Karen Halverson (American, b. 1941) Hite Crossing, Lake Powell, Utah from the Downstream series 1994-1995
As clear as a bell!
Marcus
Many thankx to the Huntington Library for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Karen Halverson (American, b. 1941) Lodore Canyon, Dinosaur National Monument from the Downstream series 1994-1995
Karen Halverson (American, b. 1941) Boulder Beach, Lake Mead, Nevada from the Downstream series 1994-1995
Karen Halverson (American, b. 1941) Wahweap Pool, Lake Powell, Arizona from the Downstream series 1994-1995
To celebrate the expansion and reinstallation of the Virginia Steele Scott Galleries of American Art, The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens presents an exhibition of works from American photographer Karen Halverson’s Colorado River series, on view May 30 through Sept. 28, 2009. Downstream: Colorado River Photographs of Karen Halverson will be on display in the Scott Galleries’ Susan and Stephen Chandler Wing, inaugurating a new changing exhibition space that will highlight photography and works on paper that, because of the fragile nature of the medium, cannot be placed on permanent display.
The exhibition will feature 26 works from Halverson’s Downstream series as well as a sampling of images from The Huntington’s historic holdings related to the Colorado River region, including photographs from John Wesley Powell’s pioneering expedition down the Colorado in 1871 and a snapshot album compiled in 1940 by Mildred Baker, one of the first women to successfully navigate the river from Green River, Wyo., to Boulder (now Hoover) Dam.
Halverson (b. 1941) says she woke one wintry morning in 1994 convinced that she needed to photograph the Colorado River. An accomplished landscape photographer who had already spent 20 years exploring the American West, she embarked on a two-year encounter with the vast terrain along the river’s serpentine route.
The desire to explain, understand, and experience the 1,700-mile river – which originates in Wyoming and Colorado before converging in Utah toward its terminus in Mexico – has exerted a powerful influence on a long line of explorers, scientists, thrill seekers, writers, artists, and photographers. Once largely wild, the modern river has been tamed by dams built to slake the American West’s thirst for water and power. Today the river’s reservoirs supply 30 million people.
“In her resonant imagery, Halverson speaks both to this immutable, rugged past while confronting the river’s complicated and often contested present,” says Jennifer Watts, curator of photographs at The Huntington.
Lush green riverbanks frame a seemingly remote Colorado River in Shafer Trail, Near Moab, Utah – a dramatic departure from the river-turned-lake in Wahweap Marina, Lake Powell, Arizona, in which the setting sun illuminates a satellite dish, a trio of passersby, and a jumble of houseboats set against distant rock outcroppings. Davis Gulch, Lake Powell, Utah captures Halverson’s voice especially succinctly: the power of nature in the form of a gigantic sandstone wall dwarfing a tiny group of plastic lawn chairs, lined up along the river bank, with not a soul in sight.
“In my travels along the Colorado,” says Halverson, “sometimes I find beauty, sometimes desecration, often a perplexing and absurd combination.”
Halverson’s large-format colour photography references the 19th-century era of exploration when the United States, still reeling from the Civil War, saw photographers fan across the West to make pictures for scientific and commercial ends. Many of these iconic views by William H. Bell, John K. Hillers, Timothy O’Sullivan and others form the core of The Huntington’s superlative photography collection. Halverson consulted these works in preparation for her own trips.
The two years Halverson spent hiking, driving, and rafting along the Colorado brought her to a more profound understanding of the river and her relationship to it. During her travels, Halverson wrote, “I feel my place, small and finite in relation to space and time: I feel my self, expansive and trusting.”
Text from The Huntington Library website [Online] Cited 12/06/2009. No longer available online
Karen Halverson (American, b. 1941) Big River, California from the Downstream series 1994-1995
Karen Halverson (American, b. 1941) Davis Gulch, Lake Powell from the Downstream series 1994-1995
“In my travels along the Colorado, sometimes I find beauty, sometimes desecration, often a perplexing and absurd combination.”
Karen Halverson
One wintry morning in1994, Karen Halverson (b. 1941) awoke convinced she needed to photograph the Colorado River. An accomplished artist who had already spent 20 years exploring the American West, she set off on a two-year encounter with the vast, breathtaking terrain along the river’s serpentine route. “The impulse to photograph the Colorado River came to me out of the blue,” she writes, “but I acted on it as if it were my destiny.” Personal destiny and the Colorado River have long been linked in the lives of the explorers, scientists, writers, artists, and thrill seekers who have sought to understand and experience this remarkable river.
“Nature appears to have been partial to this stream,” noted “Captain” Samuel Adams, who described the river in 1869. The Colorado and its major tributary, the Green River, run 1,700 miles from headwaters in the Rocky Mountains and Wyoming’s Wind River Range to a terminus in Mexico. Sheer size helps explain the river’s enduring allure; the Colorado’s gargantuan watershed covers a quarter of a million miles and runs through seven states. The Colorado is the riparian centre and symbol of the American West. Once wild, the river has been tamed by dams built to slake the arid West’s demand for water and power; 30 million people are dependent on it today.
Halverson’s large-format colour photography alludes to a 19th-century era of exploration when photographers fanned out across the West to make pictures for scientific and commercial ends. Iconic views by William H. Bell (1830-1910), John K. Hillers (1843-1925), Timothy O’Sullivan (c. 1840-1882), and others captured timeless landscapes of fierce, often forbidding, beauty. Halverson looked at these works in preparation for her trips, viewing them as documentary and visual points of departure for her own image making. Beyond the debt she owes these photographic pioneers, Halverson is firmly rooted in a late 20th-century aesthetic that comments on humanity’s use, and misuse, of the environment.
Beginning in the 1970s, a group of photographers, almost all of them men – who are now sometimes called the “New Topographers” – used their cameras to criticise the effects of rampant urban and suburban growth on western lands. Sprawling cities like Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Las Vegas owe their existence almost entirely to the importation of water from the Colorado River. As Halverson rightly claims, today the river is a “water delivery system,” with its dozens of reservoirs, dams, and diversions ensuring the allocation of virtually every drop for human needs.
Yet Downstream is no visual jeremiad railing against environmental abuse. Nor is it a dispassionate travelogue of the two years Halverson spent hiking, driving, and rafting along the Colorado. The wild terrain that flabbergasted early explorers is still here in the Paleozoic strata of gigantic rock outcroppings, the ancient calm of ghostly canyons, the dizzying heights overlooking a ribbon of water far below. And the colours – ochre, cerulean blue, deep red, electric green – are all intensified against the palette of a dammed river running colder and deeper than if it flowed freely. A modern-day beauty even finds itself inscribed in steel and concrete, whether in the sleek form of a pipeline or the still surface of an irrigation canal.
But it is in the bizarre, sometimes humorous, intersections of past and present that Downstream gains its potency. Cheap plastic lawn chairs, sitting vacant, look puny and ridiculous against a looming canyon wall. Weekend revellers pump fists skyward on the shores of Lake Mead, a giant reservoir held in place by Hoover Dam. A garden hose waters a scrawny palm tree in a desert oasis populated by rows of RVs.
What is gained and what is lost by controlling the Colorado River? And what are the river’s limits? Halverson’s Downstream series asks the viewer to contemplate these questions in a time when the arid West’s thirsty population threatens to overwhelm technological as well as natural resources, and when our well-watered urban lives remain utterly disconnected from riparian realities. Through her resonant imagery, Halverson speaks to the immutability of the river’s past while confronting its complex, contested present and future.
Jennifer A. Watts, Curator of Photographs from “Colorado River Photographs of Karen Halverson,” The Huntington Library Halverson Gallery guide [Online] Cited 28/02/2019. No longer available online
Karen Halverson (American, b. 1941) Near Palo Verde, California from the Downstream series 1994-1995
Karen Halverson (American, b. 1941) Imperial Dam, near Yuma, Arizona from the Downstream series 1994-1995
Karen Halverson (American, b. 1941) Flaming Gorge Reservoir, Wyoming from the Downstream series 1994-1995
Karen Halverson (American, b. 1941) Shafer Trail, Near Moab, Utah from the Downstream series 1994-1995
The Huntington Library The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens 1151 Oxford Road San Marino, CA 91108
Eirik Johnson (American, b. 1974) Freshly Felled Trees, Nemah, Washington from the series Sawdust Mountain 2007
Not much joy in this melancholy tone poem, but there doesn’t need to be. Masses of history, memory, anxiety, isolation and death, all reinforced by Johnson’s photographic perspective, which seems to flatten out the pictorial plane. Some stunning photographs and others that don’t hit the mark, but overall a very strong body of work. View the complex, environmental, social documentary photographs of the Sawdust Mountain series on Eirik Johnson’s website.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Rena Bransten Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“When I was a young, my family would hunt for mushrooms in the forests of the Cascade and Olympic Mountains. Some days we would spend afternoons along the shallows of a river watching salmon fight their way to spawning grounds upstream. These were the icons of the region: forest and salmon, pillars of Northwest identity. These photographs address the complicated relationship between the region’s landscape, the industries that rely upon natural recourses, and the communities they support.
‘Sawdust Mountain’ is a melancholy love letter of sorts, a personal reflection on the region’s past, its hardscrabble identity and the turbulent future it must navigate.”
Eirik Johnson
Eirik Johnson (American, b. 1974) Junked Blue Trucks, Forks, Washington from the series Sawdust Mountain 2007
Eirik Johnson (American, b. 1974) Elwha River Dam, Washington from the series Sawdust Mountain 2008
Eirik Johnson (American, b. 1974) Stacked logs in Weyerhaeuser sort yard, Cosmopolis, Washington from the series Sawdust Mountain 2007
Eirik Johnson’s colour photographs chronicle his study of Sawdust Mountain, a once idyllic patch of the Pacific Northwest now in decline after a century of human encroachment. The story is a familiar one – early settlers attracted by the sublime beauty and abundant natural resources – of Washington state in the case – began local nature-based industries that eventually depleted the natural resources. The romance of lumberjacks and fishermen taming the wilderness and living off the land has been replaced by the hardscrabble reality of those now trying to eke out a living as well as conservationists and ecologists trying to save and restore the landscape. Johnson presents a well-rounded portrait of a town and country struggling to find solutions to these conflicting demands. His photographs capture the history and legacy of the industries, the landscape at the centre of the vortex, and the changes undertaken to staunch the economic and ecological declines so all can survive.
Johnson was born in Seattle, WA and graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Washington, Seattle and with a Master of Fine Arts from the San Francisco Art Institute. Sawdust Mountain photographs will also be exhibited at the Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington who co-published the accompanying book with Aperture. Other Johnson book and exhibitions include Borderlands from 2006 and Animal Holes from 2007. Johnson is currently living and teaching in Boston at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design.
Text from the Rena Bransten Gallery website [Online] Cited 11/06/2009. No longer available online
Eirik Johnson (American, b. 1974) Weyerhaeuser sorting yard along the Chehalis River, Cosmopolis, Washington from the series Sawdust Mountain 2006
Eirik Johnson (American, b. 1974) Stacked alder boards, Seaport Lumber Planer, South Bend, Washington from the series Sawdust Mountain 2007
Eirik Johnson (American, b. 1974) Adult books, firewood and truck for sale, Port Angeles, Washington from the series Sawdust Mountain 2008
A culmination of four years of photographing throughout Oregon, Washington, and Northern California, Sawdust Mountain focuses on the tenuous relationship between industries reliant upon natural resources and the communities they support.
