exhibitionArt Blart _ art and cultural memory archive

Exhibition: ‘Postwar Propliners in Miniature: Models from the Collection of Anthony J. Lawler’ at SFO Museum (SFOM), San Francisco International Airport

Exhibition dates: June 2011 – December 2011

Location: Aviation Museum and Library 1 – Front Wall Cases

Lockheed Aircraft Co., Burbank, California
American Overseas Airlines Lockheed L-049 Constellation
c. 1946
Scale 1:44
Metal, paint
Collection of Anthony J. Lawler

One of my favourite postings in a long while. As an inveterate collector how I would love to have these in my collection. What beautiful aircraft; what graceful models; what simple, gorgeous photographs by photographer Chad Michael Anderson. The Lockheed Constellation has to be one of the most delicious aircraft ever made. But the model I would take is the gorgeous Air France Breguet 763 Provence, because of it’s aerodynamic beauty and angle of flight.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to John Hill, Assistant Director, Aviation for his help and to SFO Museum for allowing me to publish the text and the photographs. Attribution for the photographs is to the SFO Museum (actual photographer unknown). Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Lockheed Aircraft Co., Burbank, California
American Overseas Airlines Lockheed L-049 Constellation
c. 1946
Scale 1:44
Metal, paint
Collection of Anthony J. Lawler

In 1945, in an effort to gain transatlantic routes to Europe, American Airlines purchased American Export Airlines (founded in 1937 as a subsidiary of the shipping company American Export Lines) and renamed it American Overseas Airlines (AOA). The airline then began purchasing suitable aircraft for its new subsidiary. The best choice for the lengthy route to Europe was the Lockheed Model 047 Constellation, one the longest-range and fastest airliners produced at the time. Like other airliner manufacturers, Lockheed had its own in-house model factory that constructed highly-accurately scaled models for its customers. It produced this 1:44 scale model for AOA in polished sheet aluminium and painted in the airline’s earliest livery scheme.

Text from the SFO Museum website

Maarten Matthys Verkuyl (Dutch)
KLM (Koninklijke Luchtvaart Maatschappij) Royal Dutch Airlines Douglas DC-6
c. 1950
Scale 1:48
Metal, paint
Collection of Anthony J. Lawler

KLM (Koninklijke Luchtvaart Maatschappij) Royal Dutch Airlines commenced service in 1920. After ceasing operations during World War II, the airline rapidly emerged to become a leading European and international carrier during the postwar era. KLM received its first deliveries of the Douglas DC-6, both freighter and passenger versions, in 1948. The DC-6 was the first American-produced airliner to be introduced after the war. The model represents the DC-6 Princess Juliana (Koningin Juliana), which was the second aircraft Douglas delivered of the passenger version. The Dutch model maker Maarten Matthys Verkuyl fabricated the model from sheet zinc for a KLM pilot around 1950. It is one of only two produced by Verkuyl of the type using this material during this period.

Text from the SFO Museum website

Shawcraft Models, Uxbridge, England
BEA Airspeed AS.57 Ambassador
1950s
Scale 1:48
Wood, metal, paint
Collection of Anthony J. Lawler

In 1946, BEA (British European Airways) was formed as the British flag carrier for domestic and Continental Europe flights. By 1947, a number of independent airlines, including Scottish Airways, had merged with the company. In 1948, BEA placed an order for twenty of the Ambassador, a Douglas DC-3 replacement that had been under development by Airspeed of Great Britain since the latter years of World War II. This high-wing, tripletail, two-engine, mid-range aircraft was introduced in 1952 and operated by the airline until 1958. Shawcraft of Great Britain crafted the model of wood during the same decade, which accurately represents the Ambassador RMA Elizabethan, the flagship of the fleet. BEA’s comfortable Ambassador service, which was named “Elizabethan Class,” became highly popular among commuters between Britain and the Continent.

Text from the SFO Museum website

Peter V. Nelson, Reading, England
Ethiopian Air Lines Convair 240 model aircraft
Early 1950s
Scale 1:48
Metal, paint
Collection of Anthony J. Lawler

Ethiopian Air Lines was founded in 1946 and began operating out of Addis Ababa Airport in 1947, with administrative, managerial, and flight crew support from TWA (Transcontinental & Western Airlines). In 1950, the airline acquired three Convair 240s in order to expand its routes and offer international service to Europe and Asia. These aircraft were produced by Convair of San Diego, California and developed to replace the Douglas DC-3. The sand-casted metal model represents the first aircraft to be delivered, ET-T-20, and was crafted by Peter V. Nelson in Great Britain during the same period. It was accurately painted in Ethiopian Air Lines’ vibrant early livery with the national colours of red, yellow, and green, and the Lion of Judah, the symbol of Ethiopia’s former ruler Haile Selassie – whose family traces their origins to King Solomon. Selassie played a major role in establishing the national airline, which was considered vital to the modernisation of Ethiopia after World War II.

Text from the SFO Museum website

Walkers Westway Models, London, England
Capital Airlines Vickers Viscount model aircraft
1950s
Scale 1:48
Metal, paint
Collection of Anthony J. Lawler

Capital Airlines originated out of a merger between Pennsylvania and Central Airlines to form Pennsylvania Central Airlines or PCA in 1936. In 1941, the airline moved its headquarters to the newly built Washington National Airport, and in 1948, changed its name to Capital Airlines. In 1955, in an effort to attract more passengers by offering technologically advanced aircraft, it became the first U.S. carrier to inaugurate turboprop-powered airliner service with the introduction of the British produced Vickers Viscount. The aircraft was originally introduced by BEA (British European Airways) in 1950, which made it the first of its kind to go into service, and moreover, it was years ahead of the introduction of other turboprop airliners. Capital purchased sixty of the aircraft and realised an increased market share nearly everywhere the Viscount flew. This sand-cast metal model was produced in the 1950s by Walkers Westway in London, England, and accurately painted in Capital’s iconic 1950s red, white, and blue livery with eagle logo.

Text from the SFO Museum website

La Maquette d’Etude et d’Exposition à Aubervilliers, France
Air France Breguet 763 Provence
1950s
Scale 1:50
Wood, plastic, metal, paint
Collection of Anthony J. Lawler

Created in 1933 through a merger of several French aviation concerns, Air France became one of the largest airlines in Europe by the late 1930s, with routes throughout Europe and to French colonies in North Africa and Asia. During World War II, the carrier moved its base of operation to Morocco, and by 1946, became nationalized by the French government and opened its first terminal in central Paris. During the latter years of the war, the French aircraft manufacturer Breguet began designing a large capacity, mid-range airliner that would ultimately become the double deck (Deux Ponts in French), twin-tail, four-engine 763 Provence. Air France ordered twelve of the aircraft, which entered service in 1953 and were operated on routes to Algiers and Southern Europe for carrying both passengers and freight. Crafted from wood by the French model maker La Maquette d’Etude et d’Exposition à Aubervilliers, the model represents the first aircraft delivered to Air France, F-BASN.

Text from the SFO Museum website

Immediately following the end of World War II in 1945, airlines and passengers benefited from a surplus of inexpensive, advanced propeller-driven transport aircraft, or “propliners.” Over the next fifteen years, commercial aviation expanded rapidly as airlines persistently requested improved propliner designs to lower costs, attract new customers, and gain advantages over competitors. In meeting these demands the manufacturers of North America and Europe developed increasingly superior aircraft. These included the jet-powered turboprop airliners that flew successively faster, higher, and farther.

Making scale models of these airliners was an important part of the design, manufacturing, and marketing process during this period. Crafted by in-house model shops or independent model makers, they represented the new designs in miniature for convenient three-dimensional analysis. Accurately painted livery schemes on the models helped the airlines to imagine the new airliner operating within their fleet. Carriers also commissioned the making of models to promote their improved services in airline offices and travel agencies. During the late 1940s and early 1950s, they were usually made of sheet or cast metal and complemented with metal bases often formed into unique streamline shapes. By the late 1950s, models began to be produced from plastic, which was easier to mold into intricate shapes and reflected the proliferation of new synthetic resins.

These models represent the age of postwar propliners, which lasted until the 1960s when faster, more fuel-efficient and propeller-less turbojet airliners began to supersede them. They are from the collection of Anthony J. Lawler, an aviation industry professional and avid airplane model collector since first seeing the De Havilland Comet – the world’s first jetliner – fly over his boyhood home in Rhodesia. Mr. Lawler has spent decades assembling one of the finest collections of scale airliner display models, most of which were acquired while working as a senior sales representative for Airbus North America during the 1980s and 1990s. His collection spans a century of commercial aviation design innovation.

Text from the SFO Museum website

Raise-Up Models, Rotterdam, Netherlands
REAL (Redes Estaduais Aéreas Limitadas) Transportes Aéreos Lockheed 1049H Super Constellation
1950s
Metal, paint
Collection of Anthony J. Lawler

In 1945, Vicente Mammana Netto and Linneu Gomes formed REAL (Redes Estaduais Aéreas Limitadas) Transportes Aéreos, as a small regional Brazilian airline. By the mid-1950s, the airline had grown substantially by acquiring numerous other Brazilian airlines and expanding its routes through South America. In 1958, in order to compete with its rival Varig, REAL acquired three long-range Lockheed 1049H Super Constellations. The next year, the airline inaugurated international service between Rio de Janeiro and Los Angeles with stops in Manaus-Ponta Pelada, Bogotá, and Mexico City. By 1960, REAL had expanded its Constellation service to include trans-pacific flights to Tokyo. Ultimately, however, the international service proved too costly for the airline, and in 1961, amid financial difficulties, it was acquired by Varig. Raise-Up Models of the Netherlands produced the cast-metal model of the REAL Super Constellation. It was painted in the airline’s eye-catching green livery of the late 1950s, with the slogan “Voe Pela REAL,” meaning, “Fly on REAL” in Portuguese.

