Exhibition: ‘Acting Out: Cabinet Cards and the Making of Modern Photography’ at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas

Exhibition dates: 14th August – 1st November, 2020

Curator: John Rohrbach

G. S. Smith, Salt Lake City, UT. '[Taking in the view]' c. 1880 from the exhibition 'Acting Out: Cabinet Cards and the Making of Modern Photography' at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas, Aug - Nov, 2020

G. S. Smith, Salt Lake City, UT
[Taking in the view]
c. 1880
Albumen silver print
Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas

While the premise for this exhibition is interesting – that cabinet cards acted as a “primer” for coaxing “Americans into thinking about portraiture as an informal act, forging the way for the snapshot and social media with its contemporary “selfie” culture – in reality, the notion is far fetched.

Of the many millions of cabinet cards produced during their period of proliferation (1880s-1910s), only a small percentage, perhaps as low as 3%, would ever fit the performative type illustrated in this posting. Most were of the “solemn records of likeness and stature type”, typically full-length, half-length or a head and shoulders portrait, usually of a single person, sometimes a couple or family. Even then, the performative type of cabinet card would have a limited distribution, either within the family or commercially.

The four sections of the exhibition – Caught in the Act (actors, orators and other public figures); The Trade (commercial advertising); Sharing Life: Family and Friends (family albums); and Acting Out (people at play; reality and truth) – are logical partitions of these certain types of cabinet card. But what interests me more are the psychological aspects of having ones photograph taken. Why is the person’s photograph being taken, at whose direction (the photographers, the sitters)… who is posing the individual, what do they intend to convey through the image, who decides what that message is and, of course, how does the viewer decipher the message. “The interpretation of a person’s acting out and an observer’s response varies considerably, with context and subject usually setting audience expectations.” (Wikipedia)

Here we must acknowledge that the acting out is not singular but plural, for it is as much an act on the part of the photographer as it is the sitter. How much the outcome is dependent on the “director” or the subject is an act of constant negotiation (and, of course, it is also an outcome of the ritual of production).

The curator John Rohrbach observes that, “In our current moment of ‘selfie’ culture and social media-centered interaction, understanding the history of self-presentation and portraiture is more prescient than ever…” but this statement, linking cabinet cards and selfies, is a very very long bow to draw. This is because cabinet cards are not “selfies” as we perceive them now – informal snapshots taken by the self – but posed and performed photographic studies that require inherent discipline, structure and form constructed by the photographer and the sitter to achieve their end.

I often wonder about the revelatory process of having one’s portrait taken in the early days of photography. I know from texts that I have read that some people found the process slow and irritating, the results unsatisfactory. On the other hand, imagine being made to stand still for several seconds when you are not used to being completely still. Could there possibly be a moment in time and space, of meditation and reconciliation with oneself, a revelation in the stillness of the seconds of exposure. A revelation more spiritual than performative? *Two girls (1864, below)

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to the Amon Carter Museum of American Art for allowing me to publish the art work in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Acting

The art or practice of representing a character on a stage or before cameras.

Acting serves countless purposes including the following: It reminds us of times past and forgotten, or gives us a glimpse of a possible future. It portrays our raw, unadulterated, vulnerable, emotional, and at times, ugly, horrifying humanity. It provokes emotion, thought, discussion, awareness, or even imagination.

Acting Out

A child is “acting out” when they exhibit unrestrained and improper actions. The behaviour is usually caused by suppressed or denied feelings or emotions.

Acting out reduces stress. It’s often a child’s attempt to show otherwise hidden emotions. Acting out may include fighting, throwing fits, or stealing. In severe cases, acting out is associated with antisocial behaviour and other personality disorders in teenagers and younger children. …

Acting Out a) represents in action and b) translates into action, expressing (something, such as an impulse or a fantasy) directly in overt behaviour without modification, not complying with social norms.

In the psychology of defence mechanisms and self-control, acting out is the performance of an action considered bad or anti-social. In general usage, the action performed is destructive to self or to others. The term is used in this way in sexual addiction treatment, psychotherapy, criminology and parenting. In contrast, the opposite attitude or behaviour of bearing and managing the impulse to perform one’s impulse is called acting in.

The performed action may follow impulses of an addiction (e.g. drinking, drug taking or shoplifting)[citation needed]. It may also be a means designed (often unconsciously or semi-consciously) to garner attention (e.g. throwing a tantrum or behaving promiscuously). Acting out may inhibit the development of more constructive responses to the feelings in question. …

Interpretation

The interpretation of a person’s acting out and an observer’s response varies considerably, with context and subject usually setting audience expectations.

Alternatives

Acting out painful feelings may be contrasted with expressing them in ways more helpful to the sufferer, e.g. by talking out, expressive therapy, psychodrama or mindful awareness of the feelings. Developing the ability to express one’s conflicts safely and constructively is an important part of impulse control, personal development and self-care.

Anonymous. “Acting out,” on the Wikipedia website [Online] Cited 04/10/2020

G. S. Smith, Salt Lake City, UT. '[Taking in the view]' c. 1880 (detail)

G. S. Smith, Salt Lake City, UT
[Taking in the view] (detail)
c. 1880
Albumen silver print
Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas

Howie, Detroit, MI 'George Moore and Fred Howe' 1890s from the exhibition 'Acting Out: Cabinet Cards and the Making of Modern Photography' at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas, Aug - Nov, 2020

Howie, Detroit, MI
George Moore and Fred Howe
1890s
Collodion silver print
Robert E. Jackson Collection

Fred Howe, the Fatman and George Moore, the living skeleton; they are the most comical boxers in the world. Fred Howe’s father was a carpenter at Alleghany City, Penn., and Fred started to learn the same trade, but soon became too fat. At the age of eighteen he joined the Forepaugh Circus as a “tat boy,” and there met his present sparring partner.

George Moore was born in Helena, Montana, where his father had a little dry goods shop. Until he was twenty-one years of age George worked in his father’s shop. But his greatest desire was to see the world. When the fist big circus came to Helena, the manager offered him an engagement to exhibit himself as the “living skeleton,” and he closed with the offer at once. Fred Howe, they soon became great friends. The doctors advised both to take as much exercise as possible – the one to gain flesh, and the other to get rid of it. These smart Yankee lads then resolved to combine duty with pleasure, so they went in for boxing. For a long time they practised privately. One day, however, the manager was told of the fun by some of his “freaks,” who had been allowed to see a set-to” between the two gladiators. The manager then arranged a round or two, and the moment he saw Howe and Moore face each other, he offered them a long engagement at an increased salary, if only they would do their boxing before the public. Today these funny fellows are not only expert boxers, but also perfect comedians in their “art.” Their boxing is uproariously funny.

Moore is 6ft. 3in. in height, and weighs but 97lb., Howe is only 4ft. 2in. high, and weights exactly 422lb.

The Strand Magazine

Howie, Detroit, MI 'George Moore and Fred Howe' 1890s (detail)

Howie, Detroit, MI
George Moore and Fred Howe (detail)
1890s
Collodion silver print
Robert E. Jackson Collection

Alfred U. Palmquist and Peder T. Jurgens, St. Paul, MN. '[Skater]' 1880s

Alfred U. Palmquist (Swedish, 1850-1922) and Peder T. Jurgens, St. Paul, MN
[Skater]
1880s
Albumen silver print
Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas

The Swede Alfred U. Palmquist (1850-1922) immigrated to America in 1872. In 1874, together with the Norwegian Peder T. Jurgens he opened the photo studio Palmquist & Jurgens in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Alfred Palmquist was born in Finland to Swedish parents on June 21, 1850. We know nothing about his childhood and upbringing except that he emigrated to Minnesota in the United States at the age of twenty-two. A year later, he and a colleague started a photo studio in Saint Paul, Minnesota, which was named Palmquist & Lake.

Ten years later, in 1883, Palmquist entered into a collaboration with Peder T. Jurgens. We only know about his partner Jurgens that he was Norwegian and had previously supported himself as an economist. Peder Jurgens worked in the company between the years 1882 to 1888. The new company was then of course named Palmquist & Jurgens and lived on until the beginning of the 20th century. During the 1870s and 1880s, most photographers worked in their studios… Palmquist & Jurgens was such a typical photography company that preferred people to come to their studio to be photographed. The company had specialised in photographing famous families in Saint Paul.

M. C. Hosford, West Rutland, VT
[Getting the cleaver]
1880s
Albumen silver print
Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas

M. C. Hosford, West Rutland, VT. '[Getting the cleaver]' 1880s (detail)

M. C. Hosford, West Rutland, VT
[Getting the cleaver] (detail)
1880s
Albumen silver print
Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas

M. C. Hosford, West Rutland, VT
[Getting the saw]
1880s
Albumen silver print
Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas

Acting Out: Cabinet Cards and the Making of Modern Photography offers the first-ever in-depth examination of the photographic phenomenon of cabinet cards. Cabinet cards were America’s main format for photographic portraiture through the last three decades of the nineteenth century. Inexpensive and sold by the dozen, they transformed getting one’s portrait made from a formal event taken up once or twice in a lifetime into a commonplace practice shared with family and friends.

Building on the museum’s history as a leader in American photography, this exhibition reveals how photography studios and their sitters across the United States introduced immediacy to studio portraiture and transformed their sessions into avenues of fun and personal expression. Sections will trace the cabinet card’s development and evolution, from its beginnings in celebrity culture through the marketing and advertising innovations of practitioners to the diversity of what people brought to their sittings. Not only did Americans embrace photography as a commonplace fact of life during these years, they openly played with the medium’s believability. In short, cabinet cards made photography modern.

This August, the Amon Carter Museum of American Art will present Acting Out: Cabinet Cards and the Making of Modern Photography, an exhibition offering the first in-depth examination of the nineteenth-century photographic phenomenon of cabinet cards. Charting the proliferation of this under appreciated photographic format, Acting Out reveals that cabinet cards coaxed Americans into thinking about portraiture as an informal act, forging the way for the snapshot and social media with its contemporary “selfie” culture. Acting Out presents hundreds of photographs – many on view publicly for the first time – from collections nationwide, including examples from the Carter’s own extensive photography collection. On view August 18 through November 1, 2020, the exhibition is organised by the Carter and will travel to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, cabinet cards gave birth to the golden age of photographic portraiture in America. Measuring 6 1/2 by 4 1/4 inches, roughly the size of the modern-day smartphone screen, they were three times larger than the period’s leading photographic format. This larger size revealed previously obscured details in the images captured, encouraging action-ready gestures and the introduction of an astonishing array of props. Where photographs had once functioned as solemn records of likeness and stature, cabinet cards offered a new outlet for entertainment and remembering life’s everyday moments.

Acting Out investigates how this new performative medium prompted sitters to become far more comfortable with having their portrait made. By the time Eastman Kodak introduced its new affordable Brownie camera in 1900, cabinet cards had primed Americans to photograph every aspect of their lives. Though produced over 100 years ago, cabinet cards have a familiarity and a levity that resonates with our experience of photography today.

“Acting Out exemplifies the Carter’s commitment to organising exhibitions rooted in groundbreaking scholarship, a core tenet of our curatorial philosophy,” stated Andrew J. Walker, Executive Director. “This exhibition harnesses the resources of our vast photography collection and archive to show visitors the contemporary relevance of the medium’s pre-modern history.”

The exhibition is organised into four sections chronicling the birth and evolution of the cabinet card:

Caught in the Act: Actors, orators, and other public figures were among the first to embrace cabinet cards. This section examines how the creative innovations employed by New York photographer Napoleon Sarony and his cohorts built public enthusiasm for a new kind of photographic portraiture founded on a relaxed sense of immediacy that influenced studio photographers across America.

The Trade: This section looks at the entertaining and evocative ways that photographers worked to overcome low prices and fierce competition, and to stand out from their peers. Their creative solutions gave rise to the ubiquity of cabinet cards across America by the 1880s.

Sharing Life: Family and Friends: Over the last quarter of the nineteenth century, cabinet cards were often the favoured means for recording and celebrating family life. This evocative section reveals the ways in which cabinet cards established a model for family albums as channels for sharing and boasting of the joys and transits of life.

Acting Out: If portraiture was the ostensible subject of cabinet cards, play was just as important. This section examines Americans’ acceptance of the camera as a tool for shared amusement as they toyed with photography’s pretence of reality and truth.

“In our current moment of ‘selfie’ culture and social media-centered interaction, understanding the history of self-presentation and portraiture is more prescient than ever,” said John Rohrbach, Senior Curator of Photographs at the Carter. “This exhibition reveals how nineteenth-century Americans approached photography far more playfully than ever before, a transformation that forever shifted our relationship to the medium.”

Acting Out: Cabinet Cards and the Making of Modern Photography was organised by the Amon Carter Museum of American Art. The exhibition is supported in part by the Alice L. Walton Foundation Temporary Exhibitions Endowment and accompanied by a 232-page catalogue co-published with the University of California Press, Berkeley. The book is the first dedicated to the history of the cabinet card and features colour plates of 100 cards at their actual size. Contributors include Dr. John Rohrbach, Senior Curator of Photographs at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art; Dr. Erin Pauwels, Assistant Professor of American Art at Temple University; Dr. Britt Salvesen, Department Head and Curator of the Wallis Annenberg Department of Photography at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and Fernanda Valverde, Conservator of Photographs at the Carter.

Press release from the Amon Carter Museum of American Art

Unknown photographer
[Chess against myself]
1880s
Albumen silver print
Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas

Unknown photographer. '[Chess against myself]' 1880s (detail)

Unknown photographer
[Chess against myself] (detail)
1880s
Albumen silver print
Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas

Hatch and White, Burlington, WI
[Man in woman’s clothing]
c. 1891
Collodion silver print
Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas

Benjamin J. Falk, New York, NY
Helena Luy
1880s
Albumen silver print
Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas

Benjamin J. Falk (American, 1853-1925)

When Napoleon Sarony died in 1896, Benjamin J. Falk ascended to the first place in the world of performing arts photography…

Falk’s contemporaries, who spoke primarily of the clarity, verisimilitude, and composure of his images, never recognised his greatest power as a portraitist. Falk was a man of extraordinary erotic engagement with his sitters, and the intensity of his attention becomes visible only when one sees the entirety of his work envisioning one of the several women – Belle Archer, Mrs. James Brown Potter, Cleo De Merode, Cissy Fitzgerald, Amy Busby, the Barrison Sisters – who capture his imagination. He was capable of refracting the sitter’s beauty in a tremendous array of scenes, costumes, and attitudes, doing so without making the images seem artificial.

When asked in 1893 what was most important in creating effective portraits, he replied matter of factly, “I name expression, posing and lighting in the order as they appear to be most important. The technique of the profession being absolutely under the control of the operator since the introduction of the dry plates, there is no excuse now for any but perfect photographic results. I have always made my price high enough, so that I did not have to consider the cost of material while doing my work.” The camera, in the proper hands, is, in many ways, a finer art tool to-day than the chisel or the brush, although, like them, it has its limitations.

Specialty

The first strong adherent of artificial light sources in the studio, Benjamin Falk created portraits that were among the most dramatically sculptural looking images of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Possessed of a playful visual wit, he often experimented with his images, using curious juxtapositions, unusual poses, and lighting highlights to convey distinctiveness of personality. Increasingly indifferent to painted backdrops, he did many portraits against blank walls or bleached out backcloths. He began the fashion for faces and figures suspended in a milky white ground that became ubiquitous shortly after 1900.

Anonymous. “Benjamin J. Falk,” on the Broadway Photographers website [Online] Cited 05/09/2020

Benjamin J. Falk, New York, NY. 'Helena Luy' 1880s (detail)

Benjamin J. Falk, New York, NY
Helena Luy (detail)
1880s
Albumen silver print
Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas

Napoleon Sarony, New York, NY
[Fanny Davenport]
c. 1870
Albumen silver print
Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas

Napoleon Sarony (American, 1821-1896)

Napoleon Sarony (March 9, 1821 – November 9, 1896) was an American lithographer and photographer. He was a highly popular portrait photographer, best known for his portraits of the stars of late-19th-century American theatre. His son, Otto Sarony, continued the family business as a theatre and film star photographer.

Sarony was born in 1821 in Quebec, then in the British colony of Lower Canada, and moved to New York City around 1836. He worked as an illustrator for Currier and Ives before joining with James Major and starting his own lithography business, Sarony & Major, in 1843. In 1845, James Major was replaced in Sarony & Major by Henry B. Major, and the firm continued operating under that name until 1853. From 1853 to 1857, the firm was known as Sarony and Company, and from 1857 to 1867, as Sarony, Major & Knapp. Sarony left the firm in 1867 and established a photography studio at 37 Union Square, during a time when celebrity portraiture was a popular fad. Photographers would pay their famous subjects to sit for them, and then retain full rights to sell the pictures. Sarony reportedly paid the internationally famous stage actress Sarah Bernhardt $1,500 to pose for his camera, equivalent to $42,683 in 2019. In 1894, he published a portfolio of prints entitled “Sarony’s Living Pictures”.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Napoleon Sarony, New York, NY. '[Fanny Davenport]' c. 1870 (detail)

Napoleon Sarony, New York, NY
[Fanny Davenport] (detail)
c. 1870
Albumen silver print
Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas

Fanny Lily Gipsey Davenport (English-American, 1850-1898)

Fanny Lily Gipsey Davenport (April 10, 1850 – September 26, 1898) was an English-American stage actress. The eldest child of Edward Loomis Davenport and Fanny Elizabeth (Vining) Gill Davenport, Fanny Lily Gypsey Davenport was born on April 10, 1850 in London.

Most of her siblings were actors, including Harry Davenport. She was brought to the United States in 1854 and educated in the Boston public schools. At age 7, she appeared at Boston’s Howard Athenæum as Metamora’s child, but her real debut occurred in February 1862 when she portrayed King Charles in Faint Heart Never Won Fair Lady at Niblo’s Garden.

In February 1862, she appeared in New York City at Niblo’s Garden at the age of 12 as the King of Spain in Faint Heart Never Won Fair Lady. From 1869 to 1877, she performed in Augustin Daly’s company; and afterwards, with a company of her own, acted with especial success in Sardou’s Fédora (1883) her leading man being Robert B. Mantell, Cleopatra (1890), and similar plays. She took over emotional Sardou roles that had been originated in Europe by Sarah Bernhardt. Her last appearance was at the Grand Opera House in Chicago on March 25, 1898, shortly before her death.

Her first husband was Edwin B. Price, an actor. They married on July 30, 1879, and divorced on June 8, 1888. On May 18, 1889, she married her leading man, Melbourne MacDowell. Both marriages were childless. Davenport died September 26, 1898, from an enlarged heart, at her summer home in Duxbury, Massachusetts.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Unknown photographer
[Two girls]
1864
Albumen silver print (carte de visite)
Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas

Unknown photographer. '[Two girls]' 1864 (detail)

Unknown photographer
[Two girls] (detail)
1864
Albumen silver print (carte de visite)
Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas

A. M. Nikodem, Chicago, IL
[Cat]
1880s
Albumen silver print
Robert E. Jackson Collection

A.M. Nikodem

According to Origin, Growth, and Usefulness of the Chicago Board of Trade: Its Leading Members, and Representative Business Men in other Branches of Trade (1885): “Miss A.M. Nikodem, Photographic Artist. No. 701 West Madison Street. – One of the most popular and finely appointed photographic studios in Chicago is that conducted by Miss A.M. Nikodem, who succeeded Mr. M. T. Baldwin one year ago. This lady, who is regarded as one of the most skilful and accomplished photographic artists in the city, occupies an entire two-storied building completely equipped with all modern improvements and appliances and her elegantly furnished parlours are the resort of the élite of Chicago. Miss Nikodem is the only lady in the city who give personal attention to the taking of pictures, etc., and having had an extended practical and theoretical training she has attained a marked perfection in her art. In social circles Miss Nikodem occupies a prominent position both as a skilful artist and estimable lady, while in the business world she is held in high esteem as an enterprising and capable woman.”

Nikodem occupied the studio at this address from 1885-1891, and then moved to another location. 1895 is the last year in which she seems to be listed in Chicago city guides. Despite her prominence, photographs from her studio are exceptionally uncommon. Nikodem’s skill is fully on display in this portrait. The three or four other examples of her work we could find, all in library special collections, are all of women or girls, and they display a uniform artistic excellence and technical photographic skill.

W. A. White, Wilson, KS
My first baby friend Tompie and his pet
1896
Collodion silver print
Robert E. Jackson Collection

W. A. White, Wilson, KS. 'My first baby friend Tompie and his pet' 1896 (detail)

W. A. White, Wilson, KS
My first baby friend Tompie and his pet (detail)
1896
Collodion silver print
Robert E. Jackson Collection

W. A. Wilcoxon, Bonaparte, IA
[Baby]
1890s
Collodion silver print
Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas

Unknown photographer
[Painter]
1890s
Albumen silver print
William L. Schaeffer Collection

Unknown photographer. '[Painter]' 1890s (detail)

Unknown photographer
[Painter] (detail)
1890s
Albumen silver print
William L. Schaeffer Collection

Charles L. Griffin, Scranton, PA
[Toddler with dog]
c. 1892
Gelatin silver print
Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas

F. J. Nelson, Anoka, MN
Domestic Bread
c. 1890s
Collodion silver print
Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas

Gilbert G. Oyloe (American, 1851-1927) Ossian, IA
[Woman]
1880s
Albumen silver print
Robert E. Jackson Collection

Oyloe had a studio in Ossian during the 1880’s and 1890’s.

James F. Ryder, Cleveland, OH
Verso
1880s
Planographic print
Gift of Robert E. Jackson
Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas

Charles Quartley, Baltimore, MD
[Church woman]
1880s
Albumen silver print
Robert E. Jackson

Caroline Bergman, Louisville, KY
Untitled [Bergman’s Photograph Gallery]
c. 1890
Relief print
Gift of Robert E. Jackson
Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas

Louise and Caroline Bergman

Louis Bergman opened a Louisville photo studio in 1872 on W Market. After 1885, however, Caroline Bergman (his wife) is listed as the proprietor and photographer, and Louis is listed only as “manager”. This very successful studio was in operation until 1896.

Louis Bergman’s … studio was located at 56 & 58 Market Street, in Louisville, Kentucky. Perusal of Louisville business directories reveals that Bergman began business with a partner. Bergman & Flexner; the firm was listed in the 1868 and 1869 directories. He was reported to be the sole proprietor of a studio from 1872 until 1886. Bergman was listed at a number of different addresses over these years. Using these addresses, it appears that this particular photograph was taken between 1873 and 1881. From 1886 through 1894 the proprietor of the studio became Caroline Bergman. The Photographic Times and American Photographer (1883) reported that Bergman was Vice President of the Photographers Mutual Benefit Society of Louisville. Louis Bergman (c. 1838 -?) was born in Hanover, Germany to Prussian parents. His wife, Carrie (1845 -?) was born in Louisiana to German parents. The couple married in about 1865. The Bergman’s had a daughter, Lillie, who was 12 years-old at the time of the 1880 census. The census listed Louis as a photographer and Carrie as a homemaker. It is interesting to note that when the couples daughter reached 18 years of age, Carrie became the studio’s proprietor / photographer.

Anonymous. “Man with a Great Beard in Louisville, Kentucky,” on The Cabinet Card Gallery website 03/01/2012 [Online] Cited 05/09/2020

R. O. Helsom, Menomonie, WI
Verso
1880s
Relief print
Gift of Robert E. Jackson
Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas

Cabinets
c. 1880s
Celluloid-covered album
Robert E. Jackson Collection

Amon Carter Museum of American Art
3501 Camp Bowie Boulevard
Fort Worth, TX 76107-2695

Opening hours:
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European photographic research tour exhibition: ‘L’equilibriste, André Kertész’ at Jeu de Paume, Château de Tours Part 2

Exhibition dates: 26th June – 27th October, 2019
Visited September 2019 posted September 2020

Curators: Matthieu Rivallin and Pia Viewing

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985) 'Nageur sous l'eau, Esztergom' (Underwater swimmer, Esztergom) 1918 from the exhibition 'L'equilibriste, André Kertész' at Jeu de Paume, Château de Tours Part 2, June - Oct, 2019

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
Nageur sous l’eau, Esztergom
Underwater swimmer, Esztergom
1918
Contact original

“”… especially haptic qualities are demanded of the deconstructionist performer, spectator, and reader; not to follow optically the ‘line of ideas’ in the text or in a picture and see only the representation proper, the surface, but to probe with the eyes the pictorial texture and even to enter the texture.”69 Such “touching” with the eye did not lead to a secure tactile experience of being firmly planted on the ground, for all grounds, all foundations, were suspect, however construed. We are, as Nietzsche knew, swimming in an endless sea, rather than standing on dry land. To “touch” a trace, groping blindly in the dark, is no more the guarantee of certainty than to see its residues.”