Timber and salmon are the bedrock of a regional Northwest identity, but the environmental impact of these declining industries has been increasingly at odds with the contemporary ideal of sustainability. In this, his second book, Johnson reveals a landscape imbued with an uncertain future – no longer the region of boomtowns built upon the riches of massive old-growth forests.
Johnson, a Seattle native, describes his photographs as “a melancholy love letter of sorts, my own personal ramblings.” Through this poetic approach, Sawdust Mountain records a region affected by historic economic complexities, and by extension, one aspect of our fraught relationship with the environment in the twenty-first century.
Text from the Aperture Foundation website. No longer available online
Roy de Maistre (Australian, 1894-1968) Colour Composition derived from three bars of music in the Key of Green 1935 Oil and pencil on composition board Private Collection
Despite some interesting highlight pieces this is a patchy, thin, incoherent exhibition assembled by the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney now showing at Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne. Featuring a hotchpotch of work ranging across fields such as drawing, architecture, photography, painting, film, graphic design, craft, advertising, Australiana and aboriginal works the exhibition attempts to tell the untold story of Modernism in Australia to little effect. Within the exhibition there is no attempt to define exactly what ‘Modernism’ is and therefore an investigation into Modernism in Australia is all the more confusing for the visitor as there seems to be no stable basis on which to build that investigation. Perhaps reading the catalogue would give a greater overview of the development of Modernism in Australia but for the average visitor to the exhibition there seems to be no holistic rationale for the inclusion of elements within the exhibition which, much like Modernism itself, seems eclectically gathered from all walks of life with little regard for narrative structure.
With work spanning five decades from 1917-1967 we are presented with, variously, Robert Klippel’s kitsch Boomerang table from 1955, Robin Boyd’s ‘House of Tomorrow’ from 1949, Wolfgang Sievers ‘new objective’ photographs, Berlei’s scientific system for calculating beauty in woman in use till the 1960s, swimsuits from the 1920s-1940s, Featherston chairs from the Australian pavilion at the 1967 Expo, a recreation of Australian architect Harry Seidler’s office (the most interesting part of this being the books he had in his office library: Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van de Rohe and Concerning Town Planning by Le Corbusier) and the wind tunnel test model of the Sydney Opera House in wood from 1960. Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera …
Highlight pieces include the above mentioned test model of the Sydney Opera House which is stunning in its scale and woodenness, in it’s simplicity of shape and form. Other highlight pieces are the colour music compositions of Roy de Maistre which were the tour de force of the show for me, true revelations in their rhythmic synchronic Moebius-like construction with layered planes of colour swirling in purples, greens and yellows. The large vintage photographic print of Sunbaker (1934) by Max Dupain was also a revelation with it’s earthy brown tones, the blending of the atmospheric out of focus foreground with the clouds behind, the architectural nature of the outline of the body almost like the outline of Uluru, the darkness of the head with the sensuality of the head and shoulders framed against the largeness of the hand resting on the sand. Lastly the two paintings and one rug by French artist Sonia Delaunay are a knockout. It says something about an exhibition when the best work in the show are two paintings by a French artist seemingly plucked at random to show external influences on Australian artists and designers.
While the exhibition does attempt to portray the breadth of the development of Modernism in Australia ultimately it falls well short in this endeavour. The most striking example of this shortcoming is the true star of the exhibition – the building that is Heide II itself. Commissioned by John and Sunday Reed and designed by the Victorian architect David McGlashan of the architectural firm McGlashan and Eversit in 1963 the building epitomises everything that is good about architectural Modernism and it’s form overshadows the exhibition itself. In this building we have beautiful spaces and volumes, an amazing staircase down into the lower area, suspended decking overlooking gardens, the blending of inside and outside areas, large expanses of glass to view the landscape, nooks and studies for privacy and the simplicity and eloquence of form that is Modernist design. With money one can indulge in the best of elitist Modernism. With position, position, position one can side steep the alienation of the city and the spread of surburbia where the dream of Australians owning a home of their own still continues in the vast, tasteless expanses of McMansion estates.
Robert Nelson in his review of this exhibition sees the car as creating the suburbs and Modernism as the emptying of the city after 6pm, the lessening of community and the devaluing of space he insists that there is little difference between a Californian bungalow in the suburbs and a utopian geometric neo-Corbusian box by Harry Seidler because they were equally shackled to motor transport.1 This is to miss the point.
Although Modernism in its basic form influenced most walks of life in Australia from swimsuit design to milk bars, from cinema to naturism, from bodies to advertising the most effective expressions of Modernism are architectural (as evidenced by Heide II) and were only open to those with money, power and position. Although Le Corbusier’s concept of public housing was a space ‘for the people’ the most interesting of his houses were the private commissions for wealthy clients. And so it proves here. One can imagine the parties on the deck at Heide II in the 1960s with men in their tuxedo and bow ties and woman in their gowns, or the relaxation of the Reed’s sitting in front of their fire in the submerged lounge. For the ordinary working class person Modernism brought a sense of alienation from the aspirational things one cannot buy in the world, an alienation that continues to this day; for the privileged few Modernism offered the exclusivity of elitism (or is it the elitism of exclusivity!) and an aspirational alienation of a different kind – that of the separation from the masses.
Go to Heide for the glorious gardens, the wonders of Heide II but don’t go to this exhibition expecting grand insights into the basis of Australian Modernism for that story, as Robert Nelson rightly notes, remains as yet untold.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Heide Museum of Modern Art for allowing me to publish the art work in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
An excellent review of the exhibition by Jill Julius Matthews, “Modern times: The untold story of modernism in Australia,” (reCollections Volume 4 number 1) can be found on the Journal of the National Museum of Australia website [Online] Cited 20/02/2019
1/ “Emanating from Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum, Modern Times“explores how modernism transformed Australian culture from 1917 to 1967.” But something is missing. The overwhelming modern development in these 50 years was the proliferation of automotive transport, which redefined the layout and function of Australian cities.The cars created the suburbs; and as the individual bungalow drew out the vast dormitories of Sydney and Melbourne, the city centre was spiritually drained, dedicated to bureaucratic and commercial premises.The story at Heide emphasises the gradual triumph of the tall buildings of the CBD. It doesn’t really reflect how these abstract monuments didn’t contain a soul after 6pm.Although the project makes such a big deal of being interdisciplinary, the social history doesn’t have a robust geographical basis. And because of this, the exhibition and book fail to handle the new alienation that modernism brings: the evacuation of the city and the insularity of suburban people in bungalows with little street life and roads increasingly deemed unsafe for children.
What does it really matter if a house looks like a Californian bungalow or a utopian geometric neo-Corbusian box by Harry Seidler? In social terms, they’re structurally the same, equally retracting from a sense of community and equally shackled to motor transport. In this sense, the styles are immaterial, except that one of them gives you a feeling of intimacy while the other has a bit more light and is easily wiped with a sponge.
At the end of the chosen period, the folly of the dominant suburban pattern came to be understood in its dire ecological consequences. Alas, it was too late. The modernist devaluation of space had already occurred, and our whole society had been reorganised around petrol.”
Robert Nelson. The Age. Wednesday 6th May, 2009
Roy de Maistre (Australian, 1894-1968) Arrested Movement from a Trio 1934 Oil and pencil on composition board 72.3 × 98.8cm National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
In late 1918, Roy de Maistre collaborated with fellow artist Roland Wakelin in exploring the relationship between art and music. Their experiments produced Australia’s first abstract paintings, characterised by high-key colour, large areas of flat paint and simplified forms. The works received critical acclaim, but modernist developments were largely derided by the conservative establishment.
This painting exemplifies de Maistre’s theory of colour harmonisation based on analogies between colours of the spectrum and notes of the musical scale. It is also aligned with de Maistre’s search for spiritual meaning through abstraction, akin to other artists such as Kandinsky who were interested in the ideas of the theosophy and anthroposophy movements, spiritualism and the occult.
Text from the Art Gallery of New South Wales website
Sonia Delaunay (Ukraine, b. 1885 moved Paris 1905-1979) Rhythm 1938 Oil on canvas
Wolfgang Sievers (Australian born Germany, 1913-2007) “House of Tomorrow” exhibition at Exhibition Building, Melbourne 1949 Gelatin silver print National Library of Australia
Stanislaus Ostoja-Kotkowski (Australian born Poland, 1922-1994) Nymphex 1966 Gelatin silver photograph from electronic image 50.6 x 60.8cm Gift of Dr George Berger 1978 Art Gallery of New South Wales @ Estate of Stanislaus Ostoja-Kotkowski
Rayner Hoff (Australian born United Kingdom, 1894-1937) Decorative portrait – Len Lye 1925 Marble 30.5 x 22.5 x 16.5cm Purchased 1938 Art Gallery of New South Wales
Cossington Smith captures the drama of a crowd in Rushing, which depicts commuters clamouring down to the ferries of Circular Quay to get home after work. The flying scarf and fallen hat emphasise the speed at which the travellers are moving and the peril and claustrophobia of a, mostly faceless, city crowd. The steep gangplank and diagonal composition accentuates the dynamism of the painting.
A brilliant colourist, Cossington Smith’s work of the early 1920s adopts a darker palette than the vivid colours she is usually associated with. Inspired by a visit to Sydney in 1920 by the tonalist painter and teacher Max Meldrum, her paintings became studies in tone, rather than colour, a practice she had abandoned by 1925.
Text from the Art Gallery of New South Wales website
Robert Klippel (Australian, 1920-2001) Boomerang coffee table 1955
The Powerhouse Museum travelling exhibition Modern times: the untold story of modernism in Australia explores how modernism transformed Australian culture from 1917 to 1967, a period of great social, economic, political and technological change. From the ideals of abstraction and functionalism to the romance of high-rise cities, new leisure activities and the healthy body, modernism encapsulated the possibilities of the twentieth century. This exhibition is the first interdisciplinary survey of the impact of modernism in Australia, spanning art, design, architecture, advertising, photography, film and fashion.
Modern times is presented at Heide across all four of the Museum’s gallery spaces. It unfolds in thematic sections highlighting key stories about international exchange, the modern body, modernist ‘primitivism’, the city, modern pools, and the Space Age. Comprising over 300 objects and artworks, it showcases works by major artists including Sidney Nolan, Margaret Preston, Albert Tucker, Grace Cossington Smith, Max Dupain, Wolfgang Sievers, and Clement Meadmore, key architects Robin Boyd, Roy Grounds and Harry Seidler, and designers Fred Ward and Grant and Mary Featherston. An installation, Cannibal Tours, by Madrid-based Australian artist Narelle Jubelin is a contemporary adjunct to the exhibition.
Inspired by the futurist visions of various European avant-gardes, modernist ideas were often controversial and shaped by many competing positions. Modern times reveals how these ideas were circulated and took hold in Australia, via émigrés, expatriates, exhibitions, films and publications. Australian contact with significant international modernist sources, such as the Bauhaus school in Germany, occurred through figures such as influential artist and teacher Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack, who taught Bauhaus principles at Geelong Grammar, and renowned architect Harry Seidler, who played a central role in shaping the modern city in Australia. Hirschfeld-Mack’s extraordinary film Colour Light Play of 1923 is shown for the first time in Australia, and Seidler’s 1948 studio, designed on his arrival from New York, has been re-created for the exhibition.
While modernism was international in character, an ‘Australian modernism’ was first championed in the 1920s by artist Margaret Preston, whose promotion of Aboriginal forms and motifs was important to the understanding of their artistic value. Preston’s designs, Len Lye’s stunning animation Tusalava (1929), Robert Klippel’s boomerang table (c. 1955) and other works show the development of a vernacular modernism.