Text from the SFO Museum website

Peter V. Nelson, Reading, England
Trek Airways Lockheed 1649 Starliner
Early 1960s
Scale 1:62
Metal, paint
Collection of Anthony J. Lawler

Founded in 1953, Trek Airways was a South African airline based out of Johannesburg with service to Northern Europe. Initially, Trek was equipped with Vickers Vikings, which required overnight stops on routes to Europe. By the early 1960s, the airline began acquiring long-range Lockheed 1649 Starliners from carriers like TWA (Trans World Airlines) and Lufthansa, which had begun to replace these models with jetliners such as the Boeing 707 and Douglas DC-8. The Starliner provided fast, smooth, and comfortable service, along with the range and speed necessary for limited stops on routes to Düsseldorf, Vienna, and Luxembourg. British model maker Peter V. Nielson crafted the Starliner model for the airline in the early 1960s. At the time of acquisition, the heavy, all-metal model was used as a doorstop for the airline’s storeroom.

Text from the SFO Museum website

Westway Models, London, England
BOAC Bristol Britannia 300
Late 1950s
Scale 1:72
Metal, plastic, wood, paint
Collection of Anthony J. Lawler

In 1957, Britain’s long-haul international flag carrier BOAC (British Overseas Airways Corporation) introduced the Bristol Aircraft Company’s turboprop Britannia on its routes to South Africa and New York. Two years later, the airline inaugurated the first regular round-the-world Britannia service via San Francisco, Hong Kong, and Tokyo. The large capacity, long-range, jet-prop-powered airliner, nicknamed the “Whispering Giant,” was significantly quieter than piston-engine airliners of the period and provided smooth, fast service with comfortable accommodations. Due to many delays in its development, the airliner was introduced later than anticipated and only operated into the early 1960s, before it was replaced by faster jetliners with similar range and capacity, such as the Boeing 707. The all-metal model was crafted in England by Westway, a prominent builder of airliner models for the British aerospace industry during the 1950s.

Text from the SFO Museum website

Raise-Up Models, Rotterdam, the Netherlands
Western Airlines Lockheed L-188 Electra model aircraft
Late 1950s
Scale 1:40
Metal, paint
Collection of Anthony J. Lawler

Western Air Express was founded in 1925, and after several mergers and name changes, became Western Air Lines in 1941. During the postwar era, Western quickly grew as a regional airline serving routes from Minneapolis, Minnesota, to the West Coast. In 1959, the airline began receiving delivery of the Lockheed L-188 Electra, a new, revolutionary turboprop airliner developed and produced by Lockheed Aircraft of Burbank, California. With medium range, a cruise speed of nearly four hundred miles per hour, and a capacity for approximately one hundred passengers, the Electra was ideal for Western’s regional needs and, initially, was instrumental in attracting a larger customer base. This large-scale model was fabricated of metal by Raise-Up Models of Rotterdam, Holland, and was painted to represent one of the first aircraft received from Lockheed in Western’s late 1950s red-and-white livery with the Native American logo.

Text from the SFO Museum website

U.S.S.R.
Aeroflot Tupolev Tu-114 Rossiya
Early 1960s
Scale 1:100
Metal, paint, plastic
Collection of Anthony J. Lawler

SFO Museum
San Francisco International Airport
P.O. Box 8097
San Francisco, CA 94128 USA
Phone: 650.821.6700

SFO Museum website

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Exhibition: ‘W. Eugene Smith – Photographs A retrospective’ at Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin

Exhibition dates: 27th August – 27th November 2011

W. Eugene Smith (American, 1918-1978)
Dance of the Flaming Coke
1955
Gelatin silver print
20.6 x 33cm
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona: W. Eugene Smith Archive / Gift of the artist
© The Heirs of W. Eugene Smith, courtesy Black Star, Inc., New York

This man is legend. He created some of the most memorable and moving photographs in the history of the medium. Once seen, for example his seminal photograph Tomoko Uemura in Her Bath (1972, below), they are never forgotten. Look at the photographs, really look deeply at them. The compositions are flawless, peerless. Smith’s use of chiaroscuro makes his images sing and flow, like a Bach fugue. In spite of everything, “in spite of all the wars and all I had gone through that day, I wanted to sing a sonnet to life and to the courage to go on living it.”

Through that courage he left us a body of work that will live forever as masterpieces of the art of photography. Applause.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

W. Eugene Smith (American, 1918-1978)
Albert Schweitzer, Aspen, Colorado
1949
Gelatin silver print
24.7 x 33.2cm
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona: W. Eugene Smith Archive / Gift of the artist
© The Heirs of W. Eugene Smith, courtesy Black Star, Inc., New York

W. Eugene Smith (American, 1918-1978)
Guardia Civil, Spain
1950
Gelatin silver print
25.1 x 32.1cm
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona: W. Eugene Smith Archive / Gift of the artist
© The Heirs of W. Eugene Smith, courtesy Black Star, Inc., New York

W. Eugene Smith (American, 1918-1978)
The Wake
1950
Gelatin silver print
22.2 x 33.1cm
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona: W. Eugene Smith Archive / Gift of the artist
© The Heirs of W. Eugene Smith, courtesy Black Star, Inc., New York

W. Eugene Smith (American, 1918-1978)
Steel Mill Worker, Pittsburgh
1955
Gelatin silver print
15.1 x 21.5cm
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona: W. Eugene Smith Archive / Gift of the artist
© The Heirs of W. Eugene Smith, courtesy Black Star, Inc., New York

W. Eugene Smith (American, 1918-1978)
Untitled
1955
Gelatin silver print
22.2 x 34cm
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona: W. Eugene Smith Archive / Gift of the artist
© The Heirs of W. Eugene Smith, courtesy Black Star, Inc., New York

W. Eugene Smith (American, 1918-1978)
Tomoko Uemura in Her Bath Minamata, Japan
1972
Gelatin silver print
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona: W. Eugene Smith Archive / Gift of the artist
© The Heirs of W. Eugene Smith, courtesy Black Star, Inc., New York

One of the most well-known photojournalists in the 20th century, Eugene Smith, with his wife at that time Aileen, took this photograph of Tomoko Uemura bathed by her mother, Ryoko. Tomoko was severally disabled, as a result of mercury poisoning, through her mother who ate fish caught in the nearby bay, contaminated by industrial wastewater from a chemical factory. The Smiths lived in a small fishng village in Southern Japan for four years, and documented the human victims and the natural environments destroyed by industrial pollution.

This photograph was carefully posed and lit by the photographers to create a composition similar to that of Michelangelo’s Pietà, a sculpture in which Mary holds the dead body of her son Jesus. The Smiths created the photograph as a tool to raise the public’s awareness of mercury poisoning and to help the victims’ fight against the polluting corporation and ultimately the Japanese government.

Text from the Minneapolis Institute of Art Collection website

W. Eugene Smith, who was born in 1918 in Wichita, Kansas, and died in 1978 in Tucson, Arizona, first made a name for himself as a politically and socially committed photojournalist in the USA in the 1940s. Many of his photographic reports appeared in Life, the leading picture magazine that had been launched in New York in 1936. Smith saw in photography more than just an illustration to a text and had often asked editors for a greater say in the composition of a photo-essay. His painstakingly researched and emotionally moving features set new standards of photojournalism in the 1940s and 1950s.

Smith had begun to take photographs as a fifteen-year-old, having been inspired by his mother, a keen amateur photographer. In 1936, following the suicide of his father as a result of the Great Crash, Smith initially enrolled at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana. But he dreamed of becoming a photographer and moved to New York, where he attended the New York Institute of Photography. He embarked on his professional career in 1937 as a photo reporter for Newsweek.

A year later he began to work as a freelance for the Black Star Agency, and his pictures appeared in Harper’s Bazaar, Collier’s, Time and Life. With Life he was to have a close association that went on for years.

When the USA found itself at war at the end of 1941 Smith initially took propaganda shots for the magazine Parade to support the American troops. Then, as a correspondent for Flying magazine, he took part in reconnaissance flights, taking photos from the air. In 1944 he was back on the staff of Life – this time as a war correspondent – documenting the battle of Saipan and the American landings on the islands of Iwo Jima and Okinawa. In the course of the fighting the style of his photos changed. Instead of being gung ho they tended to focus on the terrible sufferings of the civilian population and were shot in a way that involved the viewer emotionally. On 22 May 1945 Smith himself was seriously injured, forcing him to submit to a series of operations that went on until 1947.

His new lease of life was symbolised by the first photograph he took after his wound. A Walk to Paradise Garden depicts his two youngest children walking towards a sun-bathed clearing. “While I followed my children into the undergrowth and the group of taller trees – how they were delighted at every little discovery! – and observed them, I suddenly realized that at this moment, in spite of everything, in spite of all the wars and all I had gone through that day, I wanted to sing a sonnet to life and to the courage to go on living it.” (1954)

After his recovery he went back to work for Life again. Documentary features showing the dedicated work of ordinary people were particularly popular with readers. In The Country Doctor (1948) he accompanied a young country doctor from the Denver area on his rounds for several weeks. His report Nurse Midwife (1951) on the black midwife Maud Callen was produced against a background of racial discrimination and the brazen activities of the Ku Klux Klan in the Deep South. In developing the prints Smith adjusted the lighting so as to enhance the emotional atmosphere – during a birth, for example – and so arouse sympathy for the selfless efforts of the midwife. His social commitment, however, did not always meet with approval, as in the case of the unpublished report (1950) on the re-election campaign of Clement Attlee, the candidate of the British Labour Party.

Life intended the report to strengthen indirectly the position of the Conservatives by presenting the results of Attlee’s nationalisation policies in a critical light. Smith’s coverage, however, aroused sympathy for Attlee’s programme and the candidate himself. Smith had more success with his Spanish Village feature (1951). He wanted to convey an impression of living conditions under a fascist regime. After obtaining the necessary shooting permission, he spent two months studying the Spanish countryside before finally selecting a remote village in the Estremadura as his subject. Not a few of the photographs, with their chiaroscuro and clearly structured composition, are reminiscent of classical paintings and convey by means of this stylistic device a sense of the hardships but also the beauty of life there.