Gandelman, Claude. ‘Reading Pictures, Viewing Texts’. Bloomington, Indiana, 1991, p. 140 quoted in Martin Jay. ‘Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought’. Berkley: University of California Press, 1993, p. 512.

Touching with the eye

Part 2 of a large posting on the exhibition L’equilibriste, André Kertész at Jeu de Paume, Château de Tours, which I saw in Tours in September 2019.

This posting contains photographs from his famous series “Distortions” (fascinating to see the original plates for the book of the same name, complete with cropping marks and red lead pencil annotations); American works from 1936 onwards, when Kertész moved to the United States to avoid the persecution of the Jews and the threat of World War II; and the late work colour Polaroids.

I admit that Kertész is not my favourite photographer. While I admire some of his photographs, I feel emotionally distant from most of them. Edward Clay observes in the quotation below that Kertész was “one of the most lyrical and formally inventive photographers of the twentieth-century… [His photographs] often convey a quiet mood of melancholy … He remains revered for his clarity of style and ability to blend simplicity with emotion, prizing impact over technical precision, seeking metaphors and geometry in everyday objects and scenarios, to turn the mundane into the surreal.”

Personally, I don’t find his photographs emotional nor lyrical, only a few poetic. Not melancholic, but geometric. In later works, he simplifies, simplifies, simplifies much like his friend Mondrian did. For me, the balance between sacred / geometry, the sacred geometry of the mystery of things, is often unbalanced in these images (particularly relevant, given the title of this exhibition). Is it enough just to turn the mundane into the surreal? Where does that lead the viewer? Is it enough to just observe, represent, without digging deeper.

At his best, in images such as Underwater swimmer, Esztergom (1918, above), Arm and Fan, New York (1937, below) and Washington Square, New York (1954, below) there is a structured, avant-garde mystery about the reality of the world, as re/presented through the object of the photograph, it’s physical presence. In Underwater swimmer, the body is stretched and distorted by an element, water, not a man-made mirror. His photographs from Hungary, Italy and early Paris possess a sensitivity of spirit that seems to have been excised from his life, the older he got. Far too often in later images, there is a “brittleness” to his photography, in which the object of reflection sits at the surface of the image, all sparkling in unflinching light. The single cloud oh so lonely in the sterile city; the man looking at the broken bench; the “buy, buy, buy” of consumer culture. You consumer Kertész’s later images, you do not reflect on them.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

All iPhone installation photographs © Marcus Bunyan. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image. View Part 1 of the posting.

“André Kertész, one of the most lyrical and formally inventive photographers of the twentieth-century, whose work advocated for spontaneity over technical precision, has left a distinctive legacy of poetic images which form a bridge between the avant-garde and geometrical precision. A roamer for much of his life, his feelings of rootlessness manifest in his work and often convey a quiet mood of melancholy. …

Claiming “I am an amateur and I intend to stay that way for the rest of my life”, Kertesz was a great source of inspiration to photographic legends such as Cartier-Bresson.

He remains revered for his clarity of style and ability to blend simplicity with emotion, prizing impact over technical precision, seeking metaphors and geometry in everyday objects and scenarios, to turn the mundane into the surreal. Nothing was too plain or ordinary for his eye, since he had a special ability to breathe life into even the most ‘unremarkable’ subjects.”

Edward Clay. “André Kertész: between poetry and geometry,” on ‘The Independent Photographer’ website, May 19th 2020 [Online] Cited 26/08/2020

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985) 'Distortion #34' 1933 from the exhibition 'L'equilibriste, André Kertész' at Jeu de Paume, Château de Tours Part 2, June - Oct, 2019

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
Distortion #34
1933
Gelatin silver print

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
Distortion #40
1933
Gelatin silver print

Installation view of the exhibition 'L'equilibriste, André Kertész' at Jeu de Paume, Château de Tours

Installation view of the exhibition 'L'equilibriste, André Kertész' at Jeu de Paume, Château de Tours showing at left, the photograph 'Underwater swimmer, Esztergom' 1918

Installation views of the exhibition L’equilibriste, André Kertész at Jeu de Paume, Château de Tours showing photographs from the series Distortions, the bottom image showing at left, the photograph Underwater swimmer, Esztergom 1918
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985) 'Original plates of the model of the book 'Distortions'' 1975-1976 (installation view)

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
Planches originales de la maquette du livre ‘Distortions’ (installation view)
Original plates of the model of the book ‘Distortions’
1975-1976
Collection Médiathèque de l’architecture et du patrimoine
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition L’equilibriste, André Kertész at Jeu de Paume, Château de Tours showing photographs from the series Distortions
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985) 'Distortion #60' 1933 (installation view)

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
Distortion #60 (installation view)
1933
Contact original
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985) 'Distortion #86' 1933 (installation view)

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
Distortion #86 (installation view)
1933
Contact original
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985) 'Distortion #109' 1933 (installation view)

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
Distortion #109 (installation view)
1933
Contact original
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985) 'Distortion #6' 1933 (installation view)

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
Distortion #6 (installation view)
1933
Contact original
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985) 'Distortion #159' 1933 (installation view)

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
Distortion #159 (installation view)
1933
Contact original
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985) 'Distortion #128' 1933 (installation view)

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
Distortion #128 (installation view)
1933
Contact original
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985) 'Distortion #70' 1933 (installation view)

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
Distortion #70 (installation view)
1933
Contact original
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985) 'Distortion #80' 1933 (installation view)

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
Distortion #80 (installation view)
1933
Contact original
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985) 'Distortion' 1933 (installation view)

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
Distortion (installation view)
1933
Contact original
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985) 'Distorted Portrait (Face of a Woman), Paris' 1927 (installation view)

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
Portrait déformé (Visage de femme), Paris (installation view)
Distorted Portrait (Face of a Woman), Paris
1927
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

One of the twentieth century’s great photographers, André Kertész (Budapest, 1894 – New York, 1985) left a prolific body of work spanning more than seventy years (1912-1984), a blend of the poetic and the intimate with its wellspring in his Hungarian culture. The Art of Poise: André Kertész traces this singular career, showcasing compositions that bear the stamp of Europe’s avant-garde art movements, from the artist’s earliest Hungarian photographs to the blossoming of his talent in France, and from his New York years to ultimate international recognition.

Kertész arrived in Paris in October 1925. Moving in avant-garde literary and artistic circles, he photographed his Hungarian friends, artists’ studios, street life and the city’s parks and gardens. In 1933 he embarked on his famous Distortions series of nudes deformed by funhouse mirrors, producing anamorphic images similar in spirit to the work of Pablo Picasso, Jean Arp and Henry Moore.

In addition to this profusion of activity, he explored the possibility of disseminating his work in publications. Between 1933 and the end of his life he had designed and published a total of nineteen books.

In 1936 Kertész and his wife Elizabeth left for New York, where he began with a brief assignment for Keystone, the world’s biggest photographic agency. He struggled, though, to carve out a place for himself in a context whose demands were very different from those of his Paris years.

Inspired by the rediscovery of his Hungarian and French negatives, from 1963 onwards he devoted himself solely to personal projects, and was offered retrospectives by the French National Library in Paris and MoMA in New York. This fresh recognition sparked a flurry of books in which he harked back to the high points of his oeuvre. In his last years, armed with a Polaroid, he returned to his earlier practice of everyday photography.

Text from the Jeu de Paume website for the earlier exhibition The Art of Poise: André Kertész

Text from the exhibition L’equilibriste, André Kertész at Jeu de Paume, Château de Tours

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
La Tulipe mélancolique, New York
Melancholic Tulip, New York
1939
Gelatin silver print

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985) 'Paris' 1984 (installation view)

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
Paris (installation view)
1984
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
Paris
1984
Gelatin silver print

Installation view of the exhibition 'L'equilibriste, André Kertész' at Jeu de Paume, Château de Tours showing at top left, 'Ballet, New York' 1938; and at bottom left, 'Lake Placid' 1954

Installation views of the exhibition L’equilibriste, André Kertész at Jeu de Paume, Château de Tours showing at top left, Ballet, New York 1938; and at bottom left, Lake Placid 1954
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985) 'Ballet, New York' 1938 (installation view)

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
Ballet, New York (installation view)
1938
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
Ballet, New York
1938
Gelatin silver print

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985) 'Lake Placid' 1954 (installation view)

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
Lake Placid (installation view)
1954
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985) 'New York' 1937 (installation view)

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
New York (installation view)
1937
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985) 'New York' 1939 (installation view)

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
New York (installation view)
1939
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
New York
1939
Gelatin silver print

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985) 'New York' 1954 (installation view)

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
New York (installation view)
1954
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
Escalier, rampe, ombres et femme, New York (installation view)
Staircase, banister, shadows and woman, New York
1951
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
“Buy”, Long Island
1963
Gelatin silver print

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
6th Avenue, New York
1973
Gelatin silver print

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985) 'Nuage égaré' 'Lost cloud' 1937 (installation view)

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
Nuage égaré
Lost cloud
1937
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

André Kertész. 'Lost Cloud' New York, 1937

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
Nuage égaré
Lost cloud
1937
Gelatin silver print

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985) 'Poughkeepsie, New York' 1937 (installation view)

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
Poughkeepsie, New York (installation view)
1937
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
Poughkeepsie, New York
1937
Gelatin silver print

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985) 'Of New York…' New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1976 (installation view)

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
Of New York… (installation view)
New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1976
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985) 'New York' 1951 (installation view)

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
New York (installation view)
1951
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
Of New York… (installation view)
New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1976
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985) '"Buy", New York' 1966 (installation view)

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
“Buy”, New York (installation view)
1966
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
Of New York… (installation view)
New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1976
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
Double page de la maquette originale du livre ‘Of New York…’ (installation view)
Double page of the original model of the book ‘Of New York…’
1975-76
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition L’equilibriste, André Kertész at Jeu de Paume, Château de Tours showing at second left, New York 1939; and at third left, New York 1936
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
New York (installation view)
1939
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985) 'New York' 1936 (installation view)

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
New York (installation view)
1936
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
New York
1936
Gelatin silver print

Installation view of the exhibition L’equilibriste, André Kertész at Jeu de Paume, Château de Tours showing at second right, Arm and Fan, New York 1937
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985) 'Bras et ventilateur, New York' 'Arm and Fan, New York' 1937 (installation view)

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
Bras et ventilateur, New York (installation view)
Arm and Fan, New York
1937
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985) 'Arm and Fan, New York' 1937

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
Bras et ventilateur, New York
Arm and Fan, New York
1937
Gelatin silver print

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
Of New York… (installation view)
New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1976
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985) 'New York' 1947 (installation view)

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
New York (installation view)
1947
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985) 'Le retour au port, New York' 'Return to port, New York' 1944 (installation view)

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
Le retour au port, New York (installation view)
Return to port, New York
1944
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition L’equilibriste, André Kertész at Jeu de Paume, Château de Tours showing at left, Disappearance, New York 1955
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985) 'La Disparition, New York' 'Disappearance, New York' 1955 (installation view)

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
La Disparition, New York (installation view)
Disappearance, New York
1955
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
Disappearance, New York
1955
Gelatin silver print

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985) 'New York' 1969 (installation view)

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
New York (installation view)
1969
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Text from the exhibition L’equilibriste, André Kertész at Jeu de Paume, Château de Tours

Installation view of the exhibition 'L'equilibriste, André Kertész' at Jeu de Paume, Château de Tours showing at left, 'Broken Bench, New York' 1962

Installation views of the exhibition L’equilibriste, André Kertész at Jeu de Paume, Château de Tours showing at left in the bottom image, Broken Bench, New York 1962
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
Le Banc cassé, New York
Broken Bench, New York
1962
Gelatin silver print

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
Of New York… (installation view)
New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1976
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985) 'Soixante ans de photographie' 'Sixty years of photography' 1912-1972 (installation view)

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
Soixante ans de photographie (installation view)
Sixty years of photography
1912-1972
Paris, éditions du Chêne, 1972
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985) 'Jour pluvieux, Tokyo' 'Rainy day, Tokyo' 1968 (installation view)

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
Jour pluvieux, Tokyo (installation view)
Rainy day, Tokyo
1968
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985) 'McDougall Alley, New York' 1965 (installation view)

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
McDougall Alley, New York (installation view)
1965
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
Washington Square, New York
1954
Gelatin silver print

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985) 'Washington Square, New York' 1954 (installation view)

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
Washington Square, New York (installation view)
1954
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
Washington Square, New York
1954
Gelatin silver print

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985) 'Winter Garden, New York' 1970 (installation view)

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
Jardin d’hiver, New York (installation view)
Winter Garden, New York
1970
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
Martinique
1972
Gelatin silver print

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
Soixante ans de photographie (installation view)
Sixty years of photography
1912-1972
Paris, éditions du Chêne, 1972
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985) 'In the cellar, Williamsburg' 1951 (installation view)

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
Dans la cave, Williamsburg (installation view)
In the cellar, Williamsburg
1951
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
Nara, Japan
1968
Gelatin silver print

Text from the exhibition L’equilibriste, André Kertész at Jeu de Paume, Château de Tours

Harold Riley. 'André Kertész' Manchester, The Manchester Collection, 1984 (installation view)

Harold Riley
André Kertész (installation view)
Manchester, The Manchester Collection, 1984
Collection Médiathèque de l’architecture et du patrimoine
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition 'L'equilibriste, André Kertész' at Jeu de Paume, Château de Tours showing his late Polaroid work

Installation views of the exhibition L’equilibriste, André Kertész at Jeu de Paume, Château de Tours showing his late Polaroid work
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
12 December 1979 (installation view)
1979
Tirage jet d’encre d’après la reproduction d’un polaroid, 2019
Inkjet print from a reproduction of a polaroid, 2019
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985) 'Untitled' 1979-1981 (installation view)

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
Untitled (installation view)
1979-1981
Tirage jet d’encre d’après la reproduction d’un polaroid, 2019
Inkjet print from a reproduction of a polaroid, 2019
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
June 1979 (installation view)
1979
Tirage jet d’encre d’après la reproduction d’un polaroid, 2019
Inkjet print from a reproduction of a polaroid, 2019
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
21 June 1979 (installation view)
1979
Tirage jet d’encre d’après la reproduction d’un polaroid, 2019
Inkjet print from a reproduction of a polaroid, 2019
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
13 August 1979 (installation view)
1979
Tirage jet d’encre d’après la reproduction d’un polaroid, 2019
Inkjet print from a reproduction of a polaroid, 2019
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
July 3, 1979 
1979
Tirage jet d’encre d’après la reproduction d’un polaroid, 2019
Inkjet print from a reproduction of a polaroid, 2019

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
Untitled
1979-1981
Tirage jet d’encre d’après la reproduction d’un polaroid, 2019
Inkjet print from a reproduction of a polaroid, 2019

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
13 August
1983
Tirage jet d’encre d’après la reproduction d’un polaroid, 2019

Jeu de Paume at the Château de Tours
25 avenue André Malraux, 37000 Tours
Phone: 02 47 70 88 46

Opening hours:
Tuesday – Sunday 2pm – 6pm
Closed on Monday

Jeu de Paume website

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Exhibition: ‘Gathering Clouds: Photographs from the Nineteenth Century and Today’ at George Eastman Museum, Rochester, NY

Exhibition dates: 26th July, 2020 – 3rd January, 2021

John Shaw Smith (British, 1811-1873) 'The Mosque of Omar, Jerusalem' April 1852 from the exhibition 'Gathering Clouds: Photographs from the Nineteenth Century and Today' at George Eastman Museum, Rochester, NY, July 2020 - Jan 2021

John Shaw Smith (British, 1811-1873)
The Mosque of Omar, Jerusalem
April 1852
Albumen silver print, printed c. 1855
George Eastman Museum, gift of Alden Scott Boyer
Courtesy of the George Eastman Museum

From December 1850 to September 1852, John Shaw Smith travelled throughout the Mediterranean with a camera. He used the paper negative process that William Henry Fox Talbot patented in 1841. Shaw Smith masked out uneven tonality or aberrations in the sky with India ink, a common practice at the time, and he introduced clouds into his prints through combination printing. Rather than a cloud negative made from life, however, his second paper negative consisted of clouds hand-drawn with charcoal.

John Shaw Smith (British, 1811-1873)
The Mosque of Omar, Jerusalem
April 1852
Calotype negative
George Eastman Museum, gift of Alden Scott Boyer
Courtesy of the George Eastman Museum

Completing a triumvirate of postings about aeroplanes, air, and sky … we finish with a posting on a small but perfectly formed exhibition, Gathering Clouds: Photographs from the Nineteenth Century and Today at George Eastman Museum.

The technical competence of the early photographers, and the sheer beauty of their images, is mesmerising. To overcome the technical deficiencies of early photographic processes – where the dynamic tonal range between shadows and highlights was difficult to capture on one negative – the artists used painted clouds, hand-drawn clouds, and combination prints with cloud negatives made from life. You name it, they could do it to fill a sky!

My particular favourites in this elevated selection, these songs of the earth and sky, are three. Firstly, that most divine of daguerreotypes, a woman by Southworth & Hawes c. 1850 (below). “The heavenly realm had long been represented by clouds in Western art.” Secondly, and always a desire of mine, are the seascapes of Gustave Le Gray. There is something so spatial, so serene about his images. One day I know I will own one. And finally, the surprise that is that most beautiful of images, Marsh at Dawn 1906 (below). You could have knocked me over with a feather when I found out it was by that doyen of modernist photography, Imogen Cunningham, a member of the California-based Group f/64, known for its dedication to the sharp-focus rendition of simple subjects. How an artist evolves over the life time of their career.

I have added text to some of the images from the George Eastman Museum virtual tour, and also added further biographical notes on the artists below some of the photographs. I do hope you enjoy the magic of these accumulated – a cumulus related images.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

Gathering Clouds traces the complex history of photography’s relationship with clouds from the medium’s invention to Alfred Stieglitz’s Equivalents. The exhibition demonstrates that clouds played a seminal role in the development and subsequent reception of photography in the nineteenth century. At the same time, with Equivalents serving as a connection between past and present, the exhibition features contemporary works that forge new aesthetic paths while responding in various ways to the history of cloud photography.

Clouds and the Limitations of Photography

In the nineteenth century, clouds were technically difficult to photograph. As early as the 1830s, the medium’s inventors observe that photographic plates were more sensitive to violet and blue wavelengths of light and less sensitive to warm greens, yellows, oranges and reds. In order to record grass and trees in a landscape, photographers had to expose the plate to light longer, which left the sky overexposed; if they times their exposure to record the sky properly, the grass and trees were underexposed. Furthermore, clouds disappeared from even properly exposed skies because blue and white registered the same tonal value on the plate. Pink and orange skies created enough contrast for photographers to capture clouds, but the yellow hue of the late-day sun made it a challenge to record the browns and greens of the landscape. Cloudless skies are therefore a common feature of nineteenth-century photographs.

Clouds & Combination Printing

Painted Clouds and Combination Prints with Hand-Drawn Clouds

Southworth & Hawes (Albert Sands Southworth, American, 1811-1894; Josiah Johnson Hawes, American, 1808-1901)
Woman
c. 1850
Daguerreotype
George Eastman Museum, gift of Alden Scott Boyer
Courtesy of the George Eastman Museum

Around 1850, Southworth & Hawes began adding hand-painted clouds to select portraits of women. This was undoubtedly an aesthetic decision, but the association of women with clouds also corresponds with mid-nineteenth-century views of white women and their role in American society. At the time, piety was seen as a virtue bestowed on women by God – a strength upon which men were to draw. The heavenly realm had long been represented by clouds in Western art.

Southworth & Hawes (Albert Sands Southworth, American, 1811-1894; Josiah Johnson Hawes, American, 1808-1901) 'Woman' c. 1850 (detail)

Southworth & Hawes (Albert Sands Southworth, American, 1811-1894; Josiah Johnson Hawes, American, 1808-1901)
Woman (detail)
c. 1850
Daguerreotype
George Eastman Museum, gift of Alden Scott Boyer
Courtesy of the George Eastman Museum

Count Camille Bernard Baillieu d’Avrincourt (French, 1824-1862)
Château de Chambord
c. 1855
Salted paper print
George Eastman Museum, gift of Kodak-Pathé
Courtesy of the George Eastman Museum

Count Camille Bernard Baillieu d’Avrincourt received praise from his peers for his technical skill and artistic sentiment. The clouds in Baillieu d’Avrincourt’s photographs of the Château de Chambord demonstrate his commitment to both. Perhaps dissatisfied with the relationship of clouds to the tower, he used combination printing to alter the placement of the cloud formation between the two prints.

“We have the sky always before us, therefore we do not recognise how beautiful it is. It is very rare to see anybody go into raptures over the wonders of the sky, yet of all that goes on in the whole world there is nothing to approach it for variety, beauty, grandeur, and serenity.”

H. P. Robinson, ‘The Elements of a Pictorial Photograph’, 1896

At the end of the nineteenth century, Henry Peach Robinson (British, 1830–1901) emphasised the significance of the sky in landscape photography. “The artistic possibilities of clouds,” he further noted, “are infinite.” Robinson’s plea to photographers to attend to the clouds was not new. From photography’s beginnings, clouds had been central to aesthetic and technological debates in photographic circles. Moreover, they featured in discussions about the nature of the medium itself. Gathering Clouds demonstrates that clouds played a key role in the development and reception of photography from the medium’s invention (1839) to World War I (1914-1918). Through the juxtaposition of nineteenth-century and contemporary works, the exhibition further considers the longstanding metaphorical relationship between clouds and photography. Conceptions of both are dependent on oppositions, such as transience versus fixity, reflection versus projection, and nature versus culture.

Gathering Clouds includes cloud photographs made by prominent figures such as Anne Brigman (American, 1869-1950), Alvin Langdon Coburn (British, 1882-1966), Peter Henry Emerson (British, 1856-1936), Gustave Le Gray (French, 1820-1884), Eadweard Muybridge (British, 1830-1904), Henry Peach Robinson, Southworth & Hawes (American, active 1843-1863), and Adam Clark Vroman (American, 1856-1916). Selections from the group of photographs that Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) titled Equivalents (1923-34) serve as a link between past and present. The featured contemporary artists are Alejandro Cartagena (Mexican, b. Dominican Republic, 1977), John Chiara (American, b. 1971), Sharon Harper (American, b. 1966), Nick Marshall (American, b. 1984), Joshua Rashaad McFadden (American, b. 1990), Sean McFarland (American, b. 1976), Abelardo Morell (American, b. Cuba, 1948), Vik Muniz (Brazilian, b. 1961), Trevor Paglen (American, b. 1974), Bruno V. Roels (Belgian, b. 1976), Berndnaut Smilde (Dutch, b. 1978), James Tylor (Kaurna, Māori & Australian, b. 1986), Carrie Mae Weems (American, b. 1953), Will Wilson (American, Navajo, b. 1969), Byron Wolfe (American, b. 1967), Penelope Umbrico (American, b. 1957), and Daisuke Yokota (Japanese, b. 1983).

Text from the George Eastman House website

Combination Prints with Cloud Negatives Made from Life

Gustave Le Gray (French, 1820-1884)
Mediterranean with Mount Agde
1857
Albumen silver print
George Eastman Museum, gift of Eastman Kodak Company, ex-collection Gabriel Cromer
Courtesy of the George Eastman Museum

The seascapes that Gustave Le Gray made between 1856 and 1858 were both praised and panned by his contemporaries. Some faulted the clouds for being too luminous in relation to the sea. One critic maintained that in Le Gray’s photographs, the clouds and the landscape – made on two separate negatives and combined during printing – were untrue to the laws of nature.

Combination Prints with Cloud Negatives Made from Life

Gioacchino Altobelli (Italian, 1825-1878)
The Colosseum
c. 1865
Albumen silver print
George Eastman Museum, purchase
Courtesy of the George Eastman Museum

Gioacchino Altobelli used combination printing to achieve a “moonlight effect,” made by photographing the sun (not the moon) behind clouds. Altobelli likely made such photographs with foreign travellers in mind. Inspired by Romantic poets like Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Lord Byron, tourists to Rome often visited the Colosseum by moonlight.