Other highlights of Modern times include works from the visionary experiment in colour theory by Roy de Maistre and Roland Wakelin in 1919, a model of Robin Boyd’s innovative House of Tomorrow (1949), the iconic Featherston wing sound chairs from the Australian pavilion at the 1967 Montreal Expo, and a large wooden model for Jørn Utzon’s Sydney Opera House.
Text from the Heide Museum of Art website [Online] Cited 06/06/2009. No longer available online
Athlete and movie-star Annette Kellerman’s Modern Kellerman Bathing Suit for Women which became commercially available by the mid-1920s. The one-piece bathing suit became Kellermans trademark Gift of Dennis Wolanski Library, Sydney Opera House, 2000 Photo: Powerhouse Museum
On hot summer days cool off with Tooth’s KB Lager About 1940 Advertising poster Colour and process lithograph, artist name “Parker” in image lower right 100.4 x 75.4cm Sydney Living Museums
Grant Featherston (Australian, 1922-1995) and Mary Featherston (Australian, b. London 1943, migrated to Australia 1952) Expo mark II sound chair 1967 Aristoc Industries Polystyrene, polyurethane foam, Dunlopillo foam rubber, Pirelli webbing, fibreglass, hardwood, sound equipment, upholstery fabric Powerhouse Collection
The Expo Mark II sound chair, adapted for the Australian domestic market after Expo 67 in Montreal.
A cloth-covered high back winged chair with a circular base. The chair has a circular orange cloth covered cushion in the base and an integral full-width headrest. Two 125mm diameter inserts are pressed into the top of the back of the chair where speakers are fitted inside it. There is a cylindrical knob on the side of the chair.
National Archives of Australia A modernist vision of Australia: Grant and Mary Featherston’s wing sound chairs were a feature of the Australian Pavilion, designed by architect James Maccormick with exhibits selected by Robin Boyd, at Expo 67 in Montreal, 1967 1967
In 1967 Australia participated in the International and Universal Exposition held in Montreal, Canada. Australia’s Expo ’67 theme was the ‘Spirit of Adventure’. In the 30,000 square feet glass-walled Australian Pavilion, developed by the Australian Government and designed by Robin Boyd, exhibits explored Australian science, arts, people and development. The pavilion was designed as a ‘haven’ of ‘space and tranquillity’ floating above an Australian bushland setting. Inside, 240 innovative sound chairs offered ‘foot-weary Expo visitors’ the chance to hear the voices of famous Australians describing the exhibits, in French as well as English. The Great Barrier Reef was re-created in a lagoon beneath the pavilion while wallabies and kangaroos could be viewed in a sunken enclosure.
Text from the National Museum of Australia website [Online] Cited 20/02/2019
James Birrell (Australian, 1928-2019) View of the elevated restaurant, Centenary Pool, Brisbane Nd Powerhouse Museum
“A major exhibition opening for Sydney Design 08 in August, Modern times looks closely at the transformation of modern city life. The advent of cars, freeways, skyscrapers and new entertainment such as cinemas, milk bars, swimming pools, cafes and pubs are all legacies of modernism as revealed through the exhibition. The exhibition spans five decades from 1917 to 1967 – a tumultuous period marked by global wars, economic depression, a technological revolution and major social changes – out of which a modern cosmopolitan culture was shaped.
“The modernist movement was inspired by various European avant-gardes that projected visions of a better future, shaped by many competing positions. It was through émigrés, expatriates, exhibitions and publications that modernism become known in Australia,” Ann Stephen said. Encompassing art, design and architecture, Modern times focuses on seven themes: 1. the human body, image and health; 2. international influences and exchanges; 3. Indigenous art and modernism; 4. Interdisciplinary projects with retailers; 5. city landscapes and urban life; 6. public pools and milk bars; and 7. the space age.
Several great modern public pools were designed in Australia initially as part of an international swimming boom in the 1930s and boosted by the 1956 Melbourne Olympics. These will be shown on a large, immersive, panoramic audio visual screen celebrating the most Australian of past-times, being poolside. The earliest 1920s swimming costumes by silent film star Annette Kellerman, several decades of Australian icon ‘Speedo’ cossies and an early bikini will also be on display.
The much-loved corner milk bar from the 1930s will also be recreated in the exhibition for visitors to enter, complete with lolly jars, milkshakes and a juke box.
Other story highlights in the exhibition include Robin Boyd’s ‘House of Tomorrow’ that featured at the 1949 Modern Home Exhibition in Melbourne; and Boyd’s memorable Australian pavilion at the 1967 Montreal Expo that showcased Australian design including the iconic Featherston wing sound chairs and hostess uniforms designed by Zara Holt, wife of then prime minister Harold Holt.
Modernism also inspired new forms of public art and design like the abstract fountains by Tom Bass on Sydney’s former P&O building and Robert Woodward’s El Alamein Memorial Fountain, a popular tourist site in Sydney’s Kings Cross. Modernism shaped an exultant explosion of experiment as part of the Space Age informing such spectacular architectural feats as Roy Grounds’ dome for the Australian Academy of Science in Canberra and Jørn Utzon’s internationally-acclaimed Sydney Opera House, both featured in the exhibition.”
Ruzan Haruriunyan, “Modern Times: Untold Story Of Modernism In Australia,” on the Huliq News website [Online] Cited 20/02/2019
Hedie II photographs by Rory Hyde. More photos of Heide are on his Flickr photoset
Heide II – commissioned by John and Sunday Reed 1963, designed 1964, constructed 1964-1967
Designed by Melbourne architect David McGlashan of McGlashan Everist, it was intended as “a gallery to be lived in” and served as the Reeds’ residence between 1967 and 1980. The building is considered one of the best examples of modernist architecture in Victoria and awarded the Royal Institute of Architects (Victorian Chapter) Bronze Medal – the highest award for residential architecture in the State – in 1968. It is currently used to display works from the Heide Collection and on occasion projects by contemporary artists.
Max Dupain (Australian, 1911-1992) Australia Square: a keyhole to the future [Australia Square Tower] 1968 Gelatin silver print 49.9 × 39.2cm Courtesy of Max Dupain and Associates
Jeff Carter (Australian, 1928-2010) At the Pasha Nightclub, Cooma c. 1957-1959 Gelatin silver print
Modern Times: The Untold Story of Modernism in Australia, edited by Ann Stephen, Philip Goad and Andrew McNamara, Powerhouse Publishing, 2008 (paperback).
Heide Museum of Modern Art 7 Templestowe Road, Bulleen, Victoria 3105
Opening hours: Tuesday – Sunday Public holidays 10am – 5pm
Many thankx to the Fotomuseum Winterthur for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
With this retrospective of the work of Walker Evans (1903-1975) Fotomuseum Winterthur presents one of the twentieth century’s pre-eminent photographers. His lucid and detailed portrayals of American life, especially his images of rural poverty during the Great Depression, made photographic history and went on to influence countless photographers. Walker Evans took an extremely innovative approach, capturing the very essence of the American way of life.
The exhibition, featuring some 120 works (the majority of which are from the most important private collection of Walker Evans’ works) represents every phase of his career: his early street photographs of the 1920s, his poignant documentation of 1930s America and pre-revolutionary Cuba, his landscapes and architectural photography, his subway portraits, storefronts, signage, the later colour Polaroids and more besides. As early as the 1930s, Walker Evans, in a departure from conventional notions of art and style, sought a new direct approach to reality. It is this that makes him a truly modern photographer.
The exhibition was curated by Jeff L. Rosenheim and Carlos Gollonet. Realisation in Winterthur: Urs Stahel. A cooperation with the Fundación MAPFRE, Madrid.
With this major retrospective of the work of Walker Evans (1903-1975) Fotomuseum Winterthur pays homage to one of the twentieth century’s pre-eminent photographers. His insightful and detailed portrayals of American life, especially his images of rural poverty during the Great Depression, made photographic history and went on to influence countless photographers. The 130 works in this retrospective exhibition represent every phase of his career: his early street photographs of the 1920s, his poignant documentation of 1930s America and pre-revolutionary Cuba, his landscapes and architectural photography, his subway portraits, storefronts, signage, and more besides.
On his return from France, where he had tried unsuccessfully to launch a literary career inspired by his love of Flaubert and Baudelaire, Walker Evans turned to photography. From the very start, with his keen eye for street life and the visual freshness of his unexpected slant on what he saw, his work spoke the language of European Modernism. But it was not long before Evans found his true voice – and it was at once profoundly personal and unequivocally American.
Some years before, the direct, undistorted and innovative gaze of Eugène Atget (1857-1927), whose work Evans knew and admired, had quietly paved the way for the split between documentary auteur photography and the purely descriptive photographic tradition. Atget’s unconventional angles, his de-centralised view and his focus on the seemingly trivial all had a major impact on Evans.
Walker Evans’ work is a far remove from what had, until then, been accepted as art photography. He was not interested in superficial beauty, but in a new objectivity. He subscribed to a style that observed undistorted facts and sought to capture things precisely as they were, seemingly without intervention, emotion or idealisation. For the first time in art photography, there were such unusual subjects as a pair of old boots or a subway passenger lost in thought. The artistic quality was based solely on the clarity, intelligence and authenticity of the photographer’s gaze. In this, Walker Evans’ oeuvre represents both a high point and a turning point in the formal and visual evolution of photography.
As the creator of this new, direct style, often referred to as straight photography, which drew upon scenes of sometimes blatant banality and rolled back the boundaries between the ‘important’ and the ‘trivial’, Walker Evans introduced the aesthetics of Modernism into American photography. This seemingly cold detachment spawned a style rich in expressive substance that was not only capable of embracing the lyricism and complexity of the American tradition, but of doing so without a trace of false romanticism, sentimentality or nostalgia. At long last, there was a forward-looking and enduring alternative to the traditional conventions of photography.
Press release from the Fotomuseum Winterthur website [Online] Cited 05/06/2009. No longer available online
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Palma Cuernavaca 1925 Gelatin silver print Sheet: 24.4 x 16.5cm (9 5/8 x 6 1/2 in.) The Lane Collection Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
What a privilege to be able to post these photographs that appear in the exhibition. Breathe, look, enjoy!
Marcus
Many thankx to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Desde la Azotea 1924 Platinum or palladium print Sheet: 19.4 x 24.4cm (7 5/8 x 9 5/8 in.) The Lane Collection Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
In the decades following the Revolution of 1910, foreign artists and intellectuals flocked to Mexico in order to experience its warm climate and lively cultural scene. They were inspired by Mexico‘s exotic tropical landscape, its ancient monuments and colonial architecture, the work of its modern muralists, and the country‘s indigenous arts and crafts. During two extended trips to Mexico made between 1923 and 1926, American photographer Edward Weston (1886-1958) created some of his earliest modernist photographs, which form the core of the exhibition, Viva Mexico! Edward Weston and His Contemporaries, at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA). Featured are approximately 45 works, among them about 30 rare photographs by Weston and selected images by Tina Modotti, Brett Weston, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, and Paul Strand. These photographs from the 1920s and ’30s are drawn from the Museum’s own collection, as well as The Lane Collection, which is on long-term loan to the MFA. Additionally, a compelling 1939 portrait of Frida Kahlo by Hungarian-born photographer Nickolas Muray has been lent from a local private collection. Viva Mexico! is on view May 30 through November 2 in the MFA’s Herb Ritts Gallery.
