In the history of group photography Nixon’s ongoing series of family portraits The Brown Sisters (1975- ) is the best in the world. Beautifully structured and composed the photographs are nuanced and sensitive to the people portrayed and the passage of time. The subjects project and recede within the image frame, exposing vulnerability, intimacy and strength. Simply breathtaking!
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Amelia Kantrovitz for her help and to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Themes such as the passage of time and the enduring nature of close family relationships are brought into focus in the exhibition Nicholas Nixon: Family Album at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA). The show, on view from July 28, 2010, through May 1, 2011, in the MFA’s Herb Ritts Gallery, features more than 70 black and white portrait photographs by Nicholas Nixon, one of the most celebrated American photographers of this generation. Among them are pictures of Nixon’s wife, Beverly (Bebe) Brown Nixon, and their two children, Clementine and Sam. Nicholas Nixon also includes The Brown Sisters, the ongoing annual series of portraits of Bebe and her sisters taken each summer for the past 35 years. Nixon will take another photograph of the sisters this summer, which will be hung in the gallery during the course of the exhibition.
The promised gift to the MFA of The Brown Sisters series is the impetus for Nicholas Nixon. The group of photographs has been lent to the Museum for the exhibition from the collection of James Krebs, a Distinguished Benefactor of the MFA, and his late wife, Margie. Also included are works by Nixon purchased by the Museum, and a number that were given and lent to the MFA by the artist. Nicholas Nixon is presented with support from the Shelly and Michael Kassen Fund.
“Nicholas Nixon rose to prominence in the mid 1970s for his large-format black-and-white views of Boston and New York. Since then, he has turned almost exclusively to portraiture, and has produced many celebrated series of pictures – of the elderly, people with AIDS, and couples – but his portrayals of his family are particularly evocative and beloved. Nick has been a friend of the MFA for a long time and has generously given the Museum many of his photographs,” said Malcolm Rogers, Ann and Graham Gund Director of the MFA.
Nicholas Nixon’s photographs of family are both personal in nature and have a universality with which observers can connect. These pictures, a number of which have never been publicly displayed, celebrate the bonds of close family relationships, especially as they grow over time. Included in the exhibition is the luminous image that Nixon took of his wife in the bathtub, Bebe, Cambridge (MFA, Boston, 1980). The beautiful glowing light on her face suggests her interior state, as well as the depth of their long relationship. There are also many photographs in the show that highlight the richness and warmth of daily life with children. In an image from 1985, a cropped view of Bebe pictures her gazing downward, as Clementine’s fist emerges from the bottom of the frame, evoking the power of a new life. A close-up of Clementine’s face made the following year, with her wide eyes gazing upward, captures the toddler’s impression of wonder. The latest photograph of Clementine in the exhibition dates to 2003 and depicts her as a young woman, embracing her mother. Images of Nixon’s son, Sam, are also included, showing him in different stages over the years and in portraits with his sister.
The most recognised images in the exhibition are those that Nixon has taken of the Brown sisters each summer since 1975. The four women – Heather, Mimi, Bebe, and Laurie – always appear in the same order in the portraits, from left to right. These compelling photographs reveal the evolving nature of the sisters’ relationship over time. The serial portraits begin with The Brown Sisters, 1975 (James and Margie Krebs Collection, 1975), which captures them as young women, ranging in age from 15 to 25. With each passing year, observers can note changes in appearance, stance, and demeanour. In several of the portraits, the presence of the photographer is suggested through the shadow of himself and his camera projected across the figures, which makes reference to his role in the family dynamic. The series unfolds in a grid display on the central wall of the Ritts Gallery.
“In his serial pictures of family, Nicholas Nixon explores a classic conundrum in photography: how to suggest the passage of time by means of an instrument that records the instantaneous image. His effort is related to that of several predecessors – Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Weston, Harry Callahan, to name the most important – who, like him, used their wives as subject matter, photographing them over a period of years. What Nixon has added to the discussion – beyond recording facets of appearance, personality, or emphasising formal concerns – is his emphasis on the meaning of family,” said Anne Havinga, the MFA’s Estrellita and Yousuf Karsh Senior Curator of Photographs, who curated the show with Emily Voelker, the MFA’s Estrellita and Yousuf Karsh Assistant Curator of Photographs.
Born in Detroit in 1947, Nixon graduated from the University of Michigan in 1969 with a bachelor’s degree in English, and from the University of New Mexico in 1974 with a Masters of Fine Arts degree. Later that year, he moved to Boston, where he teaches at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Nixon is known for his documentary photography, especially city views and portraits rooted in the snapshot tradition. He works primarily in black and white, creating gelatin silver prints with a 8 x 10-inch view camera as did many of the great photographers who influenced him, including Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Weston, and Walker Evans. Working in large format and making contact prints enables him to create images of crisp detail and subtle tone. In recent years, Nixon has also begun to experiment with colour, although the photographs in the exhibition are all black-and-white, for which he is best known. He is the recipient of three National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships and two Guggenheim Fellowships, and, in addition to the MFA, his work is included in numerous museum collections, among them, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Press release from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston website [Online] Cited 26/04/2011 no longer available online
Nicholas Nixon (American, b. 1947) The Brown Sisters 1976 Gelatin silver print Promised gift of James and Margie Krebs Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Nicholas Nixon (American, b. 1947) The Brown Sisters 1978 Gelatin silver print Promised gift of James and Margie Krebs Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Nicholas Nixon (American, b. 1947) The Brown Sisters 1980 Gelatin silver print Promised gift of James and Margie Krebs Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Nicholas Nixon (American, b. 1947) The Brown Sisters 1996 Gelatin silver print Promised gift of James and Margie Krebs Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Nicholas Nixon (American, b. 1947) The Brown Sisters 1999 Gelatin silver print Promised gift of James and Margie Krebs Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Avenue of the Arts 465 Huntington Avenue Avenue of the Arts Boston, Massachusetts 02115-5523 617-267-9300
Opening hours: Thursday and Friday 10am – 10pm Saturday – Monday 10am – 5pm Closed Tuesday and Wednesday
Bill Henson (Australian, b. 1955) Image No. 9 from an Untitled sequence 1977 1977 Gelatin silver print
This is an exquisite exhibition by one of Australia’s preeminent artists. Like Glenn Gould playing a Bach fugue, Bill Henson is grand master in the performance of narrative, structure, composition, light and atmosphere. The exhibition features thirteen large colour photographs printed on lustre paper (twelve horizontal and one vertical) – nine figurative of adolescent females, two of crowd scenes in front of Rembrandt paintings in The Hermitage, St. Petersburg (including the stunning photograph that features The return of the prodigal son c. 1662 in the background, see below) and two landscapes taken off the coast of Italy. What a journey this exhibition takes you on!
Throughout his career Henson has carefully and thoughtfully mined the history of art to create personal mythologies that have wider universal implications. His work is a spiral feeding back into itself. As it ascends so it expands. His inquiry has been consistent and persuasive – themes and techniques that were evident in the very first photographs still appear many years later. For example, the very early photograph Image No.9 from an Untitled sequence 1977 (above) features a Mannerist-influenced elongated body, a form that appears in the latest exhibition in several of the works. Other influences have been, in early work, the Baroque (Untitled 1983/84, below), Rembrandt’s use of chiaroscuro in the Paris Opera Project (Untitled 21/51, below), the Pre-Raphaelite (used in most of his figurative work, especially in the faces, see below). In the current exhibition the influence of Caravaggio on the form of the body and the relationship between a work and Leonardo da Vinci’s Head of Christ (c. 1494-1495, below) is evident as is the implementation of a flattened perspective that is opposed to the principles of linear perspective, used in Dutch still life of the 17th century (see ‘The Art of Describing’1) that Henson employed in early photographs of crowds (Untitled 1980/82, below) – now reappearing in the two photographs taken in front of the Rembrandt paintings.
Henson’s vulnerable bodies have always been marked, bruised and subject to distress, emerging into the light in fragments – unsure in their relationship to life, spirit and mortality. His naked adolescent subjects occupy interstitial spaces: the gap between spaces full of structure, between childhood and adulthood – fluid spaces of adventure, exploration and problematic transience. Using this metaphor the photographs invite the viewer to examine their own social identity for this is never fixed and stable, is always in a state of flux; we, the viewer, have an intimate relationship to this period in our life not as some distant memory but with a sense of wonder and appreciation.
The new photographs, with their languorous, limpid figures have a certain malaise to them – the disintegrating body, the surface of the skin all blotchy hues of blue, pink and purple as if diseased – are translucent like a chrysalis … the inner light seeming to magically emerge from under the skin. As John McDonald in his excellent article (an essential read!) in The Age comments,
“The bodies of teenagers are transformed into living sculptures, infused with a slivery-blue sheen, every bruise and blemish captured in unsettling detail. Henson does not provide us with fantasy objects; he makes us feel how lonely it can be within our own skins. These are disturbing images but not because they feature naked adolescents. They are disturbing because they have the beauty of old master paintings or antique statuary but depict beings of flesh and blood. They are disturbing because they touch parts of the psyche we might prefer to avoid, stripping away the social self, leaving us as defenceless as a snail without its shell.”2
As McDonald notes, these bodies are more melancholy than erotic although they do possess, powerfully, that ability to image “the primeval deity who embodies not only the force of love but also the creative urge of ever-flowing nature, the firstborn Light for the coming into being and ordering of all things in the cosmos.”3 In this sense they emerge from darkness into the (dying of the) Light and possess a foreboding sense of death as well as elegiac sensuality: the placement of a hand, the hair of a person enveloped in darkness languidly resting on an exposed stomach, easily missed if not being attentive to the image.
Henson’s photographs have been said by many to be haunting but his images are more haunted than haunting. There is an indescribable element to them (be it the pain of personal suffering, the longing for release, the yearning for lost youth or an understanding of the deprecations of age), a mesmeric quality that is not easily forgotten. The photographs form a kind of afterimage that burns into your consciousness long after the exposure to the original image has ceased. Haunted or haunting they are unforgettable.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ See Alpers, Svetlana. The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century. University Of Chicago Press, 1984
2/ McDonald, John. “Bill Henson,” in The Age newspaper. April 9th 2011 [Online] Cited 17/04/2011
3/ Anon. “Eros,” on Wikipedia [Online] Cited 17/04/2011
All photographs published other than the ones supplied by Tolarno Galleries are published under fair dealing for the purposes of criticism or review (Commonwealth of Australia Consolidated Acts: Copyright Act 1968 – Sect 41).