At the end of 1865 the two painter-photographers divided and Gioacchino Altobelli moved to a studio at Passeggiata di Ripetta n.16 that had been used by the photographer Michele Petagna. A new company was formed “Photographic Establishment Altobelli & Co.” which leads us to assume that Atobelli was working in conjunction with other photographers probably including Enrico Verzaschi.

In the beginning of 1866 Altobelli asked for a declaration of ownership (a brevet) to the Department of Commerce in Rome for his invention of the application of color to photographic images (a union of photography with chrome-lithography). The manager of the Pontifical Chrome-Lithography strongly opposed his application as they are already using such an invention from his own Company. Few months later Altobelli asked for another brevet that is granted him this time, “to perform in photograph the views of the monuments with effect of sky”. His method, similar if not identical to that of Gustave Le Gray, consisted in taking a first photograph of a monument where the exposure was adjusted to highlight the architectural characteristics sought. Subsequently Altobelli took at another time one or more additional photographs exposed to capture strong sky and cloud contrasts. In the dark room Altobelli captured on photographic paper the double exposure of the two perfectly aligned plates – this resulted in a well illuminated monument contrasted with a strong sky that gave the feeling of “claire de lune”. In November 1866 Altobelli obtained the brevet for 6 years. It is probable that he didn’t know that in Venice the photographers Carlo Ponti and Carlo Naya were already using the “claire de lune” technique – moreover they tinted them with aniline giving their prints a beautiful blue tone as if the water of the lagoon was illuminated at night by the moon. However the brevet allowed the painter-photographer Gioacchino Altobelli to have great notoriety in Rome and this helped him to increase his work as a portraitist.

Text from the Luminous-Lint website [Online] Cited 21/08/2020

George N. Barnard (American, 1819-1902)
Rebel Works in Front of Atlanta, Ga. No. 1
1866
Albumen silver print
George Eastman Museum, purchase, ex-collection Philip Medicus
Courtesy of the George Eastman Museum

Within one copy of Photographic Views of Sherman’s Campaign (1866), George N. Barnard sometimes used the same cloud negative to print in cloudscapes to two different scenes, such as in the example shown here. Moreover, between two copies of the album, he is also known to have used different cloud negatives to reproduce the same scene. In reviews of the album, the cloudscapes received particular attention. One reviewer claimed that the pictures’ clouds conveyed “a fine idea of the effects of light and shade in the sunny clime in which the scenes are laid.” In part because of Barnard’s practice of re-using cloud negatives, however, it is impossible to know whether Barnard even photographed the clouds while in the South.

George N. Barnard (American, 1819-1902) 'Rebel Works in Front of Atlanta, Ga. No. 1' 1866 (detail)

George N. Barnard (American, 1819-1902)
Rebel Works in Front of Atlanta, Ga. No. 1 (detail)
1866
Albumen silver print
George Eastman Museum, purchase, ex-collection Philip Medicus
Courtesy of the George Eastman Museum

One of the first persons to open a daguerreotype studio in the United States, George Barnard set up shop in Oswego, New York. In 1854 he moved his operation to Syracuse, New York, and began using the collodion process, a negative / positive process that allowed for multiple prints, unlike the unique daguerreotype.

Along with Timothy O’Sullivan, John Reekie, and Alexander Gardner, Barnard worked for the Mathew Brady studio and is best known for his photo-documentation of the American Civil War. In 1864 he was made the official photographer for the United States Army, Chief Engineer’s Office, Division of the Mississippi. He followed Union General William Tecumseh Sherman’s infamous march to the sea and in 1866 published an album of sixty-one photographs, Photographic Views of Sherman’s Campaign. After the war he continued primarily as a portrait photographer in Ohio, Chicago, Charleston, South Carolina, and Rochester, New York, where he briefly worked with George Eastman, the founder of the Eastman Kodak Company.

Text from the J. Paul Getty website [Online] Cited 21/08/2020

Combination Prints with Cloud Negatives Made from Life

Carleton E. Watkins (American, 1829-1916)
Cape Horn, Columbia River, Oregon
1867
Albumen silver print
George Eastman Museum, museum accession
Courtesy of the George Eastman Museum

In 1867, Carleton E. Watkins travelled to Oregon for two purposes; to photograph the state’s geological features, and to document the sites and scenes along the Oregon Steam Navigation Company’s steamboat and portage railway route. This photograph was circulated with and without clouds, suggesting a third function for his Oregon views. The introduction of clouds into the prints staked a claim for the photograph’s artistic potential, in addition to its original scientific and commercial goals.

Clouds and Landscape on a Single Negative

Eadweard J. Muybridge (English, 1830-1904)
Clouds
1868-1872
From the series Great Geyser Springs
Albumen silver print
George Eastman Museum, museum accession
Courtesy of the George Eastman Museum

Painted Clouds and Combination Prints with Hand-Drawn Clouds

Unidentified maker
Mount Fuji
c. 1870
Albumen silver print with applied colour
George Eastman Museum, gift of University of Rochester
Courtesy of the George Eastman Museum

Hand-painted Japanese photographs made for Western tourists often played to their prospective consumers’ assumptions and desires. Near the port city of Yokohama, Mount Fuji was readily accessible to foreign travellers, and photographs of the mountain were common. Guidebooks primed visitors to delight in the clouds surrounding the mountain, an expectation to which this photograph – with its hand-painted clouds – caters.

Henry Peach Robinson (British, 1830-1901)
Evening on Culverden Down
c. 1870
Albumen silver print
Lent by Patrick Montgomery

An influential practitioner of combination printing, H.P. Robinson argued that printing in clouds was essential to the photographer’s endeavour to interpret nature. A “properly selected cloud,” he wrote, allowed the photographer to control the composition, thereby rescuing the “art form from the machine.”

Clouds and Landscape on a Single Negative

Charles Victor Tillot (French, 1825-1895)
Vues instantannées, effets de nuages, Barbizon
Instant views, cloud effects, Barbizon
1874
Albumen silver print
Lent by Patrick Montgomery

Charles Victor Tillot’s instantaneous views were criticised for being to dark. In addition to practicing photography, Tillot was a painter and exhibited with the Impressionists, whose central concerns were the effects of light and the truthfulness to nature. As a photographer, Tillot was attentive to the play of light both on the clouds – the most fleeting aspect of the scene – and in unaltered photographs.

Lala Deen Dayal (Indian, 1844-1905)
Jahaz Mahal
between 1879 and 1881
Albumen silver print
George Eastman Museum, gift of University of Rochester Library
Courtesy of the George Eastman Museum

Lala Deen Dayal (Hindi: लाला दीन दयाल) 1844 – 1905; (also written as ‘Din Dyal’ and ‘Diyal’ in his early years) famously known as Raja Deen Dayal) was an Indian photographer. His career began in the mid-1870s as a commissioned photographer; eventually he set up studios in Indore, Mumbai and Hyderabad. He became the court photographer to the sixth Nizam of Hyderabad, Mahbub Ali Khan, Asif Jah VI, who awarded him the title Raja Bahadur Musavvir Jung Bahadur, and he was appointed as the photographer to the Viceroy of India in 1885.

In the early 1880s he travelled with Sir Lepel Griffin through Bundelkhand, photographing the ancient architecture of the region. Griffin commissioned him to do archaeological photographs: The result was a portfolio of 86 photographs, known as “Famous Monuments of Central India”.

Text from the Wikipedia website [Online] Cited 21/08/2020

Photograph of the Jahaz Mahal at Mandu in Madhya Pradesh, taken by [Indian photographer] Lala Deen Dayal in the 1870s. The Jahaz Mahal or Ship Palace is part of the Royal Enclave in northern Mandu and dates from the late 15th century. It is a long, narrow, two-storey arcaded range crowned with roof-top pavilions and kiosks, built between two artificial lakes, the Munj Talao and Kapur Sagar. It was so named because from a distance in this setting it resembled a ship. Conceived as a pleasure palace, it housed the harem of Ghiyath Shah Khalji, a Sultan of Malwa who ruled between 1469 and 1500. This is a perspective view of the façade taken from one end, showing a flight of steps ascending to the roof terrace at left and rubble in the foreground. The palace is one of several at Mandu, a historic ruined hill fortress which first came to prominence under the Paramara dynasty at the end of the 10th century. It was state capital of the Sultans of Malwa between 1401 and 1531, who renamed the fort ‘Shadiabad’ (City of Joy) and built palaces, mosques and tombs amid the gardens, lakes and woodland within its walls. Most of the remaining buildings date from this period and were originally decorated with glazed tiles and inlaid coloured stone. They constitute an important provincial style of Islamic architecture characterised by an elegant and powerful simplicity that is believed to have influenced later Mughal architecture at Agra and Delhi.

Text from the British Library website [Online] Cited 21/08/2020

Painted Clouds and Combination Prints with Hand-Drawn Clouds

Unidentified maker
The Roman Forum
c. 1885
Albumen silver print
George Eastman Museum, gift of George C. Pratt

Painted Clouds and Combination Prints with Hand-Drawn Clouds

William Henry Jackson (American, 1843-1942)
Mt. Hood from Lost Lake
c. 1890
Albumen silver print
George Eastman Museum, gift of Harvard University
Courtesy of the George Eastman Museum

Writing in 1883, the poet Joaquin Miller declared that the constantly moving cloud effects around Mount Hood added “most of all to the beauty and sublimity of the mount scenery.” Perhaps Miller’s description of the clouds elucidates William Henry Jackson’s decision to print clouds from drawn – as opposed to photographed – negatives. Jackson might have lacked cloud negatives that communicated motion and vigour and felt compelled to draw them himself.

William Henry Jackson (April 4, 1843 – June 30, 1942) was an American painter, Civil War veteran, geological survey photographer and an explorer famous for his images of the American West. He was a great-great nephew of Samuel Wilson, the progenitor of America’s national symbol Uncle Sam. …

The American photographer along with painter Thomas Moran are credited with inspiring the first national park at Yellowstone, thanks to the images they carried back to legislators in Washington, D.C. America’s great, open spaces lured these artists, who delivered proof of the natural jewels that sparkled on the other side of the country.

From 1890 to 1892 Jackson produced photographs for several railroad lines (including the Baltimore and Ohio (B&O) and the New York Central) using 18 x 22-inch glass plate negatives. The B&O used his photographs in their exhibit at the World’s Columbian Exposition.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Unidentified maker
Plate V
1896
Chromolithograph
From the International Cloud-Atlas, edited by Hugo Hildebrand Hildebrandsson (Swedish, 1838-1925), Albert Riggenbach (Swiss, 1854-1921), and Léon Philippe Teisserenc de Bort (French, 1855-1913), published by Gauthier-Villars et Fils (Paris)
George Eastman Museum, purchase with funds from the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation
Courtesy of the George Eastman Museum

Published in 1896, the International Cloud-Atlas standardised the definitions and descriptions of cloud formations and outlined instructions for cloud observations so that scientists could communicate dependable data across borders. The atlas was illustrated with chromolithographs made after photographs. Photography thus played a central role in overcoming the difficulty of applying language to ever-changing cloud formations. To cloud scientists, photograph was valued not for its perceived objectivity but for its ability to capture minute details in a sea of infinite and transient forms. Photographs helped ensure that cloudspotters everywhere could use a standard vocabulary to describe their observations.

Unidentified maker. 'Plate III' 1896 From the 'International Cloud-Atlas'

Unidentified maker
Plate III
1896
Chromolithograph
From the International Cloud-Atlas, edited by Hugo Hildebrand Hildebrandsson (Swedish, 1838-1925), Albert Riggenbach (Swiss, 1854-1921), and Léon Philippe Teisserenc de Bort (French, 1855-1913), published by Gauthier-Villars et Fils (Paris)
George Eastman Museum, purchase with funds from the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation
Courtesy of the George Eastman Museum

Unidentified maker. 'Plate IV' 1896 From the 'International Cloud-Atlas'

Unidentified maker
Plate IV
1896
Chromolithograph
From the International Cloud-Atlas, edited by Hugo Hildebrand Hildebrandsson (Swedish, 1838-1925), Albert Riggenbach (Swiss, 1854-1921), and Léon Philippe Teisserenc de Bort (French, 1855-1913), published by Gauthier-Villars et Fils (Paris)
George Eastman Museum, purchase with funds from the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation
Courtesy of the George Eastman Museum

Alfred Horsley Hinton (English, 1863-1908)
Day’s Awakening
1896
Platinum print
George Eastman Museum, gift of the 3M Foundation, ex-collection Louis Walton Sipley. Courtesy of the George Eastman Museum

“In the photographic rendering of clouds, not as atmospheric phenomena, but as vehicles of beautiful thought, we have to-day something of an indication of how much superior the photograph may be wen made and controlled by an artist mind.” ~ A. Horsely Hinton, 1897

Alfred Horsley Hinton (1863 – 25 February 1908) was an English landscape photographer, best known for his work in the Pictorialist movement in the 1890s and early 1900s. As an original member of the Linked Ring and editor of The Amateur Photographer, he was one of the movement’s staunchest advocates. Hinton wrote nearly a dozen books on photographic technique, and his photographs were exhibited at expositions throughout Europe and North America. …

Hinton’s landscape photographs tend to be characterised by prominent foregrounds and dramatic cloud formations, often in a vertical format. He typically used sepia platinotype and gum bichromate printing processes. Unlike many Pictorialists, Hinton preferred sharp focus to soft focus lenses. He occasionally cropped and mixed cloud scenes and foregrounds from different photographs, and was known to rearrange the foregrounds of his subjects to make them more pleasing. His favourite topic was the English countryside, especially the Essex mud flats and Yorkshire moors.

Text from the Wikipedia website [Online] Cited 21/08/2020

Combination Prints with Cloud Negatives Made from Life

Osborne I. Yellott (American, b. 1871 – d. unknown)
Winter Evening
1898
Albumen silver print
George Eastman Museum
Courtesy of the George Eastman Museum

“Before printing a cloud negative into any view the worked should always ask himself whether those particular clouds are properly appropriate to the scene, or whether they lend expression to the scene.” ~ Osborne I. Yellott, 1901

Yellott distinguished between two branches of cloud photograph: clouds for their own sake and clouds for printing in. The first he identified as a “delightful hobby,” the pursuit of which would lead to a collection of “pleasing or unusual” cloud formations to be viewed as lantern-slide projections or as cyanotypes in an album. The second, practiced by Yellott himself, required more discrimination: the photographer must carefully select their clouds and camera position.

Osborne I. Yellott (American, b. 1871 - d. unknown) 'Winter Evening' 1898 (detail)

Osborne I. Yellott (American, b. 1871 – d. unknown)
Winter Evening (detail)
1898
Albumen silver print
George Eastman Museum
Courtesy of the George Eastman Museum

Clouds and Landscape on a Single Negative

Adam Clark Vroman (American, 1856-1916)
Cibollita Mesa (South from top of Mesa)
1899
Platinum palladium print
George Eastman Museum, purchase with funds from the Charina Foundation
Courtesy of the George Eastman Museum

“… if fortune favours you, you may find a background of such beautiful clouds as only the light clear air of the south-west can produce. All day long these fleecy rolls of cotton-like vapour have tempted you, until you are in danger of using up all your… plates the first day out. You think there never can be such clouds again – but keep a few for tomorrow, they are a regular thing in this land of surprises.”

Vroman, 1901

Vroman never used combination printing to add cloud effects to his celebrated photographs of the SW landscape. Rather, the Pasadena bookstore owner capture both cloudscapes and landscapes on an orthochromatic plate and made prints from this single negative. By the mid-1880s, orthochromatic plates were available and made the photography of clouds and landscape easier.

Adam Clark Vroman (1856-1916), a native of LaSalle, Illinois, moved to Pasadena, California, in 1892. He was an amateur field photographer who worked primarily with glass plate photography and was the founder of Vroman’s Bookstore located in Pasadena. His impressive body of photographic work from the late 1890s and early 1900s documents his multiple expeditions to the pueblos and mesas of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah, several of these trips alongside Dr Frederick Webb Hodge with the Bureau of American Ethnology. Vroman’s close friendship with the natives, notably the Zuni, Hopi, and Navajo, allowed him to capture intimate images of their daily lives and customs as well as the lands that they inhabited. These photographs provide a stark contrast from common depictions of the time period that portrayed American Indian peoples as either exotic subjects or as savages.

His work during this period also reflects his extreme fondness of the glowing, superior quality of light found in the Southwest region. During these expeditions he worked primarily with a 6 1/2″ x 8 1/2″ view camera as well as with 4″ x 5″ and 5″ x 7″ cameras. Between 1895 and 1905, Vroman documented the interiors and exteriors of the Spanish missions in California prior to the restoration of the buildings. He photographed areas in California such as Pasadena, Yosemite National Park, as well as the eastern region of the United States, including Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Washington, D.C. Vroman was also an avid art collector with an interest in the crafts of Native Americans and treasures from Japan and the Far East. He spent the last years of his life traveling to the East Coast and Canada, as well as to Japan and to countries in Europe. He died in Altadena, California, in 1916 of intestinal cancer.

Text from the Online Archive of California website [Online] Cited 21/08/2020

Combination Prints with Cloud Negatives Made from Life

Gertrude Käsebier (American, 1852-1934)
The Sketch (Beatrice Baxter)
1903
Platinum print
George Eastman Museum, gift of Hermine Turner

Gertrude Käsebier’s addition of clouds, which are absent from the original negative, gives this photograph a meditative quality that parallels the subject’s contemplative state. As a leading Pictorialist, Käsebier viewed photographs as an art form and drew inspiration from the work of famous painters. Perhaps, then, she was aware of painter Joghn Constable’s belief that the sky as the “chief organ of sentiment” in a picture.

Gertrude Käsebier (American, 1852-1934) 'The Sketch (Beatrice Baxter)' 1903 (detail)

Gertrude Käsebier (American, 1852-1934)
The Sketch (Beatrice Baxter) (detail)
1903
Platinum print
George Eastman Museum, gift of Hermine Turner

Clouds and Landscape on a Single Negative

Imogen Cunningham (American, 1883-1976)
Marsh at Dawn
1906
Platinum print, printed 1910
George Eastman Museum, purchase
© The Imogen Cunningham Trust. All Right Reserved

Alvin Langdon Coburn (British, b. United States, 1882-1966)
Clouds in the Canyon
1911
Gum bichromate over platinum print
George Eastman Museum, bequest of the photographer

Unidentified maker (French)
Cumulus
c. 1918
Gelatin silver print
George Eastman Museum, purchase
Courtesy of the George Eastman Museum

Unidentified maker (French)
Mer de nuages (Sea of clouds)
c. 1918
Gelatin silver print
George Eastman Museum, purchase
Courtesy of the George Eastman Museum

Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946)
Equivalent
1925
Gelatin silver print
George Eastman Museum, purchase and gift of Georgia O’Keeffe
Courtesy of the George Eastman Museum

Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946)
Equivalent
probably 1926
Gelatin silver print
George Eastman Museum, purchase and gift of Georgia O’Keeffe
Courtesy of the George Eastman Museum

Vik Muniz (Brazilian, b. 1961)
Reclining Girl and Dog Cloud
1993
Gelatin silver print
George Eastman Museum, purchase with funds from the Charina Foundation
Courtesy of the George Eastman Museum
© 2020 Vik Muniz / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY

Sometimes we see a cloud that’s dragonish;
A vapour sometime like a bear or lion,
A tower’d citadel, a pendent rock,
A forked mountain, or blue promontory
With trees upon’t, that nod unto the world,
And mock our eyes with air.

Shakespeare, “Antony and Cleopatra”, (IV, xii, 2-7)

Trevor Paglen (American, b. 1974)
Untitled (Reaper Drone)
2013
Chromogenic development print
Courtesy of the Artist and Altman Siegel, San Francisco
© Trevor Paglen

Trevor Paglen’s artwork draws on his long-time interest in investigative journalism and the social sciences, as well as his training as a geographer. His work seeks to show the hidden aesthetics of American surveillance and military systems, touching on espionage, the digital circulation of images, government development of weaponry, and secretly funded military projects. …

Since the 1990s, Paglen has photographed isolated military air bases located in Nevada and Utah using a telescopic camera lens. Untitled (Reaper Drone) reveals a miniature drone mid-flight against a luminous morning skyscape. The drone is nearly imperceptible, suggested only as a small black speck [in] the image. The artist’s photographs are taken at such a distance that they abstract the scene and distort our capacity to make sense of the image. His work both exposes hidden secrets and challenges assumptions about what can be seen and fully understood.

Text from the Institute of Contemporary Art / Boston website [Online] Cited 21/08/2020

Abelardo Morell (American, b. Cuba 1948)
Rapidly Moving Clouds over Field, Flatford, England, #1
2017
From After Constable
Inkjet print
Courtesy of Edwynn Houk Gallery
© Abelardo Morell

After Constable, [is] a series of unique visions of the landscape of Hamstead Heath by Abelardo Morell.

In June of 2017, the photographer Abelardo Morell took a pilgrimage to England, visiting the landscape of nineteenth-century Romantic painter John Constable. In the hopes of capturing the spirit of Constable’s work, Morell pitched a tent in the middle of London’s Hampstead Heath. This tent, a constructed camera obscura, projected the surrounding landscape onto the earthen ground through a small aperture at the tent’s top. Describing his camera obscura, Morell stated, “I invented a device – part tent, part periscope – to show how the immediacy of the ground we walk on enhances our understanding of the panorama, the larger world it helps to form.”

Photographing the ground below him, Morell captured both the texture of the earth as well as its vast surrounding landscape: both macro- and micro-visions of Constable’s surroundings, caught in harmony on one plane. With this layering, the photographs blend both image and texture. Always drawn to the dimension of a painting’s surface, Morell sought to emulate texture in his own photographs. In Constable’s romantic visions of Hampstead Heath from the early nineteenth century, the painter captured the english landscape in gestures of tactile, thick paint. With the roughness of the ground underneath the projected sky, each photograph’s plane echoes a painting’s surface.

Text from the Rosegallery website [Online] Cited 21/08/2020

James Tylor (Kaurna, Māori and Australian, b. 1986)
Turalayinthi Yarta (Wirramumiyu)
2017
Inkjet print with ochre
George Eastman Museum, purchase with funds from the Charina Foundation
Courtesy of the George Eastman Museum
© James Tylor

This series explores my connection with Kaurna yarta (Kaurna land) through learning, researching, documenting and traveling on country. Turalayinthi Yarta* is a Kaurna phrase “to see yourself in the landscape” or “landscape photography”. In a two year period I travelled over 300 km of the southern part of the Hans Heysen trail that runs parallel along the Kaurna nation boundary line in the Mount Lofty ranges. Combining photographs and traditional Nunga** designs to represent my connection with this Kaurna region of South Australia.

*Yarta means Land, Country and Nation in Kaurna language
**Nunga means South Australian Aboriginal people or person (Nunga language)

Text from the James Tylor website [Online] Cited 21/08/2020

John Chiara (American, b. 1971)
Old River Road: Stovall Road: Oakhurst Road
2018
Silver dye bleach print
Courtesy of ROSEGALLERY
© John Chiara

John Chiara is an experimental photographer who makes unique works by directly manipulating photosensitive paper. Chiara always believed that too much was lost in the final photograph because of the enlargement processes in the darkroom. In 1995, he was working primarily with making contact prints with large-format negatives, but in subsequent years he developed equipment and processes that allowed him to make large-scale, colour, positive photographic images without the use of film. The largest of his devices is a field camera that is large enough for Chiara to enter; he attaches the paper to this camera’s back wall and uses his hands and body to burn and dodge the image instinctively. Chiara’s developing process often leaves anomalies in the resulting images, which he embraces.

Text from the Artsy website [Online] Cited 21/08/2020

George Eastman Museum
900 East Ave, Rochester, NY 14607, USA

Opening hours:
Wednesday – Saturday 10am – 5pm
Sunday 11am – 5pm
Closed Mondays and Tuesdays

George Eastman House website

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Exhibition: ‘Model Aircraft’ at SFO Museum, San Francisco International Airport

Exhibition dates: 21st August, 2020 – onwards

Modelbau Schaarschmidt, Berlin. 'Pan American World Airways Boeing 377 Stratocruiser model aircraft'1950s (detail) from the exhibition 'Model Aircraft' at SFO Museum, San Francisco International Airport

Modelbau Schaarschmidt, Berlin
Pan American World Airways Boeing 377 Stratocruiser model aircraft (detail)
1950s
Scale 1:72
Metal, paint, decals
SFO Museum
Gift of Constance Ogilvie

Continuing the aeronautical theme, a selection of gorgeous photographs of model aircraft from the SFO Museum, mainly details from the intricate and beautiful models. The man and the shadow he casts atop the enormous Hughes H-4 Hercules (Spruce Goose) flying boat is just delightful.