Smith’s feature on the work of Albert Schweitzer in Lambaréné was to be his last for Life whose refusal to give him a say in the selection and layout of pictures had become unacceptable, and he left the periodical after the appearance of his photo essay Albert Schweitzer – Man of Mercy in November 1955.

A career alternative offered itself in the shape of membership of Magnum, the photographers’ agency founded in 1947. Stefan Lorant commissioned Smith to do an extensive feature on the city of Pittsburgh and its iron foundries, which occupied him for the next few years and nearly exhausted his financial and personal resources. Instead of the 100 prints agreed with Lorant, there arose 13,000 shots out of which he wanted to compose an essay which would be entirely in line with his convictions. In 1958 88 photographs were published in Popular Photography’s Annual Guide, although the essay never appeared in its entirety.

In 1957 Smith, who was known for his excessive devotion to his work, had left his family and moved to 821 Sixth Avenue in New York. The house was visited and used for rehearsals by many well-known jazz musicians, and Smith, who was a passionate music lover, photographed and documented this creative milieu over the next few years, while also keeping an audio record on 1,740 tapes, which were only discovered among his posthumous effects in 1998. At the same time he photographed street scenes from his window while also working on the construction of a psychiatric clinic in Haiti.

In 1961 a commission from the Cosmos PR Agency to photograph the company Hitachi Ltd. took Smith to Japan for a year. This was followed in 1963 by a book which contrasted modern Japan with its deeply rooted traditions. A decade later he again turned to the forced modernisation of Japan and its grave consequences with a shocking series about the Minamata epidemic which had been triggered by the environmental pollution caused by the chemical concern Chisso, which had discharged mercurial waste into the sea near the town of Minamata. The Committee for the Defence of the Victims hired Smith to document the human and ecological dimensions of the catastrophe, and the photographer, who threw himself heart and soul into the project, moved with his second wife, Aileen Mioko Smith, to Minamata. In the course of his researches he was beaten up by company security guards and severely injured. The pictures he took, which appeared in Life and his book Minamata: A Warning to the World largely contributed to publicising the scandal.

By the early 1970s Smith’s photographic work was attracting the attention of museums. His photo A Walk to Paradise Garden had already been selected by Edward Steichen as a symbolic climax to the exhibition The Family of Man (1955), but it was not until 1971 that the first retrospective Let Truth Be the Prejudice was held in the Jewish Museum in New York. In 1977 Smith, by this time seriously ill, moved to Tucson, Arizona, to take up a teaching post at the university there in what was to be the last year of his life.

Text from the Martin-Gropius-Bau website

W. Eugene Smith (American, 1918-1978)
A Walk to Paradise Garden
1946
Gelatin silver print
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona: W. Eugene Smith Archive / Gift of the artist
© The Heirs of W. Eugene Smith, courtesy Black Star, Inc., New York

W. Eugene Smith (American, 1918-1978)
Dr. Ernest Ceriani Following the Loss of a Mother and Child During Childbirth
1948
Gelatin silver print
28 x 20.2cm
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona: W. Eugene Smith Archive / Gift of the artist
© The Heirs of W. Eugene Smith, courtesy Black Star, Inc., New York

W. Eugene Smith (American, 1918-1978)
Untitled
1954
Gelatin silver print
33.5 x 23.6cm
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona: W. Eugene Smith Archive / Gift of the artist
© The Heirs of W. Eugene Smith, courtesy Black Star, Inc., New York

W. Eugene Smith (American, 1918-1978)
The Spinner
1950
Gelatin silver print
32.4 x 23cm
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona: W. Eugene Smith Archive / Gift of the artist
© The Heirs of W. Eugene Smith, courtesy Black Star, Inc., New York

W. Eugene Smith (American, 1918-1978)
Maude – Delivery
1951
32.7 x 25cm
Gelatin silver print
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona: W. Eugene Smith Archive / Gift of the artist
© The Heirs of W. Eugene Smith, courtesy Black Star, Inc., New York

W. Eugene Smith (American, 1918-1978)
Untitled
1954
Gelatin silver print
34.6 x 25.2cm
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona: W. Eugene Smith Archive / Gift of the artist
© The Heirs of W. Eugene Smith, courtesy Black Star, Inc., New York

Martin-Gropius-Bau Berlin
Niederkirchnerstraße 7
Corner Stresemannstr. 110
10963 Berlin
Phone: +49 (0)30 254 86-0

Opening hours:
Wednesday to Monday 10 – 19 hrs
Tuesday closed

Martin-Gropius-Bau website

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Exhibition: ‘Rückenfigur’ by David Ashley Kerr at Dear Patti Smith ARI, Fitzroy

Exhibition dates: 17th November – 27th November 2011

David Ashley Kerr (Australian, b. 1986)
I hear the River 
2009
Lightjet photographic print
80 x 140cm

Congratulations to David-Ashley Kerr on his first solo exhibition: the photographs and concept are very interesting.

Marcus

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

David Ashley Kerr (Australian, b. 1986)
I hear the Sea
2010
Lightjet photographic print
80 x 140cm

David Ashley Kerr (Australian, b. 1986)
I hear the Wind
2010
Lightjet photographic print
80 x 140cm

Although rückenfigur is popularly associated with the German romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich, its appearances in art very much pre-date his time. Early forms of it were attributed to Giotto but it became a more substantial style in the 15th century, creeping into the works of painters such as Jan van Eyck and later with Allaert van Everdingen and Jan Luiken.

Often these uses were simply to direct the viewer to behold the landscape in the scene. Friedrich’s approach transfigured this into a different concept, sometimes referred to as “the halted traveller”, where the lonely wanderer has appeared to have been “stopped” by the view of the landscape. This implies to us as a viewer that there is perhaps more to the landscape than we see, but those thoughts may remain unknown to us… privately contained in the mind of the rückenfigur in the scene.

It appears to me that in looking at rückenfigur art, there are two distinct thematic conveyances. The first is the aforementioned “halted traveller” lost in the contemplation of the landscape. In gazing upon the landscape, the rückenfigur is quite separate from the scene being viewed. Although s/he is anonymous and without identity, there is still a distinct identity from that of the landscape.

The second appears, to me at least, to be quite the opposite. Another form of rückenfigur seems to be where the figure(s) are distantly placed deep within the landscape itself. You’ve still got “back figures” in contemplation, but the composition makes them part of the landscape rather than separate. While we still identify with them as a viewer, the identity of the figures are very much subsumed into the grandeur of the landscape, maybe even biblically so.

Text by Christian Were, Melbourne

David Ashley Kerr (Australian, b. 1986)
I hear Them
2010
Lightjet photographic print
80 x 140cm

David Ashley Kerr (Australian, b. 1986)
Territory
2010
Lightjet photographic print
80 x 140cm

David Ashley Kerr is a Melbourne based visual artist working with large-format photography. This is his first Australian solo show, a selection of landscape studies completed since 2009 that began as a photographic investigation of the Rückenfigur, or back figure. This visual device is commonly associated with German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich. It involves depicting a human figure that does not engage the viewer, introspectively contemplating the natural world or landscape before them.

David Ashley Kerr’s photographic practice is a visual inquiry into the relationship between cultural identity and physical environment, site, or place. He currently investigates the use of a staged lone figure in contemporary landscape photography, attempting a symbolic representation of belonging to ‘place’ in a national context, in relation to both indigenous and non-indigenous Australian ownership and connection to land.

David Ashley Kerr completed a Bachelor of Contemporary Art at Deakin University (2009) and a Master of Fine Art at RMIT University (2010). He is currently undertaking a PhD at Monash University on an Australian Postgraduate Award Scholarship, his research inquiring into place theory through photography, investigating the visual relationship between Australian cultural identity and physical environment.

Text from the Dear Patti Smith website

David Ashley Kerr (Australian, b. 1986)
Ore
2010
Lightjet photographic print
80 x 140cm

David Ashley Kerr (Australian, b. 1986)
Trash
2010
Lightjet photographic print
80 x 140cm

David Ashley Kerr (Australian, b. 1986)
Game
2009
Lightjet photographic print
80 x 140cm

Dear Patti Smith

This gallery has now closed.

David-Ashley Kerr website

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Exhibition: ‘Renaissance Faces. Masterpieces of Italian Portraiture’  at the  Bode Museum, Berlin

Exhibition dates: 25th August – 20th November 2011

Filippo Lippi (Italian, 1406-1469)
Portrait of a Man and a Woman at a Casement
c. 1440
New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art
© Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

The Legend of the Surface, the Facies

“Facies simultaneously signifies the singular air of a face, the particularity of its aspect, as well as the genre or species under which this aspect should be subsumed. The facies would thus be a face fixed to a synthetic combination of the universal and the singular: the visage fixed to the regime of representation, in a Helgian sense.

Why the face? – Because in the face the corporeal surface makes visible something of the movements of the soul, ideally.”

Didi-Huberman, Georges. Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpetriere (trans. Alisa Hartz). Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003, p. 49

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to the Bode Museum for allowing me to publish the artwork in the posting. Please click on the images for a larger version.

Jacopo Bellini (Italian, 1400-1470)
Saint Bernardino of Siena
Between c. 1450 and c. 1455
Tempera and gold leaf on panel
Weber Collection, New York

Pisanello (Antonio Pisano) (Italian, 1395-1455)
Portrait of Leonello d’Este
c. 1444
Bergamo, Accademia Carrara
© Accademia Carrara, Bergamo

Pisanello (c. 1395 – c. 1455), known professionally as Antonio di Puccio Pisano or Antonio di Puccio da Cereto, also erroneously called Vittore Pisano by Giorgio Vasari, was one of the most distinguished painters of the early Italian Renaissance and Quattrocento. He was acclaimed by poets such as Guarino da Verona and praised by humanists of his time, who compared him to such illustrious names as Cimabue, Phidias and Praxiteles.