“Viva Mexico! highlights Weston’s pivotal years in this highly creative environment, which had a lasting impact on his work and inspired some of his earliest experiments in still life, landscape, and cloud studies,” said Malcolm Rogers, Ann and Graham Gund Director of the MFA. “This exhibition allows us to focus on a critical juncture in Weston’s career, and to present one of the strengths of The Lane Collection – its holdings of the photographer’s early modernist work.”
The Lane Collection, which includes gifts and loans to the MFA, comprises modern American paintings, photographs, and works on paper assembled by the late William H. Lane and his wife, Saundra B. Lane, a Trustee of the MFA. During the late 1960s, the Lanes acquired a large number of Weston’s vintage photographs, which are now widely acknowledged to be the most important collection of the photographer’s work in private hands.
“Acquiring more than 2,000 Edward Weston photographs directly from his sons was an amazing learning experience for us and we were thrilled to be able to immerse ourselves in the work of such a major artist in such great depth,” said collector Saundra Lane. “The Mexico pictures by Edward, Brett, and Tina Modotti are some of my personal favourites. These works inspired me to more recently acquire two early Manuel Alvarez Bravo photographs, El soñador (The Dreamer) and Nude, included in the exhibition, each of them a quintessentially Mexican subject and clearly made under the influence of Weston and Modotti.”
In an early biography of Edward Weston, writer and editor Nancy Newhall described Mexico as his “Paris,” the place where he greatly expanded his range as an artist. His total of more-than two years in Mexico – Weston’s only travel outside the US – offered him the opportunity to move away from his Pictorialist style, with its soft focus and ethereal, romantic qualities, toward more abstract forms and sharper resolution of detail. Heroic portrait heads, avant-garde nudes, urban views, cloud studies and landscapes, and images of Mexican toys and folk art are among the subjects he captured with his large-format camera. This period of experimentation with isolated objects also resulted in some of Weston’s earliest forays into still life, as can be seen in Chayotes (1924), a close-up of the beautiful, spiny squash arranged in a painted wooden bowl.
In 1923, Weston made the difficult decision to close his portrait photography studio in Tropico (now Glendale), California, and move to Mexico, as he wrote in his journal – to start life anew. He left behind his wife and three of his four young sons and traveled to Mexico City with his lover, Italian-born actress Tina Modotti (1896-1942) and his oldest son Chandler. Modotti ran Weston’s new studio, served as his translator and muse, and under his tutelage began to make highly accomplished photographs of her own. Together they became immersed in the vibrant community of artists and intellectuals centred there, which included painters Diego Rivera, Jean Charlot, Xavier Guerrero, and Rafael Salas, as well as the poet Luis Quintanilla, writer D.H. Lawrence, anthropologist Frances Toor, and journalist Carleton Beals. Although Weston and Modotti always remained outsiders looking in, the several exhibitions of their work during their Mexican sojourn helped spark a lively interest in modernist photography in their adopted country, where until this time photography had been admired mainly as a documentary tool, rather than a fine art.
“This exhibition will be a wonderful opportunity for our visitors to experience Weston’s stunning Mexican photographs firsthand, many of which are rarely seen platinum prints taken in the period just before he made his classic black-and-white images of peppers and shells,” said Karen Haas, The Lane Collection Curator of Photographs, who organised Viva Mexico! “These rich, warm-toned prints, when seen in context with photographs by his contemporaries in Mexico during the 1920s and ’30s, promise to be a revelation even to those who know Weston’s work well.”
Many of the earliest images that Weston produced in Mexico were portraits and nudes, both subjects that he had specialised in previously but now took on a very different look and feel. Soon after his arrival, he began a series of monumental portraits of friends and acquaintances, all of them shot very close-up and from slightly below eye level, their heads filling the picture frame and their features heroicised. These include Galván Shooting (1924), Tina Modotti (1924), Victoria Marin (1926), and Rose Roland Covarrubias (1926). He also made a stunning group of nudes of Modotti posing on their sun-baked rooftop patio, all three of which he titled Tina on the Azotea (1924), as well as an incredibly simple and sculptural image, Nude (1926) of fellow American expatriate Anita Brenner. The Brenner nude, along with Palma Cuernavaca (1925), Aqueduct (1924), and Excusado (1925) all share a similarly stark, abstract, and timeless quality – what Weston described as an attempt to render “the very substance and quintessence of the thing itself.”
Abstract architectural details began to make their way into Weston’s work as well and he was drawn to capture light and shadow on a variety of surfaces, from the zigzag stone patterns of the ancient Ruinas de Mitla (1926) to the angled forms of the convent stairwell and skylight in San Pedro y San Pablo (1924). Viva Mexico! also showcases Weston’s experimentation with landscape photography, both urban and rural. The striking view from his studio roof is recorded in Desde la Azotea (1924), in which the geometry of the buildings below is heightened by the elevated vantage point and steeply raking light, and in Michoacán (1926), where he captures the beautifully undulating silhouette of the pastoral countryside. Much less common among his subjects from this period are some of Weston’s little-known photographs made in outdoor markets and fairs, such as Mercado, Oaxaca (1926) and Bowls, Oaxaca (1926). These open-air street images closely relate to another group of pictures, including Torito (1925), a playful little papier-maché bull, and Fish Gourd and Striped Serape (1926), which reflect Weston’s newfound interest in the vernacular Mexican toys and folk objects that he collected and lovingly documented in his studio while waiting for clients to arrive for portrait sittings. These whimsical photographs also serve as fascinating precursors to Weston’s high modernist still lifes of less than a decade later.
Over the course of her time in Mexico, Modotti rapidly went from photographer’s apprentice and model to fine art photographer in her own right. Although her career as a photographer was relatively brief, her powerful pictures from this period sometimes rival those of her lover and teacher, Edward Weston. Modotti was a rare woman in a mostly male profession, but she brought to her work a deep-seated interest in the people and the politics of Mexico in the 1920s. Unlike Weston, who preferred to work in the studio rather than the street, Modotti straddled the worlds of fine art photography and radical social activism. Her commitment to the struggles of the people can be seen in her iconic Worker’s Hands (1927), and her fascination with Mexico’s public demonstrations and celebrations is captured in Effigies of Judas (1924). She was so impassioned by these causes, in fact, that Modotti joined the Communist party and continued to work in Mexico for several years after Weston finally returned home in 1926. Before he left for California, however, Weston and Modotti collaborated on a photographic commission to illustrate a book on Mexican history and culture entitled Idols Behind Altars, which was written by their friend Anita Brenner and published in 1929. A copy of the book is among the case materials featured in the exhibition, as is American photographer Laura Gilpin’s book, Temples in Yucatan: A Camera Chronicle of Chichén Itzá (1948), which showcases her pictures of the ancient Mayan ruins taken during her two trips there in the early 1930s and mid ’40s.
Viva Mexico! also offers visitors to the MFA a rare chance to see some of Brett Weston’s (1911-1993) earliest serious photographs made during Edward Weston’s second extended trip to Mexico in 1925 and 1926 (after an eight-month-long hiatus in California). The second eldest of Weston’s four sons was only 14 years old when he accompanied his father to Mexico City and went with him to live in the house and studio that Weston shared with Modotti. Rather than the large-format camera and platinum prints that his father preferred, Brett Weston was given a 3 1/4 x 4 1/4 Graflex camera and printed his pictures on less expensive gelatin silver papers, which captured the precise detail and texture that his father admired in his work. The boy quickly fell under the spell of photography and his time in Mexico proved to be an ideal preparation for his own future as a professional photographer. Two of Brett Weston’s highly abstract architectural views, Tin rooftops (1926) and Ventilator (1926), are on view in the exhibition.
The only Mexican-born artist in the exhibition, Manuel Alvarez Bravo (1902-2002), is represented with three works, El soñador (The Dreamer) (1931), Nude (1935), and Las lavanderas sobreentendidas (Washerwomen Implied), Draped Yucca Plants, Mexico (1932). As a young, aspiring photographer in Mexico City, Bravo first met Modotti in 1927, soon after Weston’s departure. He was greatly inspired by the look and spirit of Modotti’s work as well as the Weston prints that she shared with him. Bravo is perhaps best-known for the stunning female nudes that he made over the course of his long career, but Viva Mexico! features a rare male figure study, Nude (1935). With its androgynous curves and simplified form, it clearly relates to Weston’s nudes of his son Neil made a decade earlier. Bravo’s photographs always have a profoundly Mexican essence to them, but especially during the 1920s and ’30s; they also demonstrate the influence of the European Surrealists as can be seen in the slightly unsettling, yet lovely work El soñador (The Dreamer).“
Viva Mexico! also showcases the work of American photographer and documentary filmmaker Paul Strand (1890-1976), who lived in Mexico during the mid-1930s. Although he and Weston had met in New York in 1922 and were aware of each other’s careers, their sojourns in Mexico did not coincide. The situation that Strand found on crossing the border in 1932 was very different than the more optimistic period of cultural Renaissance that Weston had experienced during the mid-1920s. Like Modotti, whose social concerns and unsentimental approach he shared, Strand was inspired to make portraits of Mexico’s indigenous peoples and the country’s dramatic landscapes. Landscape, Near Saltillo (1932) was one of the earliest images Strand shot in Mexico; taken in the north of the country on his initial trip down to Mexico City, it features the glowing white form of an adobe building set off by spiny, tall cacti and a vast expanse of sky. Also on view is Día de Fiesta (1933), a starkly simple image of three men and a child standing against a sunlit wall, which was made just prior to the production of Redes (Nets, or The Wave, in the US), his documentary film focusing on the struggles of a group of fisherman near Veracruz.”
Press release from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston [Online] Cited 03/06/2009 no longer available online
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Chayotes 1924 Platinum or palladium print Sheet: 19.4 x 24.3cm (7 5/8 x 9 9/16 in.) The Lane Collection Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Ruinas de Mitla 1926 Platinum or palladium print Sheet: 19.1 x 24.1cm (7 1/2 x 9 1/2 in.) The Lane Collection Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) San Pedro y San Pablo 1924 Platinum or palladium print Sheet: 19.4 x 24.4cm (7 5/8 x 9 5/8 in.) The Lane Collection Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Tina on the Azotea, with kimono 1924 Gelatin silver print Sheet: 16.2 x 23.8cm (6 3/8 x 9 3/8 in.) The Lane Collection Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Tina On The Azotea c. 1924 Palladium print Sheet: 22.2 x 17.5cm (8 3/4 x 6 7/8 in.) The Lane Collection Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Tina Modotti 1924 Palladium print Sheet: 22.7 x 17cm (8 15/16 x 6 11/16 in.) The Lane Collection Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Pure your gentle name, pure your fragile life, bees, shadows, fire, snow, silence and foam, combined with steel and wire and pollen to make up your firm and delicate being.
Part of Modotti’s epitaph which can be found on her tombstone, composed by Pablo Neruda,
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Galván Shooting (Manuel Hernández Galván, Mexico) 1924 Gelatin silver print 22.5 x 18.7cm (8 7/8 x 7 3/8 in.) Mary L. Smith Fund Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Rosa Rolanda (de Covarrubias) 1926 Gelatin silver print 21.9 x 16.5 cm (8 5/8 x 6 1/2 in.) Sophie M. Friedman Fund Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Excusado (Toilet) 1925 Gelatin silver print Sheet: 24.3 x 19.1cm (9 9/16 x 7 1/2 in.) The Lane Collection Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Tina Modotti (American born Italy, died Mexico, 1896-1942) Manos de trabajador, Mexico (Worker’s Hands, Mexico) 1927 Gelatin silver print 19.2 x 21.7cm (7 9/16 x 8 9/16 in.) Sophie M. Friedman Fund Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Tina Modotti’s closely cropped picture of a worker’s dusty hands conveys the realities of hard work. In 1923, the Italian-born film actress accompanied her lover, photographer Edward Weston, to Mexico City, where Weston taught her to use a large-format camera. She worked as his studio assistant, quickly mastering the technique and making striking portraits, close-up images of flowers, and still lifes of her own. Modotti’s compassion for the indigenous culture and political struggles of the Mexican people led her to join the Communist Party in 1927 and to focus on socially concerned subjects, using her camera as a tool to document the proud faces and weathered hands of the peasant labourers, artisans, and revolutionaries of her adopted country.
