Artists: Jean-Michel Alberola, Louis Aragon, Marie-Berthe Aurenche, Richard Avedon, Alain Baczynsky, Jared Bark, Marc Bellini, Jacques-André Boiffard, André Breton, Hansjürg Buchmeier, Anita Cruz-Eberhard, Sabine Delafon, Anne Deleporte, Paul Eluard, Max Ernst, Michael Fent, Michel Folco, Valentine Fournier, Lee Friedlander, Näkki Goranin, Jeff Grostern, Susan Hiller, Dick Jewell , Svetlana Khachaturova, Jürgen Klauke, Jacques-Henri Lartigue, Naomi Leibowitz, Leon Levinstein, Annette Messager, Willy Michel, Daniel Minnick, Suzanne Muzard, Raynal Pellicer, Mathieu Pernot, Steven Pippin, Jacques Prévert, Raymond Queneau, Arnulf Rainer, Timm Rautert, Bruno Richard, Gerhard Richter, Thomas Ruff, Michel Salsmann, Tomoko Sawada, Joachim Schmid, Cindy Sherman, Lorna Simpson, Dimitri Soulas, Yves Tanguy, Amanda Tetrault, Roland Topor, Franco Vaccari, Andy Warhol, Gillian Wearing, Jan Wenzel, David Wojnarowicz and the group Fluxus.
This is one exhibition I wish I could really see in person. Such a fascinating subject!
The images are timeless, contextless and quite beguiling. The exhibition questions the aesthetics of the photobooth through six major themes: The Booth, Automatism, The Strip, Who Am I?, Who Are You?, Who Are We?. In Melbourne there are still two black and white photobooths outside the Elizabeth Street exit of Flinders Street railway station, standing there like silent sentinels of a bygone age. I remember when I was younger queueing to have my photograph taken, for student cards and for my first passport. You needed two nearly identical black and white shoulder up portraits, no smiling, no glasses on. Now you just go to the chemist for your colour renditions. The magic and the fun has gone.
The whole performance has the illusion of the cinematic. You queue to get in, drawing back the curtain and closing it behind you, as they close the doors of the cinema. The privacy of the booth, not in darkness but behind a curtain that shields your face from prying eyes but leaves the lower half of your body exposed. Behind where you will be sitting another curtain – drawn or open? What background do you want? You adjust the seat up and down so that your face is at the correct level with the mark on the screen, enter your money and wait. The red light comes on, you (com)pose yourself and a couple of seconds later: flash! Your eyes try to recover in time for the next red light: flash!
Time seems to slow down and almost stop between the flashes of light. The experience of your performance before the screen possesses such a visceral, tense, gut feel but also a disembodied feeling. I never know how I am going to look on the cinematic film strip, not at 24 frames a second, but at 4 frames per minute. What happens to the time in between? Standing outside the booth waiting for a strip of paper with your impression on it, not knowing what the images are going to be like, whether the development of the image in such a short space of time has worked correctly – and the smell of the chemicals on the paper as you handle the still wet strip. Magic…
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Musée de l’Elysée for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
When the first photobooths were set up in Paris in 1928, the Surrealists used them heavily and compulsively. In a few minutes, and for a small price, the machine offered them, through a portrait, an experience similar to automatic writing. Since then, generations of artists have been fascinated by the concept of the photobooth. From Andy Warhol to Arnulf Rainer, Thomas Ruff, Cindy Sherman and Gillian Wearing, many used it to play with their identity, tell stories, or simply create worlds.
Behind the Curtain – the Aesthetics of the Photobooth, an exhibition created by the Musée de l’Elysée, is the first to focus on the aesthetics of the photobooth. It is divided into six major themes: the booth, the automated process, the strip, who am I ?, who are you?, who are we? Provider of standardised legal portraits, it is the ideal tool for introspection and reflection on others, whether individually or in groups. By bringing together over 600 pieces made on different media (photographs, paintings, lithographs and videos ) from sixty international artists, the exhibition reveals the influence of the photobooth within the artistic community, from its inception to the present day.
The exhibition questions the aesthetics of the photobooth through six major themes.
The Booth
An isolated space, closed in as if it were some sort of modern confessional, the photobooth is an invitation to the most intimate revelations. Generally located in public spaces-subway station, department store or train station-it also offers an extraordinary observation point onto the urban hustle and bustle. It is a world in between the intimate and the public, the inside and the outside, the debarred and the open.
Automatism
From the Surrealists to the most contemporary artists, all have been fascinated by the automatism of the photobooth. The machine does the work. The author vanishes behind the almighty technology. Malfunction can occur at times. The result is a form of poetry of the automatism made visible in its faults, failures or blunders.
The Strip
As a series of juxtaposed images, the strip recreates spatial or temporal continuities. It reconstructs improbable spaces: a closer look shows that, in fact, the adjacent image is the following image. Through this succession of images, the photobooth holds, as if folded into it, the principle of the cinema. Putting images side by side is already telling a story.
Who am I?
Identity is embodied within the space of the photobooth. It is a space for self-staging, where social, ethnic, sexual, community or any other identity can be strengthened or undone. One can pretend to ascertain one’s naked identity through the mirror of the photobooth, or on the contrary, by pulling faces or in disguise, to establish metamorphoses of the self. The photobooth is the ideal introspective tool.
Who are you?
The photobooth is not only a place suitable for self-reflection, it is also a place in which the other can be questioned, in particular through the legal identification system that delivers what is commonly referred to as ‘ID’. In devoting oneself to the compulsive and bulimic collecting of photobooth strips, one can also get lost in the faces of others.
Who are we?
While it allows us to reflect upon our own identity, or other people’s, the photobooth is also an opportunity to ponder about the nature of the couple, or the group. Inside the booth, some build their image through the mirror of the other, or of others; they pose in pairs or more, thus asserting their affiliation to a social entity. The photobooth reinforces our gregarious instinct; it embodies collective identity.
With works by Jacques-Henri Lartigue, Willy Michel, Lorna Simpson, Amanda Tetrault and the collection of albums of purikuras (see photograph below: in Japan, the name purikuras refers to a photo sticker booth or the product of such a photo booth. The name is a shortened form of the registered trademark Purinto Kurabu (プリント倶楽部). The term derives from the English print club. Jointly developed by Atlus and Sega, the first purikura machines were sold in July 1995).
The photographs in this posting highlight the conceptual diversity in contemporary art practice and emphasise the talent of the practitioners working today. Just an observation: how serious are the portraits – it’s as if no’body’ is allowed to laugh or smile anymore. Perhaps this is a reflection of the times in which we live, full of malaise, anxiety and little wonder. Fear of being replaced, fear of discrimination, fear of growing up, fear of dying. Or dressed up in a women’s dress and pink hat, having the “courage” or ignorance (the opposite of fear?) to look like a stunned mullet with a blank expression on the face (deadpan photography that I really can’t stand). Or, perhaps, simple effacement: defiance as body becomes mannequin, body hidden behind a mask or completely cloaked from view. These grand photographs have the intensity, perhaps not a lightness of being.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to PICA for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Trish Morrissey (Irish, b. 1967) Hayley Coles, June 17th, 2006 2006
Courtesy of the artist and Elaine Levy Project, commissioned by Impressions Gallery
Front deals with the notion of borders, boundaries and the edge; using the family group and the beach setting as metaphors. For this work, the artist travelled to beaches in the UK and around Melbourne. There, she approached families and groups of friends who had made temporary encampments, or marked out territories and asked if she could be part of their family temporarily. Morrissey took over the role or position of a woman within that group – usually the mother figure. The artist asked to take the place of the mother figure, and to borrow her clothes. The mother figure then took over the artist’s role and photographed her family using a 4 x 5 camera (which Morrissey had already carefully set up) under the artist’s instruction. While Morrissey, a stranger on the beach, nestled in with the mother figure’s loved ones.
These highly performative photographs are shaped by chance encounters with strangers, and by what happens when physical and psychological boundaries are crossed. Ideas around the mythological creature the ‘shape shifter’ and the cuckoo are evoked. Each piece within the series is titled by the name of the woman who the artist replaced within the group.
Text from the PICA website
Bindi Cole (Australian, b. 1975) Ajay 2009
From the series Sistagirls
Courtesy of Nellie Castan Gallery
The term ‘Sistagirl’ is used to describe a transgender person in Tiwi Island culture. Traditionally, the term was ‘Yimpininni’. The very existence of the word provides some indication of the inclusive attitudes historically extended towards Aboriginal sexual minorities. Colonisation not only wiped out many Indigenous people, it also had an impact on Aboriginal culture and understanding of sexual and gender expression.
As many traditions were lost, this term became a thing of the past. Yimpininni were once held in high regard as the nurturers within the family unit and tribe much like the Faafafine from Samoa. As the usage of the term vanished, tribes’ attitudes toward queer Indigenous people began to resemble that of the western world and the religious right. Even today many Sistagirls are excluded from their own tribes and suffer at the hands of others.
Text from the PICA website
Maciej Dakowicz (Polish, b. 1976) Pink Hat, 23:42. Cardiff 2006
Courtesy of the artist and Third Floor Gallery
St Mary Street is one of the main streets in central Cardiff, the capital city of Wales; a city as any other in the UK. Unassuming during the day, on weekend nights it becomes the main scene of the city night life, fuelled by alcohol and emotions. Some of Cardiff’s most popular clubs and pubs are located there or in its vicinity. The very popular Chippy Lane, with its numerous chip and kebab shops, is just a stone’s throw away. Sooner or later most party-goers end up in that area, whether looking for another drink, some food or in search of another dance floor.
Everything takes place in this public arena – from drinking, fighting, kissing to crying and sleeping. Supermen chat up Playboy Bunnies, somebody lies on the pavement taking a nap, the hungry ones finish their portions of chips and the policemen stop another argument before it turns into a fight. Nobody seems to worry about tomorrow, what matters is here and now, punctuated by another week at work, until the next weekend rolls around again.
Text from the PICA website
Laura Pannack (British, b. 1985) Shay 2010
Courtesy of the artist
Represented by Lisa Pritchard Agency
What’s so special about this picture are the details. The tattoo – not just what it says but the way it mimics the Nike Swoosh on her shirt – and the cigarette, that although it is not in focus, one imagines has a large line of ash on it, as if time has stopped. This is echoed in the expression on her face, deep intensity and focused on something ahead although the car is obviously stationary. From a distance one could be mistaken that this is an American photograph from the 70s but on closer inspection – the piercing, the Nike Swoosh, the car door handles – one realises that this is contemporary and British. And yet of course that stare is timeless.
Harry Hardie on the Foto8 website [Online] Cited 22/03/2012 no longer available online
Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin Culture3/Sheet72/Frame3 2011
Courtesy of the artists & Paradise Row, London
HIJACKED III interview with PICA curator Leigh Robb
… Artists are notorious for their ability to hijack; meaning to stop and hold up, to seize control by use of force in order to divert or appropriate, a deliberate attempt to action a change of direction.
Hijacked III: Contemporary Photography from Australia the UK draws on the success and unique energy of Hijacked I (Australia and USA) and Hijacked II (Australia and Germany), to once again bring together two geographically distant but historically connected communities through a range of diverse photographic practices.
This exhibition will be simultaneously presented across two sites: PICA in Perth, Western Australia and QUAD Gallery in Derby, United Kingdom, and has been timed to coincide with the launch of the luscious, full colour and 420 page Hijacked III compendium, published by Big City Press. Utilising portraiture, digital collage, archival images, documentary snap shots, internet grabs and refined photographic tableaux, the 24 artists and over 120 works in this exhibition explore themes as diverse as curious weekend leisure pursuits, gender politics and displaced Indigenous culture.
Artists: Tony Albert, Warwick Baker, Broomberg & Chanarin, Natasha Caruana, Bindi Cole, Maciej Dakowicz, Christopher Day, Melinda Gibson, Toni Greaves, Petrina Hicks, Alin Huma, Seba Kurtis, David Manley, Tracey Moffatt, Trish Morrissey, Laura Pannack, Sarah Pickering, Zhao Renhui, Simon Roberts, Helen Sear, Justin Spiers, Luke Stephenson, Christian Thompson, Tereza Zelenkova, Michael Ziebarth.
Press release from PICA website
Sarah Pickering (British, b. 1972) Land mine 2005
Courtesy of the artist and Meessen De Clercq, Brussels
The Explosion pictures document the literal theatre of war – the detailed level of artifice used to prepare men and women for combat on the front lines. They also reveal the minutiae of packaging war as entertainment. The beauty of the pictures lies in their perverse seductiveness, and this attraction underscores the distance most of us have from real combat.
Pickering’s Explosion images, by distilling an aspect of the war that is a fiction, question the reliability of seemingly objective historical accounts, such as news reports and photographs that influence how war is communicated and remembered. By extension they question how we come to know what we know about it. We learn about war from a variety of sources, from history books, first-hand accounts, news media, and movies, all of which can get confused and merged in our minds as memory.