Filippo Lippi (Italian, 1406-1469)
Portrait of a Lady
c. 1445
Paint on poplar panel
Height: 49.5 cm (19.4 in)
Width: 32.9 cm (12.9 in)
Gemäldegalerie

Andrea del Castagno (Italian, 1420-1457)
Portrait of a Man
c. 1450
Tempera on panel
Height: 54cm (21.2 in)
Width: 40.5cm (15.9 in)
Andrew W. Mellon collection
National Gallery of Art

Andrea Mantegna (Italian, 1431-1506)
Portrait of Cardinal Ludovico Trevisano
c. 1459
Berlin, National Museums in Berlin, Gemäldegalerie
© National Museums in Berlin, Jörg P. Anders

Andrea Mantegna (c. 1431 – September 13, 1506) was an Italian painter, a student of Roman archeology, and son-in-law of Jacopo Bellini. Like other artists of the time, Mantegna experimented with perspective, e.g. by lowering the horizon in order to create a sense of greater monumentality. His flinty, metallic landscapes and somewhat stony figures give evidence of a fundamentally sculptural approach to painting. He also led a workshop that was the leading producer of prints in Venice before 1500.

Antonio del Pollaiuolo (Italian, 1429-1498)
Portrait of a Young Lady
c. 1465
Berlin, National Museums in Berlin, Gemäldegalerie
© National Museums in Berlin, Jörg P. Anders

Antonio del Pollaiuolo (Italian, 1429-1498)
Portrait of a Young Woman
c. 1465-1470
© Museo Poldi Pezzoli, Milan

Piero del Pollaiuolo (Italian, 1443–1496)
Portrait of Galeazzo Maria Sforza
c. 1471
Tempera on panel
Height: 65cm (25.5 in)
Width: 42cm (16.5 in)
Uffizi Gallery

Piero Pollaiuolo painted this portrait during one of Galeazzo Maria Sforza’s visits to Florence. The work is based on a similar portrait by his brother, Antonio. That the portrait is of Sforza is beyond doubt, as copies exist bearing Sforza’s name. Restored in 1994.

Sandro Botticelli (Italian, 1445-1520)
Profile Portrait of a Young Lady (Simonetta Vespucci?)
c. 1476
Berlin, National Museums in Berlin, Gemäldegalerie
© National Museums in Berlin, Jörg P. Anders

Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni Filipepi (c. 1445 – May 17, 1510), known as Sandro Botticelli, was an Italian painter of the Early Renaissance. He belonged to the Florentine School under the patronage of Lorenzo de’ Medici, a movement that Giorgio Vasari would characterise less than a hundred years later in his Vita of Botticelli as a “golden age”. Botticelli’s posthumous reputation suffered until the late 19th century; since then, his work has been seen to represent the linear grace of Early Renaissance painting.

The Gemäldegalerie – National Museums in Berlin and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, have joined forces in organising a major exhibition on the genesis of the Italian portrait. For Berlin, the Bode Museum presents itself as the ideal location to hold such an exhibition: on its opening in 1904, it was conceived by its founder, Wilhelm von Bode, as a ‘Renaissance Museum’ on the Museum Island. The Bode Museum will host the first stage of the exhibition, running from 25 August to 20 November 2011, before it subsequently goes on show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, from 19 December 2011 to 18 March 2012.

More than 150 key works, including paintings, drawings, medals and busts, are about to go on display for the first time together. The more than 50 lenders include the Uffizi in Florence, the Louvre in Paris and the National Gallery in London. Among the exhibition’s many highlights is Leonardo da Vinci’s Lady with an Ermine from the Czartoryski Collection, Cracow.

The exhibition highlights depictions of the appearance and personality of real people. Portraits of feminine beauty vie with portraits of generals, princes and humanists, offering us a fascinating insight into the age of the early Renaissance.

At the heart of the exhibition stands the Italian Renaissance portrait. The Italian art of portraiture evolved under the influence of antique models. However, it was equally shaped by the innovations of the great Netherlandish painters. The history of the art of portraiture, from Pisanello up to Verrocchio, Botticelli, Bellini and Leonardo, is retold in a selection of magnificent and sensational key works, including paintings, sculptures, medals and drawings. The exhibition focuses both on the art produced at the Italian courts, as well as the development of the portrait in Florence and Venice.

A unique architectural and lighting concept, especially designed for the exhibition, takes into account the individual qualities of each exhibit in its presentation. Of crucial importance here is the aesthetic experience, both of the quality of the artworks and of the materials used in creating them.

The artistic diversity evident in these early portraits, the various roles the images served and their historical contexts all resonate with suspense. The Gemäldegalerie – National Museums in Berlin and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York embarked on an intense collaboration to present this to the general public. Masterpieces from New York and the rich collections of the National Museums in Berlin, not just from the Gemäldegalerie itself but also from the Sculpture Collection, Kupferstichkabinett and Numismatic Collection, offer visitors an unprecedented insight into this epoch. Furthermore, for the first time the show in the Bode Museum also encompasses all media of Italian Renaissance portraiture – medals, drawings, sculptures and panel paintings.

Portraits – either in the form of a painting, photograph and less often a medal – have become commonplace today, but between the 5th and 15th century independent portraits of individual people were rare and the exclusive reserve of rulers and historic figures. Only in the 15th century did it again become customary for artists on both sides of the Alps to produce independent portraits of men and women. Today’s exhibition Renaissance Faces pays homage to Italy’s contribution to this first great age of European portraiture and conveys a sense of the innovative ways in which artists responded to the challenge of creating individual portraits and how they explored questions of identity that arose as a result.

When selecting the exhibits, the organisers’ chief aim was to highlight the prevailing conventions and decisive innovations in a period spanning more than eight decades. Set against the backdrop of Italy’s geographical, political and cultural complexities in the 15th century, the exhibition is divided into three clearly outlined thematic sections. The first of these is Florence, as it was here that the independent portrait first appeared on a significant scale. The visitor’s gaze is then directed to the courts of Ferrara, Mantua, Bologna, Milan, Urbino, Naples and finally papal Rome. The circle is then completed in Venice, where a portrait tradition only established itself remarkably late in the century. In each section, works in all media are juxtaposed with each other to give visitors the chance to see for themselves how the various art forms mutually influenced each other with their own unique qualities.

In a society dominated by family descent and social hierarchies, conventions were binding. And it is precisely these conventions that are depicted in profile portraits from 15th-century Italy. Profile portraits were equally popular as reliefs or paintings. Compared with the far more naturalistic art produced north of the Alps, which people in 15th-century Italy were definitely familiar with, this form of portrait seems at first a little surprising, as the Italian artists present the sitters in a soft light and at a slight angle to the picture plane. The sitters are seen standing either at a window or behind a parapet and gaze at the viewer. Sometimes a hand is seen resting on the edge of the painted frame. When looking at these images, it is clear that Italian portraits are not primarily concerned with achieving an accurate likeness, at least not in the conventional sense. Italian portraits do not so much reveal personality, rather convey social conventions and cultural identity.

The profile portrait was frequently given such exceptional importance in Italy, because it largely drew from Roman coins and reliefs for inspiration. But the profile portrait has always been the most elementary form of capturing someone’s likeness. Informal, direct and frontal views have become so familiar to us in portraits today thanks to photography that we first have to be resensitised to the unique possibilities inherent in the profile portrait. For one, it makes it possible to objectify a person’s outer appearance and allows physiognomies to convey cultural meaning. The pleasing aspect of a high forehead, the refinement or contemptuousness expressed in a raised brow, the aristocratic curve of a nose and the severity or gentleness of a chin and jawline – all these are physiognomical characteristics that come to stand as emblems for beauty, rank and power.

Press release from the Bode Museum website quoting the exhibition catalogue

Sandro Botticelli (Italian, 1445-1520)
Portrait of Giuliano de’ Medici
c. 1478
Washington, National Gallery of Art
© Art Resource, New York

Antonello da Messina (Italian, 1430-1479)
Portrait of a Young Man
1478
Berlin, National Museums in Berlin, Gemäldegalerie
© National Museums in Berlin, Jörg P. Anders

Antonello da Messina, properly Antonello di Giovanni di Antonio, but also called Antonello degli Antoni and Anglicised as Anthony of Messina (c. 1430 – February 1479), was an Italian painter from Messina, Sicily, active during the Early Italian Renaissance. His work shows strong influences from Early Netherlandish painting although there is no documentary evidence that he ever travelled beyond Italy. Giorgio Vasari credited him with the introduction of oil painting into Italy. Unusually for a south Italian artist of the Renaissance, his work proved influential on painters in northern Italy, especially in Venice.

Hans Memling (Italian, c. 1433-1494)
Portrait of a Man at a Loggia
c. 1480
Oil on panel
Height: 40cm (15.7 in)
Width: 28cm (11 in)
Metropolitan Museum of Art

Davide Ghirlandaio (Italian, 1452-1525)
Selvaggia Sassetti (born 1470)
Between 1487 and 1488
Tempera on panel
Height: 57.2cm (22.5 in)
Width: 44.1cm (17.3 in)
Metropolitan Museum of Art

Leonardo da Vinci (Italian, 1452-1519)
Lady with an Ermine (portrait of Cecilia Gallerani)
1489-1490
Kraków, owned by Princes Czartoryski Foundation, at the National Museum
© bpk / Scala

Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci,known as Leonardo da Vinci , was an Italian polymath of the Renaissance whose areas of interest included invention, drawing, painting, sculpture, architecture, science, music, mathematics, engineering, literature, anatomy, geology, astronomy, botany, paleontology, and cartography. He has been variously called the father of palaeontology, ichnology, and architecture, and is widely considered one of the greatest painters of all time (despite perhaps only 15 of his paintings having survived).