The museum is doing many fine exhibitions at the moment, including two photography exhibitions, Above the Bay: The Aerial Photography of Stanley Page and R.J. Waters: Golden Gate Park.

Upcoming exhibitions of interest are Widebody: The Launch of the Jumbo jets in the Early 1970s, also Flying the Freedom Birds: Airlines and the Vietnam War and an exhibition on Early Motorcycles (mostly 1910-1914). Of Australian interest are upcoming exhibitions around the aviator Charles Kingsford Smith.

I hope to post on all of these exhibitions in the near future.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to Chad Anderson and the SFO Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Installation view of the exhibition 'Model Aircraft' at SFO Museum, San Francisco International Airport

Installation views of the exhibition Model Aircraft at SFO Museum, San Francisco International Airport

Model aircraft play a unique role in the imagination of aviation enthusiasts of all ages. They help contextualise the heroic stories and technological triumphs of flight. In many cases, the original aircraft are lost to history, but these small-scale representations remain as a reminder of that innovative past. The processes and materials employed by model makers are as varied as the aviation industry itself. This essay of images focuses on select examples from the more than two thousand models held in the collection of SFO Museum. We hope the enlargement of details provides an opportunity to return our gaze to the art of the model makers, which can be easily overlooked when focusing on the these historical recreations.

For more exhibitions featuring material from the collection of SFO Museum, visit the nearby San Francisco Airport Commission Aviation Library and Louis A. Turpen Aviation Museum. The facility, an architectural adaptation of the Airport’s 1930s passenger lobby, is located pre-security and just minutes away on the departures level of the International Terminal. Exhibitions, research services, and educational programs are offered to the public free of charge with daily operating hours of 10.00 am to 4.30 pm, closed holidays. SFO Museum The mission of SFO Museum is to delight, engage, and inspire a global audience with programming on a broad range of subjects; to collect, preserve, interpret, and share the history of commercial aviation; and to enrich the public experience at San Francisco International Airport. SFO Museum programs more than thirty galleries throughout the terminals with a rotating schedule of art, history, science, and cultural exhibitions. To browse current and past exhibitions, research the collection, or for more information about the program, please visit the SFO Museum website.

Text from the SFO Museum

Modelbau Schaarschmidt, Berlin
Pan American World Airways Boeing 377 Stratocruiser model aircraft (detail)
1950s
Scale 1:72
Metal, paint, decals
SFO Museum
Gift of Constance Ogilvie

Pan American World Airways Boeing 377 Stratocruiser
1950s

The Boeing 377 Stratocruiser was a long range double-deck airliner that first flew on 8 July 1947. Entering service on 1 April 1949 with Pan American, it was also operated by BOAC, Northwest Orient Airlines, United Airlines and American Overseas Airlines.

Seating generally between 50 and 75 passengers, the pressurised Stratocruiser featured sleeping berths for longer flights. Just 56 aircraft were produced, with Pan Am retiring the last one in 1961.

PAN AM AIRLINES INTRODUCES THE BOEING STRATOCRUISER

Edward Chavez (1917-2004)
Granville Gee Bee Model R-1 Super Sportster model aircraft
1965
Scale 1:10
Fibreglass, balsa wood, metal, acrylic, rubber, paint
SFO Museum

Edward Chavez. 'Granville Gee Bee Model R-1 Super Sportster model aircraft' 1965

Edward Chavez (1917-2004)
Granville Gee Bee Model R-1 Super Sportster model aircraft
1965
Scale 1:10
Polychrome fiberglass, balsa wood, metal, acrylic, rubber, paint
SFO Museum

'Granville Gee Bee Model R-1 Super Sportster' 1965

Granville Gee Bee Model R-1 Super Sportster aircraft
1965

A.C. Rehberger Company, Chicago
United Air Lines Douglas DC-3 model aircraft (shield logo detail)
c. 1937
Scale 1:50
Metal, enamel, paint, plastic, decals
SFO Museum

H-4 Hercules “Spruce Goose”
November 2, 1947
Public domain

Jim Lund. 'Hughes H-4 Hercules (Spruce Goose) flying boat model aircraft' 2002

Jim Lund
Hughes H-4 Hercules (Spruce Goose) flying boat model aircraft (detail)
2002
Plastic, epoxy, resin, metal, paint
Scale 1:72
SFO Museum
Gift of Jim Lund

H-4 Hercules “Spruce Goose” on its only flight
November 2, 1947
Public domain

Jones-Bause & Company, Los Angeles
United Air Lines Douglas DC-8 cutaway model (interior detail)
Late 1950s
Scale 1:10
Metal, wood, paint, plastic, ink
SFO Museum
Gift of the Rollison Family

Modelbau Schaarschmidt, Berlin
Northwest Orient Airlines Lockheed L-1049 Super Constellation
1950
Paint, metal
Scale 1:50
SFO Museum

Modelbau Schaarschmidt, Berlin. 'Northwest Orient Airlines Lockheed L-1049 Super Constellation model aircraft' 1950s (detail)

Modelbau Schaarschmidt, Berlin
Northwest Orient Airlines Lockheed L-1049 Super Constellation model aircraft (detail)
1950s
Paint, metal
Scale 1:50
SFO Museum

Edward Chavez (1917-2004)
U.S. Army Air Corps Boeing P-26A model aircraft
1972
Scale 1:10
Polychrome fibreglass, balsa wood, metal, acrylic, rubber, paint
SFO Museum

Edward Chavez. 'U.S. Army Air Corps Boeing P-26A (Peashooter) model aircraft' 1972

Edward Chavez (1917-2004)
U.S. Army Air Corps Boeing P-26A (Peashooter) model aircraft
1972
Scale 1:10
Polychrome fiberglass, balsa wood, metal, acrylic, rubber, paint
SFO Museum

Martin Čížek
Boeing P-26A Peashooter of the 34th Pursuit Squadron 17th Pursuit Group
1933-1936 (production run)
CC BY-SA 4.0

The Boeing P-26 “Peashooter” was the first American all-metal production fighter aircraft and the first pursuit monoplane to enter squadron service with the United States Army Air Corps. Designed and built by Boeing, the prototype first flew in 1932, and the type was still in use with the U.S. Army Air Corps as late as 1941 in the Philippines. There are only two surviving Peashooters, but there are three reproductions on exhibit with two more under construction.

Deliveries to USAAC pursuit squadrons began in December 1933 with the last production P-26C aircraft coming off the assembly line in 1936. Ultimately, 22 squadrons flew the Peashooter, with peak service being six squadrons, in 1936. P-26s were the frontline fighters of the USAAC until 1938, when Seversky P-35s and Curtiss P-36s began to replace the P-26. A total of twenty P-26s were lost in accidents between 1934 and America’s entry into World War II on 7 December 1941, but only five before 1940.

Text from the Wikipedia website

'Pan American Airways Sikorsky S-43 Baby Clipper amphibian model aircraft' 1930s (detail)

Pan American Airways Sikorsky S-43 Baby Clipper amphibian model aircraft (detail)
1930s
Scale 1:48
Wood, paint
SFO Museum
Gift of the Captain John B. Russell Family

Bill Larkins
Sikorsky S-43 Baby Clipper
1938
CC BY-SA 2.0

This 12-passenger amphibian was owned by William K. Vanderbilt of New York City when it was photographed at Oakland, CA, in 1938

'Pan American Airways Sikorsky S-42 flying boat model aircraft' 1934 (detail)

Pan American Airways Sikorsky S-42 flying boat model aircraft (detail)
1934
Scale 1:30
Wood, metal, paint
SFO Museum

United Technologies Corporation
One-quarter left front view of Pan American Airways Sikorsky S-42 “Pan American Clipper” (r/n NR-823M; c/n 4201) in flight over San Francisco Bay on its way to Hawaii. San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge construction is visible
c. 1934
National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution
Public domain

Delivered: December 1934
Left service: August 7, 1944

West Indies Clipper. Later renamed Pan American Clipper & surveyed trans-Pacific route, then re-named Hong Kong Clipper (1937). Sank at Antilla, Cuba.

Pan American Airways Sikorsky S-42 flying boat model aircraft (detail)
1934
Scale 1:30
Wood, metal, paint
SFO Museum

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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European photographic research tour exhibition: ‘Brassaï’ at Foam, Amsterdam

Exhibition dates: 13th September – 4th December 2019
Visited September 2019 posted July 2020

Installation view of the exhibition Brassaï at Foam, Amsterdam
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

These are my thoughts at the time of my seeing the exhibition.

I have been blessed this trip by seeing an amazing selection of master photographers… Brassaï being no exception.

Every print in this exhibition is a vintage print. They were made by Brassaï before 1968. If larger than 30 x 40cm they were made after 1945 when he started printing with an enlarger.

As usual, the iPhone camera makes all the images too light and adds too much contrast. Think darker, less contrast in these vintage prints.

Brassaï’s prints are – just like those of Josef Sudek and August Sander that I have seen on this trip – much softer and with a more limited tonal range than I imagined. They are all the more atmospheric and magical because of it.

To walk around the exhibition and then arrive at an alcove (see walk through below)… to stand in front of Le Môme Bijou, the old lady with the jewellery and Billiard Player, is such a privilege. I am surrounded by the presence of these famous images. I peer intently at each of them, observing the details, feeling their eyes stare back at me. No deflection of intent, just these human beings and their spirit presented in a photograph. Brassaï captured their essence before they drifted away, just in that moment.

In the latter print the dark billiard ball was almost indistinguishable from the baize; in the former, the circular light in the woman’s eyes means that Brassaï must have set up a light, or that there was a light source, above and behind the camera. Specular highlights twinkle off jewellery and pearls. Even as she is draped in her bourgeois, bohemian ornamentation this dame of the night possesses a resilient, composed, determined air.

Personally, I think Brassaï’s Graffiti series are far stronger than Lee Friedlander’s series of the same name.

The juxtaposition of the photographs in Paris at Night is something I will always remember.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image. All iPhone installation photographs © Marcus Bunyan

The more scrupulously [the photographer] has respected the independence and autonomy of his subject, and the closer he has gone toward it instead of bringing it nearer to himself, the more completely his own personality has become incorporated into his pictures.

Brassaï

Foam is proud to present the first retrospective of Brassaï in the Netherlands. The French photographer of Hungarian descent is considered a key figure of 20th-century photography.

Brassaï (1899-1984) created countless iconic images of 1930s Parisian life. He was famous for capturing the grittier aspects of the city, but also documented high society, including the ballet, opera, and intellectuals – among them his friends and contemporaries like Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí and Henri Matisse. The exhibition at Foam traces his career with over 170 vintage prints, plus a selection of drawings, a sculpture and documentary material.

Brassaï gathers many of the artistic facets of the photographer, from photos to drawings of female nudes. It is organised in twelve thematic sections: Paris by Day, and by Night, Minotaure, Graffiti, Society, Places and Things, Personages, Sleep, Pleasures, Body of a Woman, Portraits – Artists, Writers, Friends and The Street. Each is very different from the next – reflecting the diversity of Brassaï’s photographic work.

Digital walk through of the exhibition Brassaï at Foam, Amsterdam in September 2019

Installation view of the exhibition 'Brassaï' at Foam, Amsterdam showing at second right, Brassaï's 'Paris' 1937, and at right 'Paris' c. 1932

Installation views of the exhibition Brassaï at Foam, Amsterdam showing at second right in the bottom image, Brassaï’s Paris 1937, and at right Paris c. 1932
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984) 'Paris' c. 1932 (installation view)

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984)
Paris (installation view)
c. 1932
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984) 'Paris' 1937 (installation view)

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984)
Paris (installation view)
1937
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Wall text from the exhibition 'Brassaï' at Foam, Amsterdam

Installation views of the exhibition Brassaï at Foam, Amsterdam
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Foam is proud to announce the first retrospective of Brassaï in the Netherlands. This French photographer of Hungarian descent is considered as one of the key figures of 20th-century photography. Brassaï (1899-1984) created countless iconic images of 1930s Parisian life. He was famous for capturing the grittier aspects of the city, but also documented high society, including the ballet, opera, and intellectuals – among them his friends and contemporaries like Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí and Henri Matisse. The exhibition at Foam traces his career with over 170 vintage prints, plus a selection of drawings, a sculpture and documentary material.

Gyula Halász, Brassaï’s original name, was born in 1899 in Brassó, Transylvania (then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, nowadays Brasov, Romania). He studied at the University of Arts in Berlin before finally settling in Paris in 1924, a city that was to become the main subject of his work. He started as a painter but soon discovered that his strongest and most original talent lay in photography. To keep his real name for his paintings, he signed journalistic work, caricatures and photographs with ‘Brassaï’ (from Brassó). His photos would make this pseudonym more famous than his real name. Brassaï’s work of the 1930s would become a cornerstone of a new tradition as photography was discovered as a medium with aesthetic potential. A generation earlier photographers had merely emulated the established arts. Now photography became an art in itself and the perfect medium to capture modern life.

The nocturnal scenes collected in his book Paris by Night (1933) are complemented by his work that reveals the everyday life of the city by day. The monuments, picturesque spots, scenes from daily life and architectural details are present in his work as a reflection of the irresistible fascination the artist felt for the French capital. In his quest to cover all of the facets of Paris, he also immersed himself in the city’s darker side. For Brassaï the gang members, outcasts, prostitutes and drug addicts all represented the least cosmopolitan aspect of Paris, an aspect that was more alive and more authentic. He compiled a huge collection of images of entertainment venues, ranging from night clubs to popular festivals and featuring the people who frequented them. Brassaï was deeply immersed in a wide circle of friends among the writers and artists of Montparnasse, who also became the subjects for some of his portraits. Most of the portraits taken by Brassaï were of well-known people, putting him into a very comfortable position. He collaborated with the luxury art magazine Minotaure right from its very first issue and enjoyed a prominent role for the publication over the years. After the war, he also travelled regularly on commissioned shoots for the American magazine Harper’s Bazaar.

The exhibition at Foam gathers many of the artistic facets of the photographer, from photos to drawings of female nudes. It is organised in twelve thematic sections: Paris by Day, and by Night, Minotaure, Graffiti, Society, Places and Things, Personages, Sleep, Pleasures, Body of a Woman, Portraits – Artists, Writers, Friends and The Street. Each is very different from the next – reflecting the diversity of Brassaï’s photographic work.

Press release from the Foam gallery website

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984) 'Staircase, Montmartre' 1937 (installation view)

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984)
Staircase, Montmartre (installation view)
1937
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984) 'Les Escaliers de Montmartre, Paris' 1936 from the exhibition 'Brassaï' at Foam, Amsterdam, Sept - Dec, 2019

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984)
Les Escaliers de Montmartre, Paris
1936
Gelatin silver print

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984) 'La rue Quincampoix' c. 1932 (installation view)

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984)
La rue Quincampoix (installation view)
c. 1932
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984) 'Pillar of the Elevated, Metro Glacière' 1932 (installation view)

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984)
Pillar of the Elevated, Metro Glacière (installation view)
1932
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984) 'Near the rue Mouffetard' c. 1945 (installation view)

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984)
Near the rue Mouffetard (installation view)
c. 1945
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition 'Brassaï' at Foam, Amsterdam showing at centre, Brassaï's 'Concierge's Lodge, Paris' 1933

Installation views of the exhibition Brassaï at Foam, Amsterdam showing in the lower image at centre, Brassaï’s Concierge’s Lodge, Paris, 1933
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984) 'Concierge's Lodge, Paris' 1933 (installation view)

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984)
Concierge’s Lodge, Paris (installation view)
1933
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984) 'Concierge's Lodge, Paris' 1933 from the exhibition 'Brassaï' at Foam, Amsterdam, Sept - Dec, 2019

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984)
Concierge’s Lodge, Paris
1933
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984) 'Lovers at the gare Saint Lazare' c. 1937 (installation view)

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984)
Lovers at the gare Saint Lazare (installation view)
c. 1937
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984) 'Sunday Painter, avenue du Général Leclerc' 1946 (installation view)

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984)
Sunday Painter, avenue du Général Leclerc (installation view)
1946
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984) 'Annecy' 1936 (installation view)

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984)
Annecy (installation view)
1936
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984) 'Hôtel de la Belle Étoile' 1945 (installation view)

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984)
Hôtel de la Belle Étoile (installation view)
1945
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984) 'A Corpse on the Banks on the Seine' 1931 (installation view)

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984)
A Corpse on the Banks on the Seine (installation view)
1931
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984)
Les Fétes de Paris: La Nuit Féerique de Longhamp
1937
In L’illustration, no. 4, 923 (July 10, 1937)
13. Rue Saint-Georges, Paris (9°)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Regards, no. 155 (December 31, 1936)
Back cover
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Brassaï at Foam, Amsterdam showing at at left, Brassaï’s Meat Porters, Les Halles c. 1935 and at second left, Au Cochon Limousin 1935
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984) 'Meat Porters, Les Halles' c. 1935 (installation view)

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984)
Meat Porters, Les Halles (installation view)
c. 1935
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984) 'Au Cochon Limousin' 1935 (installation view)

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984)
Au Cochon Limousin (installation view)
1935
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984) 'Les Halles' 1930-32 (installation view)

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984)
Les Halles (installation view)
1930-1932
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984) 'Cesspool cleaners' c. 1931 (installation view)

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984)
Cesspool cleaners (installation view)
c. 1931
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Paris de nuit / Paris at night

Brassaï had been making photographs for barely two years when luck and ambition brought him a contract for a book on nocturnal Paris. When Paris de nuit (Paris at Night) was published to acclaim in December 1932, “Brassaï” became a familiar name in the world of photography. The book’s rich photogravures, marginalises pages, and bold design made it an icon of modernity. Many of Brassaï’s best night picture were made after Paris de nuit appeared, however, and many of his greatest images of Parisian nightlife were not published until 1976.

In the self-portrait here we see Brassaï’s first camera, a Voigtländer Bergheil that used 6.5 x 9 cm glass plates one at a time. The long exposures of night photography – often five minutes or more – required a tripod, which Brassaï frequently used for other pictures as well. While much of the adventurous European photography of the 1920s and 1930s celebrated mobility and speed, spontaneity was alien to Brassaï’s sensibility. He favoured images that are sharp, deliberate, and stable.

Installation view of the exhibition 'Brassaï' at Foam, Amsterdam showing a modern enlargement of Brassaï's 'Morris Column, avenue de l'Observatoire' 1934

Installation view of the exhibition 'Brassaï' at Foam, Amsterdam showing at left a modern enlargement of Brassaï's 'Morris Column, avenue de l'Observatoire' 1934

Installation views of the exhibition Brassaï at Foam, Amsterdam showing a modern enlargement of Brassaï’s Morris Column, avenue de l’Observatoire 1934
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984) 'Morris Column, avenue de l'Observatoire' 1934 (installation view)

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984)
Morris Column, avenue de l’Observatoire (installation view)
1934
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984)
Morris Column, avenue de l’Observatoire
1934
Gelatin silver print

Installation view of the exhibition Brassaï at Foam, Amsterdam showing at right, Brassaï’s Self portrait, On the boulevard Saint-Jacques 1930-1932
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Brassaï (Gyulá Halász, 1899 - 1984) 'Self-portrait, Boulevard Saint-Jacques, Paris 14ème' c. 1931-1932

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984)
Self portrait, On the boulevard Saint-Jacques
1930-1932
Gelatin silver print

Voigtländer
Bergheil
Built in 1932
6.5 x 9cm negative
Green

Installation view of the exhibition 'Brassaï' at Foam, Amsterdam showing at left, Brassaï's 'The Tour Saint-Jacques' 1932-1933, and at third right 'View through the pont Royal toward the pont Solférino' c. 1933

Installation view of the exhibition Brassaï at Foam, Amsterdam showing in the bottom image at left, Brassaï’s The Tour Saint-Jacques 1932-1933, and at third right View through the pont Royal toward the pont Solférino c. 1933
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984) 'The Tour Saint-Jacques' 1932-33 (installation view)

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984)
The Tour Saint-Jacques (installation view)
1932-1933
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984)
View through the pont Royal toward the pont Solférino
c. 1933
Gelatin silver print

Installation view of the exhibition Brassaï at Foam, Amsterdam showing at right, Brassaï’s Avenue de l’Observatoire in the Fog c. 1937
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984) 'Avenue de l'Observatoire in the Fog' c. 1937 (installation view)

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984)
Avenue de l’Observatoire in the Fog (installation view)
c. 1937
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984)
Avenue de l’Observatoire in the Fog
c. 1937
Gelatin silver print

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984) 'Paris de Nuit' (Paris at Night) 1932

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984)
Paris de Nuit (Paris at Night) pp. 9-10
1932
Book

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984)
Paris de Nuit (Paris at Night) pp. 13-14
1932
Book

Digital flick through of Brassaï’s Paris de Nuit (Paris at Night) book 1932
Video: Marcus Bunyan

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984) 'Paris de Nuit' (Paris at Night) 1932 (installation view)

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984)
Paris de Nuit (Paris at Night) pp. 19-20 (installation view)
1932
Book
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Minotaure, no. 7 (June 1935)
Pages 24-25: Photographs by Brassaï, “Nuits parisiennes” (Parisian Nights)
Pages 26-29: Photographs by Brassaï
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Portraits – artists, writers and friends

In Brassaï’s era, portraits and nudes were bread-and-butter genres for any professional photographer. As a portraitist Brassaï made a speciality of artists and writers, who often were his friends, and in 1982 he collected many of the best pictures in Les artistes de ma vie (The Artists of My Life), for which he also wrote the lively text. He excelled at two distinct types of portraiture: In one, the artist is framed by his environment – the studio. In the other, the subjects confronts the photographer frankly, and the setting hardly matters. In an undated note, Brassaï summed up his approach to the second type: “To oblige the model to behave as if the photographer isn’t there really is to stage a comic performance. What’s natural is precisely not to dodge the photographer’s presence. The natural thing in that situation is for the model to pose honestly.”

Installation view of the exhibition 'Brassaï' at Foam, Amsterdam showing at right, 'Oskar Kokoschka in his Studio, Paris' 1931-1932

Installation view of the exhibition 'Brassaï' at Foam, Amsterdam at third right, Brassaï's 'Kiki de Montparnasse and her Friends, Thérèse Treize and Lily' c. 1932

Installation views of the exhibition Brassaï at Foam, Amsterdam showing in the top photograph at right, Oskar Kokoschka in his Studio, Paris 1931-1932 (below) and in the bottom photograph at third right, Brassaï’s Kiki de Montparnasse and her Friends, Thérèse Treize and Lily c. 1932 (below)
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984) 'Oskar Kokoschka in his Studio, Paris' 1931-1932

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984)
Oskar Kokoschka in his Studio, Paris (installation view)
1931-1932
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984) 'Kiki de Montparnasse and her Friends, Thérèse Treize and Lily' c. 1932 (installation view)

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984)
Kiki de Montparnasse and her Friends, Thérèse Treize and Lily (installation view)
c. 1932
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition 'Brassaï' at Foam, Amsterdam showing at left, Brassaï's 'Jean Genet' 1948

Installation views of the exhibition Brassaï at Foam, Amsterdam showing in the bottom photograph at left, Brassaï’s Jean Genet 1948 (below)
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984)
Jean Genet
1948
Gelatin silver print

Graffiti

The appreciation of graffiti as a powerful if anonymous art form began to blossom in the twentieth century. Like African tribal objects and the art of children, graffiti was admired as more expressive and vital than the refined forms of traditional Western art. Brassaï was among the first to embrace it. He was an inveterate magpie who collected all manner of neglected artefacts and natural specimens throughout his life. Virtually as soon as he began making photographs, he used the medium to collect the graffiti that appeared abundantly on the walls of Paris – predominantly images that had been scratched or gouged rather than drawn or painted and, as he pointed out, in which irregularities of the wall itself played a role. He compiled hundreds of these pictures, a small sample of which is presented here.

Minotaure

Between arriving in Paris in early 1924 and taking up photography six years later, Brassaï developed a wide circle of friends among the international community of artists and writers in Montparnasse. Among them were Les deux aveugles (The Two Blind Men), as the art critics Maurice Raynal and E. Tériade called themselves. In December 1932 – the same month Brassaï’s book Paris de unit (Paris at Night) appeared – Tériade invited Brassaï to photograph Pablo Picasso and his studios in and near Paris for the first issue of Minotaure, a lavish art magazine launched in June 1933 by the Swiss published Albert Skira. Thus began one of the key friendships of Brassaï’s life. Over the next few years he played prominent role in Minotaure, notable as a collaborator of Salvador Dalí, as an illustrator of texts by André Breton, and, on a few occasions, as an artist in his own right.