The dual purpose of the explosives – training and re-enacting – forms a fitting parallel to how we cope with trauma, a process of both anticipation and reconciliation.”
Simon Roberts travelled across England in a motorhome between 2007 and 2008 for this portfolio of large-format tableaux photographs of the English at leisure. We English builds on his first major body of work, Motherland (2005), with the same themes of identity, memory and belonging resonating throughout. Photographing ordinary people engaged in diverse pastimes, Roberts aims to show a populace with a profound attachment to its local environment and homeland. He explores the notion that nationhood – that what it means to be English – is to be found on the surface of contemporary life, encapsulated by banal pastimes and everyday leisure activities. The resulting images are an intentionally lyrical rendering of a pastoral England, where Roberts finds beauty in the mundane and in the exploration of the relationship between people and place, and of our connections to the landscapes around us.
Tony Albert (Australian, b. 1981) No Place 2009
Courtesy of the artist
Tony Albert is a Girramay rainforest man from the Cardwell area… The No Place series references The Wizard of Oz ‘there’s no place like home’. For No Place Tony returns to his tropical paradise home with a group of Lucho Libre wrestling masks from Mexico. His family adorn these masks and again become warriors protecting their paradise. These seemingly playful masks share much with Aboriginal and particularly rainforest culture. Body and shield designs from this area represent animal gods or spirit beings. The use of these masks brings a prescient new layer of armour for a new generation of warrior.
The colour scheme of solid blocks of red, black and yellow also speak to traditional rainforest aesthetics. There are strong elements of the sublime and the fantastical within these works. Viewing Aboriginal people in iconic north Queensland locations masked in Mexican wrestling paraphernalia carries more than a hint of the surreal and absurd.
Anon. “Tony Albert and No Place,” on the Big Art website, 2010 [Online] Cited 22/03/2012 no longer available online
Christian Thompson (Australian / Bidjara, b. 1978) Untitled #7 from the King Billy series 2010
Courtesy of the artist and Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi
King Billy, is an ode to his great great grandfather, King Billy of Bonnie Doon Lorne. The initial inspiration was a photograph of King Billy, standing alone wearing his ‘name plate’. Despite its colonial overtones, for Thompson, this image of the senior tribesman exudes wisdom and kindness and reminds him of his father. In much of Thompson’s work his processes are intuitive, he delves into a rich dream world and draws out fabulous images. He manifests his own mythological world. In this series his figures are clad in fabrics patterned with Indigenous motifs, mainly cheap hoodies in lurid colours; a modern / ancient skin for a magic youth culture. He has made a triptych, three views of a pink hooded figure spewing cascading pearl stands from the face; opulent, decadent, excessive and sensual.
Another image shows a crowned figure swathed in fabrics bearing the markings of various clans, perhaps indicating the domain of this regal form. In the hands a (poisoned?) chalice – the sawn off plastic bottle a warning about petrol sniffing? His self-portrait as psychedelic godhead/Carnaby Street dandy / flower child is spectacular and arresting. He is wearing a tailored suit, patterned with more Indigenous motifs and he cradles a bouquet. His skin is green and his eyes are purple flowers. What can this otherworldly creature tell us?
Thompson seems to emphasise a theme of disparity in this work; the ‘hoodie’ with the cascading pearls, the crown with the plastic bottle, the opulence with the desperate. These works are both beautiful and confronting.
Text from the PICA website
HIJACKED III interview with Christian Thompson
Petrina Hicks (Australian, b. 1972) Emily the Strange 2011
Courtesy of the artist and Stills Gallery
Petrina Hicks’ Beautiful Creatures appeals to our senses. Immediately alluring, the large-scale, hyper-real photographs, are all rendered so clearly and with such control they are reminiscent of advertisements. But with a series of little ruptures, within images and between them, Hicks disrupts our usually beguiled response to such artistry. For her, photography’s capability to both create and corrupt the process of seduction and consumption is of endless interest.
Hicks loads her images with history and associations but denies us a clear message. Along with the ambiguity, there is a visceral quality in these new works; her depiction of flesh, hair and veins stops the viewer short of being lulled into consumption. Hicks engages a playful yet confronting approach to confound our expectations. A cat, naked without fur, in the image Sphynx, contrasts a beautiful blonde with a face full of it in Comfort. In Emily the Strange the hairless creature reappears with a young girl whose piercing green eyes, skin-pink dress, and latent defiance, make her eerily akin to her pet. Alluded to, in the title of the exhibition, this duality is present in much of the work. Her subjects are not simply beautiful or simply creatures.
Text from the PICA website
HIJACKED III interview with photographer Petrina Hicks
Tereza Zelenkova (Czech, b. 1985) Cadaver 2011
Courtesy of the artist
Luke Stephenson (British, b. 1983) Diamond Sparrow #1 2009
Courtesy of the artist
Stephenson finds birds and the world surrounding them wonderfully fascinating. The birds he has photographed all belong to avid bird breeders who on the whole have been keeping birds their whole lives. It’s a hobby people generally don’t come into contact with, unless you are active within it. The artist does not keep birds but finds them beautiful in all their variations and colours, so has set out capture these birds in a way that would show them at their best.
There are many criteria to breeding a prize-winning bird, from shape and form to its pattern, and this is something Stephenson has tried to convey whilst also attempting to show some of their personalities. He set out to photograph every breed of bird within the ‘hobby’ of keeping birds but soon realised there were thousands of variations, so decided to keep this as an ongoing project; realising instalments every couple of years which people can collect and, hopefully one day, the dictionary will be complete.
Martin Parr (British, 1952-2025) New Brighton, England From the series Last Resort 1983-1985 Pigment print Edition of 5 102 x 127cm Image courtesy of the artist and Niagara Galleries, Melbourne
This is a fine exhibition of the work of celebrated English photographer Martin Parr at Niagara Galleries, Richmond, albeit with one proviso. The mainly large colour prints are handsomely displayed in plain white frames within the gallery space and are taken from his well known series: Last Resort, Luxury, New British and British Food. Parr’s work is at its best when he concentrates on the volume of space within the image plane and the details that emerge from such a concentrated visualisation – whether it be the tension points within the image, assemblage of colour, incongruity of dress, messiness of childhood or philistine nature of luxury.
The best photographs have a wonderful frisson about them, a genuine love of and resonance with the things he is imaging. This frisson can be seen in all of the photographs in this posting but most notably in :
~ The incursion of the surreal red colour to left in England. New Brighton (above) and Parr’s masterful use of vertical and horizontal lines within the image. Note the verticality: of the child’s toy, the two children themselves, the pillars of the pavilion and the lighthouse holding the whole image together at right. If this lighthouse were not there the eye would fall out of the image. As it is it is contained, forcing the viewer to look closely at the absurdity of the melting ice cream and the splashes that have fallen on the ground.
~ The complexity of the photograph England. New Brighton (below) where the eye does not know what to rest upon, constantly jumping from object to object. Do you look at the women on the ground, the shoes to right, the piece of fabric to left, the screaming baby, the sunlit pink umbrella, the women in blue bikini up the ramp, the long elongated shadowed wall with peek-a-boo heads leading to the outlined figures at the vanishing point of image – the top of the ramp. The understanding of light (with the use of flash) and the construction of the image is superlative. Wow!
~ The incongruity evidenced in the photograph England, Ascot. 2003: the over tight pink sateen dress with unfortunate stain (which the eye is irrevocably drawn to), applique bow linked through to hideous flower embossed handbag which then contrasts with the seated women behind in hat and purple floral dress. In the large print in the gallery the background is more out of focus than in the small reproduction here, allowing the viewer’s eye an avenue of escape via the grass and deck chair beyond.
~ The delicious, choreographed mise-en-scène of Australia, The Melbourne Cup. 2008 – the suits, ties and glasses, the teezed hair, the alcohol – where none of the participants is looking at the camera, where only the ladies hand clutches at the back of the man’s shoulder. They look down, they look left, they look right, they look away, they never engage with each other or the viewer. The critical space in this assemblage is the distance between the man and the woman’s noses, that vitally small space of separation that is a synonym for the interactions occurring in the rest of the image. The blindness of Lux’ry, its crassness, its stain.
And so it goes. The dirt under the fingernails of the child eating a doughnut, the lurid colours of the popsicle and jacket of the kid with dribble on his face, all fantastic. There are moments of stasis, for example in the contemplative photograph Australia. South Hedland. Blackrock Tourist Park. 2011 (below) taken from Parr’s new series Australia, where Parr has photographed Australian life in three Western Australian port cities, Fremantle, Broome and Port Hedland. See the video at the bottom of the posting and listen to Parr talk about his work.
This is all fine and dandy, dressed up in polka dots and a lurid bow tie, but when the photographs become too reductive, as in the large photograph in the exhibition England. Dorset. West Bay. 1997 (see first column, fourth down) there is really not enough to hang your hat on. This feeling of over simplification, as though the photographer has said to himself “here’s something I have seen that you haven’t recognised, and I think it is important for you to recognise it” – the perceived essentialness of the object – can become a bit strained. I know that these type of images are part of the series about British or Scottish food or about objects from a specific place but do they really have this grand an importance in the scheme of things? This feeling is reinforced in the exhibition, and this is my proviso to show, when the images such as Scotland. Glasgow. Fairy cakes. 1999, England. Blackpool. 1995 (bread and butter on a plate on red check cloth) are presented at A4 size surrounded by heavy white frames. These photographs have to be large to have any chance of working at all and at the small size they fall flat.
The size of a photograph raises interesting questions about the display of contemporary photography. The giant light boxes of Jeff Wall, the huge group portraits of Thomas Struth, the huge portraits of Thomas Ruff, the huge environments of Candida Hofer and the huge panoramas of Andreas Gursky (to name but a few) are all points in case. Would they work at a smaller size? No. They rely on scale and detail, visual impact for their effect: the same with Martin Parr. What is really ‘In Focus’ is the visualisation of the artist, his ability to envisage the final print at this large size. The A4 prints in this exhibition simply do not work at that size, for these photographs.
Think of Ansel Adams’ famous Monolith, The Face of Half Dome, Yosemite National Park, Calif., (circa 1926). Originally printed as a contact 8″ x 10″ from the negative, Adams gradually increased the size of this image till it became a huge print as tall as a man in his later life. The image works at multiple sizes, it spoke to him (and the viewer) at all these sizes: the small contact is intense and gem-like, the larger imitating the monolithic structure of the Face itself. I feel that some large contemporary photographs are quite vacuous at this large size, that there is no reason for them to be at this size. In other words it is not appropriate for the image. Conversely it would seem that artists previsualise for this size in the end print, which is fine, but that the print cannot exist, cannot breathe in the world at a smaller size. Is this a problem? Does this matter? I believe it does, especially when a photograph is displayed at a size that simply doesn’t work. I was always taught to print a photograph at an appropriate size for the image, whatever size(s) that may be (and there can be multiples), as long as it has resonance for that particular image.
As evidenced in this exhibition, if the photograph cannot “work” at the size that it is to be exhibited then it should not be displayed at all – it is a diminution not just of the artists vision but of the resonance of the photograph, in this case going from large to small. In an upcoming posting about the retrospective of the work of American photographer Fransceca Woodman, there is an installation photograph of the exhibition at The Guggenheim, New York (see above). Her vintage prints (seen in the background) – small, intense visions – have been printed at a huge scale (with her permission) and they simply do not work at this floor to ceiling height. They have lost all of their intimacy, which is one of the strengths of her photography. Again, I believe it is a diminution of the artists vision and the integrity of the photograph, this time from small to large. Artists are not always right. The same can be said of the retrospective of Cartier-Bresson that I saw at the National Galleries of Scotland in Edinburgh in 2005. One room out of four had very small, intense vintage prints in brown hues and the other three galleries had large 20″ x 24″ grainy prints with strong contrast that really ruined any response I had to the work as evidenced by the vintage prints. They were almost reproductions, a simulacra of the real thing. I had a feeling that they weren’t even by the artist himself. The same could be said here.
To conclude I would say this is a fine exhibition of large photographs by Martin Parr that would have been even more focused without the small A4 prints. They are joyous paeans to the quirky, incongruous worlds in which we live and circulate. They evidence life itself in all its orthogonal absurdity. I love ’em!
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the artist and Niagara Galleries for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Francesca Woodman installation photograph at The Guggenheim Museum, New York. Note the small, vintage prints on the far wall.