Lorenzo di Credi (Italian, 1459-1537)
Portrait of a Young Woman
c. 1490s
Oil on panel
Height: 58.7cm (23.1 in)
Width: 40cm (15.7 in)
Metropolitan Museum of Art

Gentile Bellini (Italian, 1429-1507)
Self-portrait
c. 1496
Black chalk and charcoal on paper
Height: 23 cm (9 in)
Width: 19.4 cm (7.6 in)
Kupferstichkabinett Berlin

Sandro Botticelli (Italian, 1445-1510)
Portrait of Michael Tarchaniota Marullus
1497
Tempera from wood transferred to canvas
Height: 49cm (19.2 in)
Width: 35cm (13.7 in)
Institut Cambó

Bode Museum
Museum Island Berlin,
Am Kupfergraben 1, 10117 Berlin

Opening hours:
Monday closed
Tuesday – Sunday 10.00am – 6.00pm

Bode Museum website

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Review: ‘Selina Ou: New York’ at Sophie Gannon Gallery, Richmond

Exhibition dates: 25th October – 19th November 2011

Selina Ou (Australian born Malaysia, b. 1977)
Tim, Hair Stylist, Lower East Side, New York
2011
C-type print
100 x 100cm

A strong, nuanced body of work by Selina Au at Sophie Gannon Gallery in Richmond. In the flesh these large colour photographs have a wonderful, polyvocal presence. The solo portraits are stronger in terms of composition and intertextuality than the double portraits.

Derived from the Latin intertexto, meaning to intermingle while weaving, intertextuality is a term first introduced by French semiotician Julia Kristeva in the late sixties.1 Intertextuality “is always an iteration which is also a re-iteration, a re-writing which foregrounds the trace of the various texts it both knowingly and unknowingly places and dis-places.”2 Intertexuality is how a text is constituted. It fragments singular readings. The reader’s own previous readings, experiences and position within the cultural formation influences these re-inscriptions.

Reminding me of a contemporary redefinition of the work of Diane Arbus, Ou’s reconceptualisations of space “produce a plurality of meanings and signifying / interpretive gestures that escape the reduction of knowledge to fixed, monological re-presentations, or presences.”3 Through a process of materialisation, using the technique of assemblage, Ou weaves a lack of fixity into her photographs. She creates a kind of tapestry in the surfaces of her images, a play of pattern / randomness that redefines the significations of the body in the fold of inscription.

Take the first three portraits in this posting, for example. The photograph Tim, Hair Stylist, Lower East Side, New York weaves space, time and memory within the pictorial frame. The physical space between the portrait on the wall at rear, Tim and the clock at right is crucial to a reading of this photograph, as is the disjuncture between the appearance of the man in the framed photograph (in jacket and tie) and the casual attire of Tim. Just as important is the memorialisation of both men within the same space (where both presumably work/ed), the collapsing of past and present into a fluid space that is neither here nor there (the past of the man in the framed photograph, the moment of passing of Tim when the photograph was ‘taken’ and the present of the photograph being looked at). There is no fixed, monological representation here: the reading of this photograph hovers between past and present, between memory and reality and haunts the body of the subject, Tim.

Similarly, Raquel, Waitress and Fashion Designer, Nolita, New York and Jerome, Retail Assistant and Fashion Designer, Soho, New York offer radical re-iterations of space, this time with less temporal associations. In Raquel, two red chevrons at top left and right frame the face of the subject, playing off the colour-changing hair of the waitress/fashion designer, the title of the photograph an ironic comment on the intertextual nature of contemporary life: a waitress (low paid, menial labourer) and a fashion designer (famous, highly visible entrepreneur). The nonchalantly limp-wristed, ringed hand and over large glasses, coupled with the bedraggled threads of the black shorts – echoing the tousled nature of the subjects hair – also belies the statement “fashion designer.” The word Cervesas (beer) offers a dichotomy with the coloured bottles of flavoured water that surround the lower half of the subject while the reflection in the window behind Raquel provides a metaphorical vista into this distorted world view.

In Jerome, the same problem in a person’s relationship with self and others is evident: the context of Jerome as both a retail assistant (low paid, menial labourer) and a fashion designer (famous, highly visible entrepreneur). The narcissistic, self-importance of Jerome is beautifully portrayed by Ou as she balances the context of his body in space – his polka-dot shirt reflecting the dotted neon of the shops name, his logo emblazoned necklace doing the same, while the reflections in the shop window again hint at outside forces (the car and consumerism) and other worlds. The defiant, could not give a shit gaze of the subject into the camera lens hints at years of subjugation and unrequited ambition for this is not his shop, these are not his clothes despite the label “fashion designer.” He is just a retail assistant, the subject of his own con(text).

The strength of these photographs is that they blur the outlines of the fixed image dispersing an image of totality, “into an unbounded, illimitable tissue of connections and associations, paraphrases and fragments, texts and con-texts.”4 In this sense the solo portraits are much more successful than the rest of the work as Ou magically weaves the tapestry of life into her compositions, ready for the reader to bring their own experiences to these re-inscriptions. In a word these photographs are, literally, breath-taking.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

Endnotes

1/ Keep, Christopher, McLaughlin, Tim and Parmar, Robin. “Intertextuality,” on The Electronic Labyrinth website [Online] Cited 13/11/2011. No longer available online

2/ Ibid.,

3/ Thumlert, Kurt. Intervisuality, Visual Culture, and Education. [Online] Cited 10/08/2006. No longer available online

4/ Keep Op cit.,

Selina Ou (Australian born Malaysia, b. 1977)
Raquel, Waitress and Fashion Designer, Nolita, New York
2011
C-type print
100 x 100cm

Selina Ou (Australian born Malaysia, b. 1977)
Jerome, Retail Assistant and Fashion Designer, Soho, New York
2011
C-type print
100 x 100cm

Selina Ou (Australian born Malaysia, b. 1977)
Darren, Model and Carlito, Artist, Soho, New York
2011
C-type print
100 x 100cm

Selina Ou (Australian born Malaysia, b. 1977)
Carolyn and Jane, Lolitas, Brooklyn Botanical Garden, New York
2011
C-type print
100 x 100cm

Selina Ou (Australian born Malaysia, b. 1977)
Issa and Lamine, Taxi Mechanics, Upper West Side, New York
2011
C-type print
100 x 100cm

Selina Ou (Australian born Malaysia, b. 1977)
Clementine, Liz and Billy Bob, Mercer-Houston Dog Run, Greenwich Village, New York
2011
C-type print
100 x 100cm

Selina Ou (Australian born Malaysia, b. 1977)
Derek, Student, Chrystie st, New York
2011
Chromogenic photograph
100 x 100cm

Sophie Gannon Gallery
2, Albert Street
Richmond, Melbourne

Opening hours:
Tues – Saturday 11am – 5pm

Sophie Gannon Gallery website

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Artwork: Alan Constable camera. Opening night photographs: ‘Movement and Emotion’ at Arts Project Australia, Melbourne

Exhibition dates: 20th October – 26th November 2011

Dr Marcus Bunyan holding his new Alan Constable camera at the opening of Movement and Emotion 2011.
More of Alan’s cameras can be seen behind.

I have added a new Alan Constable camera to my collection. Yah!

The one I have chosen is very unusual. The camera has a third eye and a stunning glaze. The exhibition features the work of three Arts Project Australia artists: Alan Constable, Chris O’Brien and Terry Williams. All three artists explore machine aesthetics within their practice.

I really do hope that the National Gallery of Victoria purchases some of these cameras. They are the most unusual and beautiful sculptural pieces I have seen in a long time.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to Art Project Australia for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image. See more images from the Movement and Emotion exhibition.

Alan Constable (Australian, b. 1956)
Not titled (three lens red camera)
2011

Marcus with jeweller Marianne Cseh at right looking at the Alan Constable camera

Opening night crowd at Movement and Emotion, Arts Project Australia

Opening night, with at left curator and artist Paul Hodges, artist Jodie Noble (seated), myself and, at right, Jonah Jones, President of the board of Arts Project Australia

Dr Marcus Bunyan giving the opening night speech for the exhibition Movement and Emotion. Read the opening night speech. I was so nervous my jeweller friend Marianne said she could see my hands shaking from where she was standing in the crowd!!

Artist Catherine Staughton standing in front of her work

Arts Project Australia

Studio
24 High Street
Northcote Victoria 3070
Phone: + 61 3 9482 4484

Gallery
Level 1 Perry Street building
Collingwood Yards
Enter via 35 Johnson Street or 30 Perry Street, Collingwood
Phone: +61 477 211 699

Opening hours:
Wednesday – Friday 11am – 5pm
Saturday & Sunday 12 – 4pm

Arts Project Australia website

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Review: ‘ManStyle’ at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

Exhibition: 2 venues

NGV International (St Kilda Road) 11 March – 30 October 2011
NGV Australia (Federation Square) 11 March – 27 November 2011

Dr Marcus Bunyan at the opening of Manstyle in front of a two-piece Simpsons of Picadilly, London blue pin-stripped suit c. 1949 and Van Heusen 1940’s tie loaned from his collection for the exhibition. Photograph courtesy of the National Gallery of Victoria.

The joy of this exhibition, spread across two NGV locations, is the creativity of local contemporary designers such Gavin Brown, Leigh Bowery, Peter Tully, Michael Glover and Sarah Thorn – a match for anything the international contingent has to offer. Another positive is the wonderful catalogue with its luscious colour plates, insightful essays and interviews with people such as Benny Castles, Luke Sales, Rick Owens and Walter Van Beirendonck.

Less enamouring is the prosaic way that the male attire is displayed – either hermetically sealed behind glass (look, but don’t touch!) or assembled in serried ranks on mannequins that make the clothes look two-dimensional. The display of these historical objects takes all the fun out of their being visually alive garments; it takes all the fun out of men “dressing up.” While acknowledging the conservation issues inherent when displaying such costume the display, the performance, the spectacle of male attire could have been better conveyed to the viewing public. Moving images, placing the work in context both locally and internationally, would have helped.