Bill Henson (Australian, b. 1955) Untitled 1980/1982 Gelatin silver photograph 28 × 47cm
David Bailly (Dutch, 1584-1657) Self-Portrait with Vanitas Symbols c. 1651 Oil on canvas
Bill Henson (Australian, b. 1955) Untitled 1983/84 1983-1984 Triptych Type C colour photograph Each 98.3 x 73.6cm
Bill Henson (Australian, b. 1955) Untitled 21/51 1990-1991 Paris Opera Project Type C photograph 127 × 127cm Series of 50 Edition of 10 + 2 A/Ps
Bill Henson (Australian, b. 1955) Untitled #125 2000/2003 LMO SH163 N15A Type C photograph 127 × 180cm Edition of 5 + 2 A/Ps
Sir John Everett Millais (English, 1829-1896) Ophelia 1851-1852 Oil on canvas Tate Britain
Tolarno Galleries is pleased to present Bill Henson’s most recent body of work.
Comprising 13 photographs depicting glowing interiors, stunning landscapes and softly lit figures, this exhibition shows, as David Malouf declared in 1988, that ‘Bill Henson is a maker of magic.’
Henson’s spellbinding new works push photography into the realm of painting. His masterly compositions, captured at twilight, remind us of Caravaggio. Hauntingly beautiful, they express a palpable tenderness through subtle gestures and exquisite modulations of colour. Such photographs tell us why Bill Henson is one of Australia’s leading contemporary artists.
Born in Melbourne, he had his first solo exhibition, at the age of 19, at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1975. Since then he has exhibited extensively in Australia and internationally. In 1995 he represented Australia at the Venice Biennale with his celebrated series of cut-screen photographs.
In 2003 his work appeared in Strangers: The First ICP Triennial of Photography and Video at the International Center of Photography, New York.
A major survey of his work was held at the Art Gallery of New South Wales and the National Gallery of Victoria in 2005. This landmark exhibition attracted record visitor numbers for a contemporary art exhibition in Australia. The following year he exhibited a major body of work in Twilight: Photography in the magic Hour at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
Press release from Tolarno Galleries
Bill Henson (Australian, b. 1955) Untitled 2010/2011 NH SH346 N10B Archival inkjet pigment print 127 x 180cm Edition of 5
Bill Henson (Australian, b. 1955) Untitled 2009/2010 CL SH733 N35B Archival inkjet pigment print 127 x 180cm Edition of 5
Bill Henson (Australian, b. 1955) Untitled 2009/2010 CL SH767 N17B Archival inkjet pigment print 127 x 180cm Edition of 5
Bill Henson (Australian, b. 1955) Untitled 2009/2010 NH SH353 N33D Archival inkjet pigment print 127 x 180cm Edition of 5
Leonardo da Vinci (Italian, 1452-1519) Study for the head of Christ for The Last Supper [Testa di Cristo] c. 1494-1495 Drawing on paper 40 x 32cm Pinacoteca di Brera, Milano
Tolarno Galleries Level 4, 104 Exhibition Street Melbourne VIC 3000 Australia Phone: 61 3 9654 6000
Sam Shmith (Australian born England, b. 1980) Untitled (In Spates 2) 2011 125 x 75cm Pigment print on archival rag
The Digital Punctum
Spate, definition: A sudden flood, rush, or outpouring
This is a visually strong body of work by Sam Shmith that thematically hangs together beautifully in the Arc One Gallery space. The mystery, the sublime and the journey are well handled by the artist. As a spectral ‘body’ the photographs work together to create a new form of hallucination, one that haunts and perturbs the mind, like a disturbing psychological thriller a la David Lynchian ‘Twin Peaks’. The work, as a whole, becomes a meta-narrative and as Shmith develops as an artist, they seem to me like work that has journeyed to the point of departure. The viewer is (not really) flying, (not really) floating above the clouds observing the meta-narrative, creating a visual memory of things. Spectral luminescences, not-quite-right perspectives, the photograph as temporal hallucination.
Shmith’s photographs are constructed from “30-40 photographs per pictorial narrative” taken during the day and then digitally darkened: the clouds from Queensland, the cities from here, the cars from there. To be honest the clouds and cities could be from anywhere they are just part of the process. Shmith’s technique is interesting to know and then is quickly forgotten when looking at the photographs – like reading, it does not become the meaning (just a layer) of the work. The images, when constructed (however!) take me to other spaces and memories, opening up new vistas in my imagination.
Shmith’s series acts as a punctum, working to create an unitary impression on the mind that pricks my consciousness. The whole work becomes punctum. This is a very interesting and powerful proposition.
The punctum, as argued by Barthes in Camera Lucida, relies on the QUESTION OF INTENTIONALITY – the detail that pricks and wounds is an unconscious act on the part of the photographer – not one of intention. It cannot be perceived by the photographer or indeed anyone else in the present. In other words, when the photographer photographs the total object, he cannot not not photograph the part object, which is what the punctum is:
“Hence the detail which interests me is not, or a least not strictly, intentional, and probably must not be so; it occurs in the field of the photographer thing like a supplement that is at once inevitable and graceful; it does not necessarily attest to the photographer’s art; it says only that the photographer was there, or else, still more simply, that he could not not photograph the partial object at the same time as the total object … The photographer’s “second sight” does not consist in “seeing” but in being there. And above all, imitating Orpheus, he must not turn back to look at what he is leading – what he is giving to me!” (CL 47/CC 79-80)
As Michael Fried observes in his analysis of Camera Lucida, the punctum is “antitheatrical” in the sense that we see it for ourselves and are not shown it by the photographer: it is not consciously constructed by the photographer but unconsciously captured as part of the total object:
“As Fried has argued, the experience of the punctum lives or dies for Barthes according to the absence of presence of intentionality on the part of the photographer; if there is visible intention, there is no punctum. That the punctum can exist only in the absence of intention is consistent, Fried claims, with his distinction between “seeing” (understood positively as antitheatrical) and “being shown” (understood negatively as theatrical). The possibility of the punctum is cancelled if bound to the photographer’s intention – if we are shown what can only be seen. As Fried states: “The punctum, we might say, is seen by Barthes but not because it has been shown to him by the photographer, for whom it does not exist; as Barthes recognizes, ‘it occurs [only] in the photographic field of the photographed thing,’ which is to say that it is not a pure artefact of the photographic event.”1
This changes in digital photography, especially with photographs such as Shmith’s constructed from 30-40 photographs. Here the construction can only be intentional (or can it?), dissolving the relation between referent and photograph, the unseen nature of punctum and the ability to not not photograph the part object:
“Fried mentions the subject I have in mind when he says digital photographs undermine the condition of the punctum by making it impossible that “a partial object in the photograph that might otherwise prick or wound me may never have been part of a total object, which itself may be a digital construction” (Michael Fried, “Barthes’s Punctum,” Critical Inquiry 31, Spring 2005, p.563). In the sentence just preceding that, Fried notes that digitalization “threatens to dissolve the ‘adherence’ of the referent to the photograph,” thus ending the fundamental claim that “the photographer could not not photograph the partial object at the same time as the total object.”2
But the digital punctum still exists. Shmith’s work is evidence of this. It exists in the mind of the artist and viewer, external to rather than strictly “in” or “of” the image:
“Curiously, however, Barthes does claim in Camera Lucida that the punctum may also be of the mind, or at the level of remembrance, rather than strictly “in” or “of” the image: “… the punctum (is) revealed only after the fact, when the photograph is no longer in front of me and I think back on it. I may know better a photograph I remember than a photograph I am looking at, as if direct vision oriented its language wrongly, engaging it in an effort of description which will always miss its point of effect, the punctum” (Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 53.) Indeed, the punctum is a most difficult thing to pin down, or, should one say, to prick. Fried recognizes the truly aporetic [characterised by an irresolvable internal contradiction or logical disjunction] nature of the punctum when he points to certain affinities between the literalist work of the Minimalists and the punctum, whereby the Minimalists understood the relationship between the literalist work and the beholder as ’emphatically not determined by the work itself’, suggesting that meaning in literalism was essentially indeterminate.”3
As James Elkins has observed, the punctum, or the image’s antitheatricality, is not necessarily threatened by digitalisation either through the detaching of the referent from the photograph or through the detaching of the part object from the full object within the image itself.
“The presence and efficaciousness of the part object are independent of digitalisation because the concept of the part object arises from a certain understanding of the internal structure of pictures and objects. Part objects can be found as readily in photographs of galaxies, which are assembled from layers of cleaned and enhanced digital images, as in the background of Wessing’s Nicaragua. Nor does the detachment of the photograph from its referent threaten the operation of the punctum because photographs with subjects that are wholly digitally constructed can be understood as having overlooked elements waiting to be discovered by each viewer.”4
My belief is that the digital photographer can evidence punctum in the construction of image through an anticipation of it’s affect – either consciously or unconsciously. Not through the ‘placement’ inside disparate texts but a holistic embedding through intertextuality. The punctum becomes the (non)intentional ground of discovery – the part part object if you like – the prick among many photographs now created as one, in this case 30-40 turned into one pictorial narrative. The punctum does not have to be part of a total object and digitalisation does not undermine the punctum; it may even enhance it so that, in this case, the whole series becomes punctum.
Shmith’s series and individual photographs within the series work best when the artist lets go of his consciousness and lets the ‘thing itself’ emerge, like a Japanese haiku poem. While consciously constructed by the artist the haiku takes on a life and meaning of it’s own outside the confines of intentionality.
“The artist can proffer a ‘releasement toward things’ (Heidegger, Martin. Discourse on Thinking. New York: Harper & Row, 1966, pp. 55-56), a coexistence between a conscious and unconscious way of perceiving which sustains the mystery of the object confusing the distinction between real time and sensual time, between inside and outside, input and output becoming neither here nor there. The mystery of the image is not to be found in its emasculation (in the sense of it’s deprivation of vigour) but by being attentive to the dropping a way of awareness, of memory, imagination, and the fixed gaze of desire through the glimpsing of a coexistence between a conscious and unconscious way of perceiving, a ‘releasement towards things’ which enables the seeing of the ‘Thing Itself’.”5
While Shmith’s series works as a whole and there are some wonderful individual images occasionally the artist has become too conscious of the punctum, the marks he intentionally makes. There are too many planes in clouds, the marking of these planes loosing their aura of (in)significance. They should be discovered afresh, “overlooked elements waiting to be discovered by each viewer,” not intentionally placed and shown by the artist. The series needed other themes embedded within them to allow the viewer to discover, to journey – more! As I said in the opening paragraph the photographs seems to me like work that has journeyed to the point of departure.
And what an exciting departure it is, for what happens next is in his, and our, imagination.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ Fried, Michael. “Barthes’s Punctum,” in Critical Inquiry 31, Spring 2005 quoted in Hughes, Gordon. “Camera Lucida, Circa 1980,” in Batchen, Geoffrey (ed.,). Photography Degree Zero: Reflections on Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009
2/ Elkins, James. “What Do We Want Photography To Be?” in Batchen, Geoffrey (ed.,). Photography Degree Zero: Reflections on Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009, pp. 176-177
3/ Haraldsson, Arni. “Fried’s Turn,” on Fillip website, Spring 2004 [Online] Cited 12/04/2011. fillip.ca/content/frieds-turn
Many thankx to Angela Connor for her help and to Arc One 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.