Martin Parr (British, 1952-2025) New Brighton, England From the series The Last Resort 1983-1985 Pigment print Edition of 5 102 x 127cm Image courtesy of the artist and Niagara Galleries, Melbourne
Martin Parr (British, 1952-2025) Blackrock Tourist Park, South Hedland, Australia, 2011 From the series Australia 2011 Pigment print Edition of 5 101.6 x 152.4cm Image courtesy of the artist and Niagara Galleries, Melbourne
Martin Parr (British, 1952-2025) Ascot, England, 2003 From the series Luxury 1995-2009 Traditional C-type print Edition of 5 101.6 x 152.4cm Image courtesy of the artist and Niagara Galleries, Melbourne
Martin Parr (British, 1952-2025) The Melbourne Cup, Australia, 2008 From the series Luxury 1995-2009 Pigment print Edition of 5 101.6 x 152.4cm Image courtesy of the artist and Niagara Galleries, Melbourne
Martin Parr (British, 1952-2025) Ramsgate, England, 1996 From the series New British 1994-1996 Traditional C-type print Edition of 5 105.5 x 157.5cm Image courtesy of the artist and Niagara Galleries, Melbourne
Martin Parr (British, 1952-2025) Car boot sale, Bristol, England, 1995 From the series British Food 1994-1995 Traditional C-type print Edition of 33 18 x 25.5cm Image courtesy of the artist and Niagara Galleries, Melbourne
No Worries: Martin Parr – FotoFreo 2012
Magnum photographer Martin Parr was asked by FotoFreo Festival Director Bob Hewitt to photograph three Western Australian port cities, Fremantle, Broome and Port Hedland. Photographer David Dare Parker was assigned to document the project, the work titled No Worries.
In the 1970s, Daniel Meadows was at the forefront of the independent photography movement. His practice is complex, passionate and sometimes deeply autobiographical.
Daniel Meadows’ early work broke with tradition and infused the medium with new energies and ways of seeing. Between 1971 and 1987, he produced an astonishing record of urban society in Britain, working in a uniquely collaborative way through his interviews with – and writing about – his subjects.
Text from the National Science and Media Museum website
The National Science and Media Museum presents the first retrospective of the career of Daniel Meadows – photographer, documentarian, digital storyteller and unofficial co-founder of a uniquely British photography movement. Daniel Meadows was one of a group of photographers who spearheaded the independent photography movement in the early 1970s, breaking with tradition and infusing the medium with new energies and ways of seeing. His practice is complex, passionate and sometimes deeply autobiographical.
Between 1971 and 1987, he produced an astonishing record of urban society in Britain, working in a uniquely collaborative way through his interviews with – and writing about – his subjects. Meadows is a documentarist and an exceptional storyteller. He reveals historic and culturally significant aspects of people’s lives, dating from the 1970s to the present day. This exhibition displays photographic works alongside oral testimonies by some of the people featured in the photographs and Digital Stories.
Meadows’ practice developed at Manchester Polythechnic, where he trained alongside fellow photographers Martin Parr, Brian Griffin, Charlie Meecham and Peter Fraser. Together they spearheaded a new documentary movement intent on establishing an independent method for making and disseminating photographs, outside the existing conventions of commercial practitioners and photojournalists. Meadows’ resulting work displays complexity and passion, and confers a personal and sometimes deeply autobiographical imprint. During his career he has produced an astonishing record of urban British society, working in a uniquely collaborative way, through photography, digital stories and recorded interviews, to capture extraordinary aspects of everyday life.
His career began in 1972, when he opened a photographic studio in a former barber’s shop in the Moss Side area of Manchester. The Shop on Greame Street features residents from the district who posed for a portrait which they then received free of charge. None has been previously exhibited, and a selection will be on public display for the first time from October.
Two further early projects are also included in the exhibition, both undertaken in partnership with Martin Parr. June Street, 1973, is an intimate portrayal of working class households in an area of Salford, which have since been demolished. Butlin’s by the Sea, 1972, presents a fascinating record of the holiday camp in Filey, North Yorkshire, just after the heyday of this style of British resort.
In 1973, Meadows, aged 21, also bought a 25-year-old Leyland PD1 double-decker bus for £360.20. He removed the seats to make space for a darkroom and living quarters and named it the Free Photographic Omnibus. He spent 14 months taking his Greame Street studio philosophy of free portraits on tour around England. Original photographs from the journey appear in the retrospective, along with a selection from a follow-up project in which Meadows sought out his Photobus subjects more than 20 years later to re-photograph them for National Portraits: Now and Then, 1995-2000.
Other notable works displayed include Decline in the Cotton Industry, 1975-1978, Welfare State International, 1976-1983, and Nattering in Paradise, 1984-1987. The gallery will also screen a selection of Meadows’ Digital Storytelling films. Condensing personal stories into two-minute features of approximately 250 heartfelt words and 12 images, he created “multimedia sonnets from the people”, leading American commentator J.D Lasica to call him “one of the icons of the Digital Storytelling movement.”
This exhibition and the accompanying publication is the product of research by Professor Val Williams as part of an ongoing study into British photography of 1970s and 1980s at the University of the Arts London. It is preceded by the research project, The New British Photography, 1968-1981, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
Together Val Williams and Daniel Meadows have brought to light the photographer’s incredible archive of prints and negatives, along with ephemera and audio recordings. They have unearthed unpublished and sometimes forgotten treasures which add to a remarkable document – a dramatic, moving and empathetic evocation of a recognisable, yet increasingly alien era.
Press release from the National Science and Media Museum website
“The possibility of using our bodies as a possible source of very numerous pleasures is something that is very important. For instance, if you look at the traditional construction of pleasure, you see that bodily pleasure, or pleasures of the flesh, are always drinking, eating and fucking. And that seems to be the limit of the understanding of our bodies, our pleasures ….
It is very interesting to note, for instance, that for centuries people generally, as well as doctors, psychiatrists, and even liberation movements, have always spoken about desire, and never about pleasure. “We have to liberate our desire,” they say. No! We have to create new pleasure. And then maybe desire will follow.” (My bold)
Michel Foucault 1
George Platt Lynes, Minor White and The Temptation of Saint Anthony Is Mirrors
I had the great privilege of visiting The Minor White Archive at Princeton University while I was researching for my PhD. While there I studied the work cards and classic prints of the great photographer, paying particular attention to his photography of the male. What was a great surprise and delight to me were the presence of photographs of explicit sexual acts, men photographed with erections – images that have, to my knowledge, never been published. I don’t think that many people would even know that Minor White took such photographs. Although these images would have never been for public consumption it is still very unusual to find a classical photographer with such a public profile taking photographs of erect penises, especially in the 1940s!
Disturbed by having been in battle in the Second World War and seeing some of his best male friends killed, White’s early photographs of men (in their uniforms) depict the suffering and anguish that the mental and physical stress of war can cause. He was even more upset than most because he was battling his own inner sexual demons at the same time, his shame and disgust at being a homosexual and attracted to men, a difficulty compounded by his religious upbringing. In his photographs White both denied his attraction to men and expressed it. His photographs of the male body are suffused with both sexual mystery and a celebration of his sexuality despite his bouts of guilt. After the war he started to use the normal everyday bodies of his friends to form sequences of photographs, sometimes using the body as a metaphor for the landscape and vice versa. In the above photograph (Tom Murphy, left), based on a religious theme, we see a dismembered hairy body front on, the hands clutching and caressing the body, the lower hand hovering near the exposed genitalia, the upper hand cupping the breast. We see the agony and ecstasy of a homoerotic desire cloaked in a religious theme.
The image comes from the The Temptation of St Anthony is Mirrors (1948), four pages of which can be seen below. While at The Minor White Archive I looked at the only complete, undamaged book in existence. What an experience!
The book has a powerful and intense presence. It was beautifully sequenced as you would expect from Minor White and features photographs of Tom Murphy. There is a series of his hands over the back of a chair in different positions: hanging, curled, splayed, held slightly upwards, and these are paired with photographs of bare feet and turned up jeans, bare feet and rocks, and three other photographs of Tom Murphy. In an excellent paper Cruising and Transcendence in the Photographs of Minor White (Nd. Later published as an online-only feature accompanying Aperture magazine’s Spring 2015 issue, “Queer”), author Kevin Moore observes that the hand-bound volume with images paired on facing pages – “mirrors” to both one another and the artist – is a personal account as well as a meditation on the sins of the flesh.
“Temptation (which was never published or exhibited) begins with a sort of prologue, comprising a single full-length nude of Tom Murphy, White’s student and the model most commonly associated with his work. The pose is similar to those found in the beefcake pictures White was producing at this time: Murphy adopts a classical contrapposto stance and is entirely nude, his pale, wiry body positioned against a dark backdrop. A piece of driftwood at the model’s feet proposes a theme of innocence – man in his natural state. The sequence then moves to pairings of images describing man in his civilised state, featuring several loving close-ups of Murphy’s gesturing hands, a shot of his bare feet, and a single shoulder-length portrait, in which he wears a buttoned shirt and looks intently off to the side. Next, there is an interlude suggesting growing dissolution: an image of Murphy’s feet and a petrified stone is paired with a shot of Murphy in full dress slouched on a mass of rocks and staring vacantly off into the distance. The next pairing (images 9 and 10 below) accelerates the descent into temptation. Here, the pose in a second picture of Murphy’s feet suggests agitation, while a three-quarter length portrait of Murphy, crouched in the bushes and looking back over his shoulder, is as emblematic an image of cruising as White ever produced. The photographs that follow descend further into lust and self-recrimination, conveyed through photographs in which Murphy’s naked body alternates between expressions of pain and pleasure. The sequence ends with a series of beatific nudes (images 27 and 28 below), which express redemption through nonsexual treatments of the body and in the body’s juxtaposition with natural forms – a return to nature.
White may have thought at first that the sequence format would help him transcend the limits of personal biography, that he could use the breadth and fluidity of the sequence to emphasize a universal narrative while exercising control over the potentially explosive and revealing content of individual images. This proved to be overly optimistic, at least in his earliest uses of the form. White’s colleagues, for example, immediately understood Temptation for what it really was: an agonized portrayal of White’s love for his male student.”
Moore goes on to conclude that White obsfucated his sexuality, displacing gay ‘cruising’ “by a universalised mystical searching – sexual longing setting in motion a heroic search” using photography as his medium, and that his photographs became a dreamscape, perhaps even a dream(e)scape: “in which meanings are obscured, not clarified; signs are effaced, not illuminated; beauty is closeted, not set out for all to see. White was attracted to the ambiguity of the dream because it offered cover and protection but also freedom to maneuver. The dream supported the irrational, maintained a sense of mystery, and beautified frustration.”
I have to disagree with Kevin Moore. Anyone who has seen The Temptation of Saint Anthony Is Mirrors in the flesh (so to speak) can feel the absolute presence of these images, their reality, the connection between image and viewer. Maybe White was a Romantic but he was realistically romantic; his images are not dreamscapes, they offer multiple readings and contexts, insights into the human condition. Even though there was anguish and guilt present about his sexuality, channelled through his photography, anyone bold enough to take photographs of erections in 1940 has some ticker. It takes a clear eye and a courageous heart to do this, knowing what was at stake in this era of sexual repression. Beauty is not closeted here, unless I am looking at different images from Kevin Moore. In fact the magic of the photography of Minor White is his ability to modulate space, to modulate bodies so that they are beautiful, ambiguous and mystical whatever their context. Not everything in this world has to be in your face. Like a Glen Gould playing the Goldberg Variations revelation of beauty takes time, concentration and meditation.
Also, an overriding feeling when viewing the images was one of loneliness, sadness and anguish, for the bodies seemed to be observed and not partaken of, to be unavailable both physically and in a strange way, photographically. For a photographer who prided himself on revealing the spirit within, through photography, these are paradoxical photographs, visually accessible and mysteriously (un)revealing, photographs of a strange and wonderful ambivalence. Two great words: obsfucation, ambivalence. Clouded with mixed feelings and emotions, not necessarily anything to do with sexuality. Not everything has to be about sexuality. It is the difference between imbibing Freud or Jung – personally I prefer the more holistic, more inclusive, more spiritual Jung.
And so to the image of George Platt Lynes that I have paired with the nude of Tom Murphy (below).
Platt Lynes was another artist who struggled with is sexuality, but seemingly not to such an extent as Minor White did. GPL worked as a fashion photographer and had his own studio in New York where he photographed dancers, artists and celebrities among others. He undertook a series of mythological photographs on classical themes (which are amazing in composition and feature Surrealist motifs). Privately he photographed male nudes but was reluctant to show them in public for fear of the harm that they could do to his reputation and business with the fashion magazines. Generally his earlier male nude photographs concentrate on the idealised youthful body or ephebe.
As Lynes became more despondent with his career as a fashion photographer his private photographs of male nudes tended to take on a darker and sharper edge. After a period of residence in Hollywood he returned to New York nearly penniless. His style of photographing the male nude underwent a revision. While the photographs of his European colleagues still relied on the sun drenched bodies of young adolescent males evoking memories of classical beauty and the mythology of Ancient Greece the later nudes of Platt Lynes feature a mixture of youthful ephebes and heavier set bodies which appear to be more sexually knowing. The compositional style of dramatically lit photographs of muscular torsos of older men shot in close up (see photograph below for example) were possibly influenced by a number of things – his time in Hollywood with its images of handsome, swash-buckling movie stars with broad chests and magnificent physiques; the images of bodybuilders by physique photographers that George Platt Lynes visited; the fact that his lover George Tichenor had been killed during WWII; and the knowledge that he was penniless and had cancer. There is, I believe, a certain sadness but much inner strength in his later photographs of the male nude that harnesses the inherent sexual power embedded within their subject matter.