Installation view of the exhibition 'Brassaï' at Foam, Amsterdam showing to the right, photographs from Brassaï's series 'Graffiti'

Installation views of the exhibition Brassaï at Foam, Amsterdam showing to the right, photographs from Brassaï’s series Graffiti
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Minotaure, nos. 3-4 (December 1933)
Pages 6-7: Photographs and text by Brassaï, “Du mur des cavernes au mur d’usine” (From the Wall of the Caves to the Wall of the Factory).
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

This was the first appearance in print of Brassaï’s series Graffiti.

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984) 'The Sun King' 1945-1950 (installation view)

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984)
The Sun King (installation view)
1945-1950
From the series Graffiti
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Brassai. 'Untitled' from the series 'Graffiti' 1950

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984)
Untitled (installation view)
1950
From the series Graffiti
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Brassai. 'Untitled' from the series 'Graffiti' 1945-1955

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984)
Untitled (installation view)
1945-1955
From the series Graffiti
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Brassaï at Foam, Amsterdam showing photographs from the section Personages including at left La Môme Bijou, Bar de la Lune, Montmartre 1932; and in the centre, Billiard Player, boulevard Rochechouart 1932-1933 and Market Porter, Les Halles 1939
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Personages

In the introduction to a book of his photographs that was published in 1949, Brassaï linked the modern arts of photography and film to the work of artists of the past who had depicted everyday life, among them Rembrandt van Rijn, Honoré Daumier, Edgar Degas, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. He praised them for the “desire to get beyond the anecdotal and to promote [their] subjects to the dignity of types.” Brassaï himself had a talent for rendering at the same time a generic social role and a particular individual who inhabited it, as if his attentiveness to the person would elevate him or her into a distinctive personage.

Installation view of the exhibition Brassaï at Foam, Amsterdam showing photographs from the section Personages including at left, Festival in Seville 1951; and at right, La Môme Bijou, Bar de la Lune, Montmartre 1932
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Brassaï at Foam, Amsterdam showing photographs from the section Personages including at left, Festival in Seville 1951; at centre, La Môme Bijou, Bar de la Lune, Montmartre 1932; and at right, Billiard Player, boulevard Rochechouart 1932-1933
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Brassaï at Foam, Amsterdam showing a photograph from the section Personages, La Môme Bijou, Bar de la Lune, Montmartre 1932
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984) 'La Môme Bijou, Bar de la Lune, Montmartre' 1932 (installation view)

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984)
La Môme Bijou, Bar de la Lune, Montmartre (installation view)
1932
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984)
La Môme Bijou, Bar de la Lune, Montmartre
1932
Gelatin silver print

Installation view of the exhibition Brassaï at Foam, Amsterdam showing photographs from the section Personages including at left La Môme Bijou, Bar de la Lune, Montmartre 1932; and at right, Billiard Player, boulevard Rochechouart 1932-1933
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984) 'Billiard Player, boulevard Rochechouart' 1932-33 (installation view)

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984)
Billiard Player, boulevard Rochechouart (installation view)
1932-1933
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984)
Billiard Player, boulevard Rochechouart
1932-1933
Gelatin silver print

Installation view of the exhibition Brassaï at Foam, Amsterdam showing photographs from the section Personages including at left Billiard Player, boulevard Rochechouart 1932-1933; and at right, Market Porter, Les Halles 1939
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984) 'Market Porter, Les Halles' 1939 (installation view)

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984)
Market Porter, Les Halles (installation view)
1939
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984)
Bal des Quatre Saisons, rue de Lappe
c. 1932
Gelatin silver print

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984)
Chez Suzy
1931-1932
Gelatin silver print

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984) 'At the Hôtel des Terrasses' c. 1932 (installation view)

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984)
At the Hôtel des Terrasses (installation view)
c. 1932
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Brassaï at Foam, Amsterdam showing photographs from Brassaï’s series Sleep
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Sleep

In 1945 Brassaï wrote a brief essay to accompany some of his pictures of sleepers. It reads in part “All things that stand against their inclination – a tree, a column, a tower, a rock – are regarded with a malign eye by gravity … She especially has a grudge against man, that foolhardy being who, in open collusion with the sunlight, alone among his brothers under the spell of gravitation, dares to stand up. For sunlight and gravity fight over living beings, the one turning over what the other has put up. Alas! Sunlight lives a long way away and can never be found when she is needed the most. Thus gravity is suited to have the last word.”

Installation view of the exhibition Brassaï at Foam, Amsterdam showing photographs from Brassaï’s series Sleep with at left, Paris c. 1934; and at centre, Sleeping c. 1935
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984) 'Paris' c. 1934 (installation view)

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984)
Paris (installation view)
c. 1934
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984) 'Sleeping' c. 1935 (installation view)

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984)
Sleeping (installation view)
c. 1935
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984)
Montmartre
1930-1931
Gelatin silver print

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Exhibition: ‘2020 Vision: Photographs, 1840s-1860s’ at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Exhibition dates: 3rd December, 2019 – 13th December, 2020

Likely by Antoine-François-Jean Claudet (French, Lyon 1797 – 1867 London)
Possibly by Nicolaas Henneman (Dutch, Heemskerk 1813 – 1898 London)
The Chess Players (detail)
c. 1845
Salted paper print from paper negative
Sheet: 9 5/8 × 7 11/16 in. (24.5 × 19.6cm)
Image: 7 13/16 × 5 13/16 in. (19.8 × 14.7cm)
Bequest of Maurice B. Sendak, 2012
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Public domain

An excellent selection of photographs in this posting. I particularly like the gender-bending, shape-shifting, age-distorting 1850s-60s Carte-de-visite Album of Collaged Portraits by an unknown artist. I’ve never seen anything like it before, especially from such an early date. Someone obviously took a lot of care, had a great sense of humour and definitely had a great deal of fun making the album.

Other fascinating details include the waiting horses and carriages in Fox Talbot’s View of the Boulevards of Paris (1843); the mannequin perched above the awning of the photographic studio in Dowe’s Photograph Rooms, Sycamore, Illinois (1860s); and the chthonic underworld erupting from the tilting ground in Carleton E. Watkins’ California Oak, Santa Clara Valley (c. 1863).

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

When The Met first opened its doors in 1870, photography was still relatively new. Yet over the preceding three decades it had already developed into a complex pictorial language of documentation, social and scientific inquiry, self-expression, and artistic endeavour.

These initial years of photography’s history are the focus of this exhibition, which features new and recent gifts to the Museum, many offered in celebration of The Met’s 150th anniversary and presented here for the first time. The works on view, from examples of candid portraiture and picturesque landscape to pioneering travel photography and photojournalism, chart the varied interests and innovations of early practitioners.

The exhibition, which reveals photography as a dynamic medium through which to view the world, is the first of a two-part presentation that plays on the association of “2020” with clarity of vision while at the same time honouring farsighted and generous collectors and patrons. The second part will move forward a century, bringing together works from the 1940s through the 1960s.

Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website

Likely by Antoine-François-Jean Claudet (French, Lyon 1797 – 1867 London)
Possibly by Nicolaas Henneman (Dutch, Heemskerk 1813 – 1898 London)
The Chess Players
c. 1845
Salted paper print from paper negative
Sheet: 9 5/8 × 7 11/16 in. (24.5 × 19.6cm)
Image: 7 13/16 × 5 13/16 in. (19.8 × 14.7cm)
Bequest of Maurice B. Sendak, 2012
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Public domain

Lewis Carroll (British, Daresbury, Cheshire 1832 - 1898 Guildford) '[Alice Liddell]' June 25, 1870 from the exhibition '2020 Vision: Photographs, 1840s-1860s' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Dec 2019 - Dec 2020

Lewis Carroll (British, Daresbury, Cheshire 1832 – 1898 Guildford)
[Alice Liddell]
June 25, 1870
Albumen silver print from glass negative
Sheet: 6 1/4 × 5 9/16 in. (15.9 × 14.1cm)
Image: 5 7/8 × 4 15/16 in. (15 × 12.6cm)
Bequest of Maurice B. Sendak, 2012
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Public domain

Eighteen-year-old Alice Liddell’s slumped pose, clasped hands, and sullen expression invite interpretation. A favoured model of Lewis Carroll, and the namesake of his novel Alice in Wonderland, Liddell had not seen the writer and photographer for seven years when this picture was made; her mother had abruptly ended all contact in 1863. The young woman poses with apparent unease in this portrait intended to announce her eligibility for marriage. The session closed a long and now controversial history with Carroll, whose portraits of children continue to provoke speculation. In what was to be her last sitting with the photographer, Liddell embodies the passing of childhood innocence that Carroll romanticised through the fictional Alice.

Unknown photographer (American)
[Surveyor]
c. 1854
Daguerreotype
Case: 1.6 × 9.2 × 7.9cm (5/8 × 3 5/8 × 3 1/8 in.)
Gift of Charles Isaacs and Carol Nigro, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary, 2019
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Public domain

This portrait of a surveyor from an unknown daguerreotype studio was made during the heyday of the Daguerreian era in the United States, a time that coincided with an increased need for survey data and maps for the construction of railways, bridges, and roads. The unidentified surveyor, seated in a chair, grasps one leg of the tripod supporting his transit, a type of theodolite or surveying instrument that comprised a compass and rotating telescope. The carefully composed scene, in which the angle of the man’s skyward gaze is aligned with the telescope and echoed by one leg of the tripod, conflates its surveyor subject with an astronomer. As a result, the lands of young America are compared to the vast reaches of space, with both territories full of potential discovery.

Alphonse Delaunay (French, 1827-1906)
Patio de los Arrayanes, Alhambra, Granada, Spain
1854
Albumen silver print from paper negative
10 in. × 13 5/8 in. (25.4 × 34.6cm)
Gift of W. Bruce and Delaney H. Lundberg, 2017
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Public domain

One of the most talented students of famed French photographer Gustave Le Gray, Delaunay was virtually unknown before a group of his photographs appeared at auction in 2007. Subsequent research led to the identification of several bodies of work, including the documentation of contemporary events through instantaneous views captured on glass negatives. Delaunay also was a particular devotee of the calotype (or paper negative) process, with which he created his best pictures – including this view of the Alhambra. Among a group of pictures he made between 1851 and 1854 in Spain and Algeria, this view of the Patio de los Arrayanes reveals the extent to which Delaunay was able to manipulate the peculiarities of the paper negative. He revels in the graininess of the image, purposefully not masking out the sky before printing the negative, so that the marble tower appears somehow carved out of the very atmosphere that surrounds it. In contrast, the reflecting pool remains almost impossibly limpid, its dark surface offering a cool counterpart to the harsh Spanish sky.

Hippolyte Bayard (French, 1801-1887)
[Classical Head]
probably 1839
Salted paper print
6 1/2 × 5 7/8 in. (16.5 × 15cm)
Purchase, Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, 2019
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Public domain

This luminous head seems to materialise before our very eyes, as if we are observing the moment in which the latent photographic image becomes visible. Nineteenth-century eyewitnesses to Hippolyte Bayard’s earliest photographs (direct positives on paper) described a similarly enchanting effect, in which hazy outlines coalesced with light and tone to form charmingly faithful, if indistinct, images. These works, which Bayard referred to as essais (tests or trials), often included statues and busts, which he frequently arranged in elaborate tableaux. In this case, he photographed the lone subject (an idealised classical head) from the front and side, as if it were a scientific specimen. The singular object emerges as a relic from photography’s origins and now distant past.

William Henry Fox Talbot (British, Dorset 1800 – 1877 Lacock)
Group Taking Tea at Lacock Abbey
August 17, 1843
Salted paper print from paper negative
Mount: 9 15/16 in. × 13 in. (25.3 × 33cm)
Sheet: 7 3/8 × 8 15/16 in. (18.7 × 22.7cm)
Image: 5 in. × 7 1/2 in. (12.7 × 19cm)
Bequest of Maurice B. Sendak, 2012
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Public domain

Although Talbot’s groundbreaking calotype (paper negative) process allowed for more instantaneous image making, works such as this one nevertheless reflect the technical limitations of early photography. Here, he adapts painterly conventions to the new medium, staging a genre scene on his family estate. The stilted arrangement of figures – rigidly posed to produce a clear image – belies Talbot’s attempt to show action in progress. To achieve sufficient light exposure, he photographed the domestic tableau outdoors, arranging his subjects before a blank backdrop to create the illusion of interior space.

Unknown artist. '[Carte-de-visite Album of Collaged Portraits]' 1850s-1860s

Unknown artist (American or Canadian)
[Carte-de-visite Album of Collaged Portraits]
1850s-1860s
Albumen silver prints
5 15/16 × 5 1/8 × 2 1/16 in. (15.1 × 13 × 5.3cm)
Bequest of Herbert Mitchell, 2008
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Public domain

Beginning in the late 1850s, cartes de visite, or small photographic portrait cards, were produced on a scale that put photography in the hands of the masses. This unusual collection of collages is ahead of its time in spoofing the rigidity of the format. The images play with scale and gender by juxtaposing cutout heads and mismatched sitters, thereby highlighting the difference between social identity – which was communicated in part through the exchange of calling cards – and individuality.

Unknown artist (American)
[Studio Photographer at Work]
c. 1855
Salted paper print
Image: 5 1/8 × 3 13/16 in. (13 × 9.7cm)
Sheet: 9 1/2 × 5 5/8 in. (24.1 × 14.3cm)
William L. Schaeffer Collection, Promised Gift of Jennifer and Philip Maritz, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary
The Metropolitan Museum of Art

In this evocative image, picture making takes centre stage. Underneath a canopy of dark cloth, the photographer poses as if to adjust the bellows of a large format camera. The view reflected on its ground glass would appear reversed and upside down. Viewers’ expectations are similarly overturned, because the photographer’s subject remains unseen.

Unknown artist (American)
[Boy Holding a Daguerreotype]
1850s
Daguerreotype with applied colour
Image: 3 1/4 × 2 3/4 in. (8.3 × 7cm)
William L. Schaeffer Collection, Promised Gift of Jennifer and Philip Maritz, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary
The Metropolitan Museum of Art

The boy in this picture clutches a cased image to his chest, as if to illustrate his affection for the subject depicted within. Daguerreotypes were a novel form of handheld picture, portable enough to slip into a pocket or palm. Portraits exchanged between friends and family could be kept close – a practice often mimed by sitters, who would pose for one daguerreotype while holding another.

James Fitzallen Ryder (American, 1826-1904)
Locomotive James McHenry (58), Atlantic and Great Western Railway
1862
Albumen silver print
Image: 7 3/8 × 9 1/4 in. (18.7 × 23.5cm)
Mount: 10 × 13 in. (25.4 × 33cm)
William L. Schaeffer Collection, Promised Gift of Jennifer and Philip Maritz, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary
The Metropolitan Museum of Art

In spring 1862, the chief engineer in charge of building the Atlantic and Great Western Railway – which ran from Salamanca, New York, to Akron, Ohio, and from Meadville to Oil City, Pennsylvania – engaged James Ryder to make photographs that would convince shareholders of the worthiness of the project. Ryder’s assignment was “to photograph all the important points of the work, such as excavations, cuts, bridges, trestles, stations, buildings and general character of the country through which the road ran, the rugged and the picturesque.” In a converted railroad car kitted out with a darkroom, water tank, and developing sink, he processed photographs that make up one of the earliest rail surveys.

Attributed to Josiah Johnson Hawes (American, Wayland, Massachusetts 1808 – 1901 Crawford Notch, New Hampshire)
Winter on the Common, Boston
1850s
Salted paper print
Window: 6 15/16 × 8 15/16 in. (17.6 × 22.7cm)
Mat: 16 × 20 in. (40.6 × 50.8cm)
William L. Schaeffer Collection, Promised Gift of Jennifer and Philip Maritz, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary
The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Having originally set his sights on a career as a painter, Josiah Hawes gave up his brushes for a camera upon first seeing a daguerreotype in 1841. Two years later, he joined Albert Sands Southworth in Boston to form the celebrated photographic studio Southworth & Hawes. Turning to paper-based photography in the early 1850s, Hawes frequently depicted local scenery. This surprising picture, which presents Boston Common through a veil of snow-laden branches, shows that Hawes brought his creative ambitions to the nascent art of photography.

Carleton E. Watkins (American, 1829-1916)
[California Oak, Santa Clara Valley]
c. 1863
Albumen silver print
Image: 12 in. × 9 5/8 in. (30.5 × 24.5cm)
Mount: 21 1/4 in. × 17 5/8 in. (54 × 44.8cm)
William L. Schaeffer Collection, Promised Gift of Jennifer and Philip Maritz, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary
The Metropolitan Museum of Art

For viewers today, the crown of this majestic oak tree, with its complex network of branches, might evoke the allover paintings of Abstract Expressionism with their layers of dripped paint. As photographed by Carleton Watkins, the dark, flattened silhouette of the tree feathers out across the camera’s field of view. The sloped horizon line, uncommon in Watkins’s output, both echoes the ridge in the distance and grounds the energy of the tree canopy, ably demonstrating his masterful command of pictorial composition.

George Wilson Bridges (British, 1788-1864)
Garden of Selvia, Syracuse, Sicily
1846
Salted paper print from paper negative
Image: 6 15/16 × 8 9/16 in. (17.7 × 21.7cm)
Sheet: 7 5/16 × 8 13/16 in. (18.5 × 22.4cm)
Bequest of Maurice B. Sendak, 2012
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Public domain

The monk’s gesture of prayer in this image by George Wilson Bridges is a touchstone of stillness against the impressive landscape and vegetation that rise up behind him. Bridges was an Anglican reverend and friend of William Henry Fox Talbot, the inventor of the calotype (paper negative), who instructed him on the method before it was patented. Bridges was also one of the earliest photographers to embark upon a tour of the Mediterranean region; he wrote to Talbot that he conceived of the excursion both as a technical mission to advance photography and as a pilgrimage to collect imagery of religious sites.

Pietro Dovizielli (Italian, 1804-1885)
[Spanish Steps, Rome]
c. 1855
Albumen silver print from glass negative
Image: 14 11/16 × 11 5/16 in. (37.3 × 28.8cm)
Sheet: 24 7/16 × 18 7/8 in. (62 × 48cm)
Gift of W. Bruce and Delaney H. Lundberg, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary, 2019
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Public domain

Made in late afternoon light, Pietro Dovizielli’s picture shows a long shadow cast onto Rome’s Piazza di Spagna that almost obscures one of the market stalls flanking the base of the famed Spanish Steps. Rising above the sea of stairs is the church of Trinità dei Monti, its facade neatly bisected by the Sallustiano obelisk. In the piazza, a lone figure – the only visible inhabitant of this eerily empty public square – rests against the railing of the Barcaccia fountain. Keenly composed pictures like this led reviewers of Dovizielli’s photographs to proclaim them “the very paragons of architectural photography.”

Edouard Baldus (French (born Prussia), 1813-1889)
[Amphitheater, Nîmes]
c. 1853
Salted paper print from paper negative
Overall: 12 3/8 × 15 3/16 in. (31.5 × 38.5cm)
Gift of Joyce F. Menschel, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary, 2019
The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Instead of photographing the entire arena in Nîmes, as he had two years earlier, Baldus focusses here on a section of the façade, playing the superimposed arches against the vertical, shadowed pylons in the foreground. The resulting composition manages to isolate and monumentalise the architecture, while creating a rhythmic play of light and dark that energises the picture. The photograph was part of a massive, four-year project, Villes de France photographiées, in which the views from the south of France were said to surpass all of the photographer’s previous work in the region.

William Henry Fox Talbot (British, Dorset 1800 – 1877 Lacock)
View of the Boulevards of Paris
1843
Salted paper print from paper negative
Mount: 9 in. × 10 1/16 in. (22.8 × 25.6cm)
Sheet: 7 3/8 × 10 1/8 in. (18.7 × 25.7cm)
Image: 6 5/16 × 8 1/2 in. (16.1 × 21.6cm)
Bequest of Maurice B. Sendak, 2012
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Public domain

In May 1843 Talbot traveled to Paris to negotiate a licensing agreement for the French rights to his patented calotype process. His invention used a negative-positive system and a paper base – not a copper support as in a daguerreotype. Although his negotiations were not fruitful, Talbot’s views of the elegant new boulevards of the French capital were highly successful.

Filled with the incidental details of urban life, architectural ornamentation, and the play of spring light, this photograph appears as the second plate in Talbot’s groundbreaking publication The Pencil of Nature (1844). The chimney posts on the roofline of the rue de la Paix, the waiting horses and carriages, and the characteristically French shuttered windows evoke as vivid a notion of mid-nineteenth-century Paris now as they must have 170 years ago.

Lewis Dowe (American, active 1860s-1880s)
[Dowe’s Photograph Rooms, Sycamore, Illinois]
1860s
Albumen silver print
Image: 5 7/8 × 7 5/8 in. (14.9 × 19.3cm)
Mount: 8 × 10 in. (20.3 × 25.4cm)
William L. Schaeffer Collection, Promised Gift of Jennifer and Philip Maritz, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary
The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Above a bustling thoroughfare in Sycamore, Illinois, boldface lettering advertises the services of photographer Lewis Dowe, a portraitist who also published postcards and stereoviews. Easier to miss in the image is a mannequin perched above the awning to promote the studio. The flurry of activity below Dowe’s storefront and the prime location of the outfit, poised between a tailor and a saloon, speak to the important role of photography in town life.

E. & H. T. Anthony (American)
[Specimens of New York Bill Posting]
1863
Albumen silver prints
Mount: 3 1/4 in. × 6 3/4 in. (8.3 × 17.1cm)
Image: 2 15/16 in. × 6 in. (7.5 × 15.3cm)
William L. Schaeffer Collection, Promised Gift of Jennifer and Philip Maritz, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary
The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Benefit concerts, minstrel shows, lectures, and horse races all clamour for attention in this graphic field of broadsides posted in the Bowery neighbourhood of Manhattan. The stereograph format lends added depth and dimensionality to the layered fragments of text, transporting viewers to a hectic city sidewalk. Published for a national market, the scene indexes a precise moment in the summer of 1863, offering armchair tourists an inadvertent trend report on downtown cultural life.

Roger Fenton (British, 1819-1869)
The Diamond and Wasp, Balaklava Harbour
March, 1855
Albumen silver print from glass negative
Image: 8 in. × 10 1/8 in. (20.3 × 25.7cm)
Mount: 19 5/16 × 24 3/4 in. (49 × 62.9cm)
Gift of Thomas Walther Collection, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary, 2019
The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Fenton’s view of the Black Sea port of Balaklava, which the British used as a landing point for their siege of Sevastopol during the Crimean War, shows a busy but orderly operation. The British naval ships, HMS Diamond and HMS Wasp, oversaw the management of transports into and out of the harbour, which explains the presence of ships and rowboats, as well as the large stack of crates near the rail track in the foreground. Against claims of “rough-and-tumble” mismanagement of Balaklava in the British press, Fenton (commissioned by a Manchester publisher to record the theatre of war) offers documentation of a well-functioning port.

Roger Fenton (British, 1819-1869)
The Mamelon and Malakoff from front of Mortar Battery
April, 1855
Salted paper print from glass negative
Image: 9 1/8 × 13 1/2 in. (23.1 × 34.3cm)
Sheet: 14 3/4 × 17 13/16 in. (37.5 × 45.3cm)
Gift of Joyce F. Menschel, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary, 2019
The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Fenton’s extensive documentation of the Crimean War – the first use of photography for that purpose – was a commercial endeavour that did not include pictures of battle, the wounded, or the dead. His unprepossessing view of a vast rocky valley instead discloses, in the distance, a site of crucial strategic importance. Fort Malakoff, the general designation of Russian fortifications on two hills (Mamelon and Malakoff) is just perceptible at the horizon line. Malakoff’s capture by the French in September 1855, five months after Fenton made this photograph, ended the eleven-month siege of Sevastopol and was the final episode of the war.