Sam Shmith (Australian born England, b. 1980) Untitled (In Spates 7) 2011 50 x 30cm Pigment print on archival rag
Sam Shmith (Australian born England, b. 1980) Untitled (In Spates 14) 2011 50 x 30cm Pigment print on archival rag
Sam Shmith’s photographs resemble the opening scenes of a Hollywood blockbuster. By harnessing our collective imagination, each image is charged with mystery and intrigue, leaving the viewer to draw their own conclusions about the narrative embedded in each of the works.
Digitally layered from an image bank of over 60,000 self-shot images, Sam’s twenty-two new landscapes choreograph a series of temporal clues into single images that simultaneously obliterate all references to a particular locality. His works are a hybrid of images from his personal archives, composited so that each journey is no longer distinct, but melded to create their single, artificial realities.
Influenced by François Truffaut’s film Day for Night (1973), the works are shot during the day, and meticulously transformed into twilight scenes. Reworking and repeating particular motifs, these elaborately constructed works are broken up into four distinct groups – sky, mountains, cities and roads. The centre of the frame concentrates an immediate human intervention enveloped by mountainous panoramas, vaporous clouds or close foliage to create a murky tension between the encompassing landscape and specks of synthetic light. Intuitively composited from between 30 to 40 photographs per pictorial narrative, the works are shot from cars, aeroplanes and hot air balloons producing mood scenes that have athematic unity.
Through his methods Sam fashions an unconventional approach to landscape photography. Citing the melancholic landscapes of Bill Henson, the suburban malaise of Gregory Crewdson and drawing motivation from Alfred Stieglitz’s Equivalents, In Spates communicates the artist’s devotional dedication to the emotive importance of the genre. Though isolation appears as a common theme in his work, Sam’s observations should also be considered as an arbitrary moment viewed from afar, evoking a feeling of alienation and disengagement between the environment and ourselves.
Text from the Arc One Gallery press release
Sam Shmith (Australian born England, b. 1980) Untitled (In Spates 5) 2011 125 x 75cm Pigment print on archival rag
Sam Shmith (Australian born England, b. 1980) Untitled (In Spates 21) 2011 125 x 75cm Pigment print on archival rag
Arc One Gallery 45 Flinders Lane Melbourne, 3000 Phone: (03) 9650 0589
Exhibition dates: 10th November 2010 – 10th April 2011
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.
Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) The Terminal 1893, printed 1920s-30s Gelatin silver print 8.9 x 11.5cm (3 1/2 x 4 1/2 in.) The Metropolitan Museum of Art Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1949
As proprietor of the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession and publisher of the photographic journals Camera Notes and later Camera Work, Stieglitz was a major force in the promotion and elevation of photography as a fine art in America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His own photographs had an equally revolutionary impact on the advancement of the medium.
Stieglitz took this picture using a small 4 x 5″ camera, an instrument not considered at the time to be worthy of artistic photography. Unlike the unwieldy 8 x 10″ view camera (which required a tripod), this camera gave Stieglitz greater freedom and mobility to roam the city and respond quickly to the everchanging street life around him. The Terminal predicts by over a decade the radical transformation of the medium from painterly prints of rarified subjects to what the critic Sadakichi Hartmann dubbed “straight photography.” This new photography would take as its subject matter the quotidian aspects of modern, urban life, using only techniques that are unique to the medium.
Text from The Metropolitan Museum of Art website
Edward Steichen (American born Luxembourg, 1879-1973) The Little Round Mirror 1901, printed 1905 Gum bichromate over platinum print 48.3 x 33.2cm (19 x 13 1/16 in.) The Metropolitan Museum of Art Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1933
Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) The Hand of Man 1902, printed 1910 Photogravure 24.2 x 31.9cm (9 1/2 x 12 9/16 in.) The Metropolitan Museum of Art Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1949
The Hand of Man was first published in January 1903 in the inaugural issue of Camera Work. With this image of a lone locomotive chugging through the train yards of Long Island City, Stieglitz showed that a gritty urban landscape could have an atmospheric beauty and a symbolic value as potent as those of an unspoiled natural landscape. The title alludes to this modern transformation of the landscape and also perhaps to photography itself as a mechanical process. Stieglitz believed that a mechanical instrument such as the camera could be transformed into a tool for creating art when guided by the hand and sensibility of an artist.
Text from The Metropolitan Museum of Art website
Edward Steichen (American born Luxembourg, 1879-1973) The Flatiron 1904 Gum bichromate over platinum print 47.8 x 38.4cm (18 13/16 x 15 1/8 in.) The Metropolitan Museum of Art Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1933
Edward Steichen (American born Luxembourg, 1879-1973) Alfred Stieglitz 1907 Autochrome 23.9 x 18cm The Metropolitan Museum of Art Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1955
For the first time in more than 25 years, The Metropolitan Museum of Art will display five of its original Autochromes by Edward Steichen and Alfred Stieglitz for one week only – January 25-30, 2011 – as part of the current exhibition Stieglitz, Steichen, Strand. Invented by Auguste and Louis Lumière in 1907, Autochromes are one-of-a-kind color transparencies that are seductively beautiful when backlit.
The invention of the Autochrome was a milestone in the history of photography. It was the first commercially available means of making color photographs. Steichen was enthralled by the process and recommended it to his fellow photographers. Praising the luminosity of the new medium, he wrote, “One must go to stained glass for such color resonance, as the palette and canvas are a dull and lifeless medium in comparison.” Among the five Autochromes exhibited are Steichen’s portrait of Rodin in front of his sculpture The Eve and his widely reproduced portrait of Stieglitz holding an issue of his influential publication, Camera Work.
These fragile photographs – composed of minute grains of potato starch dyed red, blue, and green – cannot withstand the exposure of long-term display without suffering irreversible damage. Because of the high risk of the color fading, the Metropolitan – like most museums – has had a policy of not exhibiting its important collection of Autochromes. The Metropolitan recently completed a three-year study of the stability and light-sensitivity of Autochrome dyes, conducted by Luisa Casella, the Museum’s first Mellon Research Scholar in Photo Conservation, in close collaboration with Masahiko Tsukada of the Museum’s Department of Scientific Research, and supervised by Nora Kennedy, Sherman Fairchild Conservator of Photographs at the Metropolitan Museum. The study established that the Autochrome dyes are partially, though not completely, protected from light fading when in an environment where all oxygen has been removed.
Guided by this research, the Museum will display five original Autochromes by Steichen and Stieglitz within individual oxygen-free enclosures and under carefully controlled lighting conditions from January 25 to 30 in the exhibition Stieglitz, Steichen, Strand. During the other weeks of the exhibition, facsimiles of the photographs are displayed in their place.
Edward J. Steichen (American born Luxembourg, 1879-1973) Balzac, The Open Sky – 11 P.M. 1908, printed 1909 Direct carbon print 48.7 x 38.5cm (19 3/16 x 15 3/16 in.) The Metropolitan Museum of Art Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1933
In late summer 1908 Rodin moved the plaster of his sculpture of the French writer Honoré de Balzac out of his studio and into the open air so that Steichen, who disliked its chalky aspect in the daylight, could photograph it by the moon. Waiting through several exposures as long as an hour each, Steichen made this exposure at 11 p.m., when the moonlight transformed the plaster into a monumental phantom rising above the brooding nocturnal landscape. Steichen recalled that when he presented his finished prints some weeks later, an elated Rodin exclaimed: “You will make the world understand my Balzac through your pictures. They are like Christ walking on the desert.”
Text from The Metropolitan Museum of Art website
Stieglitz, Steichen, Strand
Go behind the lens with Sarah Greenough and Joel Smith as they speak about the relationships between three giants of early twentieth-century photography – Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, and Paul Strand – whose diverse and groundbreaking works are among the Metropolitan’s greatest photographic treasures. Followed by a discussion among the participants. Malcolm Daniel, Curator in Charge, Department of Photographs, MMA, introduces the program.
“Steichen, Stieglitz, and the Art of Change” Joel Smith, Curator of Photography, Princeton University Art Museum
“Stieglitz and Strand: Mentor and Protégé/Friend and Rival” Sarah Greenough, Senior Curator of Photographs, National Gallery of Art, Washington.
Stieglitz and the New York Art Scene (1905-46)
Lisa M. Messinger, associate curator, Department of Nineteenth-Century, Modern, and Contemporary Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Three giants of 20th-century American photography – Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, and Paul Strand – are featured at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, through April 10, 2011, in the exhibition Stieglitz, Steichen, Strand. The diverse and groundbreaking work of these artists will be revealed through a presentation of 115 photographs, drawn entirely from the Museum’s collection. On view will be many of the Metropolitan’s greatest photographic treasures from the 1900s to 1920s, including Stieglitz’s famous portraits of Georgia O’Keeffe, Steichen’s large coloured photographs of the Flatiron building, and Strand’s pioneering abstractions.
Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946) was a photographer of supreme accomplishment and a forceful and influential advocate for photography and modern art through his gallery “291” and his sumptuous journal Camera Work. Stieglitz also laid the foundation for the Museum’s collection of photographs. In 1928, he donated 22 of his own works to the Metropolitan; these were the first photographs to enter the Museum’s collection as works of art. In later decades he gave the Museum more than 600 photographs by his contemporaries, including Edward Steichen and Paul Strand.
Among Stieglitz’s works to be featured in this exhibition are portraits, views of New York City from the beginning and end of his career, and the 1920s cloud studies he titled Equivalents, through which he sought to arouse in the viewer the emotional equivalent of his own state of mind at the time he made the photograph, and to show that the content of a photograph was different from its subject.
The exhibition will also include numerous photographs from Stieglitz’s extraordinary composite portrait of Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986), part of a group of works selected for the Museum’s collection by O’Keeffe herself. Stieglitz made more than 330 images of O’Keeffe between 1917 and 1937 – of her face, torso, hands, or feet alone, clothed and nude, intimate and heroic, introspective and assertive. Through these photographs Stieglitz revealed O’Keeffe’s strengths and vulnerabilities, and almost single-handedly defined her public persona for generations to come.
Stieglitz’s protégé and gallery collaborator, Edward Steichen (1879-1973), was the most talented exemplar of the Photo-Secession, the loosely-knit group of artists founded by Stieglitz in 1902, seceding, in his words, “from the accepted idea of what constitutes a photograph,” but also from the camera clubs and other institutions dominated by a more retrograde establishment. In works such as The Pond – Moonrise (1904), made using a painstaking technique of multiple printing, Steichen rivalled the scale, colour, and individuality of painting.