When undertaking research into GPL’s photographs at The Kinsey Institute as part of my PhD I noted that most of the photographs had annotations in code on the back of them giving details of age, sexual proclivities of models and what they are prepared to do and where they were found. This information gives a vital social context to GPL’s nude photographs of men and positions them within the moral and ethical framework of the era in which they were made. The strong image (below) is always quoted as an example of GPL’s more direct way of photographing the male nude in the last years of his life. The male is solid, imposing, lit from above, heavy set, powerful, massive. The eyes are almost totally in shadow. Later photos have more chiaroscuro than earlier work, more use of contrasting light (especially down lit or uplit figures) but are they more direct? Yes. The men look straight into camera.
This monumentality of body and form was matched by a new openness in the representation of sexuality. There are intimate photographs of men in what seem to be post-coital revere, in unmade beds, genitalia showing or face down showing their butts off. Some of the faces in these later photographs remain hidden, as though disclosure of identity would be detrimental for fear of persecution. The photograph above is very ‘in your face’ for the conservative time from which it emerges, remembering it was the era of witch hunts against communists and subversives (including homosexuals). Conversely, this photograph is quite restrained compared to the most striking series of GPL’s photographs that I saw at The Kinsey Institute which involves an exploration the male anal area (a photograph from the 1951 series can be found in the book titled George Platt Lynes: Photographs from The Kinsey Institute). This explicit series features other photographs of the same model – in particular one that depicts the male with his buttocks in the air pulling his arse cheeks apart. After Lynes found out he had cancer he started to send his photographs to the German homoerotic magazine Der Kries under the pseudonym Roberto Rolf, and in the last years of his life he experimented with paper negatives, which made his images of the male body even more grainy and mysterious.
I believe that Lynes understood, intimately, the different physical body types that gay men find desirable and used them in his photographs. He visited Lon of New York (a photographer of beefcake men) in his studio and purchased photographs of bodybuilders for himself, as did the German photographer George Hoyningen-Huene. It is likely that these images of bodybuilders did influence his later compositional style of images of men; it is also possible that he detected the emergence of this iconic male body type as a potent sexual symbol, one that that was becoming more visible and sexually available to gay men.
The differences between the White and GPL nudes is instructive. White: introspective, haunted, religious with an unrequited sense of longing – hands clutching self, inward pointing; GPL: more closely cropped, more open, one hand firmly grasping but the other hand open, receptive, presented to the viewer above the available phallic organ. It reminds me for some unknown reason, some quirk of my brain association, of the shell of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus (1486) inverted. There is difference between the two artists – one struggling with his sexuality, being realistically romantic, the other physically doing something about it – posting his photographs to one of the first gay magazines in the world. But both were taking photographs of intimate sexual acts that could never have been published in their lifetimes – that are still are hidden from view today. When, oh when, will someone have the courage to publish this work?
Dr Marcus Bunyan
My notes on Minor White’s photographs and notes on George Platt Lynes photographs from my Phd thesis Pressing the Flesh: Sex, Body Image and the Gay Male (2001) can be found below.
Many thankx to the Brooklyn Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
1/ Gallagher, Bob and Wilson, Alexander. “Sex and the Politics of Identity: An Interview with Michel Foucault,” in Thompson, Mark. Gay Spirit: Myth and Meaning. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987, p.31.
Research notes on photographs from the Minor White Archive, Princeton University, New Jersey 06/08/1999
Research at The Kinsey Institute , Bloomington, Indiana 16/08/1999 – 19/08/1999. George Platt Lynes photographs from the Collection at The Kinsey Institute
(top) Minor White (American, 1908-1976)
Images 9 and 10 in the bound sequence The Temptation of Saint Anthony Is Mirrors 1948
9.3 x 11.8cm; 11.2 x 9.1cm
(bottom) Minor White (American, 1908-1976)
Images 27 and 28 in the bound sequence The Temptation of Saint Anthony Is Mirrors 1948. 5.3 x 11.6cm; 10.6 x 8.9cm
(left) Minor White (American, 1908-1976) Tom Murphy (San Francisco)
1948
from The Temptation of St Anthony is Mirrors 1948
Gelatin silver print
4 5/8 x 3 5/8 in. (11.7 x 9.2 cm)
George Platt Lynes (American, 1907-1955) Untitled (Frontal Male Nude)
Nd (early 1950s)
Gelatin silver print
Thomas Eakins (American, 1844-1916) Walt Whitman (American, 1818-1892)
1891
10.3 x 12.2cm
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institute
Charles Demuth (American, 1883-1935) Dancing Sailors
1917
Watercolour and pencil on paper
20.3 x 25.4cm
Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio; Mr and Mrs William H Marlatt Fund
George Wesley Bellows (American, 1882-1925) Riverfront No.1 1915
Oil on canvas
115.3 x 160.3cm
Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio: Howald Fund Purchase
Marsden Hartley (American, 1877-1943) Eight Bells Folly: Memorial to Hart Crane
1933
Oil on canvas
Gift of Ione and Hudson D. Walker
Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum, University of Minnesota
Harold Hart Crane (July 21, 1899 – April 27, 1932) was an American poet. Finding both inspiration and provocation in the poetry of T. S. Eliot, Crane wrote modernist poetry that is difficult, highly stylised, and very ambitious in its scope. In his most ambitious work, The Bridge, Crane sought to write an epic poem in the vein of The Waste Land that expressed something more sincere and optimistic than the ironic despair that Crane found in Eliot’s poetry. In the years following his suicide at the age of 32, Crane has come to be seen as one of the most influential poets of his generation…
Crane visited Mexico in 1931-32 on a Guggenheim Fellowship and his drinking continued as he suffered from bouts of alternating depression and elation … While on board the steamship SS Orizaba enroute to New York, he was beaten after making sexual advances to a male crew member, seeming to confirm his own idea that one could not be happy as a homosexual. Just before noon on April 27, 1932, Hart Crane jumped overboard into the Gulf of Mexico. Although he had been drinking heavily and left no suicide note, witnesses believed his intentions to be suicidal, as several reported that he exclaimed “Goodbye, everybody!” before throwing himself overboard. (The legend among poets is: He walked to the fantail, took off his coat quietly, and jumped.) His body was never recovered.
David Wojnarowicz (American, 1954-1992) A Fire In My Belly (Film In Progress) (film still)
1986-1987
Super 8mm film
black and white & color (transferred to video)
Courtesy of The Estate of David Wojnarowicz and P.P.O.W Gallery, New York and The Fales Library and Special Collection
One day before World AIDS Day, the renown painter, photographer, writer, filmmaker, performance artist and activist David Wojnarowicz, who died in 1992 at the age of 37 from AIDS-related complications, has had one of his most important works, A Fire In My Belly, pulled from The Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery’s HIDE / SEEK exhibit because of pressure from conservative politicians and the Catholic League.”
HIDE/SEEK: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture, the first major museum exhibition to explore how gender and sexual identity have shaped the creation of American portraiture, organised by and presented at the National Portrait Gallery last fall, will be on view at the Brooklyn Museum from November 18, 2011, through February 12, 2012. With the cooperation of the National Portrait Gallery, the Brooklyn Museum has reconstituted the exhibition in concert with the Tacoma Art Museum, where it will be on view from March 17 through June 10, 2012.
HIDE/SEEK includes approximately a hundred works in a wide range of media created over the course of one hundred years that reflect a variety of sexual identities and the stories of several generations. Highlighting the influence of gay and lesbian artists, many of whom developed new visual strategies to code and disguise their subjects’ sexual identities as well as their own, HIDE/ SEEK considers such themes as the role of sexual difference in depicting modern Americans, how artists have explored the definition of sexuality and gender, how major themes in modern art – especially abstraction – have been influenced by marginalisation, and how art has reflected society’s changing attitudes.
Announcing the Brooklyn presentation, Museum Director Arnold L. Lehman states, “From the moment I first learned about this extraordinary exhibition in its planning stages, presenting it in Brooklyn has been a priority. It is an important chronicle of a neglected dimension of American art and a brilliant complement and counterpoint to ‘Youth and Beauty: Art of the American Twenties’, a touring exhibition organised by the Brooklyn Museum, also on view this fall.”
In addition to its commentary on a marginalised cultural history, HIDE/ SEEK offers an unprecedented survey of more than a century of American art. Beginning with late nineteenth-century portraits by Thomas Eakins and John Singer Sargent, it includes works from the first half of the 1900s by such masters as Romaine Brooks, George Bellows, Marsden Hartley, and Georgia O’Keeffe; the exhibition continues through the postwar period with works by Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Agnes Martin, and Andy Warhol, and concludes with major works by late twentieth-century artists such as Keith Haring, Glenn Ligon, Nan Goldin, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and Catherine Opie.
The Brooklyn presentation will feature nearly all of the works included in the National Portrait Gallery exhibition. Among them are rarely seen paintings by Charles Demuth, whose better-known industrialised landscapes are on view in the Brooklyn Museum exhibition Youth and Beauty; a poignant portrait of New Yorker writer Janet Flanner wearing two masks, taken by photographer Bernice Abbott; Andrew Wyeth’s painting of a young neighbour standing nude in a wheat field, much like Botticelli’s Venus emerging from her shell; Robert Mapplethorpe’s photograph riffing on the classic family portrait, in which a leather-clad Brian Ridley is seated on a wingback chair shackled to his whip-wielding partner, Lyle Heeter; and Cass Bird’s photographic portrait of a friend staring out from under a cap emblazoned with the words “I look Just Like My Daddy.” The exhibition will also include David Wojnarowicz’s A Fire in My Belly, an unfinished film the artist created between 1986 and 1987.
Press release from the Brooklyn Museum website
Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) Janet Flanner (American, 1892-1978)
1927
Photographic print
23 x 17.3cm
Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C
C Berenice Abbott / Commerce Graphics Ltd., Inc.
Thomas Eakins (American, 1844-1916) Salutat 1898
Oil on canvas
127.0 x 101.6cm
Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts
Gift of anonymous donor
Lincoln Edward Kirstein (May 4, 1907 – January 5, 1996) was an American writer, impresario, art connoisseur, philanthropist, and cultural figure in New York City, noted especially as co-founder of the New York City Ballet. He developed and sustained the company with his organising ability and fundraising for more than four decades, serving as the company’s general director from 1946 to 1989. According to the New York Times, he was “an expert in many fields,” organising art exhibits and lecture tours in the same years.
Marsden Hartley (American, 1877-1943) Painting No. 47, Berlin 1915
Oil on canvas
39 7/16 x 32 in (100.1 x 81.3cm)
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
Gift of Joseph H. Hirshhorn, 1972
Herbert Ponting (British, 1870-1935) The former whaling ship, the ‘Terra Nova’ 1911
Gelatin silver print
Canterbury Museum NZ
“Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”
John 15:13
It is difficult to describe how heroic a figure Robert Scott, ‘Scott of the Antarctic’ was to a child of the Empire growing up in the 1960s. He and his doomed party were, and still are, the quintessential heroes of my youth. Despite what we now know of Scott’s failures in leadership and organisation, he and his comrades remain embedded in English consciousness as all that is noble about the explorers of the time. They may have failed to become the first to reach the South Pole and died on the return journey but what a magnificent effort it was, what camaraderie and fortitude they showed in the face of adversity.
At the centre of the exhibition at the Australian National Maritime Museum, Sydney is a representation of Scott’s base camp at Cape Evans. Visitors can walk inside the life-size hut and get a sense of the everyday realities for the 25 expedition members, from the cramped conditions and homeliness of the hut, to the wealth of specimens collected and experiments conducted. The exhibition also reunites the artefacts used by Scott and his team together with scientific specimens collected during the 1910-1913 expedition for the first time since their use in Antarctica. The exhibition uses life-size reproductions of the photographs of Herbert Ponting. At this scale it enables the viewer to inspect in intimate detail the habitus of their lives.
What a master of photography Ponting was. His photographs are classically framed and formally restrained; his use of light is magical. The camera always seems to be in the perfect position to capture the subject, neither too high or low but beautifully balanced so that the eye is led into the photograph, to investigate those wonderful nooks and crannies of the image plane. Because of the excellent quality press images I have been able to close in on details of the photographs (a la Ken Burns). The receding row of male faces to the left of Scott’s birthday dinner, June 1911 (below) that lead to Scott as the focal point at the head of the table, flags of St. George flying above, the two standing men acting as vertical counterpoints to the equipoise of the horizontal perspectival point – and then we glimpse the punctum of the piece of bread held between darkened fingers and thumb of the man caught in mid-conversation with his neighbour. Also note the framed images on the wall behind at top left, bearing witness to the fact that living is more civilised in such a desolate place if you are surrounded by images of culture and home.