Felice Beato (British (born Italy), Venice 1832-1909 Luxor) and James Robertson (British, 1813-1881)
[Dome of the Rock, Jerusalem]
1856-1857
Albumen silver print
Image: 9 in. × 11 1/4 in. (22.9 × 28.6cm)
Mount: 17 5/8 in. × 22 1/2 in. (44.8 × 57.2cm)
Gift of Joyce F. Menschel, 2013
The Metropolitan Museum of Art

This detailed print showing the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem provides a sense of the structure’s natural and architectural surroundings. Felice Beato depicted the religious site from a pilgrim’s point of view – walls and roads are given visual priority and stand between the viewer and the shrine. Holy sites such as this were the earliest and most common subjects of travel photography. Beato made multiple journeys to the Mediterranean and North Africa, and he is perhaps best known for photographing East Asia in the 1880s.

R.C. Montgomery (American, active 1850s)
[Self-Portrait (?)]
1850s
Daguerreotype with applied colour
Image: 3 1/4 × 4 1/4 in. (8.3 × 10.8cm)
William L. Schaeffer Collection, Promised Gift of Jennifer and Philip Maritz, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary
The Metropolitan Museum of Art

The insouciant subject here may be the daguerreotypist himself, posing in bed for a promotional picture or a private joke. His rumpled suit and haphazard hairstyle affect intimacy, perhaps in an effort to showcase an informal portrait style. Because they required long exposure times, daguerreotypes often captured sitters at their most stilted. With this surprising picture, the maker might have hoped to attract clients who were in search of a more novel or natural likeness.

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Exhibition: ‘Hilma af Klint – Artist, Researcher, Medium’ at Moderna Museet Malmö

Exhibition dates: 4th April 2020 – 11th April 2021

Curators: Iris Müller-Westermann and Milena Høgsberg

Hilma af Klint (Swedish, 1862-1944) 'Serie WU/Rosen, Grupp II, The Eros Series, No. 2' 1907 from the exhibition 'Hilma af Klint – Artist, Researcher, Medium' at Moderna Museet Malmö, April 2020 - April 2021

Hilma af Klint (Swedish, 1862-1944)
Serie WU/Rosen, Grupp II, The Eros Series, No. 2
1907
© Stiftelsen Hilma af Klints Verk
Photo: Albin Dahlström/Moderna Museet

The third secret

Af Klint is one my favourite painters. At such an early date (preceding any man), she created new forms from her imagination, abstract forms, that connect to, and exist, on a celestial plane.

af Klint studied Theosophy and Rosicrucianism, expanding her consciousness, trusting that “knowledge of a deeper spiritual reality could be achieved through focused attention on intuition, meditation, and other means of transcending normal human consciousness.” All from 1906-1907 onwards.

Her paintings and drawings emit an aura, her aura “drawn” into a cosmic aura, as a revelation of spirit – invisible dimensions that exist beyond the visible world – a connection from our reality to the spirit of the cosmos. Childhood; youth; adulthood; primordial chaos; eros; evolution; the altar and the tree of knowledge. All knowledge that allows us access to the divine, that opens us not to phenomena, but to the noumenal experiences of the felt, spiritual sublime.

Imagine af Klint painting her huge canvases on the floor of her studio, so many years before Jackson Pollock attempted the same connection to altered consciousness, and creating these symbolic and sensation/al masterpieces. Then to have the prescience to understand that the world was not ready for her art, would not understand it, had no way of comprehending the enormity of her artistic enquiry. To leave “a radical body of work – unprecedented in its use of colour, scale and composition – which she hoped future audiences might be better able to sense and decode.” All in hope!

Leaving everything to her nephew, she instructed him not to even open the boxes of her abstract art (which she never exhibited during her lifetime) until 20 years after her death in the late 1960s. In the ultimate irony, in 1970 her entire collection was offered to the Moderna Museet as a gift – the very museum in which this exhibition is being staged – AND THEY REFUSED THE GIFT.

What were the big wigs and curators (probably all men) at the Moderna Museet thinking in 1970? Didn’t they use their eyes, didn’t they sense the bravery of af Klint’s artistic enquiry, or feel the ecstatic (involving an experience of mystic self-transcendence) ecstasy of her work – that rapture of an emotional divine!

I am SO happy her work is now being acclaimed. For the force was truly with her.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

The exhibition opens with the joyful series dedicated to Eros, the Greek god of love, associated with fertility and desire. Full of life, these pink-hued works take up the theme of polarity between male and female as the driving force of evolution. These abstract works completely differ from the classic representation of Eros.

In the series “The Seven-Pointed Star” (1908), Hilma af Klint experimented with a greater economy of line, depicting spiralling energy expanding outwards and forming new centres. As is the case with most of af Klint’s work, there is no singular meaning. Seven is a sacred number in many cultures, associated with divine order, and also the eternal harmony of the universe. In Theosophy the star cluster, known as the Seven Stars or the Pleiades, transmits spiritual energy that eventually reaches the human plane.

Hilma af Klint (Swedish, 1862-1944) 'Serie WU/Rosen, Grupp II, The Eros Series, No. 8' 1907 from the exhibition 'Hilma af Klint – Artist, Researcher, Medium' at Moderna Museet Malmö, April 2020 - April 2021

Hilma af Klint (Swedish, 1862-1944)
Serie WU/Rosen, Grupp II, The Eros Series, No. 8
1907
© Stiftelsen Hilma af Klints Verk

During the spring and summer of 2020, Moderna Museet Malmö will give its visitors an opportunity to become acquainted with the fascinating and ground-breaking Swedish artist Hilma af Klint in a comprehensive presentation. The exhibition will present, among other works, the series “The Ten Largest,” which will be shown in it’s entirety.

Hilma af Klint (1862-1944) was a pioneer of abstraction. As early as 1906 she had developed a rich, symbolic imagery that preceded the more broadly recognised emergence of abstract art. Since her retrospective at Moderna Museet in Stockholm in 2013, interest in the Swedish artist has increased all over the world. The exhibition “Hilma af Klint – Artist, Researcher, Medium” further expands our understanding of this groundbreaking artist and researcher.

Hilma af Klint studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm from 1882 to 1887 where she focused on naturalistic landscape and portrait paintings. Like many of her contemporaries, af Klint also had a keen interest in invisible dimensions that exist beyond the visible world. When painting she was convinced that she was in contact with higher consciousness, which conveyed messages through her. Her major series, “The Paintings for the Temple”, became the crux of this artistic inquiry.

The exhibition centres on three aspects of Hilma af Klint’s life and interests – as artist, researcher and medium – that are key to revealing and understanding her art. With few exceptions, af Klint never exhibited her abstract works during her lifetime. Yet she left us with a radical body of work – unprecedented in its use of colour, scale and composition – which she hoped future audiences might be better able to sense and decode.

Hilma af Klint made paintings for the future, and that future is now.

Artist and Medium

Like many of her contemporaries at the turn of the twentieth century, Hilma af Klint sought to expand her consciousness in order to gain a wider perspective on what we perceive as reality. Consciousness remains one of the deepest mysteries in our time, a subject eagerly explored in neurology, psychology, quantum physics and epigenetics. As part of her spiritual practice, af Klint meditated, adhered to a vegetarian diet, and studied Theosophy and Rosicrucianism. These two esoteric schools thought knowledge of a deeper spiritual reality could be achieved through focused attention on intuition, meditation, and other means of transcending normal human consciousness. Over a period of ten years, af Klint met weekly with four other women, known as De fem (“The Five”). They trained their capability to access or “channel” higher levels of consciousness through contact with spiritual guides known as De Höga (“The Masters”). Af Klint received a specific assignment, which she accepted, known as “The Paintings for the Temple”. She worked throughout her life to understand the deeper meaning embedded in these works.

“The pictures were painted directly through me, without any preliminary drawings and with great force. I had no idea what the paintings were supposed to depict; nevertheless, I worked swiftly and surely, without changing a single brushstroke.”

The artist described how she painted the series as a medium, where shapes, colours and compositions came to her. Although af Klint perceived these works as flowing uninhibitedly through her guided hand, she very much applied herself and all her skills in the process: she worked methodically and sequentially in series, divided into thematically and formally focused groups exploring different aspects of cosmic and human evolution.

The Paintings for the Temple

Between 1906 and 1915, Hilma af Klint created “The Paintings for the Temple”. It comprises 193 paintings and drawings, divided into series and groups. Works produced between 1906 and 1908 are on view in the Turbine Hall; works from the second part of the series from 1912 to 1915 are on view in the upstairs galleries at Moderna Museet Malmö.

The overall theme of the series is to convey different aspects of human evolution, instigated by polarity. “The Paintings for the Temple” also thematises different stages of development that every human being goes through during life on earth. The temple in the title refers not only to a physical building, which af Klint imagined would house the work, but also to the body as a temple for the soul.

Text from the Moderna Museet Malmö website

Hilma af Klint (Swedish, 1862-1944)
The Ten Largest, No. 1, Childhood
1907
© Stiftelsen Hilma af Klints Verk

Hilma af Klint (Swedish, 1862-1944)
The Ten Largest, No. 2, Childhood
1907
© Stiftelsen Hilma af Klints Verk

Like many of the other series within “The Paintings for the Temple”, “The Ten Largest” seems somehow unfettered by limitations of place and time. Across ten canvases, swirling shapes in soft pastel colours rhythmically interact with cursive letters, forming a kind of visual poem. Petals, ovaries, flowers and spirals pulsate in constant sparks of creation. Hilma af Klint attributed this series to the exploration of the human life cycle, from childhood and youth to adulthood and old age. The artist created the ten works between November and December of 1907 on large sheets of paper later glued onto canvas. Given the unusual scale of the works, it is likely that af Klint painted each canvas, while it was lying flat on her studio floor.

Text from the Moderna Museet Malmö website

Hilma af Klint (Swedish, 1862-1944)
The Ten Largest, No. 3, Youth
1907
© Stiftelsen Hilma af Klints Verk

Hilma af Klint (Swedish, 1862-1944)
The Ten Largest, No. 4, Youth
1907
© Stiftelsen Hilma af Klints Verk

Hilma af Klint (Swedish, 1862-1944)
The Ten Largest, No. 5, Adulthood
1907
© Stiftelsen Hilma af Klints Verk

Hilma af Klint (Swedish, 1862-1944)
The Ten Largest, No. 6
1907
© Stiftelsen Hilma af Klints Verk
Photo: Albin Dahlström/Moderna Museet

Hilma af Klint (Swedish, 1862-1944)
The Ten Largest, No. 7, Adulthood
1907
© Stiftelsen Hilma af Klints Verk

Hilma af Klint (Swedish, 1862-1944)
The Ten Largest, No. 8, Adulthood
1907
© Stiftelsen Hilma af Klints Verk

On June 16, Moderna Museet Malmö opened again after having been closed for a time in response to the Coronavirus pandemic. Finally, Hilma af Klint – Artist, Researcher, Medium, a comprehensive presentation of the artist with 230 works occupying the entire museum building, can be experienced by the public.

Hilma af Klint (1862-1944) was an artist who allowed herself to take a broader perspective on life and who wanted to open up new ways of looking at reality. Her achievement as a pioneer of abstract art has been celebrated before, but with the exhibition Hilma af Klint – Artist, Researcher, Medium, Moderna Museet Malmö now wants to offer new insights into the artist’s systematic research.

“Hilma af Klint radically turned away from the portrayal of a visible reality,” says Iris Müller-Westermann. “For her, art making was about visualising contexts that lie beyond what the eye can see. Af Klint was convinced that she was connected to a higher level of consciousness when she was making her works. The exhibition argues that her spiritual practice was inextricably linked to her artistic practice. First and foremost, however, Hilma af Klint believed in the power of images.”

The whole Moderna Museet Malmö has been transformed into Hilma af Klint’s temple. The exhibition spans the artist’s entire career, and the selection of works examines the artist’s research into nature and the links between the visible and invisible worlds. In addition, the comprehensive exhibition touches on the artist’s own thoughts about her work and its various methods.

“Hilma af Klint had an inquisitive mind,” says Milena Høgsberg. “For her, painting was both an artistic activity and a spiritual one. When she was painting she meditatively allowed something bigger to pass through her and manifest itself in works of art. She then spent her life, systematically and analytically trying to understand the meaning behind her paintings, drawings, and writings.”

The heart of the exhibition are The Paintings for the Temple (1906-1915), which the artist considered her most important works. They also include the magnificent series The Ten Largest from 1907.

In conjunction with the exhibition, a comprehensive and richly illustrated catalogue has been produced, with essays by Iris Müller-Westermann, Milena Høgsberg in conversation with Tim Rudbøg, Hedvig Martin, Ernst Peter Fischer, and Anne Sophie Jørgensen. The exhibition catalogue has been published in two editions – one in Swedish and one in English.

Hilma af Klint – Artist, Researcher, Medium will be on view at Moderna Museet Malmö until September 27, 2020.

Text from the Moderna Museet Malmö website

Installation view, 'Hilma af Klint', Moderna Museet Malmö, 2020

Installation views, Hilma af Klint, Moderna Museet Malmö, 2020
Photos: Helene Toresdotter/Moderna Museet

Hilma af Klint (Swedish, 1862-1944)
De tio största, nr 9, Ålderdomen, grupp IV
1907
© Stiftelsen Hilma af Klints Verk
Photo: Albin Dahlström/Moderna Museet

Hilma af Klint (Swedish, 1862-1944)
Serie SUW/UW, Grupp IX/UW, nr 25, The Dove, No. 1
1915
© Stiftelsen Hilma af Klints Verk

“The Dove” (1915) depicts the creation process. It draws upon Christian symbols such as the dove for spirit, peace and unity. It also thematises the battle between the forces of light and darkness through the allegory of Saint George and the Dragon.

Hilma af Klint (Swedish, 1862-1944)
The Dove, no. 9
1915
© Stiftelsen Hilma af Klints Verk
Photo: Albin Dahlström/Moderna Museet

Installation view, Hilma af Klint, Moderna Museet Malmö, 2020 showing at left The Dove, No. 1, and at right The Dove, No. 9
Photo: Helene Toresdotter/Moderna Museet

Hilma af Klint (Swedish, 1862-1944)
The Large Figure Paintings, No. 5
1907
© Stiftelsen Hilma af Klints Verk

Hilma af Klint (Swedish, 1862-1944)
Group I, Primordial Chaos, No. 10
1906
© Stiftelsen Hilma af Klints Verk

Hilma af Klint (Swedish, 1862-1944) 'Group I, Primordial Chaos, No. 15' 1906-1907

Hilma af Klint (Swedish, 1862-1944)
Primordial Chaos, No. 15
1906-1907
© Stiftelsen Hilma af Klints Verk

“Primordial Chaos” (1906-1907) is devoted to the creation of the physical world. From the original unity a polarised world arose out of spirit, shown here as feminine (blue and the eyelet) and masculine (yellow and the hook), and also as W (material) and U (spirit). These works are full of spirals of energy and sparks of creation, of symbols of fertility and rebirth (sperm, snakes, crosses).

Installation view, Hilma af Klint, Moderna Museet Malmö, 2020 showing at left works from the series Evolution, and at centre works from the series Primordial Chaos
Photo: Helene Toresdotter/Moderna Museet

Hilma af Klint (Swedish, 1862-1944)
Group VI, The Evolution, No. 7
1908
© Stiftelsen Hilma af Klints Verk

The theme of the evolution of consciousness runs throughout “The Paintings for the Temple”. In the series “Evolution” (1908), the process of development is shown through the interplay between polarities: male and female, light and darkness, good and evil. Compositionally these works strive to find a balance, in horizontal and vertical mirroring. Hilma af Klint’s exploration seems aligned with the theosophist notion of evolution as a spiritual process, extending beyond the biological perspective on human development that, with the publishing of Darwin’s “The Evolution of the Species” fifty years earlier, had gained widespread notoriety. This series ends the first part of “The Paintings for the Temple”, as the commission was paused between 1908 and 1912.

Text from the Moderna Museet Malmö website

Hilma af Klint (Swedish, 1862-1944)
Group VI, The Evolution, No. 9
1908
© Stiftelsen Hilma af Klints Verk

Hilma af Klint (Swedish, 1862-1944) 'Group VI, The Evolution, No. 10' 1908

Hilma af Klint (Swedish, 1862-1944)
The Evolution, No. 10
1908
© Stiftelsen Hilma af Klints Verk

Installation view, Hilma af Klint, Moderna Museet Malmö, 2020 showing work from the series The Swan
Photo: Helene Toresdotter/Moderna Museet

Hilma af Klint (Swedish, 1862-1944)
Serie SUW/UW, Grupp IX/SUW, nr 1., The Swan, No. 1
1915
© Stiftelsen Hilma af Klints Verk

When Hilma af Klint resumed her work on “The Paintings for the Temple” in 1912, her abstraction became more geometric in nature, and Christian symbols became increasingly pronounced. When working, the artist was still in contact with higher planes of consciousness but was encouraged to interpret spiritual messages more freely.

Viewed in sequence, “The Swan” (1914-1915) has a distinct visual rhythm. Often a horizontal line breaks the canvases into two sections where opposite forces meet – light and dark, male and female, life and death. These poles unfold as a black and white swan. Eventually, figuration gives way to abstraction in a fuller spectrum of colour. In the final work in the series, the swan pair returns, unified at the centre, intertwined yet distinct and balanced as male and female poles.

Text from the Moderna Museet Malmö website

Hilma af Klint (Swedish, 1862-1944) 'The Swan, No. 8' 1915

Hilma af Klint (Swedish, 1862-1944)
Serie SUW/UW, Grupp IX/SUW, The Swan, No. 8
1915
© Stiftelsen Hilma af Klints Verk

Hilma af Klint (Swedish, 1862-1944)
Serie SUW/UW, Grupp IX/SUW, The Swan, No. 9
1915
© Stiftelsen Hilma af Klints Verk

Hilma af Klint (Swedish, 1862-1944)
Serie SUW/UW, Grupp IX/SUW, The Swan, No. 16
1915
© Stiftelsen Hilma af Klints Verk

Hilma af Klint (Swedish, 1862-1944)
Serie SUW/UW, Grupp IX/SUW, The Swan, No. 17
1915
© Stiftelsen Hilma af Klints Verk

Hilma af Klint (Swedish, 1862-1944)
Serie SUW/UW, Grupp IX/SUW, The Swan, No. 21
1915
© Stiftelsen Hilma af Klints Verk

Hilma af Klint (Swedish, 1862-1944)
Serie SUW/UW, Grupp IX/SUW, The Swan, No. 23
1915
© Stiftelsen Hilma af Klints Verk

Installation view, Hilma af Klint, Moderna Museet Malmö, 2020 showing work from the series The Swan
Photo: Helene Toresdotter/Moderna Museet

Hilma af Klint (Swedish, 1862-1944)
Altarpiece Grupp X, No. 1
1915
© Stiftelsen Hilma af Klints Verk

Hilma af Klint (Swedish, 1862-1944)
Altarpiece Group X, No. 2
1915
Oil and metal leaf on canvas
93.75 x 70.5 inches
© Stiftelsen Hilma af Klints Verk

Hilma af Klint understood the three powerful “Altarpieces” (1915) as the essence of “The Paintings for the Temple”. These works capture the two directions of spiritual evolution: the ascension from the material world back to unity (the triangle pointing to the golden circle) and the descension from divine unity into the diversity of the material world (the inverted triangle). In the third and final painting, a small six-pointed star within the large golden circle is an esoteric symbol for the universe.

Text from the Moderna Museet Malmö website

Installation views, Hilma af Klint, Moderna Museet Malmö, 2020 showing work from the series Altarpieces
Photo: Helene Toresdotter/Moderna Museet

Hilma af Klint (Swedish, 1862-1944)
Altarpiece Grupp X, No. 3
1915
© Stiftelsen Hilma af Klints Verk

Hilma af Klint (Swedish, 1862-1944)
Parsifal Grupp I, No. 1
1916
© Stiftelsen Hilma af Klints Verk

The title of this series from 1916 may refer to the legend of King Arthur, in which Parsifal, one of the Knights of the Round Table, takes part in the quest for the Holy Grail. On 144 sheets, of which a selection is on view, Hilma af Klint depicts the search for knowledge as a journey through various levels of consciousness. In the first image this is marked by a winding path through the darkness towards the white light at the centre of the spiral. In other works, a young boy, shown in different ages, attempts to balance between matter and spirit, up and down. This exploration is continued in radically conceptual yellow monochromes, inscribed with words marking direction: “Nedåt” (downward), “Framåt” (forward), “Bakåt” (backward), “Utåt” (outward) and “Inåt” (inward). Parsifal’s journey also mirrors the artist’s own process in the inward journey she has undertaken by accepting, completing and trying to understand “The Paintings for the Temple”.

Text from the Moderna Museet Malmö website

Hilma af Klint (Swedish, 1862-1944)
Parsifal Grupp II, No. 69
1916
© Stiftelsen Hilma af Klints Verk

Hilma af Klint (Swedish, 1862-1944)
Parsifal Grupp III, No. 110
1916
© Stiftelsen Hilma af Klints Verk

Hilma af Klint (Swedish, 1862-1944)
Parsifal Grupp III, No. 117
1916
© Stiftelsen Hilma af Klints Verk

Hilma af Klint (Swedish, 1862-1944)
No title, No. 22
1917
© Stiftelsen Hilma af Klints Verk

De Fem – Drawings

Between 1896 and 1906, Hilma af Klint and four other women formed the group “De Fem” (“The Five”). They met weekly to meditate, read spiritual literature and accesses higher consciousness through communication with spirit guides, “De Höga” (“The Masters”). These meetings were meticulously recorded in writing and led even to automatic drawings. The women took turns to wield the pen during their sessions, but individual authorship was not important, and rarely indicated on the drawings. The pastel works on view exhibit elements that recur in af Klint’s later work – for example, spiral, stylised floral motifs and other geometrical forms.

Installation views, Hilma af Klint, Moderna Museet Malmö, 2020 showing at bottom left, the Tree of Knowledge series 1915; and at centre right, work from Late Series
Photo: Helene Toresdotter/Moderna Museet

New Gallery is dedicated to Hilma af Klint the researcher, specifically her effort to process and understand the deeper meaning of her spiritually guided work in paintings, drawings and writing, from the 1890s to 1930s. Af Klint had an inquisitive mind. She came from a family of naval officers and nautical cartographers and approached her artistic practice with structured rigour. While she had the courage to open herself to let something larger flow through her while painting, she approached the resulting body of work in a systematic and analytic way.

Throughout her life, af Klint took copious notes, regarding her experiences and interpretations of the messages she apprehended through her spiritual practice. After completing “The Paintings for the Temple”, the artist tried to methodically gain an overview of her work and its possible meanings. In the spirit of a scientific researcher, she edited and reorganised her early notes, created a dictionary of the symbols that appeared in her works and catalogued all the works in “The Paintings for the Temple” in a portable portfolio. Remarkably, af Klint understood all of her works of art as a unified project – a notion radical for the time, but also a testament to the fact that she believed her work to have a higher purpose.

Text from the Moderna Museet Malmö website

Hilma af Klint (Swedish, 1862-1944)
Tree of Knowledge, No. 3
1915
© Stiftelsen Hilma af Klints Verk

In the series the “Tree of Knowledge” (1913-1915), Hilma af Klint maps the different spiritual planes of existence in order to picture the complexity of existence and the connection between the earth and the divine. In later series like “Series IV” (1920) and “VII” (1920), af Klint seems to focus her research on symbols such as the cross, the circle and the triangle as well as the six-pointed star and processes these sacred symbols instigate. Many of these works are characterised by a geometric idiom and involve analysis on both the macrocosmic and microcosmic level.

Text from the Moderna Museet Malmö website

Hilma af Klint (Swedish, 1862-1944) 'Tree of Knowledge, No. 5' (Kunskapens träd, nr 5) 1915

Hilma af Klint (Swedish, 1862-1944)
Tree of Knowledge, No. 5
1915
© Stiftelsen Hilma af Klints Verk

Hilma af Klint (Swedish, 1862-1944)
Group 2, No title, No. 14a – No. 21
1919
© Stiftelsen Hilma af Klints Verk

Installation view, Hilma af Klint, Moderna Museet Malmö, 2020

The Blue Books

In 1917, Hilma af Klint had a studio built on Munsö, where for the first time she had the possibility of seeing all “The Paintings for the Temple’s” different series in their entirety. Perhaps this is what precipitated the creation of the ten blue-bound books, a portable overview of “The Paintings for the Temple”. On each spread, a work is represented by a black-and-white photograph and a watercolour intended to give an accurate impression of the original. In some of the watercolours, af Klint adds close-ups and lets us examine the work as if through a microscope in order to further clarify what was not clear enough in the paintings. The works were organised in concordance with the order of the series. This tremendous effort demonstrates that af Klint wanted to reinvestigate and reflect on her life’s work in a systematic way and perhaps to share it more easily with others.