Steichen’s three large variant prints of The Flatiron (1904) are prime examples of the conscious effort of Photo-Secession photographers to assert the artistic potential of their medium. Steichen achieved coloristic effects reminiscent of Whistler’s Nocturne paintings by brushing layers of pigment suspended in light-sensitive gum solution onto a platinum photograph. Although he used only one negative to create all three photographs, the variable colouring enabled him to create three significantly different images that convey the chromatic progression of twilight. The Metropolitan’s three prints, all donated by Stieglitz in 1933, are the only exhibition prints of Steichen’s iconic image.
In 1908 Steichen photographed the plaster of Rodin’s sculpture of Honoré de Balzac in the open air, by the light of the moon, making several exposures as long as an hour each. In Balzac, The Silhouette – 4 A.M., the moonlight has transformed the plaster into a monumental phantom rising above the brooding nocturnal landscape. Steichen recalled that when he presented his finished prints to Rodin, the elated sculptor exclaimed, “You will make the world understand my Balzac through your pictures.”
Among the unique early-20th-century works by Stieglitz and Steichen in the Museum’s collection are Autochromes, an early process of colour photography that became commercially available in 1907. Because of the delicate and light-sensitive nature of these glass transparencies, five original Autochromes by Stieglitz and Steichen will be displayed for one week only, January 25-30, 2011. During the other weeks of the exhibition, facsimiles of these Autochromes will be on view.
Stieglitz’s and Steichen’s younger contemporary, Paul Strand (1890-1976), pioneered a shift from the soft-focus aesthetic and painterly prints of the Photo-Secession to the straight approach and graphic power of an emerging modernism. Strand was introduced to Stieglitz as a high-schooler by his camera club advisor, Lewis Hine, the social reformer and photographer. He quickly became a regular visitor to “291,” where he was exposed to the latest trends in European art through groundbreaking exhibitions of works by Cézanne, Picasso, Matisse, and Brancusi.
Strand incorporated the new language of geometric abstraction into his interest in photographing street life and machine culture. His photographs from 1915-1917 treated three principal themes: movement in the city, abstractions, and street portraits. Stieglitz, whose interest in photography had waned as he grew more interested in avant-garde art, saw in Strand’s work a new approach to photography. He showed Strand’s groundbreaking photographs at 291 and devoted the entire final double issue of Camera Work (1917) to this young photographer’s work, marking a pivotal moment in the course of photography.
In From the El (1915), Strand juxtaposed the ironwork and shadows of the elevated train with the tiny form of a lone pedestrian. In 1916, he experimented with radical camera angles and photographing at close range. Among the astonishingly modern photographs he made that summer is Abstraction, Twin Lakes, Connecticut, one of the first photographic abstractions to be made intentionally. When Stieglitz published a variant of this image in Camera Work, he praised Strand’s results as “the direct expression of today.”
In the same year, Strand made a series of candid street portraits with a hand-held camera fitted with a special lens that allowed him to point the camera in one direction while taking the photograph at a 90-degree angle. Blind, his seminal image of a street peddler, was published in Camera Work and immediately became an icon of the new American photography, which integrated the humanistic concerns of social documentation with the boldly simplified forms of Modernism. As is true for most of the large platinum prints by Strand in the exhibition, the Metropolitan’s Blind, a gift of Stieglitz, is the only exhibition print of this image from the period.
Stieglitz, Steichen, Strand is organised by Malcolm Daniel, Curator in Charge of the Metropolitan Museum’s Department of Photographs, assisted by Russell Lord, Jane and Morgan Whitney Fellow in the Department of Photographs.
Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website
Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) The City of Ambitions 1910, printed 1910-1913 Photogravure 33.8 x 26.0cm (13 5/16 x 10 1/4 in.) The Metropolitan Museum of Art Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1949
This photograph belongs to a series of dynamic images Stieglitz made of New York of 1910. It appeared in the October 1911 issue of Camera Work along with eight other examples of his lyrical urban modernism – a contemporary vision certainly not lost on Coburn, Struss, and Strand.
Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) Old and New New York 1910, printed in or before 1913 Photogravure 33.2 x 25.5cm (13 1/16 x 10 1/16 in.) The Metropolitan Museum of Art Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1949
Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976) From the El 1915 Platinum print 33.6 x 25.9cm (13 1/4 x 10 3/16 in.) The Metropolitan Museum of Art Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1949
Paul Strand was introduced to Alfred Stieglitz by his teacher Lewis Hine, and quickly became part of the coterie of painters and photographers that gathered at Stieglitz’s gallery at 291 Fifth Avenue. There he was exposed to the latest trends in European vanguard art through groundbreaking exhibitions of Cézanne, Picasso, Matisse, and Brancusi. Strand incorporated their abstracting compositional techniques into his work, marrying the new language of geometric surface design to his interest in street life and machine culture.
Strand’s vision of the city during these years often focuses on the problematic exchange between the sweep and rigor of the urban grid with the human lives that inhabit and pass through it. From the El is a good example of this dialectical approach, with the graphic power of the ironwork and street shadows punctuated by the tiny, lone pedestrian at the upper right. Strand addresses the effects of the new urban condition obliquely here, embedding a subtle political statement within the formal structure of the image.
Text from The Metropolitan Museum of Art website
Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) From the Back Window – 291 1915 Platinum print 25.1 x 20.2cm (9 7/8 x 7 15/16 in.) The Metropolitan Museum of Art Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1949
At the turn of the century, Stieglitz’s duties as gallery owner, publisher, editor, and promoter left him little time to photograph. When the mood struck him, however, which began to happen with some frequency about 1915, he did not look far afield but photographed his colleagues at the gallery and the view from his window with a modernist rigor exceeded only by Strand.
Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976) Blind 1916 Platinum print 34 x 25.7cm (13 3/8 x 10 1/8 in.) The Metropolitan Museum of Art Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1933
Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) Hodge Kirnon 1917 Palladium print 24.6 x 19.9cm (9 11/16 x 7 13/16 in.) The Metropolitan Museum of Art Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1949
One of the least well known and most beautiful of Stieglitz’s portraits, this photograph depicts Hodge Kirnon, a man Stieglitz saw in passing every day. When preparing to close his historic gallery “291” in 1917 as a result of World War I, Stieglitz assessed his work and life and saw that Kirnon – who operated the elevator that transported the gallery’s visitors, its critics, and its provocative modern art – had been a true fellow passenger on the momentous trip.
Text from The Metropolitan Museum of Art website
Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) Georgia O’Keeffe – Hands 1917 Platinum print 22.6 x 16.8cm (8 7/8 x 6 5/8 in.) The Metropolitan Museum of Art Gift of Georgia O’Keeffe, through the generosity of The Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation and Jennifer and Joseph Duke, 1997
Georgia O’Keeffe – Hands is one of the images that Stieglitz made during his first portrait session with O’Keeffe, in 1917, when she traveled by train to New York to see her second show of drawings and watercolours at 291. “A few weeks after I returned to Texas, photographs of me came,” she recalled. “In my excitement at such pictures of myself I took them to school and held them up for my class to see. They were surprised and astonished too. Nothing like that had come into our world before.” The notion that an expressive portrait might be made without including the sitter’s face was indeed novel.
Text from The Metropolitan Museum of Art website
Exhibition Overview
This exhibition features three giants of photography – Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946), Edward Steichen (American, b. Luxembourg, 1879-1973), and Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976) – whose works are among the Metropolitan’s greatest photographic treasures. The diverse and groundbreaking work of these artists will be revealed through a presentation of approximately 115 photographs, drawn entirely from the collection.
Alfred Stieglitz, a photographer of supreme accomplishment as well as a forceful and influential advocate for photography and modern art through his gallery “291” and his sumptuous journal Camera Work, laid the foundation of the Met’s collection. He donated twenty-two of his own works in 1928 – the first photographs to be acquired by the Museum as works of art – and more than six hundred by other photographers, including Steichen and Strand, in later decades. Featured in the exhibition will be portraits, city views, and cloud studies by Stieglitz, as well as numerous images from his composite portrait of Georgia O’Keeffe (American, 1887-1986), part of a group selected for the collection by O’Keeffe herself.
Stieglitz’s protégé and gallery collaborator Edward Steichen was the most talented exemplar of Photo-Secessionist ideas, with works such as his three large variant prints of The Flatiron and his moonlit photographs of Rodin’s Balzac purposely rivaling the scale, color, and individuality of painting. By contrast, the final issue of Camera Work (1917) was devoted to the young Paul Strand, whose photographs from 1915-1917 treated three principal themes – movement in the city, abstractions, and street portraits – and pioneered a shift from the soft-focus Pictorialist aesthetic to the straight approach and graphic power of an emerging modernism.
Text from The Metropolitan Museum of Art website
Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) Georgia O’Keeffe – Neck 1921 Palladium print 23.6 x 19.2cm (9 5/16 x 7 9/16 in.) The Metropolitan Museum of Art Gift of Georgia O’Keeffe, through the generosity of The Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation and Jennifer and Joseph Duke, 1997
Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) The Dancing Trees 1922 Palladium print 24.2 x 19.3cm (9 1/2 x 7 5/8 in.) The Metropolitan Museum of Art Gift of David A. Schulte, 1928
Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) Spiritual America 1923 Gelatin silver print 11.6 x 9.2cm (4 9/16 x 3 5/8 in.) The Metropolitan Museum of Art Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1949
In the decade leading up to the Great Depression, American modernism was a highly contested concept. Stieglitz, perhaps justifiably, considered himself one of the few qualified to dictate its course, having surrounded himself with a group of like-minded and devoted artists, critics, and writers whom he directed in an almost shamanistic fashion. Spirituality loomed large in his vision of American identity, but he was disheartened and offended with what he viewed as a pent-up, materialist, and culturally bankrupt American way. In a rare attempt at ironic commentary, Stieglitz produced this picture of a harnessed, castrated horse – a pure representation of eradicated sexual prowess and restrained muscular energy – and labelled it Spiritual America. In effect, he suggested that America was lacking in spirit by reinterpreting the horse, a traditional American symbol of unstoppable force, as a trussed-up pattern of slick geometry.