This remembrance becomes poignant in the photograph Scott writing in his area of the expedition hut, Scott’s cubicle (below). In the detail of the image we observe candid photographs of what are presumably Scott’s wife in two photographs that are slightly different from each other, his wife and child, his father and small photographs of his children pinned to the hut’s wall. Memories of home and family that become multiple momenti mori – the death of the people in the images pinned to the wall, the death present in Pontings’ photograph (the little death at the point in time that the photograph was taken) and the death of Scott himself. The pocket watch hung from a wooden post only adds to this sense of refractive timelessness.
The sense of these men living in close quarters in this community is beautifully captured in Ponting’s photograph The Tenements, 9 October 1911 (below). Three vertical lozenges project into the space from the bottom of the image, each containing its own theatrical diorama. The balance and space between the men looking across, down, up and out of the image is outstanding. The distance between Oates in the top centre and the man on the right seems somehow infinite in the photograph, like the distance in Alfred Hitchcock’s film North by Northwest where Cary Grant is waiting for the bus in the middle of nowhere and on the other side of the road is another man, also waiting. The spatial tension between the two men in the photograph is palpable, emphasised by the stacked horizontal shelf behind them. The gaze of the man at bottom left allows the viewer some room for escape from the confines of the tenements and the confines of the image plane, for without that gaze the viewer would be caught with no way out. In the detail of this man we can, as before, note the importance of personal remembrances of home with a picture pinned on the wall behind his bunk and a Fry’s Cocoa box stored underneath.
And so to the final few photographs in the posting: the famous photograph of Scott and the Polar Party at the South Pole (below) taken by Henry Bowers. Taken the day after the party had arrived at the South Pole, only to discover that Roald Amundsen had beaten them to their goal by five weeks, Bowers (seated at bottom left) used a string to release the shutter of the camera that can just be seen in his right hand in the photograph – a photograph that was then printed by Herbert Ponting from the recovered glass plate negative. In the detail of Scott and Oates in this photograph you can see the weariness, anguish and defeat in faces that are sun and wind damaged, knowing that they had to trek all the way back from this awful place (as Scott himself said, “Great God! This is an awful place”).
I have put a photograph by Herbert Ponting, Captain Lawrence Edward Grace Oates during the British Antarctic Expedition of 1911-1913, below the detail of him at the South Pole. The face is almost unrecognisable from the strong, handsome face in Ponting’s picture, the prominent nose now blackened and dark being the only thing that make it recognisably the same person. In the detail of Ponting’s photograph, if you enlarge it, you can see two small points of light in his eyes, probably the light of the polar sun when Ponting took the photograph. For me these two spots of light become portents of what was to come as Oates walked out into a blizzard saying those immortal words, “I am just going outside and may be some time”. To me these points of light seared into his retina are like the driving snow that he walked out into in such a selfless act. It is very emotional for me as an Englishman and as a human being to look into the face of this man knowing what he was eventually to go through.
Though they failed in their quest to become the first to the South Pole, for this child, for this man they will forever remain my heroes.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Australian National Maritime Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Anonymous photographer Captain Robert Falcon Scott
Nd
Gelatin silver print
Licensed with permission of the Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge
Herbert Ponting (British, 1870-1935) Members of the ‘Terra Nova’ expedition with Scott in the centre
1911
Gelatin silver print
Canterbury Museum NZ
Herbert Ponting (British, 1870-1935) Scott’s birthday dinner, June 1911
1911
Gelatin silver print
Canterbury Museum NZ
Herbert Ponting (British, 1870-1935) Scott’s birthday dinner, June 1911 (detail)
1911
Gelatin silver print
Canterbury Museum NZ
Herbert Ponting (British, 1870-1935) Scott writing in his area of the expedition hut, Scott’s cubicle
1911
Gelatin silver print
Pennell Collection, Canterbury Museum NZ
Herbert Ponting (British, 1870-1935) Scott writing in his area of the expedition hut, Scott’s cubicle (detail)
1911
Gelatin silver print
Pennell Collection, Canterbury Museum NZ
Herbert Ponting (British, 1870-1935) The Tenements, 9 October 1911
1911
Gelatin silver print
Pennell Collection, Canterbury Museum NZ
Herbert Ponting (British, 1870-1935) The Tenements, 9 October 1911 (detail)
1911
Gelatin silver print
Pennell Collection, Canterbury Museum NZ
Herbert Ponting (British, 1870-1935) Edward Atkinson in the laboratory
1911
Silver gelatin print
Canterbury Museum NZ
Herbert Ponting (British, 1870-1935) Edward Atkinson in the laboratory (detail)
1911
Silver gelatin print
Canterbury Museum NZ
One hundred years after its tragic end, the definitive story of British explorer Captain Robert Falcon Scott’s Terra Nova expedition to Antarctica is being told in a major international exhibition coming to the Australian National Maritime Museum this June.
Scott’s Last Expedition will reunite real artefacts used by Scott and his team together with rare scientific specimens collected during the 1910-1913 expedition for the first time since their use in Antarctica.
When Scott set off on what was his second journey to explore the Antarctic on board the former whaling ship Terra Nova, he could not have predicted it would be his last. Tragically he and four of his colleagues died on the return trek to the South Pole two years later, having lost the race to be first. The exhibition however will go beyond the familiar tales of the journey to the Pole and the death of the Polar party to explore the Terra Nova expedition from every angle.
“Over the years public perceptions of Scott have varied greatly, from hero to flawed leader, and discussions of what really happened still captivate people,” said museum director Mary-Louise Williams today. “This exhibition will give visitors a unique opportunity to immerse themselves in this epic journey and the remarkable landscape of Antarctica,” she said.
Visitors will uncover Scott the man, learn more about the people who made up the expedition and explore every fascinating detail of this historic journey. At the centre of the exhibition will be a life-size representation of Scott’s Cape Evans’ base camp. Visitors can walk inside and get a sense of the everyday realities for the expedition’s members… from the cramped conditions and homeliness of the hut to the wealth of specimens collected and scientific investigations conducted.
Original artefacts, equipment, clothes, and personal effects will be displayed for the first time in Australia and show the group’s attempts to make life in one of the most hostile environments on Earth as bearable as possible. Food tins including Fry’s Cocoa, Trufood Trumilk, and Symington’s Pea Flour recovered from the hut will be on display together with instruments, a microscope, and even Scott’s gramophone.
Photographs of the environment and life in camp taken by expedition photographer Herbert Ponting and poignant letters and diaries by various expedition members create a vivid picture of what life was like… working in hostile conditions, the struggles for survival and the strength of human endurance and courage.
Scott’s Terra Nova expedition made a significant contribution to Antarctic science. The expedition included a full scientific program with a large team of scientists making new discoveries which directly led to a greater understanding of Antarctica. The scientists had to endure harsh Antarctic conditions to carry out their work. It was cold, windy and completely dark in winter and, if not careful, the scientists could easily get frostbitten. And yet despite the conditions, the expedition left a rich legacy that continues to inspire and inform today.
Natural History Museum, London, the Canterbury Museum, Christchurch, New Zealand and the Antarctic Heritage Trust, New Zealand, have collaborated to create this exhibition to commemorate the centenary of the expedition and celebrate its achievements.
Press release from the Australian National Maritime Museum
Herbert Ponting (British, 1870-1935) A member of the team tucks into a tin of Heinz baked beans in the Ross Dependency, during Captain Robert Falcon Scott’s Terra Nova Expedition to the Antarctic, January 1912
1912
Silver gelatin print
Canterbury Museum NZ
Neerav Bhatt (photographer)
Installation view of the exhibition Scott’s Last Expedition at the Australian National Maritime Museum, Sydney, June – October 2011 CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
Scott and the Polar Party at the South Pole
Left to right: Captain Lawrence Oates, Lieutenant Henry Bowers (seated), Captain Robert Falcon Scott, Dr Edward Wilson (Seated), Petty Officer Edgar Evans
1912
Licensed with permission of the Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge.
Notice the camera release cord in the right hand of Lieutenant Henry Bowers.
The fatal journey
Scott’s 1,450 km journey to the geographic South Pole began on 1 November 1911, two weeks after the Norwegian polar explorer Roald Amundsen left his base camp at the Bay of Whales. Amundsen reached the pole first – on 14 December 1911 – and then raced back to tell the world their news. Scott and his team reached the Pole a month later on 17 January 1912 having been beset by fierce weather conditions. The disappointment was immense. The return journey was undertaken in horrid weather with harsh, intense cold and violent blizzards that, in the end, defeated them. Evans failed first, suffering concussion from a fall; Oates suffered dramatic frostbite to his feet – gangrene had set in – and he crawled out of the tent saying the now famous words, “I am just going outside and may be some time”. The remaining men – Scott, Wilson and Bowers – were weak with malnutrition, starvation and exhaustion and perished on or around 29/30 March 1912 – some three weeks after the world learned that Amundsen had reached the Pole first.
Captain Robert Falcon Scott at the South Pole (detail)
Captain Lawrence Oates at the South Pole (detail)
Herbert Ponting (British, 1870-1935) Captain Lawrence Edward Grace Oates during the British Antarctic Expedition of 1911-1913
c. 1911
Silver gelatin print
Photographic Archive, Alexander Turnbull Library
Herbert Ponting (British, 1870-1935) Captain Lawrence Edward Grace Oates during the British Antarctic Expedition of 1911-1913 (detail)
c. 1911
Silver gelatin print
Photographic Archive, Alexander Turnbull Library
Anonymous photographer The snow cairn raised over Scott, Bowers and Wilson by the search party, their final resting ground (detail)
1912
Silver gelatine print
Canterbury Museum NZ
Australian National Maritime Museum 2 Murray Street
Darling Harbour
Sydney NSW 2000
Australia
Installation view of the exhibition Another Story at Moderna Museet, Stockholm Photo: Albin Dahlström/Moderna Museet
A posting from an exhibition highlighting a collection of over 100,000 photographs – how lucky are they!
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Moderna Museet for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
In 2011, all the galleries will be successively rehung exclusively with photographic art. The chronology will be the same, but the 20th century will be presented from a partly new perspective. Moderna Museet will take a radical step, with Another Story – Photography from the Moderna Museet Collection. …
There is a growing interest in photography today, as proven by the panoply of exhibitions, fairs and festivals throughout the world. And this is hardly surprising. Nowadays, practically everyone is a photographer, at the very least snapping pictures with the camera built into most mobiles.
Moderna Museet’s collection of photography, ranging from 1840 to the present day, is one of the finest in Europe, featuring many of the most prominent names in photo history and comprising more than 100,000 photographs. The collection provides a historic background to the art of photography, and now we are sharing this with all our visitors. Moreover, several magnificent private donations have recently enriched the collection with works by famous artists practising in the field of photography.
Text from the Moderna Museet website
Another Story: Possessed by the Camera
1970-2010
Another Story: Possessed by the Camera highlighting contemporary photo-based art 1970-2010
From the 1970s, people have challenged the notion that the purpose of art is to show authentic identities. Instead, the camera is used to emphasise the potential of role-play and how identity can be constructed.
The reproduction of reality in the mass media has radically changed the conditions for our lives. The camera became an especially useful artistic tool in exploring the role-play of existence. The veracity of photography was called into question. By manipulating images and presenting them as authentic depictions, artists warned viewers to be critical and on their guard against how images are used in general.
These changes generated a broad range of photographic practices. Traditionally oriented photographers refined their aesthetic methods towards exquisitely artificial images. Robert Mapplethorpe, for instance, revived classical notions of beauty to undermine social prejudices against homosexuality.
Others experimented with digital manipulations and created new realities out of existing worlds. In the 1980s, the artistic use of photography went even further, in veritably philosophical studies of the many levels of meaning in representation. Since the late 1970s, Cindy Sherman has portrayed herself in stereotypical female disguises as a means of exploring the complexity of specific identities.
As a consequence of the dramatic innovations of the digital era, information and entertainment from far and wide are intermingled. Our formerly distinct notions of time and space have become fuzzier.
Annika von Hausswolff’s I Am the Runway of Your Thoughts from 2008 captures the feeling of trying to grasp and control something that is perceived as a vague threat. The concept of identity is no longer only linked to ethnicity, gender and class. Instead, it can be constructed out of surprising mixtures of given conditions and chosen ideals.
In 2011, Moderna Museet’s new directors, Daniel Birnbaum and Ann-Sofi Noring, will launch a new presentation of the collection. Another Story gives a fresh angle on art history, based on works from the Moderna Museet collection. We will start by focusing on photography, which will gradually be given a more prominent position, only to fill the entire exhibition of the permanent collection this autumn.