Continuing with these thoughts, what we wear can be seen as a spectacular, hypertextual construction. This construction comprises the authorship / designer of individual pieces (such as jacket, trousers, shirt) which can be seen as lexias, or nodal points, complimented by the wearer (reader) as author. The wearer appropriates and recasts individual garments, partially constructing the outfit through active choice, through a dissolution of the author-reader binary, through a very public characterisation of form: look at me, look at my style! Fashion can be seen as a “set of interconnecting and competing discourses than can never result in a single articulation,”1 discourses that generate and dissolve meaning. Men now use these discourses to enact the ‘performing self’, as it is known, which places greater emphasis on appearance.

“Within consumer culture … the new conception of self which has emerged, which we shall refer to as the ‘performing self’, places greater emphasis upon appearance, display and the management of impressions.”2

Appearance is critical to an understanding of self-concept. This self-concept consists of:

a/ the actual self (how a person perceives him/herself),
b/ the ideal self (how a person would like to perceive him/herself), and
c/ the social self (how a person presents him/herself to others).3

As Sproles and Burns observe, “Appearance is an extremely important part of the self-concept. Through personal appearance – dress, cosmetics, fashion expressions, body movements – an individual presents personal identity, attitudes, moods, and value or self-worth. In addition, individuals receive positive or negative evaluations from others with regard to appearance. Hence, appearance is one of the most prominent ways to display and reinforce a self-concept.”4

Appearance and the textuality of representation (stressing that representations are presentations entailing the use of codes and conventions of the available cultural forms of presentation),5 are continually being subverted throughout the history of fashion. In postmodernist fashion imitation and integration of an eclectic mixture of styles and periods into a new discourse (or montage, or collage, or bricolage)6 is critical to the constant regeneration of self using appearance as the embodiment of self-concept. Why this exhibition is so crucial is it shows that men are becoming more and more adept at manipulating their aesthetic style, not as something to be afraid of, not as something that they have to conform to, but as an expression of personal freedom. Which makes it all the more disappointing that the display of the male attire is so staid and reserved. The aesthetic display of these garments did not match up to the clothes exuberance.

Small things also irritated. At the opening a great deal was made of the multimedia element where local designers and celebrities talked about male style. In several of these videos, the men being interviewed mentioned how the shoe was always the basis for a good outfit. Fast forward to the exhibition and what do we find – photostated paper cut-outs of shoes on the mannequins instead of the real thing! Apparently the multimedia was shot after the design of the exhibition was finalised. Surely, if several people mention the basis of a good outfit is the shoe, and you promote the videos heavily, then you need to follow through on this concept. It is like putting the cart before the horse.

The fragmentary dis/locating mix and match eclecticism of contemporary male fashion needed more of a run in this exhibition, but as it stands it gives the viewer a solid overview of male attire throughout the centuries.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

Endnotes

1/ Johnson-Eilola cited in Mason, J.S. From Text To Hypertext [Online] Cited 28th May, 2003. No longer available online

2/ Lasch, C. The Culture of Narcissism. New York: Norton, 1979, quoted in Featherstone, Mike. “The Body in Consumer Culture,” in Featherstone, Mike; Hepworth, Mike and Turner, Bryan (eds.). The Body. London: Sage Publications, 1991, p. 187

3/ Sproles, George and Burns, Leslie Davis. Changing Appearances: Understanding Dress in Contemporary Society. New York: Fairchild Publications, 1994, pp. 208-209

4/ Ibid.,

5/ Dyer, Richard. The Matter of Images: Essays on Representations. London: Routledge, 1993, pp. 2-3

6/ Tseëlon, E. The Masque of Femininity: The Representation of Women in Everyday Life. London: Sage, 1995, pp. 132-133

H. Lehmann, Aldershot (tailor)
active in England c. 1900
Royal Gloucester Hussar’s uniform
c. 1900
Wool, cotton, metal
(a) 51cm (centre back), 64cm (sleeve length) (jacket)
(b) 48cm (centre back), 44cm (width) (waistcoat)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Gift of the Stone Family, 1963

England
Coat
1740s
Silk, wood, wool, linen
102cm (centre back), 65cm (sleeve length)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, 1970

England
Coat (detail)
1740s
Silk, wood, wool, linen
102cm (centre back), 65cm (sleeve length)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, 1970

France
Coat
c. 1810
Wool, silk, wood
105.8cm (centre back), 70.5cm (sleeve length)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, 1975

England
Waistcoat
c. 1850
Silk, cotton, leather, metal
65.5cm (centre back), 51.5cm (waist, flat)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Gift of Mrs A. Butler, 1954

Nutters, London (tailor)
est. 1968
Tommy Nutter (designer)(Wales, b. 1943, lived in England c. 1952- )
Suit and tie 1971 (detail)
Wool, silk, cotton, acetate (lining), metal
(a) 77cm (centre back), 58cm (sleeve length) (jacket)
(b) 52cm (centre back), 40.4cm (waist, flat) (vest)
(c) 103cm (outer leg), 37cm (waist, flat) (trousers)
(d) 142 x 10.5cm (tie)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Gift of Roger Evans, 1998

This March, the National Gallery of Victoria will showcase the first exhibition in Australia to focus on men’s fashion from the 18th century to the present day. Drawn largely from the NGV Collection, ManStyle will feature over 80 works including outfits and a selection of paintings exploring influential ideas in menswear over the past three centuries.

Charting a course between flamboyant display and absolute restraint, the exhibition begins in the 18th century with the evolution of the modern suit and concludes with contemporary outfits from today’s menswear designers. ManStyle will explore the elegantly honed lines and details of the dandy in the 19th century, a period which heralded the rise of tailoring with its focus on perfect cut and fit.

This exhibition will include recent works by contemporary designers such as Hedi Slimane for Dior Homme who have drawn upon this legacy of exacting tailoring for a new generation of young men. Roger Leong, Curator, International Fashion and Textiles, NGV said: “Men’s fashion is often seen as bound by tradition when, in fact, it has undergone a number of profound changes that reflect the shifting attitudes to class, sexuality, work and leisure over the past three centuries.

From the beginnings of the modern suit in the 18th century to 20th century sportswear, sub-cultural attire and street wear, men’s fashion has continued to transform in style and function to the present day,” said Mr Leong.

The most dramatic changes to men’s fashion occurred during the 1960s when designers such as Pierre Cardin challenged convention by creating streamlined Space-Age style outfits. Likewise, the ‘peacock revolution’ of this era reintroduced the phenomenon of the decorated man, adorned with colour, pattern and texture. Katie Somerville, Curator, Australian Fashion and Textiles, NGV said the House of Merivale was Australia’s answer to this new, colourful trend.

“Embodying the Carnaby Street look and style of bands like The Beatles, design houses such as Biba and the House of Merivale dressed men in flamboyant, body-hugging suits with wide flared trousers and shirts of contrasting patterns.

During this period, men ‘dressed up’, preened and flaunted their bodies in a new display of ostentatious masculine style.”

By the late 1970s, men’s style had fractured into a heady mix of alternatives. ManStyle features works by Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren, who defined the punk era with their ripped and distressed clothes plastered with offensive and anarchic slogans and symbols. This exhibition also captures the intense mood of the 1980s; which witnessed an outpouring of creativity across the spectrum of art, music and fashion, unleashing ideas from underground club cultures that reconfigured ideas about men’s sexuality.

“Today, new and traditional modes of dressing are continually merging to challenge our view of masculinity and contemporary style. ManStyle, it seems, offers greater possibilities than ever before,” said Ms Somerville.

Gerard Vaughan, NGV Director said: “By defining these periods in men’s fashion, visitors will be able to discover the contrasting identities men have experimented with over the past three centuries.

Visitors will be mesmerised and surprised by the richness of works in this Australia-first exhibition, showcasing the NGV’s magnificent Collection of this otherwise under-documented genre.”

ManStyle will be on display at the National Gallery of Victoria’s two locations. NGV Australia will look at transformations in the history of tailoring beginning with the notion of the dandy – a gallant man who put a lot of effort into a flawless appearance. The most famous dandy was Beau Brummell (1778-1840) who was always immaculately dressed, seeking to reflect an aristocratic style of life. The display at NGV International will focus on the peacock male, tracing a history of sartorial decoration and display that has its roots in the Renaissance and Tudor eras, and which was spectacularly revived during the 1960s when plain dark suits were discarded in favour of colour, cravats and frilled collars. Ever since then, the peacock phenomenon continues to surface with vivid intensity.

This exhibition will feature works by Vivienne Westwood, Jean Paul Gaultier, Morrissey & Edmiston, Leigh Bowery, Walter Van Beirendonck, Romance Was Born, Bernhard Willhelm, Rick Owens, Pierre Cardin, Biba and many more.