Text from The Metropolitan Museum of Art website
Edward J. Steichen (American born Luxembourg, 1879-1973) Gloria Swanson 1924, printed 1960s Gelatin silver print 24.0 x 19.1cm (9 7/16 x 7 1/2 in.) The Metropolitan Museum of Art Gift of Grace M. Mayer, 1989
Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976) Wild Iris, Maine 1927-1928 Gelatin silver print 24.8 x 19.8cm (9 3/4 x 7 13/16 in.) The Metropolitan Museum of Art Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1955 Courtesy Aperture Foundation, Inc., Paul Strand Archive
Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) Looking Northwest from the Shelton, New York 1932 Gelatin silver print 24.2 x 19.2cm (9 1/2 x 7 9/16 in.) The Metropolitan Museum of Art Ford Motor Company Collection Gift of Ford Motor Company and John C. Waddell, 1987
Stieglitz recorded the construction of the skyscrapers of midtown Manhattan from the windows of his gallery and of his nearby apartment in the Shelton Towers. His photographs seem not to celebrate the astonishing growth of new buildings but rather almost geological permanence and stability: “Crammed on the narrow island the million-windowed buildings will jut glittering, pyramid on pyramid…,” as John Dos Passos wrote.
Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) Georgia O’Keeffe – Hand and Wheel 1933 Gelatin silver print 24.1 x 19.5cm (9 1/2 x 7 11/16 in.) The Metropolitan Museum of Art Gift of Georgia O’Keeffe, through the generosity of The Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation and Jennifer and Joseph Duke, 1997
Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976) Cristo – Oaxaca 1933, printed 1940 Photogravure 25.4 x 20.2cm (10 x 7 15/16 in.) The Metropolitan Museum of Art David Hunter McAlpin Fund, 1940
Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976) Coapiaxtla, Church 1933, printed 1940 Photogravure 16.2 x 12.7cm (6 3/8 x 5 in.) David Hunter McAlpin Fund, 1940
The Metropolitan Museum of Art 1000 Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street New York, New York 10028-0198 Information: 212-535-7710
Opening hours: Sunday – Tuesday and Thursday: 10am – 5pm Friday and Saturday: 10am – 9pm Closed Wednesday
Exhibition dates: 19th November 2010 – 10th April 2011
Gene Pelham (American, 1909-2004) Photograph for The Tattoo Artist 1944 Study for The Saturday Evening Post, March 4, 1944 11 1/4 x 8 3/4 in Norman Rockwell Museum Archival Collections Norman Rockwell Licensing, Niles, Illinois
The first and last photographs (precursor to Avedon’s white background photographs) are a knockout – and then just look what Rockwell does with them!
The background of traditional tattoo ‘flash’ behind The Tattoo Artist (1944, below) is inspired, as is the humour in the crossing out of the names. The book of the English painter Augustus John nonchalantly placed on the counter in the photographic studies for Soda Jerk (1953) is delicious. Just fantastic to see some of the preparatory work behind the paintings.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Brooklyn Museum for allowing me to publish the artwork and text in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Gene Pelham (American, 1909-2004) Photograph for The Tattoo Artist 1944 Study for The Saturday Evening Post, March 4, 1944 11 1/4 x 8 3/4 in Norman Rockwell Museum Archival Collections Norman Rockwell Licensing, Niles, Illinois
Gene Pelham (American, 1909-2004) Photograph for Going and Coming 1947 Study for The Saturday Evening Post, August 30, 1947 11 1/4 x 15 5/8 in Norman Rockwell Museum Archival Collections Norman Rockwell Licensing, Niles, Illinois
Norman Rockwell (American, 1894-1978) Photographs for The Problem We All Live With 1964 Study for Look, January 14, 1964 Norman Rockwell Museum Archival Collections Norman Rockwell Licensing, Niles, Illinois
To create many of his iconic, quintessentially American paintings, most of which served as magazine covers, norman rockwell worked from carefully staged study photographs that are on view for the first time, alongside his paintings, drawings, and related tear sheets, in Norman Rockwell: Behind the Camera. The exhibition, which will be on view at the Brooklyn Museum from November 19, 2010, through April 10, 2011, was organised by the norman rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, following a two-year project that preserved and digitised almost 20,000 negatives.
Beginning in the late 1930s, norman rockwell (1894-1978) adopted photography as a tool to bring his illustration ideas to life in studio sessions. Working as a director, he carefully staged his photographs, selecting props, locations, and models and orchestrating every detail. He began by collecting authentic props and costumes, and what he did not have readily available he purchased, borrowed, or rented – from a dime-store hairbrush or coffee cup to a roomful of chairs and tables from a New York City Automat. He created numerous photographs for each new subject, sometimes capturing complete compositions and, in other instances, combining separate pictures of individual elements. Over the forty years that he used photographs as his painting guide, he worked with many skilled photographers, particularly Gene Pelham, Bill Scovill, and Louis Lamone.
Early in his career Norman Rockwell used professional models, but he eventually found that this method inhibited his evolving naturalistic style. When he turned to photography, he turned to friends and neighbours instead of professional models to create his many detailed study photographs, which he found liberating. Working from black-and-white study photographs also allowed Rockwell more freedom in developing his final work. “If a model has worn a red sweater, I have painted it red – I couldn’t possibly make it green… But when working with photographs I seem able to recompose in many ways: as to form, tone, and color,” Rockwell once commented.
Included in the exhibition will be more than one hundred framed digital prints alongside paintings, drawings, magazine tear sheets, photographic equipment, and archival letters, as well as an introductory film. Among the paintings on view will be the Brooklyn Museum’s painting The Tattoo Artist – one of many that Rockwell created during World War II – depicting a young sailor stoically having his arm tattooed, shown alongside working photographs by Gene Pelham, and the watercolour Dugout, also from the Museum’s collection, portraying the Chicago Cubs baseball team being jeered by fans of the Boston Braves. This work will be displayed along with the September 4, 1948, Saturday Evening Post cover on which it appeared and study photographs by Gene Pelham.
Among the magazine covers included in the exhibition are several from The Saturday Evening Post, for which Rockwell worked for nearly fifty years before turning his attentions to more socially relevant subjects for Look magazine, with which he had a decade-long relationship. Included is The Art Critic, showing an aspiring artist scrutinising paintings in a gallery, which appeared in the April 16, 1955, issue. The exhibition also includes several series of photographs and the final paintings and magazine tear sheets, among them the July 13, 1946, Saturday Evening Post illustration Maternity Waiting Room, shown along with a series of images by an unidentified photographer that served as details of the final work, which portrays ten anxious soon-to-be fathers.
Norman Rockwell became one of the most famous illustrators of his generation through his naturalistic, narrative paintings done in a readily recognisable style, which appeared in national magazines that reached millions of readers. Born in 1894 on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, he left high school to study at the National Academy of Design and later the Art Students League of New York. By the age of eighteen he was already a published artist specialising in children’s illustration and had become a regular contributor to magazines such as Boys’ Life, the monthly magazine of the Boy Scouts of America, where he was soon named art director. In 1916 he painted his first cover for The Saturday Evening Post, beginning a forty-seven-year relationship that resulted in 323 covers and was the centerpiece of his career.
Early in his career Rockwell had a studio in New Rochelle, New York. He later moved with his wife and three sons to Arlington, Vermont, where many of his family and neighbours served as models in working photographs for his illustrations, which began to focus on small-town American life. In 1943 a fire destroyed his Vermont studio, along with numerous paintings and many of the photographic studies. A decade later the family relocated to Stockbridge, Massachusetts. In 1963 he severed his forty-seven-year association with The Saturday Evening Post and began to work for Look magazine, where, during his ten-year association, he produced work that reflected his personal concerns, including civil rights, America’s war on poverty, and space exploration.
Press release from the Brooklyn Museum website
Norman Rockwell (American, 1894-1978) New Kids in the Neighborhood 1967 Tear sheet, Look, May 16, 1967 13 x 20 1/2 in Norman Rockwell Museum Archival Collections Norman Rockwell Licensing, Niles, Illinois
Gene Pelham (American, 1909-2004) Photograph for Shuffleton’s Barbershop 1950 Study for The Saturday Evening Post, April 29, 1950 11 5/16 x 7 15/16 in Norman Rockwell Museum Archival Collections Norman Rockwell Licensing, Niles, Illinois
Gene Pelham (American, 1909-2004) Photograph for Soda Jerk 1953 Study for The Saturday Evening Post, August 22, 1953 9 1/2 x 7 9/16 in Norman Rockwell Museum Archival Collections Norman Rockwell Licensing, Niles, Illinois
Gene Pelham (American, 1909-2004) Photograph for Soda Jerk 1953 Study for The Saturday Evening Post, August 22, 1953 9 1/2 x 7 9/16 in Norman Rockwell Museum Archival Collections Norman Rockwell Licensing, Niles, Illinois
Gene Pelham (American, 1909-2004) Photograph for The Dugout 1948 Study for The Saturday Evening Post, September 4, 1948 Norman Rockwell Art Collection Trust Licensed by Norman Rockwell Licensing, Niles, Illinois
Brooklyn Museum 200 Eastern Parkway Brooklyn New York 11238-6052
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
The Metropolitan Museum of Art 1000 Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street New York, New York 10028-0198 Information: 212-535-7710
Opening hours: Sunday – Tuesday and Thursday: 10am – 5pm Friday and Saturday: 10am – 9pm Closed Wednesday
“In the meantime the landscape presents scenes of desolation which mark the memory of all who see it. Thousands of carcasses are strewn on the baked and cracked plains. There is a brooding air of almost Biblical intensity over millions of acres which bear no trace of surface waters. The dry astringent air extracts every drop of moisture from the grass, leaving it so brittle that it breaks under foot with the tinkling of thin glass.”
Sidney Nolan. Epic Drought in Australia 1952
“Peering into the pantry, which held a particular fascination for me, my eye was caught by several jars of preserved fruit that stood on the otherwise empty shelves and by a few dozen diminutive crimson apples on the sill of the window darkened by the yew tree outside. And as I looked on these apples which shone through the half-light … the quite outlandish thought crossed my mind that these things … had all outlasted me …”
W.G. Sebald. The Rings of Saturn 1988
This is a superb exhibition of 61 black and white photographs by Sidney Nolan. The photographs were shot using a medium format camera and are printed in square format from the original 1952 negatives. They were taken near the Birdsville Track in Queensland and were commissioned at the time by the Brisbane newspaper The Courier Mail. Although not intended to be studies for the later ‘Drought paintings’ they have become, were the beginning of, can be seen as, preparatory ideas pre sketching and painting.
There are two proof sets of the Drought Photographs (including the one displayed on the gallery wall) that are printed on a cool-toned Type C photographic paper (analogue to digital to analogue) at about 8″ square. These are the less successful of the prints for the “beauty is in the box.” The more impressive prints are the edition of 10 that is for sale, either as individual prints or as a whole folio, that are printed at approximately 10″ square on a slightly warm-toned Canson Infinity 310 gsm archival inkjet paper (analogue to digital). These are the knockout prints with lots of mid-toned hues – for the warm tone of the paper more closely matches the feel of the dusty Outback. They possess a very “inky” atmosphere and wonderful light. Make sure that you get the gallery staff to show you some of these prints!