Text from the Moderna Museet Malmö website

Hilma af Klint (Swedish, 1862-1944)
The Atom, No. 5
1917
© Stiftelsen Hilma af Klints Verk
Photo: Albin Dahlström/Moderna Museet

In “The Atom Series” from 1917, Hilma af Klint explored another aspect of life that could not be perceived by the human eye: the world of atoms and their energy, a science popular at the time. Apart from the first two drawings, all feature two renderings of an atom: a large one in the lower right, which represents the energy of a physical atom, and a smaller one in the upper left, which represents the atom on an etheric or metaphysical plane. In handwritten notes, af Klint describes the atom as embodying human properties. For the theosophists, whom the artist studied, the discovery of atoms, sub-particle waves etc., were seen as proof of an invisible reality beyond the perceptible world. For af Klint, atoms and thus humans were spiritual entities connected to the centre of the universe.

Hilma af Klint (Swedish, 1862-1944)
Violet Blossoms with Guidelines, Series I
1919
© Stiftelsen Hilma af Klints Verk
Photo: Albin Dahlström/Moderna Museet

Botanical Studies

Throughout her life, Hilma af Klint had a deep interest in nature and botany. Her early botanical studies up to the late watercolours, convey that she was not only a keen observer, but also possessed a rigorously analytic mind, which she could apply in her endeavour to perceive aspects of existence beyond the visible.

Her botanical studies reveal a shifting focus from naturalistic renderings of plant-life as she observed it, to renderings intended to express the spiritual essence or presence beyond the visible body. In “The Violet, Blossoms with Guidelines, Series 1” (1919) she combines naturalistic renderings of the flower with a diagram of its essence. In “Blumen, Moose, Flechten” [Flowers, Moss, Lichens] (1919-1920), represented here as a facsimile, af Klint continues with her systematic investigation of the plant kingdom. She combines a diagram with the plant’s Latin name and the date of investigation, alongside properties such as joy, humility and devotion, which one can attempt to come in contact with through contemplation on the plant in question. By 1923, af Klint made yet another stylistic shift, influenced by Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophical views on aesthetics and her visits to the The Goetheanum, the centre for the anthroposophical movement in Dornach, Switzerland. Here af Klint gave up painting geometric compositions and began instead portraying the spiritual dimension of nature in fluid watercolours.

Hilma af Klint (Swedish, 1862-1944)
Vid betraktandet av blommor och träd (When considering flowers and trees)
1922
© Stiftelsen Hilma af Klints Verk
Photo: Albin Dahlström/Moderna Museet

Hilma af Klint (Swedish, 1862-1944)
Titel saknas
1924
© Stiftelsen Hilma af Klints Verk
Photo: Albin Dahlström/Moderna Museet

Moderna Museet Malmö
Gasverksgatan 22 in Malmö

Moderna Museet Malmö is located in the city centre of Malmö. Ten minutes walk from the Central station, five minutes walk from Gustav Adolfs torg and Stortorget.

Opening hours:
Tuesday, Thursday – Sunday 11-17
Wednesday 11-19
Mondays closed

Moderna Museet Malmö website

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European photographic research tour exhibition: ‘Berenice Abbott: Portraits of Modernity’ at Huis Marseille, Amsterdam Part 2

Exhibition dates: 7th September – 1st December, 2019

Visited September 2019 posted June 2020

Curator: Estrella de Diego, Professor of Modern Art at the Complutense University of Madrid

Installation view of the exhibition Berenice Abbott: Portraits of Modernity at Huis Marseille, Amsterdam
Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan

Old New York, new New York

This was an impressive exhibition from this powerhouse of a photographer in that most beautiful of galleries, Huis Marseille in Amsterdam. While her debt to that French master photographer Eugène Atget (1857-1927) is acknowledged through Abbott’s statement that she planned “to do for New York what Atget did for Paris,” Abbott’s photographs and her ‘point of view’ differ significantly to that of her Parisian hero.

Inflections of the influence of the Parisian master are present in the work, but in the project Changing New York Abbott develops a unique visual language through her representation of city life. Her photographs of shop fronts are more static and formal than that of Atget, more interested in the multiplicities of form than they are of reflections in glass, or ghostly people standing in doorways. Further, Atget would never have taken a photograph such as Gunsmith and Police Department, 6 Centre Market Place, Manhattan (1937, below) because the angle of the composition looking upwards is too severe, too modernist. Similarly, the placement by Abbott of the lamppost and U.S. Mail box in Old Law Tenements, 35-47 East 1st Street (1937, below) as the focus of attention, make this photograph uniquely her own.

Abbott photographs the co-mingled elements of old New York and new New York – the crowded tenements, rushing people, and “grand canyons” lined with monolithic skyscrapers of the bustling metropolis – as a city caught in the shadows of a piercing New York light. If you have been to New York you know that the city has that light, a hard, clinical light that bounces off surfaces until it sinks into the deepening shadows and recesses of overshadowed buildings. In her vital, still, intense, renditions of the cityscape Abbott’s photographs capture this light.

But what really changes her attitude (or altitude you might say) to the city is Abbott’s depiction of those edifices of modernism that are the crowning glory of New York: the skyscraper. Paraphrasing Karen Chambers from her article, “Paris to New York: Photographs by Eugène Atget and Berenice Abbott,” we can say that Abbott’s photographs of skyscrapers are different from the human scale of Atget’s photographs and of Abbott’s of a disappearing New York. Whether looking up from the bowls of the city (Canyon: Broadway and Exchange Place, 1936 below); across at the regimented forms of building (New York Telephone Company’s Lower Broadway Building, 1930-31 below); or down from a God-like perspective (Waterfront, from roof of Irving Trust Company Building, 1938 below), Abbott’s photographs of skyscrapers and the spaces they inhabit perfectly capture the layered forms and walls of isolation of the contemporary working metropolis, complete with Tempo of the City automatons.

Through the meritocracy of her talent, Abbott’s vision soars and plunges, meticulously, into the utopian / dystopian fabric of the city, Atget influences subsumed into American light, form and culture… the brooding hulks of towering skyscrapers; the skeletal form of bridges; and Abbott’s clear persistence of vision – seeing modernity clearly, with focus, in focus.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

All iPhone photographs by Dr Marcus Bunyan. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image. See Part 1 of the posting.

“When Abbott returned to New York in 1929, she planned “to do for New York what Atget did for Paris.” The project became known as ‘Changing New York’, and in her application for funding from the Federal Art Project (FAP), a part of the Farm Security Administration, best known for sending photographers, including Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans, into the American heartland to document rural poverty, she wrote that the purpose of the project was “to preserve for the future an accurate and faithful chronicle in photographs of the changing aspect of the world’s greatest metropolis”.”

Karen S. Chambers. “”Paris to New York: Photographs by Eugène Atget and Berenice Abbott,” Taft Museum of Art, through January 20, 2019,” on the AEQAI website October 28th, 2018 [Online] Cited 08/06/2020

Installation view of the exhibition Berenice Abbott: Portraits of Modernity at Huis Marseille, Amsterdam showing Abbott’s Gunsmith and Police Department Headquarters 1937
Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) 'Gunsmith and Police Department Headquarters' February 4, 1937 (installation view)

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Gunsmith and Police Department Headquarters (installation view)
February 4, 1937
Gelatin silver print
International Center of Photography
Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) 'Gunsmith and Police Department, 6 Centre Market Place, Manhattan' February 4, 1937 from the exhibition 'Berenice Abbott: Portraits of Modernity' at Huis Marseille, Amsterdam, Sept - Dec, 2019

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Gunsmith and Police Department, 6 Centre Market Place, Manhattan
February 4, 1937
Gelatin silver print
Wikipedia Commons, Public domain

Installation view of the exhibition Berenice Abbott: Portraits of Modernity at Huis Marseille, Amsterdam
Photos: Dr Marcus Bunyan

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) 'New York Harbour' 1938 (installation view)

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
New York Harbour (installation view)
1938
Gelatin silver print
International Center of Photography
Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) 'Waterfront, from roof of Irving Trust Company Building' 1938 (installation view)

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Waterfront, from roof of Irving Trust Company Building (installation view)
1938
Gelatin silver print
The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, Photography Collection
The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) 'Daily News Building, 42nd Street between 2nd and 3rd Avenues, Manhattan' 1935 (installation view)

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Daily News Building, 42nd Street between 2nd and 3rd Avenues, Manhattan
1935
Gelatin silver print
The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, Photography Collection
The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) 'Daily News Building, 42nd Street between 2nd and 3rd Avenues, Manhattan' 1935 from the exhibition 'Berenice Abbott: Portraits of Modernity' at Huis Marseille, Amsterdam, Sept - Dec, 2019

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) 'New York Telephone Company’s Lower Broadway Building' 1930-31 (installation view)

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
New York Telephone Company’s Lower Broadway Building (installation view)
1930-1931
Gelatin silver print
Courtesy of Howard Greenberg Gallery
Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) 'New York Telephone Company Building, 140 West Street, Manhattan' 1936 (installation view)

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
New York Telephone Company Building, 140 West Street, Manhattan (installation view)
1936
Gelatin silver print
The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, Photography Collection
The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Canyon: Broadway and Exchange Place
July 16, 1936
Gelatin silver print
The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, Photography Collection
The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan

Installation views of the exhibition Berenice Abbott: Portraits of Modernity at Huis Marseille, Amsterdam
Photos: Dr Marcus Bunyan

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) 'R.C.A. building' c. 1932 (installation view)

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
R.C.A. building (installation view)
c. 1932 (printed before 1950)
Gelatin silver print
Courtesy of Howard Greenberg Gallery
Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) 'Manhattan Skyline: I. South Street and Jones Lane' 1936 (installation view)

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Manhattan Skyline: I. South Street and Jones Lane (installation views)
1936
Gelatin silver print
The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, Photography Collection
The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
Photos: Dr Marcus Bunyan

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Manhattan Skyline: I. South Street and Jones Lane
1936
Gelatin silver print
The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, Photography Collection
The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
Public domain

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) 'Old Law Tenements, 35-47 East 1st Street' February 11, 1937 (installation view)

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Old Law Tenements, 35-47 East 1st Street (installation view)
February 11, 1937
Gelatin silver print
Courtesy of Howard Greenberg Gallery
Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Old Law Tenements, 35-47 East 1st Street
February 11, 1937
Gelatin silver print
Public domain

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) 'Shelter on the Waterfront, Coenties Slip, Pier 5, East River, Manhattan' 1938 (installation view)

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Shelter on the Waterfront, Coenties Slip, Pier 5, East River, Manhattan (installation view)
1938
Gelatin silver print
The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, Photography Collection
The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) 'Provincetown Playhouse, 133 MacDougal Street, Manhattan' December 29, 1936 (installation view)

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Provincetown Playhouse, 133 MacDougal Street, Manhattan (installation view)
December 29, 1936
Gelatin silver print
Courtesy of Howard Greenberg Gallery
Photos: Dr Marcus Bunyan

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) 'Country Store Interior' October 11, 1935 (installation view)

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Country Store Interior (installation view)
October 11, 1935
Gelatin silver print
Gift of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1948
Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Country Store Interior
October 11, 1935
Gelatin silver print
Public domain

Installation views of the exhibition Berenice Abbott: Portraits of Modernity at Huis Marseille, Amsterdam
Photos: Dr Marcus Bunyan

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) 'Charles Lane, between West and Washington Street' September 20, 1938 (installation view)

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Charles Lane, between West and Washington Street (installation view)
September 20, 1938
Gelatin silver print
The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, Photography Collection
The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Charles Lane, between West and Washington Street
September 20, 1938
Gelatin silver print
The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, Photography Collection
The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
Public domain

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) 'Newsstand, 32nd Street and 3rd Avenue, Manhattan' 1935 (installation view)

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Newsstand, 32nd Street and 3rd Avenue, Manhattan (installation view)
1935
Gelatin silver print
The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, Photography Collection
The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Newsstand, 32nd Street and 3rd Avenue, Manhattan
1935
Gelatin silver print
The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, Photography Collection
The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
Public domain

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) 'Cheese Store, 276 Bleecker Street, Manhattan' 1937 (installation view)

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Cheese Store, 276 Bleecker Street, Manhattan (installation view)
1937
Gelatin silver print
The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, Photography Collection
The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan

New York must have seem to Abbott extremely photogenic, with its skyscrapers and street vendors on Hester Street on the Lower East Side. It is a city of contrasts; of light and shade, and bustling squares; of all manner of shoes overflowing with bread, bric-a-brac, ricotta in Little Italy, rope, metal objects… Abbott depicts a city that heralds the consumer society and its abundance – its excess, even.

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Cheese Store, 276 Bleecker Street, Manhattan
1937
Gelatin silver print
The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, Photography Collection
The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
Public domain

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) 'A & P (Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Co.), 246 3rd Avenue, Manhattan' 1936 (installation view)

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
A & P (Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Co.), 246 3rd Avenue, Manhattan (installation view)
1936
Gelatin silver print
The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, Photography Collection
The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) 'Hardware Store, 316-318 Bowery' 1938 (installation view)

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Hardware Store, 316-318 Bowery (installation view)
1938
Gelatin silver print
Courtesy of Howard Greenberg Gallery
Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) 'Pingpank Barber Shop, 413 Bleecker Street, Manhattan' 1938 (installation view)

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Pingpank Barber Shop, 413 Bleecker Street, Manhattan (installation view)
1938
Gelatin silver print
The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, Photography Collection
The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Pingpank Barber Shop, 413 Bleecker Street, Manhattan
1938
Gelatin silver print
The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, Photography Collection
The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
Public domain

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) 'Sumner Healey Antique Shop, 942 3rd Avenue and 57th Street, Manhattan' 1936 (installation view)

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Sumner Healey Antique Shop, 942 3rd Avenue and 57th Street, Manhattan (installation view)
1936
Gelatin silver print
The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, Photography Collection
The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Sumner Healey Antique Shop, 942 3rd Avenue and 57th Street, Manhattan
1936
Gelatin silver print
The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, Photography Collection
The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
Public domain

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) 'Union Square, 14th Street and Broadway, Manhattan' 1936 (installation view)

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Union Square, 14th Street and Broadway, Manhattan (installation view)
1936
Gelatin silver print
The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, Photography Collection
The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Union Square
July 16, 1936
Gelatin silver photograph
6 7/8 x 8 7/8 in. (17.5 x 22.5cm)
Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn Museum Collection
Public domain

Installation views of the exhibition Berenice Abbott: Portraits of Modernity at Huis Marseille, Amsterdam
Photos: Dr Marcus Bunyan

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) 'Lewis Hine' 1930 (Installation view)

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Lewis Hine (installation view)
1930
Gelatin silver photograph
International Centre of Photography
Purchase with funds provided by the Lois and Bruce Henkel purchase Fund, 1984
Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) 'Edward Hopper' 1949 (installation view)

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Edward Hopper (installation view)
1949
Gelatin silver photograph
International Centre of Photography
Gift of Jonathan A. Berg, 1984
Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan

Installation views of the exhibition Berenice Abbott: Portraits of Modernity at Huis Marseille, Amsterdam
Photos: Dr Marcus Bunyan

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) 'Manhattan Bridge, Manhattan' 1935 (installation view)

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Manhattan Bridge, Manhattan (installation view)
1935
Gelatin silver print
The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, Photography Collection
The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
Photos: Dr Marcus Bunyan

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) 'Penn Station, Manhattan' 1935 (installation view)

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Penn Station, Manhattan (installation view)
1935
Gelatin silver print
The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, Photography Collection
The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
El’: 2nd & 3rd Avenue lines, looking W. from Second & Pearl St., Manhattan
1936
Gelatin silver print
The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, Photography Collection
The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
Public domain

Yousuf Karsh (Armenian-Canadian, 1908-2002) 'Portrait of Berenice Abbott, Monson, Maine' August 1989 (installation view)

Photography Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs
The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
Gift of the photographer

Huis Marseille
Keizersgracht 401
1016 EK Amsterdam
Phone: +31 20 531 89 89

Opening hours
Tue – Sun, 11 – 18 h

Huis Marseille website

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Exhibition: ‘Masculinities: Liberation through Photography’ at the Barbican Art Gallery, London

Exhibition dates: 20th February – 17th May 2020? Coronavirus

Participating artists: Bas Jan Ader, Laurie Anderson, Kenneth Anger, Knut Åsdam, Richard Avedon, Aneta Bartos, Richard Billingham, Cassils, Sam Contis, John Coplans, Jeremy Deller, Rienke Dijkstra, George Dureau, Thomas Dworzak, Hans Eijkelboom, Fouad Elkoury, Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Hal Fischer, Samuel Fosso, Anna Fox, Masahisa Fukase, Sunil Gupta, Peter Hujar, Liz Johnson Artur, Isaac Julien, Kiluanji Kia Henda, Karen Knorr, Deana Lawson, Hilary Lloyd, Robert Mapplethrope, Peter Marlow, Ana Mendieta, Anenette Messager, Duane Michals, Tracey Moffat, Andrew Moisey, Richard Mosse, Adi Nes, Catherine Opie, Elle Pérez, Herb Ritts, Kalen Na’il Roach, Collier Schorr, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Clarie Strand, Michael Subotzky, Larry Sultan, Hank Willis Thomas, Wolfgang Tillmans, Piotr Uklański, Andy Warhol, Karlheinz Weinberger, Marianne Wex, David Wojnarowicz, Akram Zaatari.

Sunil Gupta (Indian, b. 1953) 'Untitled #22' 1976 from the exhibition 'Masculinities: Liberation through Photography' at the Barbican Art Gallery, London, Feb - May, 2020

“As a writer Berger recognised that experience – whether it be personal, historical or aesthetic – will never conform to theories and systems. To read him today is to accept his failures and detours as a unique willingness to take risks.”

John MacDonald. “John Berger,” in the Sydney Morning Herald, 6 June, 2020

D-Construction: deliberate masculinities in a discontinuous world

Reviewers of this exhibition (see quotations below) have noted the preponderance of images of “traditional masculinity” – defined as “idealised, dominant (and) heterosexual” – and the paucity of images that show men as working, intelligent, sensitive human beings, “that men ever earned a living, cooked a meal or read a book… scarcely anything about the heart or intellect. Men are represented here almost entirely in terms of their bodies, sexuality or supposed type.” I need make no further comment. What I will say is that I believe the title of the exhibition to be a misnomer: a person cannot be “liberated” through photography, for photography is only a tool of a personal liberation. Liberation comes through an internal struggle of acceptance (thence liberation), one that is foremost FELT (for example, the double life one leads before you acknowledge that you are gay; or experiencing discrimination aimed at others and by proxy, yourself) and SEEN (the bashing of a mother as seen by a small child). Photographs picture the outcomes of this struggle for liberation, are a tool of that process not, I would argue, liberation itself.

What I can say is that I believe in masculinities, plural. Fluid, shifting, challenging, loving, working, intimate, spiritual masculinities that challenge normalcy and hegemonic masculinity, which is defined as “a practice that legitimises men’s dominant position in society and justifies the subordination of the common male population and women, and other marginalised ways of being a man.”

What I don’t believe in is masculinities, plural, that seek to fit into this [dis]continuous world (for we are born and then die) through the stability of their outward appearance, conforming to theories and systems – personal, historical or aesthetic – without reference to subversion, small intimacies, the toil of work, love and the passion of sexual bodies. In other words, masculinities that are not afraid to push the boundaries of being and becoming. To take risks, to experience, to feel.

While I was overjoyed at the “YES” vote on gay marriage that took place in December 2017 in Australia because I felt it was a victory for love, and equality… another part of me rejected as anathema the concept of a gay person buying into a historically patriarchal, heterosexual and monogamous institution such as marriage – too honour and obey. This is an untenable concept for a person who wants to be liberated. Coming out as I did in 1975, only 6 short years after the Stonewall Riots, the last thing I EVER wanted to be, was to be the same as a “straight” person. I was different. I fought for my difference and still believe in it.

Of course, in 2020 it’s another world. Today we all mix in together. But there is still something about “masculinities”, which in some varieties, have a sense of privilege and entitlement. Of power and control over others; of violence towards women, trans, other men and anyone who threatens their little ego, who leaves them, or jilts them. Their jealousy, their ego, bruised – they are so insecure, so insular, that they can only see their own world, their own minuscule problems (but massive in their eyes), and enforce their will on others.

My advice to “masculinities’, in fact any human being, is to go out, get yourself informed, experience, accept, and be the person that nobody thinks you can be. Be a human being. Examine your inner self, look at your dark side, your other side, your empathetic side, and try and understand the journey that you are on. Then, and only then, you might begin on that great path of personal enlightenment, that golden path on which there is no turning back.

Below I discuss some of these ideas with my good friend Nicholas Henderson, curator and archivist at the Australian Lesbian and Gay Archives.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

Masculinities: Liberation through Photography is a major group exhibition that explores how masculinity is experienced, performed, coded and socially constructed as expressed and documented through photography and film from the 1960s to the present day.

Through the medium of film and photography, this major exhibition considers how masculinity has been coded, performed, and socially constructed from the 1960s to the present day. Examining depictions of masculinity from behind the lens, the Barbican brings together the work of over 50 international artists, photographers and filmmakers including Laurie Anderson, Sunil Gupta, Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Isaac Julien and Catherine Opie.

In the wake of #MeToo the image of masculinity has come into sharper focus, with ideas of toxic and fragile masculinity permeating today’s society. This exhibition charts the often complex and sometimes contradictory representations of masculinities, and how they have developed and evolved over time. Touching on themes including power, patriarchy, queer identity, female perceptions of men, hypermasculine stereotypes, tenderness and the family, the exhibition shows how central photography and film have been to the way masculinities are imagined and understood in contemporary culture.

In fact, while there are a few gender-fluid figures here, they’re vastly outnumbered by manifestations of “traditional masculinity” – defined as “idealised, dominant (and) heterosexual”. Lebanese militiamen (in Fouad Elkoury’s perky full-length portraits from 1980), US marines (in Wolfgang Tillmans’ epic montage Soldiers – The Nineties), Taliban fighters, SS generals, Israel Defence Force grunts, footballers, cowboys and bullfighters fairly spring out of the walls from every direction. And what’s evident from the outset isn’t so much their diversity, as a unifying demeanour: a threatening intentness that comes wherever men are asked to perform their masculinity, but also a childlike vulnerability. …

Masculinity, the viewer is made to feel, criminalises men (Mikhael Subotzky’s images of South African gangsters on morgue slabs); isolates them (Larry Sultan’s poignant image of his elderly father practising his golf swing in his sitting room); renders them stupid (Richard Billingham’s excruciating, but now classic photo essay on his alcoholic father, ‘Ray’s a Laugh’). To be a man, it seems, is to be condemned to endlessly act out archetypal “masculine” behaviour, whether you’re an elderly drunk in a Birmingham high-rise or the elite American students taking part in the shouting competition staged by Irish photographer Richard Mosse.

Mark Hudson. “Does the Barbican’s Masculinities exhibition have important things to say about men?” on the Independent website Friday 21 February 2020 [Online] Cited 03/03/2020

There is not much here about work – unless you count the wall of Hollywood actors playing Nazis. You would never think, from this show, that men ever earned a living, cooked a meal or read a book (though there is a sententious vitrine of ‘Men Only’ magazines). Beyond the exceptions given, there is scarcely anything about the heart or intellect. Men are represented here almost entirely in terms of their bodies, sexuality or supposed type.

Laura Cumming. “Masculinities: Liberation Through Photography review – men as types,” on the Guardian website Sun 23 Feb 2020 [Online] Cited 03/03/2020

“The body can be taken as a reflection of the self because it can and should be treated as something to be worked upon … in order to produce it as a commodity. Overweight, slovenliness and even unfashionability, for example, are now moral disorders,” notes Don Slater

“The state of the body is seen as a reflection of the state of its owner, who is responsible for it and could refashion it. The body can be taken as a reflection of the self because it can and should be treated as something to be worked upon, and generally worked upon using commodities, for example intensively regulated, self-disciplined, scrutinized through diets, fitness regimes, fashion, self-help books and advice, in order to produce it as a commodity. Overweight, slovenliness, and even unfashionability, for example, are now moral disorders; even acute illnesses such as cancer reflect the inadequacy of the self and indeed of its consumption. One gets ill because one has consumed the wrong (unnatural) things and failed to consume the correct (‘natural’) ones: self, body, goods and environment constitute a system of moral choice.”

Slater, Don. Consumer Culture and Modernity. London: Polity Press, 1997, p. 92.