Text from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston website
Screenshot
Tina Modotti (American born in Italy, died in Mexico, 1896-1942) Hands Washing 1927 Gelatin silver print
Tina Modotti (American born Italy, died Mexico, 1896-1942) Effigies of Judas 1924 Gelatin silver print
Artists: Bindi Cole, Tamara Dean, Lee Grant, June Indrefjord, Bronek Kozka, Ka-Yin Kwok, Tracey Moffatt, Fiona Morris, Aaron Seeto, Martin Smith and Toni Wilkinson
Many thankx to the ACP for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on some of the photographs for a larger version of the image.
June Indrefjord Piano 2005 From the series Landaas
Aaron Seeto (Australian) Oblivion 2006 From the series Oblivion Daguerreotype
Aaron Seeto makes alternate historical positions and experiences visible through an exploration of archives, family photo albums and photographic records. In recent bodies of work Fortress and Oblivion, Seeto has utilised the daguerreotype, one of the earliest and most primitive photographic techniques, to highlight the malleability of narratives within archive records. Not only is the chemical process itself highly toxic and temperamental but the daguerreotype’s mirrored surface means the image appears as both positive and negative, depending on the angle of view. For Seeto, this mutability captures the essence of our experience of history and memory, reflecting how images degrade, how stories are formed and privileged, how knowledge and history are written. …
For his ongoing series Oblivion Seeto sourced details from images of the Cronulla riots – beachside riots around race and territory – of 2005 found on the internet. In reproducing these as daguerrotypes he seeks less to represent the incident than to look at how it was reported, understood and remembered. The instability of the virtual information found online is echoed in the photographic process.
Text from the Stills Gallery website [Online] Cited 14/02/2019
Tracey Moffatt (Australian, b. 1960) Useless 1974 1994 From the series Scarred for Life
Useless, 1974 is a photo-lithograph by the Australian artist Tracey Moffatt. The work shows a girl stooping down to wash a car, with one hand wiping a headlight with a sponge and the other resting on the bonnet. She looks towards the camera rather than at the car, her face bearing a serious and potentially hurt or angry expression. The caption accompanying the photograph explains that ‘Her father’s nickname for her was “useless”‘. Despite this, it seems that in this picture she is being put to use, and perhaps the car she washes is her father’s. The caption, her expression and the direction of her gaze may suggest that the viewer occupies the position of the girl’s father looking down on and supervising his daughter while she carries out her chore. …
The work’s title is a reference to the cruel nickname given to the girl in the photograph, and the date in the title, 1974, suggests the year according to which the photograph has been styled by Moffatt, who employs actors and constructed scenes to create her photographs. Curator Filippo Maggia has compared Moffatt’s photographic method to that of a film director, stating that she ‘often does not take the photographs herself but directs a sort of bona fide movie set that she organises and controls after having pictured it in her mind again and again, meticulously decomposing and recomposing it’ (Maggia 2006, p.12). As the artist has stated, ‘I often use technicians when I make my pictures. I more or less direct them. I stand back and call the shots.’ (Quoted in Maggia 2006, p.12.)
Moffatt’s photographic series often deal with themes such as race, gender and the politics of identity. Drawing on memories from the artist’s childhood, the Scarred for Life series mimics photo spreads from the American magazine Life, with their explanatory captions and focus on the family environment. The captions’ terse descriptions hint at the traumatic stories behind the images. Moffatt has commented: ‘a person can make a passing comment to you when you are young and this can change you forever. You can be “scarred for life” but it isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The photographs can be read as both tragic and comic – there is a thin line between both.’ (Quoted in display caption, Tracey Moffatt, Birth Certificate 1994, Tate P78101, accessed 28 August 2015.) Furthermore, Maggia has argued that the Scarred for Life series ‘gives us life as it is, the harshness and aridity of human relations, adolescence with its fears of not being accepted’ (Maggia 2006, p.13).
Louise Hughes August 2015
Filippo Maggia, Tracey Moffatt: Between Dreams and Reality, exhibition catalogue, Spazio Oberdan, Milan 2006, p. 13, reproduced p. 117.
Extract from Louise Hughes. “Useless, 1974,” on the Tate website [Online] Cited 14/02/2019
Lee Grant (Korean-Australian, b. 1973) The Day Meg Wore a Dress from the series Brothers and Sisters 2007
“You can choose your friends, but you can’t choose your family.”
From the tight nuclear unit to the multi-generational extended family, from refuges for the homeless to middle class suburbia, Inheritance examines the way our families shape the person we become; for better or for worse.
Taking Tracey Moffatt’s acclaimed series Scarred for Life as a starting point, the exhibition includes the work of eleven Australian artists who explore the modern family through a range of photographic disciplines, including documentary, portraiture and video. Sometimes serious and sometimes satirical, Inheritance is a family album that celebrates the skeletons and the psychodramas alongside the newborns and the nuptials.
Text from the Australian Centre for Photography website [Online] Cited 20/05/2009. No longer available online
Lee Grant (Australian, b. 1973) Nathan & Mac, BMX bros 2009 Archival pigment print 60 x 60cm Edition of 8 + 2 AP
Bindi Cole Chocka (Australian / Wathaurung, b. 1975) Wathaurung Mob 2008 From the series Not really Aboriginal Pigment print on rag paper 1035 x 1235cm
Our Past Is Our Strength – Culture and Identity
I’ve always been told that l was Aboriginal. I never questioned it because of the colour of my skin or where I lived. My Nan, one of the Stolen Generation, was staunchly proud and strong. She made me feel the same way. My traditional land takes in Ballarat, Geelong and Werribee and extends west past Cressy to Derrinallum. I’m from Victoria and I’ve always known this. All the descendants of traditional Victorian Aboriginal people are now of mixed heritage. I’m not black. I’m not from a remote community. Does that mean I’m not really Aboriginal? Or do Aboriginal people come in all shapes, sizes and colours and live in all areas of Australia, remote and urban?
Bindi Cole Chocka, Wathaurung text from the Culture Victoria website [Online] Cited 14/02/2019
Wathaurung Mob is a group portrait depicting members of Cole’s family sitting in their lounge room, their faces blackened with minstrel paint, and wearing red headbands traditionally worn by indigenous elders. The controversial practice of “blackfacing” refers to the populist minstrel shows of the 19th and 20th centuries in which a white actor put on blackface, then performed a racist caricature.
As we stand before the work, Alessi says he finds it confronting and uncomfortable. “Wathaurung Mob is quite powerful because what stands out are the eyes of each sitter; they look directly at the viewer, so you can’t help but feel challenged by that,” he says.
“There is also something quite uncomfortable about the work because, in some ways, you are being implicated in Andrew Bolt’s view, as white Australians having to own up to the broader history of the relationship between white and indigenous Australia.
“And more broadly it is about coming to grips with what is still a major issue in Australia around reconciliation and the way that we treat indigenous people. In one single frame this photograph captures 200 years of history, and I think it is an area that people like Bindi Cole are really courageous to navigate through because they have been open to criticism by people like Andrew Bolt, which is completely unfounded.”
Extract from Bronwyn Watson. “Facing up to the stereotypes,” on The Australian website November 16, 2013 [Online] Cited 14/02/2019
Fiona Morris (Australian) Sean and Jade, Wesley Mission 2006
Sean with his daughter Jade outside their tempoary accomodation provided by Wesley Mission. They can only stay their for a maximum of two months. Leah and Sean became homeless with their children after increasing rent rises in Sydney and the cost of living.
Tamara Dean (Australian, b. 1976) Alex and Maeve 2006
Diane Arbus (American, 1923-1971) Tattooed Man at a Carnival, Md. 1970 Gelatin silver print 15 x 14 5/8 in. (38.3 x 37.3 cm)
Diane Arbus is one of my favourite photographs – how I would love to see this exhibition!
I have posted some photographs from the exhibition, including all ten images from the Box of Ten 1971 that features in the show.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the National Museum of Wales for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you, the less you know.”
Diane Arbus
Diane Arbus (American, 1923-1971) A young man with curlers at home on West 20th Street, N.Y.C. 1966 Gelatin silver print
One of National Museum Cardiff’s main art exhibitions in 2009 reveals the work of legendary New York photographer Diane Arbus (1923 -1971), who transformed the art of photography. Diane Arbus, which comprises 69 black and white photographs including the rare and important portfolio of ten vintage prints: Box of Ten, 1971, is one of the best collections of Arbus’s work in existence. A large selection of these images will be on display at the Museum from 9 May until 31 August 2009.
Capturing 1950s and 1960s America, Arbus is renowned for portraits of people who were then classed on the outskirts of society nudists, transvestites, circus performers and zealots. In one of her most famous works, Identical Twins, Roselle, NJ of 1967, the twins are photographed as if joined at the shoulder and hip with only three arms between them.
Her powerful, sometimes controversial, images often frame the familiar as strange and the strange or exotic as familiar. This singular vision and her ability to engage in such an uncompromising way with her subjects has made Arbus one of the most important and influential photographers of the twentieth century.
This singular vision and her ability to engage in such an uncompromising way with her subjects has made Arbus one of the most important and influential photographers of the twentieth century.
Text from the National Museum of Cardiff website [Online] Cited 18/05/2009. No longer available online
Diane Arbus (American, 1923-1971) A Jewish Giant at home with his parents in the Bronx 1967 Gelatin silver print
From 1969 to 1971 Arbus was absorbed in the creation of a limited edition portfolio, A box of ten photographs. The portfolio was intended to present her work as an artist in the manner of the special print editions offered by new artists’ presses such as Crown Point and Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE). This group of pictures and its presentation was a very conscious statement of what she stood for, and how she regarded her own photography. The pictures range from the relatively early ones of the Nudists in their summer home and Xmas tree in a living room in Levittown, L.I., both of 1963; through the now iconic Identical twins, Roselle, N.J., 1967 and Westchester Couple sunning themselves on their lawn, to the later pictures of the Jewish giant, the Mexican Dwarf in his hotel room, N.Y.C. and the King and Queen of a senior citizens’ dance, N.Y.C., all of 1970. There is clearly an attempt to be representative of the general idea, the larger plan behind her work. There is also a significant stylistic range, from the graceful daylight in the picture of the older couple in the nudist camp, to the later picture of the elderly king and queen, whom she photographed with sharp flash. She included Xmas tree, a work without human subjects. The prints for this portfolio were selected three years after the New Documents exhibition, before there was thought of another show. But the pictures constituted a kind of exhibition in and of themselves, to be examined one at a time, rather than all at once. From her letters, we know that the idea of a clear box was very important; it was to serve as both a container and a display case allowing the owner to reorder and display the pictures easily. Just as she had wanted the black border of the print to show in the New Documents exhibition, here she wished to exhibit the entire print as it appeared on the photographic paper …
Most of the pictures in the portfolio either depict families or refer to the family. Even the corner of the cellophane-looking room in Levittown is made by peering over the two outstretched arms of a family armchair, posed like the trousered knees of the empty chair in the picture of the Jewish giant. The idea of the family album was a private but expressive metaphor for her. As in a family album, each member is part of the larger group; they are related, perhaps even tolerated, and harmony may be rare and perhaps even uninteresting. But they are all considered with the same intelligent and human regard. She photographed the Jewish giant as a mythic figure, enclosed in a modest Bronx living room, an unconventional member of an otherwise conventional family: ‘I know a Jewish giant who lives in Washington Heights or the Bronx with his little parents. He is tragic with a curious bitter somewhat stupid wit. The parents are orthodox and repressive and classic and disapprove of his carnival career…They are truly a metaphorical family. When he stands with his arms around each he looks like he would gladly crush them. They fight terribly in an utterly typical fashion which seems only exaggerated by their tragedy… Arrogant, anguished, even silly.’