The work itself is a joy to behold. The photographs hang together like a symphony, rising and falling, with shape emphasising aspects of form. The images flow from one to another. The formal composition of the mummified carcasses is exemplary, the resurrected animals (a horse, for example, propped up on a fifth leg) and emaciated corpses like contemporary sculpture. Here I am reminded of some of the work of Henry Moore.
The handling of the tenuous aspects of human existence in this uniquely Australian landscape is also a joy to behold. Through an intimate understanding of how to tension the space between objects within the frame Nolan’s seemingly simple but complex photographs of the landscape are previsualised by the artist in the mind’s eye before he even puts the camera to his face. Unfortunately I don’t have any photographs to show you of these works but for me they were one of the highlights of the exhibition, rivalling any of the work of the Farm Security Administration (FSA) photographers photographing in the American Dustbowl during the 1930s. Finally, some great Australian landscape photographs!!
As the curator Damian Smith notes of both strands, “Throughout the series emphasis shifts from detached observation to intimate contemplation – between the forces of the outer landscape to the darkness of the animals’ inner being.”
I would not say the landscapes are ‘detached observation’. Both forms require intimate contemplation.
Let us investigate the presence of these images further.
“Barthes mentions the apparently “universal” experiences of birth and death, experiences that, he points out, are in fact always mediated by historical and thus political circumstances. Echoing a famous remark by Bertolt Brecht, he contends that “the failure of photography seems to me to be flagrant in this connection: to reproduce death or birth tells us, literally, nothing.””1
“To reproduce death or birth tells us, literally, nothing.” Hence, you could argue, through an appeal to nostalgia for a mythology of the Australian bush we are held at the surface of an identity. Drought, desolation, despair, death. But these photographs go beyond the reproduction of death, go beyond mere nostalgia, by pushing the prick of consciousness, Barthes punctum, into a sense of spatial immediacy and temporal anteriority – an experience Barthes “sums up as the “having-been-there” that is the basis of every photograph’s sense of witness.”2
The new punctum becomes other than the detail – no longer of form but of intensity, of Time: conjuring past, present and future in a single image.3 We, the viewer, bring our own associations to the image, our knowledge of drought in this big land – the knowledge that this drought has happened, it did happen and it will happen again and again and again in the future, probably with more frequency than it does now. The photograph becomes an active, mental representation of the material world. It becomes the world’s ‘essence’.
The photographs stand for something else, some other state of being, much as this work can be seen as one small aspect of Nolan’s art that stands for the whole – a close examination of a small part of something that represents the whole, like a sail represents a yacht, a metonymic resonance. They tell us something through time, of life and death. As the great author W. G. Sebald eloquently observes in his quotation at the top of this posting these things outlast us – in our imagination.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ Batchen, Geoffrey. “Palinode: An Introduction to Photography Degree Zero,” in Batchen, Geoffrey (ed.,). Photography Degree Zero: Reflections on Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009, p. 6 2/ Ibid., pp. 8-9 3/ Ibid., p. 13
Many thankx to Ingrid Oosterhuis (General Manager Melbourne) for her help and to Australian Galleries for allowing me to publish the text and the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Sidney Nolan (Australian, 1917-1992) Untitled (calf carcass in tree) 1952 Archival inkjet print 23 x 23cm
In 1952 Sidney Nolan was commissioned by the Brisbane newspaper The Courier Mail to travel through far northern Queensland to record his impressions of one of the worst droughts in Australia’s history. Throughout this journey Nolan took numerous black and white photographs using a medium format camera, resulting in a host of startling and memorable images. Focusing on both the macabre spectre of the many animal carcasses strewn across the landscape and on the singular dwellings announcing a tenuous human presence, Nolan created numerous iconic images.
Having returned to Australia after an extended period traveling in Europe, Nolan commented that the animal carcasses reminded him of the petrified bodies he had seen at Pompeii. Throughout the series emphasis shifts from detached observation to intimate contemplation – between the forces of the outer landscape to the darkness of the animals’ inner being. With their carefully composed compositions the photographs represent a dramatic shift from the artist’s earlier photographic experiments. In place of a prior spontaneity, drought-stricken animal carcases are framed in formally rigorous compositions, the moment seemingly trapped in time.
For the first time this exhibition includes the complete and unabridged series of Sidney Nolan’s Drought Photographs, including images previously unavailable for public exhibition.
Damian Smith Archivist for the Nolan Estate 1996-1999
Australia has not a very long history, but it is long enough to indicate that she must expect a major drought once every decade. Even so the present drought which the north and west of the continent is enduring, is by far the worst in living memory.
Rivers which have not been dry for over a century are now beds of hot sand, and even the aborigines can find no parallel in their mythology for a drought of this magnitude.
To cattle raising areas, failure of the annual monsoonal rains spells near tragedy. Of a total of 11.4 million beef cattle 1.5million have already perished.
The position is complicated by the lack of a railway connecting the North-centre of Australia with the eastern seaboard. Had such a railway been in existence many thousands of cattle could have been shifted to agistment areas and saved. As it is, the cattle must survive journeys from 500 to 1500 miles on stock routes, and this is generally impossible owing to the weakened positions of the animals. Thus cattle men must face the prospect of watching their herds dwindle until at least the end of the year when there is the probability of early summer storms bringing relief.
In the meantime the landscape presents scenes of desolation which mark the memory of all who see it. Thousands of carcasses are strewn on the baked and cracked plains. There is a brooding air of almost Biblical intensity over millions of acres which bear no trace of surface waters. The dry astringent air extracts every drop of moisture from the grass, leaving it so brittle that it breaks under foot with the tinkling of thin glass.
Death takes on a curiously abstract patter under these arid conditions. Carcasses of animals are preserved in strange shapes which have often a kind of beauty, or even grim elegance.
Over the whole country there is a silence in which men and animals bring forth the qualities necessary for survival. Patience, endurance – and for many Australians, a bitter and salty attitude of irony.
Sidney Nolan, August 1952
Text from the Australian Galleries website [Online] Cited 18/03/2011 no longer available online
Sidney Nolan (Australian, 1917-1992) Untitled (cow in tree) 1952 Archival inkjet print 23 x 23cm
Sidney Nolan (Australian, 1917-1992) Untitled (Brian the stockman mounting dead horse) 1952 Archival inkjet print 23 x 23cm
Australian Galleries is delighted to present this fascinating exhibition of selected photographs by Sidney Nolan curated by Damian Smith, Archivist for the Nolan Estate 1996-1999.
Smith states in the accompanying exhibition catalogue:
“In 1952 Sidney Nolan was commissioned by the Brisbane newspaper The Courier Mail to travel through far northern Queensland to record his impressions of one of the worst droughts in Australia’s history. Throughout this journey Nolan took numerous black and white photographs using a medium format camera, resulting in a host of startling and memorable images. Focusing on both the macabre spectre of the many animal carcasses strewn across the landscape and on the singular dwellings announcing a tenuous human presence, Nolan created numerous iconic images. This exhibition includes the complete and unabridged series of Sidney Nolan’s Drought Photographs, including images previously unavailable for public exhibition.”
In his 1952 essay Epic Drought in Australia Sidney Nolan remarked on the poignancy of the images, noting the following:
“Death takes on a curiously abstract patter under these arid conditions. Carcasses of animals are preserved in strange shapes which have often a kind of beauty, or even grim elegance.”
To coincide with the exhibition Drought Photographs, Australian Galleries will be showing a selection of Drought Drawings by Sidney Nolan that include works previously exhibited at the National Gallery of Victoria, in it’s landmark survey of Nolan’s work Desert Drought in 2003.
Sidney Nolan Drought Photographs Curated by Damian Smith
In 2010 Damian Smith established Words For Art, a consultancy specialising in art writing and curatorial projects.
Damian has always had a strong interest in Nolan’s work, he was appointed the inaugural archivist for the estate of Sidney Nolan in 1996. Since that time he has curated numerous Nolan exhibitions including a major exhibition, Unmasked: Sidney Nolan and Ned Kelly 1950-1990 for the Heide Museum of Modern Art in 2006.
Building up to the Heide exhibition, Damian was based at Sidney Nolan’s home ‘The Rodd’ at Herefordshire, a 16th Century manor on the border of England and Wales. During that research period he developed an interest in Nolan’s life-long engagement with photography. He discovered vintage prints of Nolan’s photographs of outback Australia and the devastating drought in far northern Queensland, which were included in the landmark survey Sidney Nolan: Desert and Drought, at the National Gallery of Victoria in 2003. The exhibition included previously unseen photographic images from 1949 to 1952.
In the NGV exhibition, numerous small-scale contact prints showing Nolan’s ‘Drought animals’ were featured, as were larger black and white prints from the same series. Additional small-scale prints were sourced as well through Nolan’s step-daughter Jinx Nolan. Of note was Nolan’s now famous Untitled (Brian the stockman mounting a dead horse at Wave Hill Station), 1952, a startling image that first featured in the 1961 Thames & Hudson monograph Sidney Nolan, where it appeared titled Desert.
Having researched and written about these images, Damian recognised that Nolan had spent many hours studying the images, notating them and ultimately using them in the development of his now famous Drought paintings. Nolan offered the photographs to Life Magazine, New York in a bid to bring this extraordinary series to public attention. This bid was unsuccessful.
After all of the years since these photographs were taken, Damian made the decision to resurrect Nolan’s photographs working closely with Sidney Nolan’s widow Mary Nolan, nee Boyd. The result being this exhibition at Australian Galleries, Melbourne in 2011.
Keen to preserve the artist’s vision, the photographs have been produced to a scale consistent with the vintage prints and all are printed from the original negatives which were discovered at ‘The Rodd’.
Text from Australian Galleries Melbourne
Sidney Nolan (Australian, 1917-1992) Untitled (cow carcass and cow skull) 1952 Archival inkjet print 23 x 23cm
Sidney Nolan (Australian, 1917-1992) Untitled (cow and calf carcass covered in dirt I) 1952 Archival inkjet print 23 x 23cm
Australian Galleries 35 Derby Street [PO Box 1183] Collingwood 3066 Phone: +61 3 9417 4303
How I wish I could have been in New York to see this exhibition!