Press release from the National Gallery of Victoria website

WORLD, Auckland (fashion house)
est. 1989
Denise L’Estrange-Corbet (designer)(New Zealand, b. 1964)
Percy shops at WORLD
1999
Wool, acetate, raffia, leather, velcro, brass
(a) 68.1cm (centre back), 60cm (sleeve length) (jumper)
(b) 90 x 40cm (corset)
(c) 59.4cm (outer leg), 35.5cm (waist, flat) (knickerbockers)
(d) 120 x 4cm
(e-f) 40 x 11cm (each) (socks)
(g-h) 27 x 15 x 12cm (each) (sandals)
(i) 85cm (outer circumference), 22cm (height), 25.9cm (width) (hat)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, 1999

Plain Jane, Melbourne (fashion house)
Australia 1984-1987
Gavin Brown (designer)(Australia, b. 1964)
Indian snakes and ladders outfit
1985
Screenprinted cotton, metal, plastic, wood
(a) 109cm (centre back), 61cm (sleeve length) (frock shirt)
(b) 114cm (outer leg), 41cm (waist, flat) (pants)
(c) 52 x 20.5 x 4.5cm (necklace)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased NGV Foundation, 2009

Leigh Bowery (Australia 1961-1994, worked in England 1981-1994)
Pregnant tutu head
1992
Cotton, rayon, polyester, nylon, foam, leather
(a) 87cm (centre back), 25cm (sleeve length) (top)
(b) 130cm (length), 92cm (inner leg) (tights)
(c) 45cm (height), 130cm (outer circumference) (headpiece)
(d-e) 54 x 14cm irreg. (each) (gloves)
(f-g) 35 x 29.5 x 50cm (each) (shoes)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Gift of Nicola Bateman Bowery, 1999

Sara Thorn, Melbourne (fashion house)
1983-1985
Sara Thorn (designer)(Australia, b. 1961)
Bruce Slorach (designer)(Australia, b. 1961)
Jacket and kilt
1985
Screenprinted cotton
(a) 57cm (centre back), 59cm (sleeve length) (jacket)
(b) 73cm (centre back), 43cm (waist, flat) (kilt)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Presented by the National Gallery Women’s Association, 1995
© Courtesy of the artists

Vivienne Westwood, London (fashion house)
est. 1985
Vivienne Westwood (designer)(England, b. 1941)
Outfit (detail)
1991
Spring-summer 1991 Cut and Slash collection
Cotton, polyester, metal buttons
(a) 62.5cm (centre back), 55cm (sleeve length) (jacket)
(b) 93.4cm (outer leg), 41.2cm (waist, flat) (jeans)
(c) 27 x 17cm (codpiece)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, 1995

Peter Tully (Australia 1947-1992)
Early flight attendant’s vest
1990
Retrospectra graphic plastic, lamé, metallic thread, cotton
48.5cm (centre back), 48cm (width)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased from Admission Funds, 1991
© Courtesy of the artist’s Estate

NGV International
180 St Kilda Road

Opening hours:
Daily 10am – 5pm

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

Opening hours:
Daily 10am – 5pm

National Gallery of Victoria website

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Exhibition: ‘Bare Witness: Photographs by Gordon Parks’ at the Phoenix Art Museum

Exhibition dates: 20th August – 6th November 2011

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

Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
Children with Doll (Ella Watson’s Grandchildren)
1942
Gelatin silver print
11 x 14 inches
Lent by The Capitol Group Foundation
© 2006 The Gordon Parks Foundation

Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
Ingrid Bergman at Stromboli
1949
Gelatin silver print
16 x 20 inches
Lent by The Capitol Group Foundation
© 2006 The Gordon Parks Foundation

Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
Black Muslim Rally
New York, 1963
Gelatin silver print
16 x 20 inches
Lent by The Capitol Group Foundation
© 2006 The Gordon Parks Foundation

Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
Alberto Giacometti, Paris
1951
Gelatin silver print
16 x 20 inches
Lent by The Capitol Group Foundation
© 2006 The Gordon Parks Foundation

Gordon Parks spent the majority of his professional career at the crossroads of the glamorous and the ghetto – two extremes the noted photographer knew well. Perhaps best recognised for his works chronicling the African-American experience, Parks was also an accomplished fashion photographer. Bare Witness: Photographs by Gordon Parks provides a revealing look at the diversity and breadth of Parks’s most potent imagery. Featuring 73 works specifically selected by Parks for the photographic collection of the Los Angeles-based Capital Group, Bare Witness divulges heart wrenching images, iconic moments, celebrities and slices of everyday life.

Born in 1912 in Fort Scott, Kansas, Parks, who died in 2006 at age 93, was an African American photographer who began working professionally in the 1930’s. Parks tackled the harsh truth and dignity of the black urban and rural poor in the United States. He photographed aspects of the Civil Rights movements and individuals associated with the Black Panthers and Black Muslims. For nearly 25 years, from 1948 to 1972, he served as staff photographer for Life magazine. He also established himself as a foremost fashion photographer, providing spreads for respected magazines such as Vogue.

Bare Witness features many of Parks’s most memorable images such as “American Gothic.” Taken during Parks’s brief time with the Farm Security Agency, the photograph depicts a black cleaning woman named Ella Watson standing stiffly in front of an American flag, a mop in one hand and a broom in the other. Also included in the exhibition is a series of photos from Parks’s most famous Life magazine essay about Flavio da Silva, a malnourished and asthmatic boy living in a Rio de Janerio slum. Portraits of Muhammad Ali, Duke Ellington, Alexander Calder, Ingrid Bergman, Langston Hughes and Malcolm X among others will also be on view.

“Whether photographing celebrities or common folk, children or the elderly, Harlem gang leaders or fellow artists, Parks brought his straightforward, sympathetic ear and mind to bear witness to late 20th century civilisation,” commented Hilarie Faberman, the Robert M. and Ruth L. Halperin Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at Cantor Arts Center and organiser of the exhibition. “His photographs balance the dichotomies of black and white, rich and poor, revealing his strengths and struggles as an artist and a man.”

In addition to his documentary and fashion photography, Parks was a filmmaker, author, musician and publisher. He was the first black artist to produce and direct a major Hollywood film, “The Learning Tree” in 1969, which was based on his early life experiences. He subsequently directed the popular action films “Shaft” and “Shaft’s Big Score.” He was a founder and editorial director of Essence magazine and wrote several autobiographies, novels and poems. In 1988, he received the National Medal of Arts award and throughout his lifetime was the recipient of 40 honorary doctorates from colleges and universities in the United States and England.

“Parks was a renaissance man whose career embodied the American ideal of equality and whose art was deeply personal. This exhibition is an exciting opportunity for Museum visitors to experience the poignant images he made over five decades,” commented Rebecca Senf, Norton Curator of Photography, Phoenix Art Museum.

The exhibition includes an illustrated catalogue with an essay by photography scholar Maren Stange who writes frequently on modern American culture. This exhibition has already enjoyed a five-venue tour, where the photographs were received with great excitement. The exhibition has been revived for a final showing at the Phoenix Art Museum. Bare Witness: Photographs by Gordon Parks was organised by the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University. The exhibition and its accompanying catalogue are made possible by generous support from The Capital Group Foundation, the Cantor Arts Center’s Hohbach Family Fund, and Cantor Arts Center’s Members.

Press release from the Phoenix Museum of Art website

Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
American Gothic
1942
Gelatin silver print
24 x 20 inches
Lent by The Capitol Group Foundation
© 2006 The Gordon Parks Foundation

Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
Red Jackson, Harlem
1948
Gelatin silver print
Lent by The Capitol Group Foundation
© 2006 The Gordon Parks Foundation

Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
Mrs. Jefferson, Fort Scott
1949
Gelatin silver print
20 x 16 inches
Lent by The Capitol Group Foundation
© 2006 The Gordon Parks Foundation

Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
A Gambling Woman, Caribe Hilton Hotel, San Juan, Puerto Rico
December 1949
Gelatin silver print
20 x 16 inches
Lent by The Capitol Group Foundation
© 2006 The Gordon Parks Foundation

Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
Mário da Silva, Crying after Being Bitten by Dog, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
1961
Gelatin silver print
14 x 11 inches
Lent by The Capitol Group Foundation
© 2006 The Gordon Parks Foundation

Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
Malcolm X at Rally, Chicago, Illinois
1963
From the series Chicago Muslim Story (1963)
Gelatin silver print
Lent by The Capitol Group Foundation
© 2006 The Gordon Parks Foundation

Gordon Parks relocated from Minnesota to Chicago’s South Side in 1940, immersing himself in the local art community while operating a portrait studio out of the South Side Community Art Center. In 1941 he was awarded a Rosenwald Fellowship for a portfolio of photographs he created on the South Side; the award gave him the means to move east to Washington, DC. By 1948 Life magazine hired him as its first African American staff photographer.

In 1963 Parks returned to Chicago on assignment for Life to report on the Nation of Islam, newly headquartered in the city. Parks gained unprecedented access to this radical civil rights movement through his friendship with Malcolm X, who arranged a meeting with Elijah Muhammad, the group’s leader, so that Parks could obtain permission to proceed with the story. Parks spent weeks with the Black Muslim community, documenting a range of its activities – from self-defense training to religious services led by Malcolm X.

Parks’s photo-essay ran in the May 31, 1963, issue of Life, along with an essay by Parks that reflects on his dual status as insider and outsider. The text begins with his return to Chicago after nearly a decade and his memories of “the hopelessness that seeped into the black souls of that jungle.” Parks goes on to describe his current position: “I was a Black Man in White Man’s clothing, sent by the very ‘devils’ [Elijah Muhammad] criticized so much… . I wondered whether or not my achievements in the white world had cost me a certain objectivity.” He concludes, “I sympathize with much of what they say, but I also disagree with much of what they say… . Nevertheless, I acknowledge that the circumstance of common struggle has willed us brothers.”