If you want an art collection to develop and stay alive, it can’t remain static. You need to present it in new ways and look at it from new angles. That may sound obvious, but it is not that common. In 2011, Moderna Museet will take a radical step, with Another Story. Photography from the Moderna Museet Collection. This is possibly the most extreme re-hanging of the collection undertaken in the history of the museum.
There is a growing interest in photography today, as proven by the panoply of exhibitions, fairs and festivals throughout the world. And this is hardly surprising. Nowadays, practically everyone is a photographer, at the very least snapping pictures with the camera built into most mobiles.
Moderna Museet’s collection of photography, ranging from 1840 to the present day, is one of the finest in Europe, featuring many of the most prominent names in photo history and comprising more than 100,000 photographs. The collection provides a historic background to the art of photography, and now we are sharing this with all our visitors. Moreover, several magnificent private donations have recently enriched the collection with works by famous artists practising in the field of photography.
Moderna Museet has one of Europe’s finest collections of photography, ranging from 1840 to the present day. Many of the most famous names in photographic history are represented, and the collection comprises more than 100,000 works. The re-hanging of the permanent collection exhibition will be done in three stages. In February, we will open the first part, Another Story: Possessed by the Camera, which presents contemporary photography-based art. Just before summer, we open Another Story: See the World!, presenting the period 1920-1980. This autumn, finally, we look at the early days of photography. Another Story: Written in Light presents the pioneers of photography from 1840 to the first three decades of the 20th century. In autumn 2011 and for the rest of the year, the entire permanent collection exhibition will consist of photography and photo-based art.
Text from the Moderna Museet website [Online] Cited 22/07/2011 no longer available online
Another Story: See the World! focuses on the period 1920-1980.
Many documentary photographers are driven by a strong urge to portray events, places and people in their everyday surroundings. For some, it has been a life-long commitment to uncover and reveal social injustices. For others, it has represented a way of sharing experiences and developing documentary photography in a more personal and artistic direction.
The camera give photographers opportunities to approach vulnerable, sometimes hidden or forgotten, groups and environments. This presentation includes Larry Clark’s intimate and controversial photographs of his drugabusing friends in their hometown, Tulsa. The same theme is found in Nan Goldin’s raw colour portraits.
Amalias Street 5a is on the outskirts of old Riga, a wooden house with 37 inhabitants, documented by the photographer Inta Ruka since 2004. Together with Antanas Sutkus, she is a prominent figure on the Baltic photography scene that commented on and adapted itself to the Soviet Union in the 1980s and 90s, and then documented the changes in the post-Soviet era.
Christer Strömholm and his students also worked in the documentary tradition. Anders Petersen is perhaps the photographer who has most distinctly followed in Strömholm’s footsteps, as in his legendary series from Café Lehmitz in Hamburg (1967-70). Other photographers who have developed individual perspectives in their portrayals of Swedish society are JH Engström, Catharina Gotby and Lars Tunbjörk.
Throughout the history of photography, photographers have ventured for long periods into other people’s worlds and lives. To do that, however, and to earn their living while doing it, many photographers have worked simultaneously on independent projects, and on various commercial assignments. This has led to interesting links and shifts between socially oriented reportage, documentary projects, portrait photography and photographic art.
Julia Margaret Cameron (British born India, 1815-1879) The Mountain Nymph, Sweet Liberty
1866
Albumen print
Moderna Museet
Another Story: Written in Light
1840-1930
Another Story: Written in Light focuses on the pioneers from 1840 and up to the first three decades of the 20th century
The third part of Another Story. Photography from the Moderna Museet Collection has the subtitle Written in Light. It delineates the infancy of photography, from the moment when the Frenchman Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre developed the photographic process of the daguerreotype in 1839, to August Sander’s fascinating project People of the Twentieth Century, black-and-white portraits of German citizens from the first half of the 20th century.
In six rooms we present several pioneering feats of photography, unique works that contribute to Moderna Museet’s exceptional position among photography-collecting institutions. The section includes Julia Margaret Cameron, who portrayed famous Brits in the 1860s, revealing both their inner and outer character.
Guillaume Berggren’s photographs from 1880s Constantinople are legendary, as are Carleton E. Watkins’ documentation of the American West a few decades earlier. In addition to portraits, landscapes, nature and architecture were typical subjects for the early photographers. A few examples of present-day photography are interspersed, for instance Tom Hunter’s series in which he explored the urban landscape in the wake of industrialism around the turn of the millennium.
What does pictorialism stand for? In one of the larger rooms, we show photographs from the late 1800s up to the outbreak of the First World War, by photographers who were primarily fascinated by optical and visual issues. A seminal figure in the field of art photography is Henry B. Goodwin, famous for his striking artist portraits, painterly nudes and softly hazy Stockholm views.
Photography literally means “written in light”. The various experiments and remarkable documentations shown here encompass Nils Strindberg’s photographs from a disastrous balloon expedition to the North Pole in 1897. Three decades later, his negatives were developed, and the resulting prints are now in the Moderna Museet collection of photography.
Text from the Moderna Museet website
Carleton Watkins (American, 1829-1916) The Three Brothers
1861
Moderna Museet
Albumen print
Julia Margaret Cameron (British born India, 1815-1879) Henry Taylor
October 10, 1867
Albumen print
Moderna Museet
G Félix T Nadar (France, 1820-1910) and Paul Nadar (France, 1856-1939) Sarah Bernhardt in Pierrot, Murder of His Wife (Sarah Bernhardt dans Pierrot, assassin de sa femme)
1883/1938
Gelatin silver photograph from wet collodion negative mounted on cardboard
29.8 × 18.1cm
Moderna Museet
Purchase 1965
Nils Strindberg (Swedish, 1872-1897) Örnen efter landningen. Ur serien Ingenjör Andrées luftfärd, 14/7 1897 The Eagle after landing. From the series Engineer Andrée’s flight, 14/7 1897
1897/1930
Moderna Museet
Gelatin silver print
Nils Strindberg (4 September 1872 – October 1897) was a Swedish photographer and scientist. He was one of the three members of S. A. Andrée’s ill-fated Arctic balloon expedition of 1897. …
Strindberg was invited to the Arctic balloon expedition of 1897 to create a photographic aerial record of the arctic. Before perishing on Kvitøya (White Island) with Andrée and Knut Frænkel, Strindberg recorded on film their long-doomed struggle on foot to reach populated areas. When the remains of the expedition were discovered by the Norwegian Bratvaag Expedition in 1930, five exposed rolls of film were found, one of them still in the camera. Docent John Hertzberg of the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm managed to save 93 of the theoretically 240 frames. A selection of these photos were published along with the diaries of the expedition as Med Örnen mot Polen (Stockholm: Bonnier (1930); British edition The Andrée diaries (1931); American edition Andrée’s Story (1932). The book credited the three explorers as its authors. In an article from 2004, Tyrone Martinsson published some digitally enhanced versions of Strindberg’s photos of the expedition, while lamenting the lack of care with which the original negatives were stored from 1944.
Henry B. Goodwin (Swedish, 1878-1971) Katarina Lift (Katarinahissen), Slussen, Stockholm, Sweden
1918
Moderna Museet
Public domain
Moderna Museet, Stockholm
Moderna Museet is ten minutes away from Kungsträdgården, and twenty minutes from T-Centralen or Gamla Stan. Walk past Grand Hotel and Nationalmuseum on Blasieholmen, opposite the Royal Palace. After crossing the bridge to Skeppsholmen, continue up the hill. The entrance to Moderna Museet and Arkitekturmuseet is on the left-hand side.
Julia Margaret Cameron – you are one of my heroes!
Many thankx to the Musée d’Orsay for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Consumed by the passion of unrequited love, a young woman lies suspended in the dark space of her unrealised dreams in Henry Peach Robinson’s illustration of the Shakespearean verse “She never told her love,/ But let concealment, like a worm i’ the bud,/ Feed on her damask cheek” (Twelfth Night II,iv,111-13). Although this picture was exhibited by Robinson as a discrete work, it also served as a study for the central figure in his most famous photograph, Fading Away, of 1858.
Purportedly showing a young consumptive surrounded by family in her final moments, Fading Away was hotly debated for years. On the one hand, Robinson was criticised for the presumed indelicacy of having invaded the death chamber at the most private of moments. On the other, those who recognised the scene as having been staged and who understood that Robinson had created the picture through combination printing (a technique that utilised several negatives to create a single printed image) accused him of dishonestly using a medium whose chief virtue was its truthfulness.
While addressing the moral and literary themes that Robinson believed crucial if photography were to aspire to high art, this picture makes only restrained use of the cloying sentimentality and showy technical artifice that often characterise this artist’s major exhibition pictures. Perhaps intended to facilitate the process of combination printing, the unnaturally black background serves also to envelop the figure in palpable melancholia.
Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website [Online] Cited 27/01/2020
The historian and art critic, John Ruskin, had a great influence in Great Britain not only on the Pre-Raphaelite movement created in 1848, but on the development of early photography in the 1850s. The leading Pre-Raphaelite painters, John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Holman Hunt and Ford Madox Brown and their followers, wished to change the pictorial conventions laid down by the Royal Academy, and in order to demonstrate the transformations in modern life, invented a radically new idiom marked by bright colours and clarity of detail.
Pre-Raphaelite painters and photographers frequently made similar choices of subjects, and the photographers, particularly Julia Margaret Cameron, David Wilkie Wynfield and Lewis Carroll, were often had close links with the painters.
When painting landscapes, the Pre-Raphaelite artists answered Ruskin’s call, meticulously observing nature in order to capture every nuance of detail. For their part, photographers, such as Roger Fenton, Henry White, William J. Stillman and Colonel Henry Stuart Wortley, experimented with the new process of wet plate collodion negatives that allowed much greater image detail, and achieved similar effects. Although highly impressed at first by the daguerreotype, which enabled the eye to see tiny, overlooked details, Ruskin was nonetheless still very critical of landscape photography, which could not reproduce the colours of nature and in particular of the sky. This failing also gave rise to a major debate amongst photography critics.
In portraiture, there were clear links between the painted portraits of Watts and Cameron’s photographic portraits. By using special lenses and photographing her models in close-up, Cameron, achieved, with a glass negative, exactly the opposite effect to the clear image advocated by Ruskin, and her work was distinctive for the breadth of relief and contour, as well as the compositions evoking Raphael’s paintings, also a source of inspiration for Watts.
The painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti repeatedly drew and painted Jane Morris, a model with whom he was infatuated, and he asked Robert Parsons to produce a series of photographs, under his personal direction, which captured the fascinating presence of the young woman as effectively as his own paintings.
Just like the Pre-Raphaelite painters, Victorian photographers would turn to religious or historical subjects, finding a shared inspiration in the poems of Dante, Shakespeare and possibly Byron, and above all in the Arthurian legend made popular once more by Lord Tennyson, the poet laureate. From a formal point of view, Millais’ Ophelia, one of his most successful paintings, was a source for Henry Peach Robinson’s photograph, The Lady of Shalott, even though it had a different theme.
Finally, Pre-Raphaelite painters and Victorian photographers both liked to present scenes from modern life with a moralising undertone: hence She Never Told Her Love, a photograph by Robinson that was very successful when exhibited at the Crystal Palace in 1858, William Holman Hunt’s painting, Awakening of Conscience, and Rossetti’s Found, a painting depicting a countryman who comes across his former sweetheart, now a prostitute in the city.
In the 1880s, Pre-Raphaelite painting would be transformed, with artists and writers like William Morris, Burne-Jones, Whistler and Oscar Wilde, into a very different movement concerned only with the cult of beauty and rejecting Ruskin’s concept of art as something moral or useful. British photographers, however, inspired by the Pre-Raphaelites would inspire the Pictorialist movement that flourished in the 1890s, encouraged by the writings of Henry Peach Robinson and Peter Henry Emerson, extolling artistic photography.
Antony Gormley (British, b. 1950) MEMES installation view, Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne 2011 Photograph by Tim Griffith Courtesy the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery Melbourne and Sydney
The size of the figures surprises the viewer on entering the gallery.
Then observe the figures engagement with the gallery space.
The tensioning points between figures, wall and floor are fantastic.
“Placed directly on the floor they become acupuncture points within the volume of the space, allowing the viewer to become conscious, through the disparity of scale, of his/her own mass and spatial displacement as s/he moves around and amongst the works.” (Antony Gormley text, see below)
The figures lean, are lopsided, collapse, pose, are reordered and reconfigured.
They teeter on the edge of cracks in the gallery floor (perhaps a metaphor for humans standing before the abyss).
They form yoga poses.
They are Transformers (some of them remind me of the Star Wars ‘AT-AT’ Storm Troop Carrier, the ones that look like deadly mechanical elephants).
The figures self-replicate 27 communal blocks in different assemblages.
There seems to be a (metaphyiscal?) connection between the figures, through gesture, across space.