Marcus
Many thankx to the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Frances Benjamin Johnston (American, 1864-1952) Physiology. Class in emergency work 1899-1900 Platinum print 7 9/16 × 9 1/2″ (19.2 × 24.2cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Gift of Lincoln Kirstein
“It is wrong to regard photography as purely mechanical. Mechanical it is, up to a certain point, but beyond that there is great scope for individual and artistic expression.” ~ Frances Benjamin Johnston
After setting up her own photography studio in 1894, in Washington, D.C., Frances Benjamin Johnston was described by The Washington Times as “the only lady in the business of photography in the city.”1 Considered to be one of the first female press photographers in the United States, she took pictures of news events and architecture and made portraits of political and social leaders for over five decades. From early on, she was conscious of her role as a pioneer for women in photography, telling a reporter in 1893, “It is another pet theory with me that there are great possibilities in photography as a profitable and pleasant occupation for women, and I feel that my success helps to demonstrate this, and it is for this reason that I am glad to have other women know of my work.”2
In 1899, the principal of the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in Virginia commissioned Johnston to take photographs at the school for the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris. The Hampton Institute was a preparatory and trade school dedicated to preparing African American and Native American students for professional careers. Johnston took more than 150 photographs and exhibited them in the Exposition Nègres d’Amerique (American Negro Exhibit) pavilion, which was meant to showcase improving race relations in America. The series won the grand prize and was lauded by both the public and the press.
Years later, writer and philanthropist Lincoln Kirstein discovered a leather-bound album of Johnston’s Hampton Institute photographs. He gave the album to The Museum of Modern Art, which reproduced 44 of its original 159 photographs in a book called The Hampton Album, published in 1966. In its preface, Kirstein acknowledged the conflict inherent in Johnston’s images, describing them as conveying the Institute’s goal of assimilating its students into Anglo-American mainstream society according to “the white Victorian ideal as criterion towards which all darker tribes and nations must perforce aspire.”3 The Hampton Institute’s most famous graduate, educator, leader, and presidential advisor Booker T. Washington, advocated for black education and accommodation of segregation policies instead of political pressure against institutionalized racism, a position criticized by anti-segregation activists such as author W. E. B. Du Bois.
Johnston’s pictures neither wholly celebrate nor condemn the Institute’s goals, but rather they reveal the complexities of the school’s value system. This is especially clear in her photographs contrasting pre- and post-Hampton ways of living, including The Old Well and The Improved Well (Three Hampton Grandchildren). In both images, black men pump water for their female family members. The old well system is represented by an aged man, a leaning fence, and a wooden pump that tilts against a desolate sky, while the new well is handled by an energetic young boy in a yard with a neat fence, a thriving tree, and two young girls dressed in starched pinafores. Johnston’s photographs have prompted the attention of artists like Carrie Mae Weems, who has incorporated the Hampton Institute photographs into her own work to explore what Weems described as “the problematic nature of assimilation, identity, and the role of education.”4
Kristen Gaylord, Beaumont and Nancy Newhall Curatorial Fellow, Department of Photography, 2016
1/ “Washington Women with Brains and Business,” The Washington Times, April 21, 1895, 9 2/ Clarence Bloomfield Moore, “Women Experts in Photography,” The Cosmopolitan XIV.5 (March 1893), 586 3/ Lincoln Kirstein, “Introduction,” in The Hampton Album: 44 photographs by Frances B. Johnston from an album of Hampton Institute (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1966), 10 4/ Quoted in Denise Ramzy and Katherine Fogg, “Interview: Carrie Mae Weems,” Carrie Mae Weems: The Hampton Project (New York: Aperture, 2000), 78
One day I went to the market in Spoleto, Italy, where my husband and I spent every summer and my flowers were wrapped up in a newspaper that I brought home and realised had a photograph of the serial killers, Charlie Manson and Jeffrey Dahmer, and an article in Italian that asked why these things happen in America. I knew immediately that I wanted to incorporate it into a photograph. And in our bedroom, I had leaned some jumbo postcards from the Courtauld Museum in London on the dresser.
Although the photograph could have a lot of traditional still life elements in it, you know, the bottle or the fruit, or the flowers, I like the fact that an aspect of the still life work that I’m able to bring in is the news that’s going on in another part of the world.
In my still lives, bringing in the newspaper allows me to connect these things that might seem very disparate, a fragment of a painting by a French painter from another century, put together with a news article about murder. But in fact, the nature of our contemporary lives is that we’re flipping the channels all the time. We’re experiencing so many things at once, and we’re not able to selectively engage only one thing at a time.
The Museum of Modern Art draws from its rich collection of photography to present the history of the medium from the dawn of the modern period to the present with the exhibition Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography, from May 7 to August 30, 2010. Filling the entire third-floor Edward Steichen Photography Galleries with photographs made exclusively by women artists, this installation comprises more than 200 works by approximately 120 artists, including a selection of exceptional recent acquisitions and works on view for the first time by such artists as Anna Atkins, Claude Cahun, Rineke Dijkstra, VALIE EXPORT, Nan Goldin, Helen Levitt, and Judith Joy Ross. The exhibition also includes masterworks by such luminaries as Berenice Abbott, Diane Arbus, Gertrude Käsebier, Dorothea Lange, Lisette Model, Tina Modotti, Cindy Sherman, and Carrie Mae Weems, as well as pictures, collages, video, and photography-based installations drawn from other curatorial departments by artists such as Hannah Höch, Barbara Kruger, Annette Messager, Yoko Ono, Lorna Simpson, Kiki Smith, and Hannah Wilke. The exhibition is organised by Roxana Marcoci, Curator; Sarah Meister, Curator; and Eva Respini, Associate Curator, Department of Photography, The Museum of Modern Art.
The Edward Steichen Photography Galleries comprise a circuit of six rooms devoted to a rotating selection of photographs from the Museum’s collection. The galleries featuring works from 1850 to the 1980s open on May 7, 2010, and remain on view through March 21, 2011. The most contemporary works in the exhibition are currently on view in The Robert and Joyce Menschel Gallery, and they remain on view through August 30, 2010.
For much of photography’s 170-year history, women have contributed to its development as both an art form and a means of communication, expanding its parameters by experimenting with every aspect of the medium. Self-portraits and representations of women by a variety of women practitioners are a recurring motif, as seen in works by artists ranging from Julia Margaret Cameron to Lucia Moholy, and from Germaine Krull to Katy Grannan. Significant groups of works by individual photographers are highlighted within this chronological survey, including in-depth presentations of the work of Frances Benjamin Johnston, Käsebier, Modotti, Lange, Levitt, Arbus, Goldin, and Ross.
Marking the entrance to The Edward Steichen Photography Galleries is a large-scale photographic wallpaper, Fluxus Wallpaper, realised by Yoko Ono and George Maciunas in the early 1970s. This work depicts the serial repetition of a set of buttocks, an image originating from a provocative Fluxus film made by Ono in 1966.
Pictures by Women opens with a gallery of nineteenth and early twentieth-century work, representing the variety of photography’s applications. The earliest photograph in the installation was made in the 1850s by British photographer Anna Atkins, who used the cyanotype process to record her many plant specimens. Presented side by side are in-depth groupings of work by American photographers Frances Benjamin Johnston and Gertrude Käsebier. In 1899 the Hampton Institute commissioned Johnston to take photographs at the school that were featured in an exhibition about contemporary African American life at the Paris Exposition of 1900. On view is a selection of pictures taken from a larger album of 156, which exemplify Johnston’s talent for balancing pictorial delicacy and classical composition with the demands of working on assignment. Käsebier – another woman who produced photographic works of art while operating a successful commercial studio – is best known for her portraits and symbolic, soft-focus pictures of the mother-and-child theme.
The rise of photographic modernism in the 1920s and 1930s is traced in the second gallery primarily with the work of European women artists. A wall of portraits of women showing the range of artistic expression and experimentation during this period includes Claude Cahun’s radical gender-bending self-portrait in drag (1921); Lucia Moholy’s striking portrait of fellow Bauhaus student Florence Henri (1927); and Hannah Höch’s Indian Dancer: From an Ethnographic Museum (1930), a collage evoking the modern woman. Included here is also a photocollage by the little known Japanese artist Toshiko Okanoue, titled In Love (1953). Cannibalising images from U.S. magazines such as Life and Vogue, this surreal collage represents a young Japanese woman’s perception of the Western way of life. A group of pictures taken in Mexico in the late 1920s by Italian photographer Tina Modotti possess an aesthetic clarity and beauty that reflect her increasing political involvement within her adopted country. Also included is Ilse Bing’s Self-Portrait in Mirrors (1931), a picture staging a complex mise-en-scène between two reflections – one in the mirror and the other in the camera’s eye – as well as similarly powerful works by Imogen Cunningham, Florence Henri, Germaine Krull, and Lee Miller, who experimented with mobile perspectives of the handheld camera and graphic compositions.
The third gallery features photographers who devoted themselves to the complex challenge of exploring the social world in the interwar and postwar periods. Largely comprising work by American women, this gallery includes comprehensive presentations of two of America’s leading photographers, Dorothea Lange and Helen Levitt. The breadth of Lange’s accomplishments is represented through a selection of approximately 20 photographs, all of women, including her iconic Depression-era picture Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California (1936); the memorable One Nation, Indivisible, San Francisco (1942); and pictures capturing the bustle of postwar life in America, such as Mother and Child, San Francisco (1952). Opposite these works is a wall of colour photographs taken by Levitt in the 1970s on the streets of New York City. These lively, spontaneous pictures are full of humour and drama, and continue the rich tradition of the American documentary genre that Levitt helped establish in the 1940s with her black-and-white photographs. The rest of the gallery includes a variety of work made during the period, including Berenice Abbott’s documents of the changing architecture and character of New York City in the 1930s, and Barbara Morgan’s elegant 1940 photograph of dancer Martha Graham performing her dramatic piece “Letter to the World,” based on the love life of American poet Emily Dickinson.
Photography’s documentary tradition in the postwar period continues in the fourth gallery, most notably with a selection of Diane Arbus’s portraits of women, such as A Widow in Her Bedroom, New York City (1963); Identical Twins, Roselle, New Jersey (1966); and Girl in Her Circus Costume, Maryland (1967). This gallery also includes work by artists of the 1960s and 1970s who embraced photography not just as a way of describing experience, but as a conceptual tool for appropriating and manipulating existing photographs. Examples include Martha Rosler’s collage Cleaning the Drapes (1969-1972), which juxtaposes images of domestic bliss taken from women’s magazines with news pictures of the war in Vietnam. The gallery also introduces several notable examples of acts performed for the camera, including Adrian Piper’s self-portrait series Food for the Spirit (1971), a meditation on transcendental being through an analysis of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason; and VALIE EXPORT’s provocative Action Pants: Genital Panic (1969). Presented as a set of posters, this work memorialised a performance in which the Austrian artist marched into an experimental art-film house in Munich wearing crotchless trousers, challenging mostly male viewers to “look at the real thing” instead of passively enjoying images of women on the screen.