Sandra S. Phillips, senior curator of photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art from the book Diane Arbus Revelations.1
1/ Phillips, Sandra. “The Question of Belief,” in Diane Arbus Revelations. London: Random House, 2003, pp. 66-67.
Diane Arbus (American, 1923-1971) Mexican Dwarf in his hotel room, N.Y.C. 1970 Gelatin silver print
Diane Arbus (American, 1923-1971) Xmas tree in a living room in Levittown, L.I. 1963 Gelatin silver print
NASA, Washington, D.C. (United States est. 1958, manufacturer) Skylab (photographer) Three Skylab 2 crewmen demonstrate effects of weightlessness 1973 Type C photograph 40.5 x 49.9cm (image and sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, 1980
A small but fun show at NGV International, Melbourne that is drawing in the crowds. A selection of beautiful, breathtaking images from NASA really takes you into space. I had a great time researching and finding some of the images from the exhibition on the NASA Image and Video Library website!
Dr Marcus Bunyan
. Many thankx to 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.
“Once a photograph of the Earth, taken from outside, is available, we shall, in an emotional sense, acquire an additional dimension … and a new idea as powerful as any in history will be let loose.”
Sir Fred Hoyle, 1948
“Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of the imagination.”
John Dewey, 1859-1952, American philosopher, psychologist and educational reformer
NASA, Washington, D.C. (United States est. 1958, manufacturer) Neil Armstrong (American 1930-2012, photographer) Astronaut Buzz Aldrin, lunar module pilot, walks on the surface of the Moon near the leg of the Lunar Module (LM) 1969
Note the reflection of the shadow of the astronaut, the photographer and the leg of the LM in the visor of Buzz Aldrin.
Astronaut Edwin E. Aldrin Jr., Lunar Module LM pilot, walks near the module as a picture is taken of him. Discolouration is visible on his boots and suit from the lunar soil adhering to them. Reflection of the LM and Astronaut Neil A. Armstrong is visible in Aldrin’s helmet visor. Image taken at Tranquility Base during the Apollo 11 Mission. Original film magazine was labeled S. Film Type: Ektachrome EF SO168 colour film on a 2.7-mil Estar polyester base taken with a 60mm lens. Sun angle is Medium. Tilt direction is Northeast NE.
Text from the NASA archives website
Astronaut Buzz Aldrin, lunar module pilot, stands on the surface of the moon near the leg of the lunar module, Eagle, during the Apollo 11 moonwalk. Astronaut Neil Armstrong, mission commander, took this photograph with a 70mm lunar surface camera. While Armstrong and Aldrin descended in the lunar module to explore the Sea of Tranquility, astronaut Michael Collins, command module pilot, remained in lunar orbit with the Command and Service Module, Columbia. This is the actual photograph [above] as exposed on the moon by Armstrong. He held the camera slightly rotated so that the camera frame did not include the top of Aldrin’s portable life support system (“backpack”). A communications antenna mounted on top of the backpack is also cut off in this picture. When the image was released to the public, it was rotated clockwise to restore the astronaut to vertical for a more harmonious composition, and a black area was added above his head to recreate the missing black lunar “sky”. The edited version [below] is the one most commonly reproduced and known to the public, but the original version, above, is the authentic exposure. A full explanation with illustrations can be seen at the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal.
NASA, Washington, D.C. (United States est. 1958, manufacturer) Neil Armstrong (American, 1930-2012 photographer) Astronaut Buzz Aldrin, lunar module pilot, walks on the surface of the Moon near the leg of the Lunar Module (LM) 1969 Colour transparency 50.8 × 40.6cm (image and sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, 1980
In 1948, the British astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle speculated that “Once a photograph of the Earth, taken from outside, is available, we shall, in an emotional sense, acquire an additional dimension … and a new idea as powerful as any in history will be let loose.” Hoyle encapsulated the immense anticipation that was felt in the mid-twentieth century, when the idea of leaving Earth and viewing it from afar was on the verge of becoming reality.
When astronauts and spacecraft began exploring our solar system, it was the photographs from these voyages which visualised the reality of the epic feats of science, engineering and human imagination. These photographs transcended a strictly scientific purpose and depicted scenes of unexpected and sublime beauty.
This exhibition brings together works from the permanent collection of the National Gallery of Victoria that depict space travel, seen in archival images from NASA, space allegories, and altered perceptions of reality inspired by ideas of science and space. These photographs also show a fascination with light, as both the means and the subject of the image.
The exhibition focuses largely on the 1960s and 1970s – an exciting time for the artistic and scientific exploration of worlds beyond our own. These were ‘light years’, in which people looked up to the skies and beyond, in a real and an imagined sense, and through photography discovered additional dimensions.
The work is from van Hout’s Untitled 1992 series. It comprises images made by photographing still life constructed from small scale models. The series is based upon B-grade 1950s and 1960s science fiction films. The photographs in the series show a single word, encapsulating an essential element of the story and constructed in 3-D text, placed within a barren / lunar model landscape.
In his Untitled series, 1992, Ronnie van Hout created models based on the mountains in New Zealand, shown as the sun was setting and they fell into silhouette, and placed a single word (‘rejoice’ or ‘visitation’) in the foreground. The influence of 1960s sci-fi aesthetics is clearly evident in the glowing lights, the desolate ground, and the potential for an otherworldly experience. As with much science fiction, van Hout’s photographs create ambiguous narratives that allude to alien visitation set in a mystical landscape.
The photographs of Raymond de Berquelle reflect excitement about the possibilities of astronomy and a fascination for science fiction. The radio telescope was a particularly significant emblem of the exploration of the universe. The primary tool of astronomy, it allowed astronomers to see beyond visible light into the expansive electromagnetic spectrum. De Berquelle frequently visited observatories and radio telescopes, including the one at Parkes, outside Canberra, that was one of a network of radio antennas around the world used to receive images from the Apollo 11 Moon landing in July 1969.
To create the fantastical photograph, Space man, Raymond de Berquelle combined different negatives to construct an image that expressed both his expectations of astronomy and his vision of a man in space. De Berquelle describes the process as beginning with an unexpected vision:
[one day] a radio telescope appeared on the horizon with a human being clinging to it as if caught in its net. It was a technician [working on] the huge instrument. In the darkroom later on the negative appeared stronger than the positive image … and an earthy radio telescope technician became a space man.
Raymond de Berquelle in correspondence with Maggie Finch, 12 November 2008, quoted in Maggie Finch, Light Years: Photography and space (exh. cat.), National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2009, p. 18.
The photograms of John Wilkins reveal methods of abstraction and distortion (the hallmarks of psychedelia) to produce lush, exploding, organic forms. Wilkins uses the photogram technique to record the object (in this case, liquid) directly onto film, which was later enlarged and printed. Wilkins’s photographs resemble cosmic worlds, and he has described how the chemical patterns were directly influenced by the psychedelic patterns meant to simulate LSD trips that were projected onto the walls of nightclubs in the 1960s and 1970s. They possess a mysterious quality that transcends a distinction between art and science.
“Light is the energy that maintains life on earth, through the plants’ marvellous process of photosynthesis: no light, no plants; no plants, no animals, and no us. This is the secret of life, and I want to celebrate this life-giving energy in images of, about, and made by light, in other words in photographs.”
Sir George Pollock, 2009
Space exploration opened up new ways of seeing and imagining the world and created new perceptions of our place in the universe.
Parallel to the exploration of outer space taking place under the auspices of science, explorations of space in other realms were contributing to new and altered perceptions of the world, and inspiring new forms of art and artmaking.
During the second half of the twentieth century, many artists rejected the illusionistic representation of three-dimensional space and form which had dominated western art for centuries and opted for a flattened pictorial space. In contrast to the closed compositions traditionally found in western art, artists such as Jackson Pollock (American, 1912-1956) worked with ‘open compositions’ which created the idea that the visual elements in an image extended beyond the confines of the picture space.
The mysterious world of ‘inner space’, including the subconscious, and the senses, was also important territory for exploration, especially within the ‘hippie’ subculture that emerged in the US in the mid-1960s. Psychedelic patterns, inspired by the hallucinations and mind-altering experiences produced by drugs such as LSD, and characterised by wild patterning and colours and dazzling light effects, had a significant effect on the art and popular culture of the period.
In 1962, English artist George Pollock commenced a conceptual photographic project comprising a series of abstract photographs that he called ‘vitrographs’. This term referred to the process of creating images by photographing pieces of glass that have been lit by a number of coloured lights. Pollock used pieces of cullet, the thick lumps of glass left in a kiln at the end of a melt.
By lighting the cullet from different angles and photographing the pieces at close range, Pollock was able to produce patterned, abstract images with an ethereal quality reminiscent of solar eruptions and the nebulae of outer space.
Pollock was influenced by scientific studies, particularly in the field of biology, as well as the literature of science fiction and the abstraction found in the art of surrealism and abstract expressionism. He was interested in using photography to reveal things that otherwise may have been overlooked.
A significant number of the works in Light Years: Photography and space have been acquired by the NGV from NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration). The United States government established NASA on 29 July 1958 as the agency responsible for the development of the nation’s new space program.
The 1950s and 1960s were a period of intense activity in space exploration, led by the US and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). The US and the Soviet Union emerged as the two most powerful forces in the world after the Second World War. During the Cold War that followed, these two superpowers competed for political, military and scientific dominance, fuelling a ‘space race’. The space race effectively began when the Soviet Union launched the first artificial satellite to orbit Earth, Sputnik 1, on 4 October 1957, and reached a milestone when NASA succeeded in landing humans on the moon on 20 July 1969 (in Australia, 21 July 1969).
The Apollo missions, in particular the Apollo 11 mission of 1969 that saw Neil Armstrong become the first man to step foot on the moon, have assumed enormous importance in the popular imagination in relation to space travel.
However, since the late 1950s NASA has been involved in many different projects, involving numerous manned and unmanned missions. These projects have ranged from exploring Earth’s orbit and mapping the lunar surface to penetrating greater and greater distances into space and exploring other planets in our solar system, including Mars, Mercury, Venus and Jupiter. These missions played a critical role in extending our knowledge of the solar system.
While information and photographs of the Russian space program were closely guarded and rarely released to the public, NASA strategically managed the publication of images drawn from its vast photographic archive, and this had a very positive impact on the public reception of the space program.
Interestingly, it was not a priority in the early days of NASA to take photographs during missions. However, the importance of photography was soon recognised and, along with rigorous flight training, astronauts who piloted the various space missions were given extensive photographic training. Unmanned probes were equipped with remotely operated cameras, allowing those back on Earth to see details of these voyages. Increasingly sophisticated technology, including advanced imaging techniques such as X-ray, ultraviolet and infrared photography, has also been employed to capture different phenomena.