“A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols, or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes, in that they self-replicate, mutate, and respond to selective pressures.” (Wikipedia)
They mutate, much as the human is mutating into the posthuman.
“The randomness to which mutation testifies is implicit in the very idea of pattern, for only against the background of nonpattern can pattern emerge. Randomness is the contrasting term that allows pattern to be understood as such.” (see below)
Dr Marcus Bunyan
PS. We were down on our hands and knees looking at the figures (just like some of their configurations) and this gave a whole new perspective to the work.
Many thankx to the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery for allowing me to publish the text and photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image. All images courtesy the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery Melbourne and Sydney.
“What happens in the case of mutation? Consider the example of the genetic code. Mutation normally occurs when some random event (for example, a burst of radiation or a coding error) disrupts an existing pattern and something else is put in its place instead. Although mutation disrupts pattern, it also presupposes a morphological standard against which it can be measured and understood as mutation. We have seen that in electronic textuality, the possibility for mutation within the text are enhanced and heightened by long coding chains. We can now understand mutation in more fundamental terms. Mutation is critical because it names the bifurcation point at which the interplay between pattern and randomness causes the system to evolve in a new direction. It reveals the productive potential of randomness that is also recognized within information theory when uncertainty is seen as both antagonistic and intrinsic to information.
We are now in a position to understand mutation as a decisive event in the psycholinguistics of information. Mutation is the catastrophe in the pattern/randomness dialectic analogous to castration in the presence / absence dialectic. It marks a rupture of pattern so extreme that the expectation of continuous replication can in longer be sustained. But as with castration, this only appears to be a disruption located at a specific moment. The randomness to which mutation testifies is implicit in the very idea of pattern, for only against the background of nonpattern can pattern emerge. Randomness is the contrasting term that allows pattern to be understood as such.”
Hayles, Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999, pp. 30-33
Antony Gormley (British, b. 1950) MEME CXXVII 2011 Cast iron 37.3 x 9.3 x 7.8cm Photograph by Stephen White Courtesy the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery Melbourne and Sydney
A Meme is a cultural analogue to a gene. Forms that are transmitted in thought or behaviour from one body to another, responding to conditional environments, self-replicating and capable of mutation.
The miniature or the model allows the totality of a body to be seen at once. These small solid iron works use the formal language of architecture to replace anatomy and construct volumes to articulate a range of 32 body postures. The ambition is to make intelligible forms that form an abstract lexicon of body-posture but which nevertheless carry the invitation of empathy and the transmission of states of mind.
Displayed widely spaced within the architecture of Anna Schwartz Gallery in Melbourne, the works interface with the architecture of the gallery. Placed directly on the floor they become acupuncture points within the volume of the space, allowing the viewer to become conscious, through the disparity of scale, of his/her own mass and spatial displacement as s/he moves around and amongst the works.
This will be the first time that the Memes series, begun in 2007, will be shown together. The space of art as a reflexive test ground in which the direct experience of the viewer becomes the ground of meaning is a continual quest in this artist’s work and continues the exploration of scale seen in the expanded dimensions of FIRMAMENT at Anna Schwartz Gallery Sydney in February 2010, and the miniature scale of ASIAN FIELD, seen in the Sydney Biennale of 2008.
Antony Gormley
Text from the Anna Schwartz website
Antony Gormley (British, b. 1950) MEME CXLI 2011 Cast iron 4.5 x 9.5 x 36.4cm Photograph by Stephen White Courtesy the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery Melbourne and Sydney
Antony Gormley (British, b. 1950) MEME CXXIX 2011 Cast iron 10 x 7.7 x 29cm Photograph by Stephen White Courtesy the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery Melbourne and Sydney
Anna Schwartz Gallery 185 Flinders Lane Melbourne, Victoria 3000
Exhibition dates: 10th November 2010 – 10th April 2011
Aleksey Ivanovich Saveliev (Russian, 1883-1923) At the Prepared Grave 1910 Gelatin silver print 8.9 x 13.3cm (3 1/2 x 5 1/4 in.) The Metropolitan Museum of Art Gift of Pierre Apraxine, 2010
These six photo-postcards show various places and moments surrounding the death and burial of Leo Tolstoy. In November 1910 the eighty-two-year-old novelist walked away from his great wealth to devote himself to Christian charity and died in a stationmaster’s house after falling ill on a train. Tolstoy’s death was of tremendous national importance, and how he was to be mourned – whether to kneel or stand at the grave, for instance – signified a contrast between old and new that would be decided during the Russian Revolution seven years later.
Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website
What an eclectic group of photographs in this posting as well as a great title for an exhibition!
Marcus
Many thankx to the The Metropolitan Museum of Art for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photograph for a larger version of the image.
Aleksey Ivanovich Saveliev (Russian, 1883-1923) Peasant Carts with Funeral Wreaths 1910 Gelatin silver print 8.9 x 13.3cm (3 1/2 x 5 1/4 in.) The Metropolitan Museum of Art Gift of Pierre Apraxine, 2010
Aleksey Ivanovich Saveliev (Russian, 1883-1923) Deputation of the Yasno-Polyanskyi Peasants 1910 Gelatin silver print 8.9 x 13.3cm (3 1/2 x 5 1/4 in.) The Metropolitan Museum of Art Gift of Pierre Apraxine, 2010
Felix Thiollier (French, 1842-1914) A Village Street in the Auvergne c. 1910 Gelatin silver print The Metropolitan Museum of Art Twentieth-Century Photography Fund, 2008
An industrialist and serious amateur photographer in Saint-Étienne, Thiollier left to posterity a vast archive of photographs and negatives. Most are landscapes done in the Pictorialist style, but his more unusual images depict factories and daily life outside major cities in early twentieth century France.
Paul Haviland (American, 1880-1950) Passing Steamer 1910 Platinum print The Metropolitan Museum of Art Gilman Collection Purchase, Harriette and Noel Levine Gift, 2005
The son of a well-off china manufacturer in Limoges, Haviland encountered Alfred Stieglitz’s Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession in 1908. He soon contributed articles to and published photographs in Stieglitz’s journal Camera Work (and acted as the gallery’s secretary at one point), even bankrolling the gallery’s three-year lease for Stieglitz when the rent was raised. In 1915 he started – with the Mexican-born caricaturist and gallerist Marius de Zayas and the journalist Agnes Ernest Meyer – a new magazine called 291, named for Stieglitz’s gallery at 291 Fifth Avenue.
This image appeared as a photogravure in a 1912 issue of Camera Work. While the soft focus and platinum printing are traces of the waning Pictorialist style, the unexpected vantage point and stark design made Passing Steamer a harbinger of things to come.
Text from The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Anton Giulio Bragaglia (Italian, 1890-1960) Change of Position 1911 Gelatin silver print 12.8 x 17.9cm (5 1/16 x 7 1/16 in) The Metropolitan Museum of Art Gilman Collection Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 2005
At age nineteen, Bragaglia became enamored of the Italian Futurist movement, which espoused the beauty of speed and war, the interdependence of time and space, and the total dissolution of time-consecrated institutions. Not following the stop-motion photography of Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey from the previous century, Bragaglia left the camera’s shutter open to register the absolute fluidity of motion itself – in this case, the trajectory created by the sweeping, continuous arc of a simple change of body position. The result is a dissolution or dematerialisation of the man’s body in a seamless picture of active life. Although later banished from the Futurists’ ranks, the photographer created perhaps the first truly avant-garde images with the camera – the kind that would become prevalent across the continent only a decade later.
Text from The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Adolph de Meyer (American born France, 1868-1949) [Dance Study] c. 1912 Platinum print The Metropolitan Museum of Art Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1949
De Meyer – who would become Vogue magazine’s first official fashion photographer, in 1913 – photographed the dancer Nijinsky and other members of Sergei Diaghilev’s troupe when L’Après midi d’un Faun was presented in Paris in 1912. It has been suggested that this photograph, the only nude by de Meyer, has some connection to the Russian ballet, but if so, it remains mysterious. In 1913 Mabel Dodge, a patroness of the avant-garde, wrote: “Nearly every thinking person nowadays is in revolt against something, because the craving of the individual is for further consciousness, and because consciousness is expanding and bursting through the moulds that have held it up to now.”
Text from The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz (Polish, 1885-1939) Tadeus Langier, Zakopane 1912-1913 Gelatin silver print 12.6 x 17.6cm (4 15/16 x 6 15/16 in) The Metropolitan Museum of Art Gilman Collection Purchase, Denise and Andrew Saul Gift, 2005
A painter who considered photography a hobby, Lartigue was seven when his father, an accomplished amateur photographer, presented him with his first camera. reserving his images from childhood onward in album after album, Lartigue created a rich chronicle of the sporting life and entertainments of his upper-class milieu but one that, like his diaries, remained essentially private. Until 1963, when a show at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, revealed Lartigue as a major photographer, his work was known only to a group of friends.
[This print has] been made by Lartigue prior to his public recognition, in his customary intimate scale. He made the Grand Prix picture by swinging the camera from left to right as the racing car sped by. It captures the same awestruck, slate-erasing feeling that inspired the Futurist Marinetti to rhapsodise four years earlier, “A roaring motor car which seems to run on machine-gun fire, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.”
Text from The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Unknown Artist, British School The Great British Advance in the West: A Raiding Party Waiting for the Word to Go 1914-1918 Gelatin silver print The Metropolitan Museum of Art Twentieth-Century Photography Fund, 2010 Wikipedia Commons public domain
Unknown Artist, French School The Great Nave: Wounded Soldiers Performing Arms Drill at the End of Their Medical Treatment, Grand Palais, Paris 1916 Gelatin silver print The Metropolitan Museum of Art Gilman Collection Purchase, Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee Gift, 2005 Wikipedia Commons public domain
During World War I, wounded soldiers who had been sent to Paris to recover were drilled in the cavernous Grand Palais to prepare them for a return to the front.
Unknown artist (American School) (Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks Selling Liberty Loans during the Third Loan Campaign at the Sub Treasury Building on Wall Street, New York City) 1918 Gelatin silver print 19.4 x 24.1cm (7 5/8 x 9 1/2 in) The Metropolitan Museum of Art Purchase The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 1996
The twentieth century was truly born during the 1910s. This exhibition, which accompanies Stieglitz, Steichen, Strand, surveys the range of uses to which photography was put as its most advanced practitioners and theorists were redefining the medium as an art. The title “Our Future Is in the Air“ is taken from a military aviation pamphlet that figures prominently (in French) in a 1912 Cubist tabletop still life by Picasso; it suggests the twinned senses of exhilarating optimism and lingering dread that accompanied the dissolution of the old order.
Photography was handmaiden and witness to the upheavals that revolutionised perception and consciousness during this tumultuous era. Space and time were overcome by motorcars and airplanes, radio and wireless, and man seemed liberated from the bounds of gravity and geography. This seemingly limitless expanse was mirrored by a new understanding of the unconscious as infinitely deep, complex, and varied – a continent ripe for discovery. The camera was seen as the conduit between these two states of self and world, and “straight photography” – stripped of the gauzy blur of Pictorialist reverie – was espoused by Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand among others.
This turn was not accidental: since handheld cameras became available in the late 1880s, anyone could be a photographer; similarly, photography had snaked its way into every corner of the culture. Elevated perception would distinguish the new artists from the amateur and the tradesman. The exhibition casts the widest possible net in order to show the foundations upon which the medium staked its claim as an independent art.
The 1910s – a period remembered for “The Great War,” Einstein’s theory of relativity, the Russian Revolution, and the birth of Hollywood – was a dynamic and tumultuous decade that ushered in the modern era. This new age – as it was captured by the quintessentially modern art of photography – will be the subject of the exhibition “Our Future Is In The Air”: Photographs from the 1910s, on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from November 10, 2010, through April 10, 2011.
An eclectic centennial exhibition devoted to photography of the 1910s, “Our Future Is In The Air” provides a fascinating look at the birth of modern life through 58 photographs by some 30 artists, including Eugène Atget, Alvin Langdon Coburn, Eugène Druet, Lewis Hine, Jacques-Henri Lartigue, Adolph de Meyer, Christian Schad, Morton Schamberg, Charles Sheeler, and Stanislaw Witkiewicz, among others. Drawn exclusively from the Museum’s collection, the exhibition also features anonymous snapshots, séance photographs, and a family album made by Russian nobility on the eve of revolution. “Our Future Is In The Air” complements the Museum’s concurrent presentation of groundbreaking photographs by Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, and Paul Strand in the exhibition Stieglitz, Steichen, Strand. The exhibition’s title is taken from a pamphlet for military aviation that figures prominently (in French) in a 1912 Cubist tabletop still-life by Picasso, but is used here because of its double meaning: the feelings of excitement and anxiety that accompanied such radical change.