The emergence of colour photography as a major force in the 1970s is seen in the fifth gallery, with large photographs, including Tina Barney’s Sunday New York Times (1982) and a picture from Cindy Sherman’s celebrated Centerfolds (1981) series. This gallery also includes the work of postmodern artists associated with The Pictures Generation, such as Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, Sherrie Levine, and Laurie Simmons, who played with photography’s potential to comment on the increasingly image-saturated world of the late twentieth century. Representing the other end of the photographic spectrum is the diaristic aesthetic of Nan Goldin. A group of Goldin photographs dating from 1978 to 1985 capture the shared experience of an artistic downtown New York community – a generation ravaged by drug abuse and AIDS. These pictures of the artist’s friends, lovers, and Goldin herself explore the highs and the lows of amorous relationships. These are presented opposite work by Gay Block, Sally Mann, and Sheron Rupp, who use the probing vision of straightforward photography to explore the world around us.
Concluding the installation in The Robert and Joyce Menschel Gallery are major groups of works that suggest the diversity of artistic strategies and forms in contemporary photography. A group of Judith Joy Ross portraits of very different women – a graduation guest (1993), a soldier (1990), a congresswoman (1987), and a visitor to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (1984) – invite us to reflect upon the relationship between social roles and the unique identities of the individuals who fulfil them. Presented on the same wall is Rineke Dijkstra’s ongoing series Almerisa, comprising 11 photographs made over a period of 14 years. Dijkstra first photographed Almerisa – a six-year-old Bosnian girl whose family had relocated from their war-torn native country to Amsterdam – as part of a project documenting children of refugees. Dijkstra continued to photograph her at one- or two-year intervals, chronicling not only her development from childhood through adolescence and into adulthood but also her cultural assimilation from Eastern to Western Europe. A selection from Carrie Mae Weems’s series From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried (1995) superimpose sand-blasted text over found photographs to dissect photography’s historical role in imposing stereotypes upon African Americans. Rounding out this gallery is a wall dedicated to portraits of women, including work by Valérie Belin, Tanyth Berkeley, Katy Grannan, and Cindy Sherman, suggesting the plasticity of photography and, indeed, of female identity itself.
Press release from the MoMA website
Julia Margaret Cameron (British, 1815-1879) Untitled c. 1867 Albumen silver print 13 3/16 x 11″ (33.5 x 27.9cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Gift of Shirley C. Burden
Gertrude Käsebier (American, 1852-1934) The Manger 1899 Platinum print 12 13/16 x 9 5/8″ (32.5 x 24.4cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Gift of Mrs. Hermine M. Turner
Tina Modotti (Italian, 1896-1942) Workers Parade 1926 Gelatin silver print 8 7/16 x 7 5/16″ (21.5 x 18.6cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Given anonymously
Through the cut-and-pasted elements of Indian Dancer, Höch assembled references to film, Central African sculpture, and the domestic sphere. Her collaged model is the actress Renée (Maria) Falconetti (also known simply as “Falconetti”), appearing in a publicity still for Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1928 film The Passion of Joan of Arc. Half of Falconetti’s face is replaced with the ear, eye, and mouth of a wooden dance mask from Cameroon. Atop her head rests a crown of cutlery: cutout shapes of spoons and knives, set against glinting metallic foil.
This work belongs to a series of photomontages called From an Ethnographic Museum (1924-1934), in which Höch juxtaposed images of women with reproductions of tribal art cut from magazines. The artist cited a visit to the ethnographic museum in Leiden, in the Netherlands, as an influence in the conception of this series; however, she used material from other cultures mostly as a point of departure for commentary on the status of women in contemporary German society. Invoking an androgynous fifteenth-century French martyr as embodied by a glamorous movie star, capping her with the finery of a domestic goddess, and aligning her with a cultural Other, this composite representation examines the complex facets of modern femininity.
Publication excerpt from MoMA Highlights: 375 Works from The Museum of Modern Art, New York (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2019)
Rosler conceived Bringing the War Home during a time of increased intervention in Vietnam by the United States military. Splicing together pictures of Vietnamese citizens maimed in the war, published in Life magazine, with images of the homes of affluent Americans culled from the pages of House Beautiful, Rosler made literal the description of the conflict as the “living-room war,” so called in the USA because the news of ongoing carnage in Southeast Asia filtered into tranquil American homes through television reports. By urging viewers to reconsider the “here” and “there” of the world picture, these activist photomontages reveal the extent to which a collective experience of war is shaped by media images.
Gallery label from The Shaping of New Visions: Photography, Film, Photobook, April 16, 2012 – April 29, 2013
Vanila Netto (Brazil, b. 1963) Pole Relief 2011 50 x 50cm Archival pigment ink on cotton rag paper
“There’s an odd diaristic quality to Vanila Netto’s photographic, still life, video and neon works. What at first might seem like a hotchpotch of gestures, assemblages and moments reveals a lateral narrative – still points on a fluid map.”
Dan Rule in The Age newspaper
Netto’s work moves from one place to another, Navigating Widely. Some elements are more successful than others. The grainy colour field photographs of extruded objects (foam packing, the detritus of cardboard) fail to impress lacking the fidelity that the subject matter requires and the ability to integrate successfully into the lateral narrative. The Super 8 film transferred to digital video It is time to bridge (2011) is excellent, evoking as it does the utopian ideals of industrialisation, planes and rockets becoming “permanent and sedentary residents” of an abandoned dream park. The diptych neon installation Elation, Deflation (Inner Tubes) (2011) is also effective in evoking the interface between human and machine.
The best work in the exhibition is the series of small square format, analogue colour photographs that have been printed digitally (see photographs below). There is a lovely spatial resistance in these photographs – hints of colour, slices, markings on walls, the collision of opposites – that elevates them above the rest of the exhibition. In these photographs, the punctum pricks our consciousness but is it enough? Although these are interesting photographs, are they photographs that you would remember in a week, a month or a year? More was needed to hang your hat on, perhaps an ambiguous sense of Time that stretched the frame of reference.
Overall, the hotchpotch of gestures, assemblages and moments needed a more substantial grounding and, for me, became points on a confused map: a collection of complexities, both global and personal, that needed a focusing of rationale and conceptualisation. Less is more! Drawing what are some good ideas and threads together in a simplified form would add to the strength of the work for there is talent here. Perhaps concentrating on one idea and exploring it more fully would be a step along the path. I look forward to the next literation.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thanxk to Angela Connor for her help and to Arc One Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photograph for a larger version of the image.
Vanila Netto (Brazil, b. 1963) Colossus 2011 100 x 100cm Archival pigment ink on cotton rag paper
Vanila Netto (Brazil, b. 1963) Mir 2011 50 x 50cm Archival pigment ink on cotton rag paper
Vanila Netto (Brazil, b. 1963) Wheeling Consorts 2011 50 x 50cm Archival pigment ink on cotton rag paper
Vanila Netto (Brazil, b. 1963) Solaris 2011 50 x 50cm Archival pigment ink on cotton rag paper
Vanila Netto (Brazil, b. 1963) Air Buzzing 2011 50 x 50cm Archival pigment ink on cotton rag paper
Arc One Gallery 45 Flinders Lane Melbourne, 3000 Phone: (03) 9650 0589
Curators: Maria Zagala, Associate Curator of Prints, Drawings and Photographs, Art Gallery of South Australia and Stephen Zagala, Curator at Monash Gallery of Art
Tracey Moffatt (Australia, b. 1960) Something More (no. 3) From the series of 9 photographs Something More 1989 Direct positive colour photograph 98 × 127cm Courtesy the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney
Many thankx to the Art Gallery of South Australia for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Tracey Moffatt: Narratives is the first major exhibition of this leading contemporary Australian artist to be held in Adelaide. The exhibition is a collaboration between the Monash Gallery of Art in Melbourne and the Art Gallery of South Australia and explores Moffatt’s interest in the history of cinema and the formal language of film and video in her construction of ‘photo-narratives’. It features seven of Moffatt’s multi-part photographic series, including Something More (1989), Scarred for Life I (1994) and II (1999), Up in the Sky (1997), Laudanum (1999), Invocations (2000), and The Adventure Series (2004).
In these series Moffatt uses photographic stills to build non-linear and open-ended stories. The narrative aspect of these series allows her to develop dream-like sequences, in which the real and the imaginary can unfold alongside each other. In this way, Moffatt invests the social reality of issues like race relations and domestic violence with uncertainty and subconscious dimensions. She presents disturbing subject matter in highly staged photographs which use the seductive language of film and popular culture to directly engage her audience.
The exhibition also includes Moffatt’s ground breaking films Nice Coloured Girls (1987), Night Cries (1990), Heaven (1997) and BeDevil (1993), and the critically acclaimed video montages produced with Gary Hillberg, Artist (2000), Revolution (2008) and Other (2009).
Text from the AGSA website
Tracey Moffatt (Australia, b. 1960) Something More (no. 5) From the series of 9 photographs Something More 1989 Direct positive colour photograph 98 × 127cm Courtesy the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney
Tracey Moffatt (Australian, b. 1960) Something More (no. 1) 1997 From the series of 9 photographs Something More 1989 Direct positive colour photograph 98 × 127cm Courtesy the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney
Tracey Moffatt (Australia, b. 1960) Job hunt, 1976 From the series of 10 prints Scarred for life I 1994 Colour photolithograph on paper 80 x 60cm Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney
Tracey Moffatt (Australia, b. 1960) Useless, 1974 From the series of 10 prints Scarred for life I 1994 Colour photolithograph on paper 80 x 60cm Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney
Tracey Moffatt (Australia, b. 1960) Up in the sky (no. 1) From the series of 25 prints Up in the sky 1997 colour photolithograph on paper 61 x 76cm Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney
Tracey Moffatt (Australia, b. 1960) Up in the sky From the series of 25 prints Up in the sky 1997 colour photolithograph on paper 61 x 76cm Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney
Tracey Moffatt (Australia, b. 1960) Laudanum (no. 1) From the series of 19 prints Laudanum 1998 Photogravure on paper 76 × 57cm Courtesy the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney
Tracey Moffatt (Australia, b. 1960) Invocations (no. 2) From the series of 13 prints Invocations 2000 Colour silkscreen on paper 146 x 122cm Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney
Tracey Moffatt (Australia, b. 1960) Invocations (no. 5) From the series of 13 prints Invocations 2000 Colour silkscreen on paper 146 x 122cm Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney
Tracey Moffatt (Australia, b. 1960) Invocations (no. 7) From the series of 13 prints Invocations 2000 Colour silkscreen on paper 146 x 122cm Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney
Tracey Moffatt (Australia, b. 1960) Adventure Series (no. 1) from the series of 10 prints Adventure Series 2004 Inkjet print on paper 132 × 114cm Courtesy the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney
Tracey Moffatt (Australia, b. 1960) Adventure Series (no. 2) From the series of 10 prints Adventure Series 2004 Inkjet print on paper 132 × 114cm Courtesy the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney
Art Gallery of South Australia North Terrace Adelaide Public information: 08 8207 7000
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