy with which Mark Morrisroe threw himself into his life and work.

The exhibition will feature early colour and black-and-white prints, Polaroids, and Polaroid negatives from which it was possible to make enlargements, as well as the early and late photograms he processed by hand. During his art studies at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston (1978-1982) Morrisroe was already experimenting with various interpretations of reprography, trying to understand the possibilities of the medium and its inherent limitations, and using different ingenious printing processes for his photographic prints. Within his close circle of friends he soon laid claim to the “invention” of what are called “sandwich” prints – enlargements of double negatives of the same subject mounted on top of one another – which yielded an elaborate pictorial quality, producing a very iconic impression in the final result, which over time Morrisroe learned to use in an increasingly controlled way. Early on, the artist recognised the intrinsic value of prints – irrespective of the medium used to produce them – as pictorial objects that he could manipulate, colour, paint, and write on at will.

By all accounts, Mark Morrisroe was a man driven to achieve fame and recognition. Restless and demanding – of himself as well as of others – he always wanted more, and from this inner restlessness he derived enormous resources of artistic energy. Right to the very end, his life and work, down to the photograms feverishly produced in the makeshift darkroom in his hospital, which have hardly ever been publicly shown until today, attest to an unlimited and ecstatic search for a sensual, aesthetic, and always ambivalently charged pictorial world.

The Estate of Mark Morrisroe (Collection Ringier) at the Fotomuseum Winterthur

Following Pat Hearn’s untimely death in 2000, there was a break in exhibition activities focusing on Mark Morrisroe. From 1998 the Ringier Collection had been continuously in contact with Pat Hearn about Mark Morrisroe’s work and they continued the discussion with Pat Hearn’s husband, Colin de Land of American Fine Arts, who had inherited the Mark Morrisroe estate. In 2002 Colin de Land approached Michael Ringier and Beatrix Ruf to discuss options for the future of the Morrisroe estate because he had also fallen ill and was very aware that he was going to die soon himself. In their conversations, the main concern was how responsibility for this important artist could be taken on by keeping the oeuvre together as a comprehensive group of works and making it accessible to a broad audience internationally as well. The Ringier Collection proposed to Colin de Land that they secure the estate by acquiring it and placing it in the Fotomuseum Winterthur. Furthermore, the decision was made to form a foundation for the Morrisroe estate, which would be the home to a comprehensive group of works and would keep the estate together, provide conversational and curatorial continuity, and act as the leading force in communicating and distributing the work through exhibitions and publications.”

Press release from Fotomuseum Winterthur website

Mark Morrisroe (American, 1959-1989) 'Untitled [Self-Portrait with Jonathan]' c. 1978 from the exhibition 'Mark Morrisroe' at Fotomuseum Winterthur

Mark Morrisroe (American, 1959-1989)
Untitled [Self-Portrait with Jonathan]
c. 1978
T-665 Polaroid
10.7 x 8.5cm
© Nachlass Mark Morrisroe (Sammlung Ringier) im Fotomuseum Winterthur

Mark Morrisroe (American, 1959-1989) ' Self-Portrait (to Brent)' 1982  from the exhibition 'Mark Morrisroe' at Fotomuseum Winterthur

Mark Morrisroe (American, 1959-1989)
Self-Portrait (to Brent)
1982
C-Print von Sandwich-Negativ, bearbeitet mit Retuschefarben und Marker
50.5 x 40.5cm
Privatsammlung Brent Sikkema
© Nachlass Mark Morrisroe (Sammlung Ringier) im Fotomuseum Winterthur

Mark Morrisroe (American, 1959-1989) 'Untitled (Lynelle)' c. 1985 from the exhibition 'Mark Morrisroe' at Fotomuseum Winterthur

Mark Morrisroe (American, 1959-1989)
Untitled [Lynelle]
c. 1985
T-665 Polaroid
10.7 x 8.5cm
© Nachlass Mark Morrisroe (Sammlung Ringier) im Fotomuseum Winterthur

Mark Morrisroe (American, 1959-1989) 'Baby Steffenelli [John S.]' 1985 from the exhibition 'Mark Morrisroe' at Fotomuseum Winterthur

Mark Morrisroe (American, 1959-1989)
Baby Steffenelli [John S.]
1985
Negative sandwich, retouched with ink and inscribed with marker
31 x 44cm
© Nachlass Mark Morrisroe (Sammlung Ringier) im Fotomuseum Winterthur

The portrait of Baby Steffenelli, captured by the provocative photographer Mark Morrisroe, offers a glimpse into the bold, rebellious spirit of the 1980s underground art scene. Morrisroe, known for his raw and unflinching style, frequently blurred the lines between art and performance, creating images that were both intimate and confrontational. This photograph of Steffenelli, a figure often associated with the New York City art world of the time, reflects the vibrant energy of a subculture that thrived on pushing societal boundaries. Steffenelli, much like Morrisroe, embraced unconventional identities, and their collaboration in this photo serves as a visual statement of individuality and defiance, characteristic of the era’s exploration of gender, sexuality, and self-expression.

The 1980s were a transformative time for the art world, particularly in New York, where artists like Morrisroe, Robert Mapplethorpe, and David Wojnarowicz were redefining the possibilities of photography, painting, and performance. Morrisroe, who was also a member of the artistic collective called “The Factory” and part of the East Village art scene, used his camera as a tool to document the subversive lifestyles of his peers. His work, often marked by a sense of urgency and intimacy, captured the raw emotions and complexities of those living on the fringes of society. This photo of Steffenelli, taken in 1985, is a prime example of how Morrisroe’s photographs served as a historical document, reflecting the ongoing dialogues surrounding identity and the body in the context of the post-punk, pre-AIDS crisis era.

For Steffenelli, this image became an emblem of the intersection between personal expression and the broader cultural shifts taking place in the 1980s. The vibrant, sometimes jarring energy of Morrisroe’s photography mirrored the boldness with which people like Steffenelli navigated their place in an increasingly complex world. The photo not only immortalises Steffenelli’s individuality but also serves as a testament to the powerful and often controversial art scene that defined this period. In this single frame, Morrisroe captures not only a person but the essence of a moment in time – a snapshot of defiance, liberation, and transformation in the face of societal norms.

Text from the Old Historical Facebook page

Mark Morrisroe (American, 1959-1989) 'Untitled [Self-Portrait]' 1986  from the exhibition 'Mark Morrisroe' at Fotomuseum Winterthur

Mark Morrisroe (American, 1959-1989)
Untitled [Self-Portrait]
1986
Silbergelatine-Abzug
42.5 x 29.8cm
© Nachlass Mark Morrisroe (Sammlung Ringier) im Fotomuseum Winterthur

Mark Morrisroe (American, 1959-1989) ' Untitled' 1987 from the exhibition 'Mark Morrisroe' at Fotomuseum Winterthur

Mark Morrisroe (American, 1959-1989)
Untitled
1987
Silbergelatine-Abzug, Fotogramm von Drucksache
50.4 x 40.3cm
© Nachlass Mark Morrisroe (Sammlung Ringier) im Fotomuseum Winterthur

Mark Morrisroe (American, 1959-1989) ' Untitled' c. 1988 from the exhibition 'Mark Morrisroe' at Fotomuseum Winterthur

Mark Morrisroe (American, 1959-1989)
Untitled
c. 1988
C-Print von Sandwich-Negativ
50.7 x 40.5cm
© Nachlass Mark Morrisroe (Sammlung Ringier) im Fotomuseum Winterthur

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