The photographs in this exhibition include images taken on manned and unmanned space voyages, from the Gemini space walks of 1965 to the Pioneer missions of 1979.
While these space photographs clearly serve a documentary purpose and are a tool of scientific research, they have a unique beauty and evoke something of the mystery and wonder of space.
The NGV acquired the NASA space photographs in two groups, the first in 1971 and the second in 1980. The acquisition submission of 1980, prepared by the former Curator of Photography, Jennie Boddington, noted:
“Apart from the considerations of technology one cannot help but speculate on the philosophical and metaphysical questions which spring to mind when one sees so beautifully presented the form of nebulae which may be light years away from our small earth, or when we see spacemen performing strange exercises in a Skylab.”
Text from the NGV Education kit
NASA, Washington, D.C. (United States est. 1958, manufacturer) James McDivitt (American, 1929-2022, photographer) Astronaut Edward H. White, Gemini 4, June 1965 1965 Type C photograph laminated on aluminium 39.0 × 49.1cm (image and sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Presented by Photimport, 1971
This photograph by astronaut James McDivitt is taken from inside the spacecraft on the Gemini 4 mission as it orbited Earth. It shows astronaut Edward White in his spacesuit and golden visor, ‘floating’ high above the Pacific Ocean. White is attached to the spacecraft by a twisting eight-metre tether and holds a manoeuvring unit. Below him is the extraordinary vision of the vivid blue curvature of Earth and, beyond, the black abyss of deep space.
Text from the NGV Education kit
NASA, Washington, D.C. (United States est. 1958, manufacturer) Apollo 12 (photographer) View of two U.S. spacecraft on the surface of the moon, taken during the second Apollo 12 extravehicular activity (EVA-2) [Astronaut inspecting Surveyor 3, Unmanned craft resting on moon since April 1967] 1969 Gelatin silver photograph 49.0 × 39.0cm (image and sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Presented by Photimport, 1971
This unusual photograph, taken during the second Apollo 12 extravehicular activity (EVA), shows two U.S. spacecraft on the surface of the moon. The Apollo 12 Lunar Module (LM) is in the background. The unmanned Surveyor 3 spacecraft is in the foreground. The Apollo 12 LM, with astronauts Charles Conrad Jr. and Alan L. Bean aboard, landed about 600 feet from Surveyor 3 in the Ocean of Storms. The television camera and several other pieces were taken from Surveyor 3 and brought back to Earth for scientific examination. Here, Conrad examines the Surveyor’s TV camera prior to detaching it. Astronaut Richard F. Gordon Jr. remained with the Apollo 12 Command and Service Modules (CSM) in lunar orbit while Conrad and Bean descended in the LM to explore the moon. Surveyor 3 soft-landed on the moon on April 19, 1967.
Text from the NASA Image and Video Library website
NASA, Washington, D.C. (United States est. 1958, manufacturer) Charles Conrad (American, 1930-1999 photographer) Astronaut Bean, Apollo XII, November 1969, on moon 1969 Gelatin silver photograph 49.0 x 39.0cm (image and sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Presented by Photimport, 1971
NASA, Washington, D.C. (United States est. 1958, manufacturer) Apollo 8 crew (photographer) The Earth showing Southern Hemisphere 1969 Type C photograph 48.9 × 38.9cm National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Presented by Photimport, 1971
Project Apollo (1968-1972) sent astronauts greater distances from Earth in the quest to land humans on the Moon. The further they travelled also, crucially, allowed for more complete photographic views of Earth. In this photograph, Earth is shown as a delicate, blue, cloud-covered dot hanging in infinite space.
The spectacle of Earth suspended in a black void had a profound effect on humanity. Earth was no longer seen to be our complete ‘world’ but was recognised as a small planet spinning in the solar system. As awareness of the vulnerability and limits of the planet grew, photographs such as this one formed a strong catalyst for environmental movements.
Photographs from the Apollo missions were also used to promote the inaugural Earth Day on 22 April 1970.
Text from the NGV Education kit
NASA, Washington, D.C. (United States est. 1958, manufacturer) Voyager 1 (photographer) Photo collage of Jupiter and its four largest moons; from early March Voyager I photos 1979 Type C photograph 51.0 x 40.5cm (image and sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, 1980
While Jupiter had been studied through telescopes for centuries, the Voyager robotic probes that were launched into space in 1977 revealed new information about the planet and its moon system. In March 1979, the Voyager 1 mission took images of the four largest moons of Jupiter. These images were made into a photographic collage, so that the moons are seen in their relative positions (although not to scale). NASA’s arrangement of images in this montage (and others) essentially created an aesthetic rendering of scientific reality.
Text from the NGV Education kit
NASA, Washington, D.C. (United States est. 1958, manufacturer) Pioneer 11 (photographer) Image of Saturn and it’s moon Titan 1979 Type C photograph National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, 1980
Light Years: Photography and Space will feature around 50 works drawn entirely from the NGV Collection. Focusing largely on the 1960s and ’70s, the exhibition will include photographs taken during early NASA missions. The exhibition celebrates the International Year of Astronomy and the 40th anniversary of the first Moon walk.
Maggie Finch, Assistant Curator, Photography, NGV said that cameras were used to give form to both the fantasies and realities of space travel, revealing extra dimensions and animating space.
“The 1960s and ’70s were an exciting time for the artistic and scientific exploration of worlds beyond our own. They were ‘light years’ in which people looked up to the skies and beyond, in a real and an imagined sense, and through photography discovered additional dimensions. The photographs in ‘Light Years’ represent a giant leap forward in the collective journey into space. They retain the extraordinary sense of awe and wonderment that encapsulates our first encounters with a larger universe,” said Ms Finch.
A highlight of the exhibition is a collection of more than 30 NASA photographs, on display for the first time in over twenty years. Among the NASA selection are many celebrated space photographs, including the iconic image of Edwin E. (Buzz) Aldrin, Jr standing on the lunar surface, taken in 1969 by Neil Armstrong, the first man to step foot on the Moon.
These remarkable photographs will be on display alongside works by Sir George Pollock, John Wilkins Raymond de Berquelle, Dacre Stubbs, Val Foreman, Susan Fereday, Olive Cotton and Ronnie van Hout – artists who have been inspired by, and have responded to, the mysteries of space and science.
Frances Lindsay, Deputy Director, NGV said: “The photography from the NASA missions of the 1960s and ’70s has a fascinating yet nostalgic quality, particularly when one considers the advances in both science and photographic technology since that time. These early photographs of space changed our awareness and offered a new understanding of the Earth, the universe and our shared existence within it. Coinciding with the International Year of Astronomy and the 40th anniversary of the first Moon walk, this exhibition will delight viewers, providing a glimpse into another dimension,” said Ms Lindsay.
Press release from the National Gallery of Victoria
NASA, Washington, D.C. (United States est. 1958, manufacturer) Skylab (photographer) Solar Flare recorded by NASA Skylab, December 1973 1973 Colour transparency 50.8 × 40.6cm (image and sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, 1980
This photograph of the sun, taken on Dec. 19, 1973, during the third and final manned Skylab mission (Skylab 4), shows one of the most spectacular solar flares ever recorded, spanning more than 588,000 kilometres (365,000 miles) across the solar surface. The last picture, taken some 17 hours earlier, showed this feature as a large quiescent prominence on the eastern side of the sun. The flare gives the distinct impression of a twisted sheet of gas in the process of unwinding itself. Skylab photographs such quiescent features erupt from the sun. In this photograph the solar poles are distinguished by a relative absence of supergranulation network, and a much darker tone than the central portions of the disk. Several active regions are seen on the eastern side of the disk. The photograph was taken in the light of ionised helium by the extreme ultraviolet spectroheliograph instrument of the United States Naval Research Laboratory.
Text from the NASA Image and Video Library website
National Gallery of Victoria International 180, St. Kilda Road, Melbourne
Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009) New York, NY 1945 Gelatin silver print
Further to my earlier posting about the passing of renowned New York photographer Helen Levitt comes this wonderful exhibition at the Laurence Miller Gallery in New York. How I wish I was in that city to see it – what a joy!
Below are a selection of 1940’s black and white photographs from the exhibition.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Laurence Miller Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009) Kids Dancing, New York c. 1940 Gelatin silver print
Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009) Kids graffiti, New York c. 1938 Gelatin silver print
Laurence Miller Gallery will present a memorial tribute to Helen Levitt from May 9 – June 26, 2009. Helen Levitt passed away in her Greenwich Village home on March 29, at the age of 95. Ironically, or perhaps fittingly, a show of her work entitled Passages, which Helen had approved, was already in the works, and her death caused a momentary pause in how to proceed. It was decided that Helen would not have wanted her passing to intrude upon best laid plans. Hence, guided by her spirit, we celebrate her legacy with this exhibition, her twelfth at Laurence Miller Gallery.
Helen Levitt: A Memorial Tribute will present a series of passages, in both colour and black-and-white, from her extraordinary 70-year career. Featured will be her pictures of animals, which were among her earliest as well as last pictures taken; a little-known series of portraits taken on the subway using Walker Evans’ camera; children’s street drawings; elderly folks in conversation; and children at play, the photographs for which she is most well-known. Helen Levitt’s classic and rarely seen silent film, In the Street, from 1948, will be shown as well.
One of the tribute’s highlights will be a selection of never-before-exhibited “first proofs.” These early documents of her working methods are often unique. Some are vintage, others were printed as late as the 1970’s, but all were printed by Helen in her bathroom that doubled as the darkroom. Often they are variants of iconic images, and often they are sequences of several shots taken at the same time. They all reveal the photographer’s “dance” as she observes boys climbing up a tree, a large family gathering on the front stoop, two men seated beside a curious cat, or four boys peering into a pool hall. In combination with the film In the Street, the early sequences reinforce her reputation as a cinematographer, and are genuine and valuable records of the working methods of a canny and poetic photographer.”
Text from the Laurence Miller Gallery website [Online] Cited 12/05/2009. No longer available online
In the Street 1948 Directed and edited by Helen Levitt Cinematography by NYC photographers James Agee, Helen Levitt, Janice Loeb Re-edited version rereleased by Levitt in 1952 with musical score by Arthur Kleiner 16mm film photographed in Harlem
Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009) New York c. 1942 Gelatin silver print
Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009) Three Girls Playing Dress Up, New York c. 1940 Gelatin silver print
Helen Levitt (1913-2009) short biography
Helen Levitt’s playful and poetic photographs, made over the course of sixty years on the streets of New York City, have delighted generations of photographers, students, collectors, curators, and lovers of art in general. The New York Times described her as: “a major photographer of the 20th century who caught fleeting moments of surpassing lyricism, mystery and quiet drama on the streets of her native New York”. Throughout her long career, Helen Levitt’s photographs have consistently reflected her poetic vision, humour, and inventiveness as much as they have honestly portrayed her subjects – men, women, and children acting out a daily drama on the sidewalks and stoops of New York City’s tenements.
She shot and edited the film In the Street with Janice Loeb and James Agee, providing a moving portrait of her still photography. Levitt’s first major museum exhibition was at the Museum of Modern Art in 1943, and a second solo show, of colour work only, was held there in 1974. Major retrospectives of her work have been held at several museums: first in 1991, jointly at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; in 1997 at the International Center for Photography in New York; and in 2001 at the Centre National la Photographie in Paris.