“Our Future Is In The Air” opens in dramatic fashion with a series of photographs showing moments in the funeral procession and burial of Leo Tolstoy on November 9, 1910. The great Russian novelist passed away just after walking away from his great wealth and literary fame to lead a life of Christian charity. Certain details that can be seen in the photo-postcards – such as whether or not to kneel by the grave – represented a long simmering struggle between old and new, spiritual and secular, that would lead to revolution seven years later.
As cameras became smaller, faster, and easier to operate, amateur photographers such as the child prodigy Jacques-Henri Lartigue pushed the medium in directions that trained photographers shied away from. Since Lartigue was only recognised much later as a key figure in photography, prints such as the ones included here – showing speeding motorcars – are exceedingly rare. Lartigue made one of his most memorable photographs, Le Grand Prix A.C.F. (1913), by swinging his camera in the same direction as the car, as it sped by.
The camera also afforded access to the previously invisible, whether capturing a broken leg bone, revealed in an X-ray from 1916 or the trajectory created by a simple change in body position, in a 1911 motion study by the Futurist artist Anton Giulio Bragaglia.
At the same time, photography became an agent of democratic communication, and documentary photographers used its growing influence to expose degrading conditions of workers, the injustice of child labor, and the devastation of war. Beginning in 1908, Lewis Hine made 5,000 photographs of children working in mills, sweatshops, factories, and street trades; six of his photographs will be featured in this exhibition, including Newsboy asleep on stairs with papers, Jersey City, New Jersey, February 1912. Hine’s reports and slide lectures were meant to trigger a profound, empathetic response in the viewer.
During World War I, photography was utilised to document the mass casualties of mechanised warfare; in the exhibition, an affecting image from 1916, by an unknown artist, shows wounded French soldiers performing drills in the nave of the Grand Palais in Paris as part of their rehabilitation.
Also in the exhibition is an evocative 1918 photograph, again by an unknown artist, of Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks entertaining a huge crowd at a war bonds rally on Wall Street.
“Our Future Is In The Air” accompanies the exhibition Stieglitz, Steichen, Strand, which focuses on contemporaneous works by three modernist masters of American photography: Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, and Paul Strand. It includes photographs by several friends and compatriots of Alfred Stieglitz, from Adolph de Meyer, Alvin Langdon Coburn, Paul Haviland, and Karl Struss to Morton Schamberg and Charles Sheeler, in whose works one can trace the transition from soft focus Pictorialism to a harder-edged, more detached “straight photography.”
Press release from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website
Alvin Langdon Coburn (British born America, 1882-1966) The Octopus 1909 Platinum print The Metropolitan Museum of Art Ford Motor Company Collection, Gift of Ford Motor Company and John C. Waddell, 1987
During the early 1910s, photographers such as Paul Strand, Karl Struss, and Coburn were using Pictorialist techniques from the previous century to depict startling perspectives on contemporary urban subjects, such as this dizzying, bird’s-eye view of New York’s Madison Square from a new skyscraper.
Unknown artist (American School) (Man Holding Baseball in Catcher’s Mitt) 1910 Gelatin silver print 13.8 x 8.7cm (5 7/16 x 3 7/16 in.) The Metropolitan Museum of Art Funds from various donors, 1998
Lewis Hine (American, 1874-1940) 11:00 A.M. Monday, May 9th, 1910. Newsies at Skeeter’s Branch, Jefferson near Franklin. They were all smoking. Location: St. Louis, Missouri 1910 Gelatin silver print The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gilman Collection Gift of Phyllis D. Massar, 1970
Trained as a sociologist at Columbia University, Hine gave up his teaching job in 1908 to become a full-time photographer for the National Child Labor Committee. The success of the reform agency, created four years earlier, was largely dependent on its ability to sway public opinion.
Influenced by Jacob Riis’s pictures of slum conditions on New York’s Lower East Side, Hine obsessively documented the working conditions of children in mills, factories, and fields across the country, often going undercover to gain access to his subjects. The results – more than five thousand photographs – were used in field reports, exhibitions, pamphlets, and slide lectures. Hine’s decidedly unromantic, understated pictures served as a potent weapon of persuasion.
Text from The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Lewis Hine (American, 1874-1940) Addie Card, 12 years. Spinner in North Pownal Cotton Mill. Girls in mill say she is ten years. She admitted to me she was twelve; that she started during school vacation and now would “stay”. Location: Vermont, August 1910 1910 Gelatin silver print 24.4 x 19.3cm (9 5/8 x 7 5/8 in) The Metropolitan Museum of Art Gilman Collection Purchase, Anonymous Gifts, by exchange, 2005
Lewis Hine (American, 1874-1940) Newsboy asleep on stairs with papers, Jersey City, New Jersey February 1912 Gelatin silver print Image: 11.5 x 16.8cm (4 1/2 x 6 5/8 in) Metropolitan Museum of Art Gilman Collection, Purchase, Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee Gift, 2005
Exhibition Overview
The twentieth century was truly born during the 1910s. This exhibition, which accompanies Stieglitz, Steichen, Strand, surveys the range of uses to which photography was put as its most advanced practitioners and theorists were redefining the medium as an art. The title “Our Future Is in the Air” is taken from a military aviation pamphlet that figures prominently (in French) in a 1912 Cubist tabletop still life by Picasso; it suggests the twinned senses of exhilarating optimism and lingering dread that accompanied the dissolution of the old order.
Photography was handmaiden and witness to the upheavals that revolutionised perception and consciousness during this tumultuous era. Space and time were overcome by motorcars and airplanes, radio and wireless, and man seemed liberated from the bounds of gravity and geography. This seemingly limitless expanse was mirrored by a new understanding of the unconscious as infinitely deep, complex, and varied – a continent ripe for discovery. The camera was seen as the conduit between these two states of self and world, and “straight photography” – stripped of the gauzy blur of Pictorialist reverie – was espoused by Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand among others.
This turn was not accidental: since handheld cameras became available in the late 1880s, anyone could be a photographer; similarly, photography had snaked its way into every corner of the culture. Elevated perception would distinguish the new artists from the amateur and the tradesman. The exhibition casts the widest possible net in order to show the foundations upon which the medium staked its claim as an independent art.
Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website
Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) Boulevard de Strasbourg 1912 Albumen silver print from glass negative 22.4 x 17.5cm (8 13/16 x 6 7/8 in.) The Metropolitan Museum of Art Gilman Collection Purchase, Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee Gift, 2005
Atget found his vocation in photography in 1897, at the age of forty, after having been a merchant seaman, a minor actor, and a painter. He became obsessed with making what he termed “documents for artists” of Paris and its environs and compiling a visual compendium of the architecture, landscape, and artefacts that distinguish French culture and history. By the end of his life, Atget had amassed an archive of more than eight thousand negatives, which he organized into such categories as Parisian Interiors, Vehicles in Paris, and Petits Métiers (trades and professions). In Atget’s inventory of Paris, shop windows figure prominently and the most arresting feature mannequin displays. In the 1920s the Surrealists recognised in Atget a kindred spirit and reproduced a number of his photographs in their journals and reviews. Antiquated mannequins such as the ones depicted here struck them as haunting, dreamlike analogues to the human form.
Text from The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz (Polish, 1885-1939) Jadwiga Janczewska, Zakopane c. 1913 Gelatin silver print The Metropolitan Museum of Art Gilman Collection Museum Purchase, 2005
Witkiewicz was prolific in many mediums, writing plays, novels, and philosophical treatises as well as painting and making darkly brooding photographic portraits and self-portraits. In all his work, he describes a proto-existential sense of the self struggling in vain against the undifferentiated mass of men and the indifference of death; he often turned to drugs to recover this missing plenitude of existence.
Between 1912 and 1913, when he thought he was going mad, Witkiewicz made a series of extraordinary self-portraits and portraits of friends, his dying father, and his fiancée, Jadwiga Janczewska. After this time, his engagement with photography was brief, as he devoted himself instead to literature and painting. He took his life on the day Russian troops entered Poland in 1939 – in part a gesture of national solidarity.
Text from The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Karl Struss (American, 1886–1981) Claremont Inn, Riverside Drive 1915 Platinum print The Metropolitan Museum of Art Warner Communications Inc. Purchase Fund, 1977
A member of the Photo-Secession, Struss was a student of Clarence White and a friend of Alfred Stieglitz. He made dozens of photographs of New York City at dusk, delighting in the way things merged and were illuminated by strings of fine lights. This photograph, with its gleaming automobiles and electric lights, shows a popular summer restaurant housed in a colonial-era home on the Upper West Side. Four years later, Struss moved to Los Angeles to work as a still photographer in the burgeoning movie business. He wound up being hired as a cameraman by Cecil B. DeMille and in 1927 won the first Oscar for cinematography for his work on F. W. Murnau’s Sunrise.
Text from The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Morton Schamberg (American, 1881–1918) [View of Rooftops] 1917 Gelatin silver print The Metropolitan Museum of Art Ford Motor Company Collection, Gift of Ford Motor Company and John C. Waddell, 1987 Public domain
Had he not died of influenza in 1918, Schamberg likely would have remained one of the best avant-garde painters and photographers of his generation in America. He absorbed the lessons of Cubism through his contacts with the Stieglitz and Arensberg circles, and in photographs such as this one he demonstrated his deft application of the new artistic idioms.
After reaching a point of almost pure abstraction in his painting in the wake of the Armory show of 1913, Schamberg turned in 1915 toward more objective machine forms in his pastels and paintings, and toward urban images in his photographs.
Like Stieglitz’s photographs of the city made from the windows of his galleries, Schamberg’s New York is seen from an elevated perspective, but unlike the elder photographer’s images, Schamberg’s photograph is cool, altogether lacking in human or natural references, and celebrates an almost wholly geometric order underscored by his calculated framing and point of view. For many years this print, the only one Schamberg made from this negative, belonged to his closest friend, Charles Sheeler.
Morton Schamberg (American, 1881-1918) Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (German, 1874-1927) “God” by Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven and Morton Schamberg 1917 Gelatin silver print 24.1 x 19.2cm (9 1/2 x 7 9/16 in.) The Metropolitan Museum of Art The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1973 Wikipedia Commons public domain
This photograph of a drain pipe attached to a miter box documents one of the most famous examples of American Dada. The sculpture God, a Readymade in the spirit of Marcel Duchamp’s upended urinal Fountain, has traditionally been attributed to Schamberg. Recent scholarship suggests, however, that it was primarily the creation of Baroness Elsa von Freytag Loringhoven, a poet, shoplifter, junk collector, and Duchamp worshiper famous for strolling the streets of Greenwich Village with cancelled postage stuck to her face and a birdcage with a live canary dangling from her neck. The sculpture’s irreverent title recalls the sculptor Beatrice Wood’s unattributed comment, included in a published defence of Duchamp’s Fountain, “The only works of art America has given are her plumbing and her bridges.”
Text from The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Charles Sheeler (American, 1883–1965) Dan Mask c. 1918 Gelatin silver print 24.2 x 18.2cm (9 1/2 x 7 3/16 in.) The Metropolitan Museum of Art Gilman Collection, Purchase, Denise and Andrew Saul Gift, 2005
When Charles Sheeler took up the camera sometime in 1910-11, he was already a modestly accomplished painter. He began to photograph domestic architecture in the Philadelphia area, and within three years he had a successful sideline documenting fine private and public American collections of Chinese bronzes, Meso-American pots, and modern painting and sculpture by Cézanne, Picasso, and Duchamp. Through this work Sheeler met Walter Arensberg, Alfred Stieglitz, and other important collectors and dealers; to a few of them he sold his paintings.
The rigorous demands of detailed record photography soon influenced his painting as the direct, generally frontal assessment of both an object’s form and structure retrained and refined his eye. By 1916, Sheeler had begun to paint from photographs and also to pursue photography as an end in itself. With his first exhibition of photographs, a three-person show with Paul Strand and Morton Schamberg at Marius de Zayas’s Modern Gallery in 1917, Sheeler emerged as one of America’s few prominent artists equally skilled with brush and camera.
This photograph of a Dan mask from Ivory Coast may have been commissioned by John Quinn, a New York lawyer, collector of African art, and patron of the avant-garde. The ceremonial mask emerges from virtual obscurity, filled with mystery, its highly polished wood surface animated by a raking, angular light. The photograph functions as a fetish, speaking with its own voice, commanding our attention, and even, it would seem, judging our response.
This photograph was published in the March 1923 issue of “The Arts,” in an article by de Zayas entitled “Negro Art.”
Charles Sheeler (American, 1883-1965) Doylestown House – Stairs from Below 1917 Gelatin silver print 21 x 15cm (8 1/4 x 5 15/16 in.) The Metropolitan Museum of Art Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1933
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![Adolph de Meyer (American born France, 1868-1949) '[Dance Study]' c. 1912](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/adolf-de-meyer-dance-study-web.jpg "Adolph de Meyer (American born France, 1868-1949) '[Dance Study]' c. 1912")
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