Text from the Art Institute of Chicago website

Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
Muhammad Ali
c. 1970
Gelatin silver print
24 x 20 inches
Lent by The Capitol Group Foundation
© 2006 The Gordon Parks Foundation

Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
Muhammad Ali
1970
Cibachrome
20 x 16 inches
Lent by The Capitol Group Foundation
© 2006 The Gordon Parks Foundation

Phoenix Art Museum
McDowell Road & Central Avenue
1625 N. Central Avenue
Phoenix, AZ 85004

Opening hours:
Monday Closed
Tuesday Closed
Wednesday 10am – 9pm
Thursday – Sunday 10am – 5pm

Phoenix Art Museum website

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Exhibition: ‘Joel Meyerowitz – Aftermath’ at the Miami Art Museum

Exhibition dates: 19th August – 6th November 2011

Joel Meyerowitz (American, b. 1938)
Searchers in Rubble
2001
Vintage contact print
Collection Miami Art Museum, gift of Steven E. and Phyllis Gross

And do you know what “the world” is to me? Shall I show it to you in my mirror? This world: a monster of energy, without beginning, without end; a firm, iron magnitude of force that does not grow bigger or smaller, that does not expend itself but only transforms itself; as a whole, of unalterable size, a household without expenses or losses, but likewise without increase or income; enclosed by “nothingness” as by a boundary; not something blurry or wasted, not something endlessly extended, but set in a definite space as a definite force, and not a space that might be “empty” here or there, but rather a force throughout, as a play of forces and waves of forces, at the same time one and many, increasing here and at the same time decreasing there …

Frederick Nietzsche, The Will to Power

Sadness. And light. Hope. Amidst the inferno. Study the masterpiece Finding More Fireman (below) in the enlarged version and you cannot fail to be moved. It is all there: monumental, intimate, hellish, redemptive – a modern, “disastrous” form of the Rembrandt’s The Night Watch.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thanxk to the Miami Art Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Joel Meyerowitz (American, b. 1938)
Flower Offering
2001
Vintage contact print
Collection Miami Art Museum, gift of Steven E. and Phyllis Gross

Joel Meyerowitz (American, b. 1938)
Pit Looking North
2002
Vintage contact print
Collection Miami Art Museum, gift of Steven E. and Phyllis Gross

Joel Meyerowitz (American, b. 1938)
Smoke and Spray
2001
Vintage contact print
Collection Miami Art Museum, gift of Jeffrey Hugh Newman

Joel Meyerowitz (American, b. 1938)
Moving the Monument
2001
Vintage contact print
Collection Miami Art Museum, gift of Jeffrey Hugh Newman

Joel Meyerowitz (American, b. 1938)
Finding More Fireman
2001
Vintage contact print
Collection Miami Art Museum, gift of Charles S. and Elynne B. Zucker

Joel Meyerowitz (American, b. 1938)
Searchers
2002
Vintage contact print
Collection Miami Art Museum, gift of Charles S. and Elynne B. Zucker

Joel Meyerowitz (American, b. 1938)
Welders in South Tower
2001
Vintage contact print
Collection Miami Art Museum, gift of Charles S. and Elynne B. Zucker

In commemoration of the 10th anniversary of 9/11, Miami Art Museum presents Focus Gallery: Joel Meyerowitz – Aftermath, an exhibition of photographs taken by the only photographer granted right of entry into Ground Zero after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City. For nine months during the day and night, Meyerowitz photographed “the pile,” as the World Trade Center came to be known, and the over 800 people a day that were working in it. The exhibition consists of 24, recently-donated photographs, presented in the Focus Gallery section of the Museum’s Permanent Collection installation. Admission to Miami Art Museum will be free to all emergency personnel, including police and firefighters, and their guests throughout the exhibition’s run, August 19 – November 6, 2011. A special preview for emergency personnel will be held on Thursday, August 18, 2011, 4-7pm. Author and photography critic Vicki Goldberg will give a lecture entitled “What Remains” on Thursday, September 8, 2011, beginning at 6:30pm.

After September 11, 2001, the Ground Zero site in New York City was classified as a crime scene and only those directly involved in the recovery efforts were allowed inside. The press was prohibited from the site. Influenced by Walker Evans’s and Dorothea Lange’s work for the Farm Security Administration during the Great Depression, Meyerowitz, long recognised as one of the pioneers of colour photography, was convinced that if a photographic record of the unprecedented recovery efforts was not made, “there would be no history.” With the help of sympathetic officials, he managed to become the only photographer granted right of entry into Ground Zero.

“I was making photographs for everyone who didn’t have access to the site,” says Meyerowitz, “I wanted to communicate what it felt like to be in there as well as what it looked like: to show the pile’s incredible intricacy and visceral power. I could provide a window for everyone else who wanted to be there, too, to help, or to grieve, or simply to try to understand what had happened to our city.”

Armed with a large-format wooden camera, Meyerowitz spent nine months photographing the site. In the first few weeks, he was chased off the site repeatedly, but over time, with the help of officials on and off site, the use of forged workers’ passes, and by assuming the “uniform” of hard hat, goggles, respirator, gloves, boots and duct taped pants, Meyerowitz became “woven into the fabric of the site.”

About the experience, Meyerowitz has written, “The nine months I worked at Ground Zero were among the most rewarding of my life. I came in as an outsider, a witness bent on keeping the record, but over time I began to feel a part of the very project I’d been intent on recording… the intense camaraderie I experienced at Ground Zero inspired me, changing both my sense of myself and my sense of responsibility to the world around me. September 11th was a tragedy of almost unfathomable proportions. But living for nine months in the midst of those individuals who faced that tragedy head-on, day after day, and did what they could to set things right, was an immense privilege.”

The photographs in MAM’s collection are from a unique set of contact prints (photographs printed on a 1:1 scale from the negatives) issued by the artist in 2006. As a group, they span the entire nine month period that Meyerowitz was on site, presenting a poignant, condensed view of the clean up effort, including portraits of the workers involved. The set is introduced by a single image of the World Trade Center towers taken by the artist in the 1980s from his apartment window.

The entire set of more than 8,000 photographs taken by Meyerowitz form an archive at the Museum of the City of New York. The Aftermath series was the focus of a 2006 book, Aftermath: World Trade Center Archives published by Phaidon (reissued this year in a special 10th anniversary edition) and an exhibition organised by the US Department of State that traveled worldwide from 2002 to 2005.

Press release from the Miami Art Museum website

Joel Meyerowitz (American, b. 1938)
Explosion Squad Detective
2001
Vintage contact print
Collection Miami Art Museum, gift of Steven E. and Phyllis Gross

Joel Meyerowitz (American, b. 1938)
Steps Down to Plaza
2001
Vintage contact print
Collection Miami Art Museum, gift of Jeffrey Hugh Newman

Joel Meyerowitz (American, b. 1938)
Fireman at Last Column
2002
Vintage contact print
Collection Miami Art Museum, gift of Charles S. and Elynne B. Zucker

Joel Meyerowitz (American, b. 1938)
Building #5 and Woolworth
2001
Vintage contact print
Collection Miami Art Museum, gift of Simon and Bonnie Levin

Joel Meyerowitz (American, b. 1938)
Welder and Rubble
2001
Vintage contact print
Collection Miami Art Museum, gift of Steven E. and Phyllis Gross

Miami Art Museum
101 W Flagler St., Miami, FL 33130

Opening hours:
Monday 11am – 6pm
Tuesday – Wednesday Closed
Thursday 11am – 9pm
Friday – Sunday 11am – 6pm

Miami Art Museum website

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Exhibition: ‘A Perfect Price For Donny’ by Martin Smith at Ryan Renshaw Gallery, Brisbane

Exhibition dates: 12th October – 12th November 2011

Martin Smith (Australian, b. 1971)
My Father Doesn’t Relate Well With Other Men
2011

Martin Smith is one of my favourite photo artists working in Australia at the moment. Smith produces consistently intriguing, stimulating art. Having had a particularly fractious relationship with my own father I appreciate the pathos and humour that Smith achieves in his work. Fantastic!

Marcus

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

Martin Smith (Australian, b. 1971)
My Father is a Deeply Flawed Human Being
2011

Martin Smith’s artwork focuses on those small moments that glance into a life. Tending to gather photographs as opposed to taking them, his works offer wry observations rather than grand statements. The loss or absence inherent in photographic images, which are suggestive of another time and place, is echoed in the physical loss of the words cut into the surface of the works. One story is inscribed on another; just like one memory is laid upon another or one version of a story embellishes another. The resulting works are replete with the same ambiguity, melancholy and richness as one’s memory.

‘The storytelling came from when I started looking at my old family photos and thinking about what goes with them,’ Smith explains. ‘You know when you’re looking at family photos, there are particular stories that go with them – that’s that person, that’s the time when your uncle turned up for Christmas, and so on.’

Smith’s stories that are painstakingly hand-cut into the photographic image give a whimsical and highly personal account of his life, like his ill-fated attempt to become an actor with the Sandgate Amateur Theatre Group or the time he worked in the cutlery crew at Australian Airlines, combining the text of these stories with photographs. The scarring of the photographic image with Smith’s scalpel blade ensures a unique artwork, a notion at odds with the reproducible aspects of photography.

Martin’s exhibition stems from his reflection of his experiences as an actor in Roger Fagan’s play A Perfect Price For Donny and questions the legacy of what we ‘leave behind’ for others to read.

‘Tanya was from the past of my amateur theatre days when I was 17 years old and possessed with deluded dreams of being an actor. We were both new members of the Sacred Heart Players and we both landed the leads in the production of A Perfect Price for Donny written by Roger Fagan. Roger was an elderly member of the group and had joined years earlier to gain practical experience so he could finish his play. The Perfect Price for Donny was his first and only play. Roger had worked at the Railways for 32 years and had been writing A Perfect Price for Donny on and off over the 32 years. He had not started another play, he hadn’t written any short stories, prose or even a Haiku. Since he had retired two years ago he was finally able to realise his dream of finishing A Perfect Price for Donny at the age of 68′.

‘The memories are left behind and then reconstituted and turned into other things, it’s a language constantly getting churned up. Memories are things that inform taking the photo,’ Smith says ‘and I’m bringing some of the intrinsic aspects of the photograph with me. Photography captures the classic moments of life, like your first day at school,’ he continues, ‘but it doesn’t capture the other parts of your life that are sometimes way more significant.’

People spend a lot of time in a Martin Smith exhibition reading the works and then laughing or sighing in recognition. The photographs are all of fairly impersonal exteriors, almost crime scenes, not postcards, not picturesque snaps but odd disregarded corners of the world. In some way they are reminiscent of album covers or slightly lame posters but are brought into the present by Smith’s honest and often very funny tales of modern living.

Press release from the Ryan Renshaw Gallery website