In 2007 “Helen Levitt: Un Art de l’accident poetique” opened at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris; in 2008, the Sprengel Museum, Hannover, Germany chose Ms. Levitt as the recipient for the Spectrum International Photography Prize which was accompanied by a major retrospective; and FOAM Museum Amsterdam, mounted another major retrospective in October, 2008. She was a 2008 recipient of the Francis Greenburger award for excellence in the arts.
Curator:Sarah Hermanson Meister, associate curator of MoMA’s Department of Photography
Many thankx to La Casa Encendida for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photograph for a larger version of the image.
Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976) Wall Street 1915 Platinum palladium print
Wall Street is a platinum palladium print photograph by the American photographer Paul Strand taken in 1915. There are currently only two vintage prints of this photograph with one at the Whitney Museum of American Art (printed posthumously) and the other, along with negatives, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. This photograph was included in Paul Strand, circa 1916, an exhibition of photographs that exemplify his push toward modernism.
It depicts a scene of everyday life in Manhattan’s Financial District. Workers are seen walking past the J.P. Morgan & Co. building in New York City on the famous Wall Street, of which the photograph takes its name. The photograph is famous for its reliance on the sharpness and contrast of the shapes and angles, created by the building and the workers, that lead to its abstraction. This photograph is considered to be one of Strand’s most famous works and an example of his change from Pictorialism to straight photography. Strand moved from the posed to portraying the purity of the subjects. It is one of several images that stand as marks of the turn to modernism in photography. …
Technique
This photograph depicts the J.P. Morgan building in New York City. Strand photographed “people hurrying to work past the banking building” situated on Wall Street, from which the photo takes its name. the subject depicted is a real-life subject without manipulation. The depiction of the real nature of the medium and the subject is an example of straight photography. There is no focal point, with the lines converging off of the frame of the image. The financial building take majority of the frame. Emphasis is placed on the strong shapes created by the architecture of the building. The workers are included in the image, but are faceless and are trumped in size by the massive square shapes from the building they walk past. Also, the workers are captured in motion which on film makes them appear blurry. This aesthetic that Strand creates in Wall Street is his break toward the modern, the straight photography, demonstrating that Pictorialism is no longer part of his aesthetic. Strand captured the building with clean, sharp lines. The building is covered in the high contrast, chiaroscuro. It is heavily in the shadows, but still creates an overwhelming presence over the people that walk past it. These people are also shrouded in the contrast made evident with the clean lines and black and white nature of his photos and photography as a medium. The people jump from their places, being the dark figures in the light of the sun that beams in from the left of the frame.
Strand fills the image with his recognisable aesthetic. The photo is platinum print, one of the materials frequently used by photographers of the time. Strand was unique in how he printed his photos. As stated on the George Eastman House website section Notes on Photography, Strand would make large prints from small negatives. He also left them in their matte condition that was inherent with platinum print. With his printing techniques, he “added a richness to the image.” As with the time, the photo is entirely black and white. There is a heavy contrast with the black and white areas of the photo. Strand creates diagonal shapes that pull emphasis to subject of the building and away from the people.
Aspects
Having taken Hine’s class at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School, social change became important to Strand and appeared often in his art. As a pupil of Hine, Strand learned of the social aspect his work could have. With Wall Street, he sought to portray a social message. He captured the faceless people next to the looming financial building in order to give a warning. Strand shows “the recently built J.P. Morgan Co. building, whose huge, dark recesses dwarf the passersby with the imposing powers of uniformity and anonymity.” The people cannot escape the overwhelming power that this modern establishment will have on their future and the future of America. He warns us to not be the small people that look almost ant-like next to this building that has a massive amount of control over the American economy.
Unidentified photographer Brooklyn Bridge c. 1914 Gelatin silver print 7 5/8 × 9 9/16″ (19.4 × 24.3cm) Museum of Modern Art, New York The New York Times Collection
La Casa Encendida presents an exhibition organised by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, which showcases a fundamental part of the institution’s assets: its photography collection. Portraits of New York: Photographs from the MoMA offers an overview of the history of photography against the backdrop of this iconic metropolis through the work of more than 90 artists.
For the show’s curator Sarah Hermanson Meister, associate curator of the MoMA’s Department of Photography, “Portraits of New York amply reflects the history of synergies between this medium and the Big Apple during a period of important transformations for both. The photographs generated by the restless and constant commitment of numerous photographs to New York City have played a fundamental role in determining how New Yorkers perceive the city and themselves. These photographs have also defined the city’s image in the world’s imagination.”
Featured artists include Berenice Abbott, Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Margaret Bourke-White, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Harry Callahan, Walker Evans, Andreas Feininger, Larry Fink, Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander, Lewis W. Hine, William Klein, Irving Penn, Cindy Sherman, Edward Steichen, Thomas Struth and Garry Winogrand.
Text from the La Casa Encendida website
Lewis Wickes Hine (American, 1874-1940) Welders on the Empire State Building c. 1930 Gelatin silver print 10 5/8 × 13 5/8″ (27 × 34.6cm) Museum of Modern Art, New York Committee on Photography Fund
Ted Croner (American, 1922–2005) Central Park South 1947-1948 Silver gelatin print 10 15/16 x 13 3/4″ (27.8 x 34.9cm) Gift of the photographer Museum of Modern Art, New York
Ted Croner (1922-2005) was an American photographer, described as an influential member of the New York school of photography during the 1940s and 1950s. His images are said to represent the best example of this movement.
Born in Baltimore in 1922 and raised in North Carolina, Croner developed an interest in photography while in high school. He honed his skills while serving as an aerial photographer in World War II before settling in New York City in 1947. At the urging of fashion photographer Fernand Fonssagrives, he enrolled in Alexey Brodovitch’s class at The New School where he studied with Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon and Lisette Model. During this period he produced many of his most memorable images including “Taxi, New York Night, 1947-48”, which appears on the cover of Bob Dylan’s 2006 album, Modern Times. Another of Croner’s photographs was used on the cover of Luna’s album Penthouse.
Croner also had a successful career as a fashion and commercial photographer – his work was published in Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue. He also worked extensively with corporations such as Coca-Cola and Chase Manhattan Bank. Croner is best known for his haunting night images of New York City taken in the 1940s and 1950s. He was one of several important photographers who belonged to the New York school of photography.
Photographs from the MoMA, which will provide an in-depth look at an essential component of the MoMA’s assets: its photography collection. Curated by Sarah Hermanson Meister, associate curator of the museum’s department of photography, the exhibition offers an overview of the history of photography through the work of over 90 artists, with the iconic city as a backdrop. It includes some of the most prestigious names in photography, such as Berenice Abbott, Diane Arbus, Harry Callahan, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Walter Evans, Lee Friedlander, Helen Levitt, Cindy Sherman, Irving Penn and Alfred Stieglitz.
For Sarah Hermanson Meister, associate curator of the MoMA’s Department of Photography, “Portraits of New York amply reflects the history of synergies of this medium and of the Big Apple during a period of important transformations for both. The photographs generated by the restless and constant commitment of numerous photographers to the city of New York have played a fundamental role in determining how New Yorkers perceive the city and themselves. These photographs have also defined the city’s image in the world’s imagination.
[…] The urban landscape of the city is a combination of the old and the new in constant evolution, and these physical transformations are repeated in the demographic changes that have characterised the city since the 1880s, when massive waves of immigrants began to arrive. This same diversity can be seen in the photography of New York of the past four decades. Just as its architects are inspired and limited by surrounding structures and building codes, and just as its inhabitants learn and rub up against each other and previous generations, so too the photographers of New York transport the visual memory of a an extensive and extraordinary repertoire of images of the city. They take on the challenge of creating new works that go beyond traditions and respond to what is new in New York.”
The exhibition curator continues: “Throughout the 20th century, numerous artists have felt inspired by New York’s combination of glamour and rawness. The city – which acquired its modernity at the same pace as photography, and in an equally impetuous and undisciplined way – has always been a theme of particular vitality for photographers, both those who have visited the city and those who live in it. On one occasion, faced with the challenge of capturing the essence of New York with a camera, the photographer Berenice Abbott wondered, “How shall the two-dimensional print in black and white suggest the flux of activity of the metropolis, the interaction of human beings and solid architectural constructions, all impinging upon each other in time?” Each of the photographs reproduced here is a unique response to that question.
New York may not be the capital of the United States, but it prides itself on being the capital of the world. Its inhabitants are intimate strangers, its avenues are constantly teeming and its buildings are absolutely unmistakeable, though they are packed so close together that it is impossible to see just one. The New York subway runs twenty-four hours a day, which has earned it the sobriquet of “the city that never sleeps.” It is the model for Gotham City, the disturbing metropolis that Batman calls home, and a symbol of independence and a wellspring of opportunities in a wide variety of films, from Breakfast at Tiffany‘s to Working Girl. And this is just a sample of the captivating and abundant raw material that the city offers to artists, regardless of the medium in which they work. However, it is the convergence of photographers in this city – in this place that combines anonymity and community, with its local flavour and global ambitions – that has created the ideal setting for the development of modern photography.
Text from the La Casa Encendida website [Online] Cited 28/04/2009. No longer available online
Each of Sherman’s sixty-nine Untitled Film Stills (1977-80), presents a female heroine from a movie we feel we must have seen. Here, she is the pert young career girl in a trim new suit on her first day in the big city. Among the others are the luscious librarian (#13), the chic starlet at her seaside hideaway (#7), the ingenue setting out on life’s journey (#48), and the tough but vulnerable film noir idol (#54). To make the pictures, Sherman herself played all of the roles or, more precisely, played all of the actresses playing all of the roles. In other words, the series is a fiction about a fiction, a deft encapsulation of the image of femininity that, through the movies, took hold of the collective imagination in postwar America – the period of Sherman’s youth, and the crucible of our contemporary culture.
In fact, only a handful of the Untitled Film Stills are modelled directly on particular roles in actual movies, let alone on individual stills of the sort that the studios distribute to publicise their films. All the others are inventive allusions to generic types, and so our sure sense of recognition is all the more telling. It tells us that, knowingly or not, we have absorbed the movie culture that Sherman invites us to examine as a powerful force in our lives.
Publication excerpt from The Museum of Modern Art, MoMA Highlights, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, revised 2004, originally published 1999, p. 295.
Diane Arbus (American, 1923-1971) Woman with Veil on Fifth Avenue, N.Y.C 1968 Silver gelatin print Museum of Modern Art, New York
Nickolas Muray (American, 1892-1965) Babe Ruth c. 1927 Gelatin silver print 13 3/8 × 10 7/16″ (33.9 × 26.5cm) Museum of Modern Art, New York Gift of Mrs. Nickolas Muray
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![Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) '[Detail of Stencilled Lettering on Yellow Railroad Car: "DO NOT HUMP"]' September 16, 1974](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/evans-do-not-hump-web.jpg "Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) '[Detail of Stencilled Lettering on Yellow Railroad Car: \"DO NOT HUMP\"]' September 16, 1974")
![Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) '[Fireplace in Floyd Burrroughs's Bedroom with Bedpost in Foreground, Hale County, Alabama]' 1936](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/walker-evans-fireplace-web.jpg "Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) '[Fireplace in Floyd Burrroughs's Bedroom with Bedpost in Foreground, Hale County, Alabama]' 1936")
![Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009) 'New York [Children with Soap Bubbles, New York City]' c. 1940](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/helen-levitt-children-with-soap-bubbles-new-york-city-web.jpg "Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009) 'New York [Children with Soap Bubbles, New York City]' c. 1940")
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