Installation view of Masculinities: Liberation through Photography at Barbican Art Gallery on February 19, 2020 in London, England showing John Coplans’ work Self-portrait, Frieze No 2, Four Panels 1994
Photo: Tristan Fewings/Getty Images for Barbican Art Gallery

John Coplans (British, emigrated America 1960, 1920-2003) 'Self-portrait, Frieze No 2, Four Panels' 1994 from the exhibition 'Masculinities: Liberation through Photography' at the Barbican Art Gallery, London, Feb - May, 2020

John Coplans (British, emigrated America 1960, 1920-2003)
Self-portrait, Frieze No 2, Four Panels
1994
Tate
Presented by the American Fund for the Tate Gallery 2001
Photograph: © John Coplans Trust

Masculinities: Liberation through Photography

Plan of the Masculinities: Liberation through Photography exhibition spaces

Introduction

Masculinities: Liberation through Photography explores the diverse ways masculinity has been experienced, performed, coded and socially constructed in photography and film from the 1960s to the present day.

Simone de Beauvoir’s famous declaration that ‘one is not born a woman, but rather becomes one’ provides a helpful springboard for considering what it means to be a male in today’s world, as well as the place of photography and film in shaping masculinity. What we have thought of as ‘masculine’ has changed considerably throughout history and within different cultures. The traditional social dominance of the male has determined a gender hierarchy which continues to underpin societies around the world.

In Europe and North America, the characteristics and power dynamics of the dominant masculine figure – historically defined by physical size and strength, assertiveness and aggression – though still pervasive today, began to be challenged and transformed in the 1960s. Amid a climate of sexual revolution, struggle for civil rights and raised class consciousness, the growth of the gay rights movement, the period’s counterculture and opposition to the Vietnam War, large sections of society argued for a loosening of the straitjacket of narrow gender definitions.

Set against the backdrop of the #MeToo movement, when manhood is under increasing scrutiny and terms such as ‘toxic’ and ‘fragile’ masculinity fill endless column inches, an investigation of this expansive subject is particularly timely, especially given current global politics characterised by male world leaders shaping their image as ‘strong’ men.

Touching on queer identity, race, power and patriarchy, men as seen by women, stereotypes of dominant masculinity as well as the family, the exhibition presents masculinity in all its myriad forms, rife with contradictions and complexities. Embracing the idea of multiple ‘masculinities’ and rejecting the notion of a singular ‘ideal man’, the exhibition argues for an understanding of masculinity liberated from societal expectations and gender norms.

Room 1-4

Disrupting the Archetype

Over the last six decades, artists have consistently sought to destabilise the narrow definitions of gender that determine our social structures in order to encourage new ways of thinking about identity, gender and sexuality. ‘Disrupting the Archetype’ explores the representation of conventional and at times clichéd masculine subjects such as soldiers, cowboys, athletes, bullfighters, body builders and wrestlers. By reconfiguring the representation of traditional masculinity – loosely defined as an idealised, dominant heterosexual masculinity – the artists presented here challenge our ideas of these hypermasculine stereotypes.

Across different cultures and spaces, the military has been central to the construction of masculine identities – which has been explored through the work of Wolfgang Tillmans (below) and Adi Nes (below) among others, while Collier Schorr (below) and Sam Contis’s powerful works (below) address the dominant and enduring representation of the lone cowboy. Athleticism, often perceived as a proxy for strength which is associated with masculinity, is called into question by Catherine Opie’s and Rineke Dijkstra’s tender portraits (below). The male body, a cornerstone for artists such as John Coplans (above), Robert Mapplethorpe and Cassils (below), is meanwhile exposed as a fleshy canvas, constantly in flux.

Historically, the non-western male body has undergone a complex process of subjectification through the Western gaze – invariably presented as either warlike or sexually charged. Viewed against this context, the work of Fouad Elkoury and Akram Zaatari, as well as the found photographs of Taliban fighters that Thomas Dworzak discovered in Afghanistan (below), can be read as deconstructing the Orientalist gaze.

Installation view of Masculinities: Liberation through Photography at Barbican Art Gallery on February 19, 2020 in London, England showing a detail from Wolfgang Tillmans’ epic montage Soldiers – The Nineties
Photo: Tristan Fewings/Getty Images for Barbican Art Gallery

Installation view of Masculinities: Liberation through Photography at Barbican Art Gallery on February 19, 2020 in London, England showing a detail from trans masculine artist Cassils’ series Time Lapse, 2011
Photo: Tristan Fewings/Getty Images for Barbican Art Gallery

Installation view of Masculinities: Liberation through Photography at Barbican Art Gallery on February 19, 2020 in London, England showing at left a detail from trans masculine artist Cassils’ series Time Lapse, 2011, and at right the work of Rineke Dijkstra
Photo: Tristan Fewings/Getty Images for Barbican Art Gallery

Rineke Dijkstra (Dutch, b. 1959)
Montemor, Portugal, May 1, 1994
1994
Chromogenic print
90 x 72cm
© Rineke Dijkstra

Rineke Dijkstra (Dutch, b. 1959)
Vila Franca de Xira, Portugal, May 8, 1994
1994
Chromogenic print
90 x 72cm
© Rineke Dijkstra

Installation view of 'Masculinities: Liberation through Photography' at Barbican Art Gallery on February 19, 2020 in London, England showing photographs from Adi Nes' series 'Soldiers' 1999

Installation views of Masculinities: Liberation through Photography at Barbican Art Gallery on February 19, 2020 in London, England showing photographs from Adi Nes’ series Soldiers, 1999
Photo: Tristan Fewings/Getty Images for Barbican Art Gallery

Adi Nes (Israeli, b. 1966)
Untitled
2000
From the series Soldiers
Courtesy Adi Nes & Praz-Delavallade Paris, Los Angeles

Adi Nes (Israeli, b. 1966)
Untitled
1999
From the series Soldiers
Courtesy Adi Nes & Praz-Delavallade Paris, Los Angeles

Adi Nes was born in Kiryat Gat. His parents are Jewish immigrants from Iran. He is openly gay. Nes is notable for series “Soldiers”, in which he mixes masculinity and homoerotic sexuality, depicting Israeli soldiers in a fragile way.

Nes creates cinematic images that reference war, sexuality, life, and death with the kind of stylised polish you might expect from a photographer whose images have appeared in the pages of Vogue Hommes. His partially autobiographical work is deliberate and staged in an attempt to raise questions about sexuality, masculinity and identity in Israeli culture. “The beginning point of my art is who I am,” he says. “Since I’m a man and I’m an Israeli, I deal with issues of identity with ‘Israeli-ness’ and masculinity, but my photographs are multi-layered.”

“The challenge of the photographer is to catch the viewer for more than one second in front of the picture,” says Nes, explaining his provocative images. “If you catch the viewer in front of the picture, it can touch the viewer.”

Anonymous text “Adi Nes on masculinity, sexuality and war,” from the Phaidon website 2012 [Online] Cited 07/03/2020

Thomas Dworzak (Germany, b. 1972)
Taliban portraits
2002
Kandahar, Afghanistan

While covering the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, Magnum photographer Thomas Dworzak came across a handful of photo studios in Kandahar which despite the Taliban’s ban on photography had been authorised to remain open, for the sole purpose of taking identity photos. Complicating the conventional image of the hypermasculine soldier, the colour portraits Dworzak found in the back rooms of these studios depict Taliban fighters variously posing in front of scenic backdrops, holding hands, using guns or flowers as props or enveloped in a halo of vibrant colours, their eyes heavily made up with black kohl. These stylised photographs directly contradict the public image of the soldier in this overwhelmingly male-dominated patriarchal society.

Sam Contis (American, b. 1982) 'Untitled (Neck)' 2015

Masculinities: Liberation through Photography catalogue cover

Installation view of Masculinities: Liberation through Photography at Barbican Art Gallery on February 19, 2020 in London, England showing photographs from Catherine Opie’s series High School Football, 2007-2009
Photo: Tristan Fewings/Getty Images for Barbican Art Gallery

Catherine Opie (American, b. 1961)
Stephen
2009
From the series High School Football, 2007-2009
Courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles, and Thomas Dane Gallery, London
© Catherine Opie

Catherine Opie (American, b. 1961)
Rusty
2008
From the series High School Football, 2007-2009
Courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles and Thomas Dane Gallery, London
© Catherine Opie

Catherine Opie (American, b. 1961)
Football Landscape #17 (Waianae vs. Leilehua, Waianae, HI)
2009
From the series High School Football, 2007-2009
Courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles, and Thomas Dane Gallery, London
© Catherine Opie

Kenneth Anger (American, b. 1927)
Kustom Kar Kommandos
1965
3 mins 22 secs

Collier Schorr (American, b. 1963) 'Americans #3' 2012

Room 5-6

Male Order: Power, Patriarchy and Space

‘Male Order’ invites the viewer to reflect on the construction of male power, gender and class. The artists gathered here have all variously attempted to expose and subvert how certain types of masculine behaviour have created inequalities both between and within gender identities. Two ambitious, multi-part works, Richard Avedon’s The Family, 1976, and Karen Knorr’s Gentlemen, 1981-1983, focus on typically besuited white men who occupy the corridors of power, while foregrounding the historic exclusion not only of women but also of other marginalised masculinities.

Male-only organisations, such as the military, private members’ clubs and college fraternities, have often served as an arena for the performance of ‘toxic’ masculinity, as chronicled in Andrew Moisey’s The American Fraternity: An Illustrated Ritual Manual, 2018. This startling book charts the misdemeanours of fraternity members alongside an indexical image bank of US Presidents, alongside leaders of government and industry who have belonged at one time or another to these fraternities. Richard Mosse’s film, Fraternity, 2007, takes a different tack by painting a portrait of male rage that is both playful and alarming.

Installation view of Masculinities: Liberation through Photography at Barbican Art Gallery on February 19, 2020 in London, England showing photographs from Richard Avedon’s series The Family (1976)
Photo: Tristan Fewings/Getty Images for Barbican Art Gallery

Early in 1976, with both the post-Watergate political atmosphere and the approaching bicentennial celebration in mind, Rolling Stone asked Richard Avedon to cover the presidential primaries and the campaign trail. Avedon counter-proposed a grander idea – he had always wanted to photograph the men and women he believed to have constituted political, media and corporate elite of the United States.

For the next several months, Avedon traversed the country from migrant grape fields of California to NFL headquarters in Park Avenue and returned with an amazing portfolio of soldiers, spooks, potentates, and ambassadors that was too late for the bicentennial but published in Rolling Stone’s Oct. 21, 1976, just in time for the November elections.

Sixty-nine black-and-white portraits … were in Avedon’s signature style – formal, intimate, bold, and minimalistic. Appearing in them are President Ford and his three immediate successors – Carter, Reagan, and Bush. Other familiars of the American polity such as Kennedys and Rockefellers are here, and as are giants who held up the nation’s Fourth Pillar during that challenging decade: A. M. Rosenthal of the New York Times who decided to publish the Pentagon Papers, and Katharine Graham who led Woodward and Bernstein at Washington Post.

Alex Selwyn-Holmes. “The Family, 1976; Richard Avedon” on the Iconphotos website May 18, 2012 [Online] Cited 03/03/2020

Installation views of Masculinities: Liberation through Photography at Barbican Art Gallery on February 19, 2020 in London, England showing photographs from Karen Knorr’s series Gentlemen, 1981-1983
Photo: Tristan Fewings/Getty Images for Barbican Art Gallery

Karen Knorr (American, born Germany 1954) 'Newspapers are no longer ironed, Coins no longer boiled So far have Standards fallen' 1981-1983

Karen Knorr (American born Germany, b. 1954)
Newspapers are no longer ironed, Coins no longer boiled So far have Standards fallen
1981-1983
From the series Gentlemen
Tate: Gift Eric and Louise Franck London Collection 2013
© Karen Knorr

Installation view of 'Masculinities: Liberation through Photography' at Barbican Art Gallery on February 19, 2020 in London, England showing Piotr Uklanski's 'Untitled (The Nazis)' 1998, a collage of actors dressed as Nazis, courtesy of Massimo De Carlo

Installation view of Masculinities: Liberation through Photography at Barbican Art Gallery on February 19, 2020 in London, England showing Piotr Uklanski’s Untitled (The Nazis), 1998, a collage of actors dressed as Nazis, courtesy of Massimo De Carlo
Photo: Tristan Fewings/Getty Images for Barbican Art Gallery

Room 7-8

Too Close to Home: Family and Fatherhood

Since its invention photography has been a powerful vehicle for the construction and documentation of family narratives. In contrast to the conventions of the traditional family portrait, the artists gathered here deliberately set out to record the ‘messiness’ of life, reflecting on misogyny, violence, sexuality, mortality, intimacy and unfolding family dramas, presenting a more complex and not always comfortable vision of fatherhood and masculinity.

Loss and the ageing male figure are central to the work of both Masahisa Fukase and Larry Sultan (both below). Their respective projects marked a new departure in the way men photographed each other, serving as a commentary on how old age engenders a loss of masculinity. An examination of everyday life, Richard Billingham’s tender yet bleak portraits of his father, as chronicled in Ray’s a Laugh, cast a brutally honest eye on his alcoholic father Ray against a backdrop of social decline (below).

Anna Fox’s disturbing autobiographical work undermines expectations of the traditional family album while revealing the mechanics of paternalistic power. Meanwhile, the father-daughter relationship is brought into sharp focus in Aneta Bartos’s sexually charged series Family Portrait which unsettles traditional family boundaries (below).

Masahisa Fukase (Japan, 1934-2012)
Masahisa and Sukezo
1972
From the series Family, 1971-1990
© Masahisa Fukase Archives

Masahisa Fukase (Japan, 1934-2012)
Upper row, from left to right: A, a model; Toshiteru, Sukezo, Masahisa. Middle row, from left to right: Akiko, Mitsue, Hisashi Daikoji. Bottom row, from left to right: Gaku, Kyoko, Kanako, and a memorial portrait of Miyako
1985
From the series Family, 1971-1990
© Masahisa Fukase Archives

Masahisa Fukase (Japan, 1934-2012)
Masahisa and Sukezo
1985
From the series Family, 1971-1990
© Masahisa Fukase Archives

‘A magnificent memorial to paternal love’.

Installation view of Masculinities: Liberation through Photography at Barbican Art Gallery on February 19, 2020 in London, England showing the photographs of Larry Sultan from the series Pictures from Home
Photo: Tristan Fewings/Getty Images for Barbican Art Gallery

Larry Sultan (American, 1946-2009)
Dad on Bed
1984
From the series Pictures from Home
Chromogenic print
Courtesy the Estate of Larry Sultan, Yancey Richardson, Casemore Kirkeby, and Galerie Thomas Zander
© Estate of Larry Sultan

Larry Sultan (American, 1946-2009)
Practicing Golf Swing
1986
From the series Pictures from Home
Chromogenic print
Courtesy the Estate of Larry Sultan, Yancey Richardson, Casemore Kirkeby, and Galerie Thomas Zander
© Estate of Larry Sultan

Installation view of Masculinities: Liberation through Photography at Barbican Art Gallery on February 19, 2020 in London, England showing Richard Billingham’s photographs from the series Ray’s a Laugh
Photo: Tristan Fewings/Getty Images for Barbican Art Gallery

Installation view of Masculinities: Liberation through Photography at Barbican Art Gallery on February 19, 2020 in London, England showing the photographs of Aneta Bartos’s sexually charged series Family Portrait
Photo: Tristan Fewings/Getty Images for Barbican Art Gallery

Aneta Bartos (Born Poland, lives New York)
Mirror
2015
From the series Family Portrait
Archival inkjet print
30 x 30.65 inches

Aneta Bartos (Born Poland, lives New York)
Apple
2015
From the series Family Portrait
Archival inkjet print
30 x 30.65 inches

Since 2013 New York based artist Aneta Bartos has been traveling back to her hometown Tomaszów Mazowiecki, where she was raised by her father as a single parent from the age of eight until fourteen. Then 68 years old, and having spent a lifetime as a competitive body builder, Bartos’ father asked her to take a few shots documenting his physique before it degenerated and inevitably ran its course. The original request of her father inspired Bartos to transform his idea into a long-term project called Dad. A few summers later Dad developed into a new series of portraits, titled Family Portrait, exploring the complex dynamics between father and daughter.

Text from the Antwerp Art website [Online] Cited 01/03/2020

“The pastoral setting is a romanticised portal to Bartos’s past. Her father’s poses are often heroic; at times the pictures are playful and flirty, almost seductive. Seen together, they display the sadness of a man who knows he is ageing, with the subtext of his waning sexuality. They are bittersweet, images of time passing and memories being preserved.”

Elisabeth Biondi quoted on the Postmasters website 2017 [Online] Cited 01/03/2020

Installation views of Masculinities: Liberation through Photography at Barbican Art Gallery on February 19, 2020 in London, England showing photographs from Peter Hujar’s series Orgasmic Man 1969 (see below)
Photo: Tristan Fewings/Getty Images for Barbican Art Gallery

Room 9-12

Queer Masculinity

In defiance of the prejudice and legal constraints against homosexuality in Europe, the United States and beyond over the last century, the works presented in ‘Queering Masculinity’ highlight how artists from the 1960s onwards have forged a new politically charged queer aesthetic.

In the 1970s, artists such as Peter Hujar (below), David Wojnarowicz, Sunil Gupta (below) and Hal Fischer (below) photographed gay lifestyles in New York and San Francisco in a bid to claim public visibility and therefore legitimacy at a time when homosexuality was still a criminal offence. Reflecting on their own queer experience and creating sensual bodies of work, artists such as Rotimi Fani-Kayode (below) and Isaac Julien (below) portrayed black gay desire while Catherine Opie’s seminal work Being and Having, 1991 (below), documented members of the dyke, butch and BDSM communities in San Francisco playing with the physical attributes associated with hypermasculinity in order to overturn traditional binary understandings of gender.

Installation views of Masculinities: Liberation through Photography at Barbican Art Gallery on February 19, 2020 in London, England showing photographs by Karlheinz Weinberger
Photo: Tristan Fewings/Getty Images for Barbican Art Gallery

Karlheinz Weinberger (Swiss, 1921-2006)
Horseshoe buckle
1962
Courtesy Galerie Esther Woerdehoff
© Karlheinz Weinberger

Karlheinz Weinberger (Swiss, 1921-2006)
Sitting Boy with Elvis Necklace in KHW studio, Zurich
1961
Courtesy Galerie Esther Woerdehoff
© Karlheinz Weinberger

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Orgasmic Man
1969
Gelatin silver print

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Orgasmic Man (I)
1969
Gelatin silver print

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Orgasmic Man (II)
1969
Gelatin silver print

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
David Brintzenhofe Applying Makeup (II)
1982
Courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York, and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
© 1987 The Peter Hujar Archive LLC

Installation view of Masculinities: Liberation through Photography at Barbican Art Gallery on February 19, 2020 in London, England showing photographs from Sunil Gupta’s series Christopher Street 1976
Photo: Tristan Fewings/Getty Images for Barbican Art Gallery

Sunil Gupta (Indian, b. 1953) 'Untitled #21' 1976

Gupta went on to study under Lisette Model at the New School and take his place among the most accomplished photographers, editors, and curators of his generation, exploring the way identities flower under various sexual, geographical, and historical conditions. But Christopher Street is where it all began. His subjects are engaged in an unprecedented moment in which it seemed possible to build a world of their own. He shows inner lives, barely concealed within the downturned face of a mustachioed man with his hands in his pockets, and outer ones as well, as other men cruise the lens right back, or laugh with each other, unbothered by the stranger with the camera. They were often just engaged in the everyday and extraordinary act of simply existing as gay. In each photograph, Gupta somehow projects a protective and versatile desire: to remember and be remembered at once.

Extract from Jesse Dorris. “Christopher Street Revisited,” on the Aperture website May 30th, 2019 [Online] Cited 29/02/2020

Sunil Gupta (Indian, b. 1953) 'Untitled #56' 1976

The 1976 Christopher Street series marks the first set of photographs Gupta made as a practicing artist, using the camera as a tool for open expression. His decision to use black and white film was partly aesthetic, yet also practical, as he was developing the prints in his bathroom. Although he uses a documentarian style, Gupta was by no means an impartial observer behind the camera, he was a participant, enthralled by his subjects.

The series … captures a specific moment in history – a cross section of a thriving community in one of New York’s most dynamic areas – Manhattan’s Christopher Street. Dressed in the latest fashions, moving confidently and relaxing on street corners, their visible presence is a signifier of a specific period of public consciousness. Un-staged and spontaneous, most of the artist’s subjects are unaware of the camera and are simply going about their day. Now, with hindsight, Gupta is struck by the routineness of the images, stating:

‘There is a poignancy they never had at the time… A few years later, the AIDS crisis took hold. The public nature of gay life was forced back into the shadows. Thousands of men died. New York shut down its bathhouses, gay parties became private, and this whole world became hidden again.’

Fusing the public with the personal, the Christopher Street series reflects the openness of the gay liberation movement, as well as Gupta’s own “coming out” as an artist. More than a nostalgic time capsule, the photographs reveal a community that shaped Gupta as a person and cemented his lifelong dedication to portraying people who have been denied a space to be themselves.

Extract from Anonymous. “Sunil Gupta: Christopher Street,” on the Monovisions website 24 May 2019 [Online] Cited 29/02/2020

Hal Fischer (American, b. 1950)
Handkerchiefs
1977
From the series Gay Semiotics
Gelatin silver print

Hal Fischer (American, b. 1950)
Street Fashion Jock
1977
From the series Gay Semiotics
Gelatin silver print

Rotimi Fani-Kayode (Nigerian, 1955-1989) 'Untitled' c. 1985

Installation view of Masculinities: Liberation through Photography at Barbican Art Gallery on February 19, 2020 in London, England showing at left, photographs from Isaac Julien’s series After Mazatlàn, 1999/2000
Photo: Tristan Fewings/Getty Images for Barbican Art Gallery

Isaac Julien (British, b. 1960)
From After Mazatlàn III – VI
1999/2000
Colour photogravures
33 x 43.2cm; 13 x 17 in
Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro, London/Venice
© Isaac Julien

Installation view of Masculinities: Liberation through Photography at Barbican Art Gallery on February 19, 2020 in London, England showing Catherine Opie’s series Being and Having 1991
Photo: Tristan Fewings/Getty Images for Barbican Art Gallery

Catherine Opie (American, b. 1961)
Bo from “Being and Having”
1991
Collection of Gregory R. Miller and Michael Wiener
© Catherine Opie, Courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles; Thomas Dane Gallery, London; and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York

The exhibition brings together over 300 works by over 50 pioneering international artists, photographers and filmmakers such as Richard Avedon, Peter Hujar, Isaac Julien, Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Robert Mapplethorpe, Annette Messager and Catherine Opie to show how photography and film have been central to the way masculinities are imagined and understood in contemporary culture. The show also highlights lesser-known and younger artists – some of whom have never exhibited in the UK – including Cassils, Sam Contis, George Dureau, Elle Pérez, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Hank Willis Thomas, Karlheinz Weinberger and Marianne Wex amongst many others. Masculinities: Liberation through Photography is part of the Barbican’s 2020 season, Inside Out, which explores the relationship between our inner lives and creativity.

Jane Alison, Head of Visual Arts, Barbican, said: ‘Masculinities: Liberation through Photography continues our commitment to presenting leading twentieth century figures in the field of photography while also supporting younger contemporary artists working in the medium today. In the wake of the #MeToo movement and the resurgence of feminist and men’s rights activism, traditional notions of masculinity has become a subject of fierce debate. This exhibition could not be more relevant and will certainly spark conversations surrounding our understanding of masculinity.’

With ideas around masculinity undergoing a global crisis and terms such as ‘toxic’ and ‘fragile’ masculinity filling endless column inches, the exhibition surveys the representation of masculinity in all its myriad forms, rife with contradiction and complexity. Presented across six sections by over 50 international artists to explore the expansive nature of the subject, the exhibition touches on themes of queer identity, the black body, power and patriarchy, female perceptions of men, heteronormative hypermasculine stereotypes, fatherhood and family. The works in the show present masculinity as an unfixed performative identity shaped by cultural and social forces.

Seeking to disrupt and destabilise the myths surrounding modern masculinity, highlights include the work of artists who have consistently challenged stereotypical representations of hegemonic masculinity, including Collier Schorr, Adi Nes, Akram Zaatari and Sam Contis, whose series Deep Springs, 2018 draws on the mythology of the American West and the rugged cowboy. Contis spent four years immersed in an all-male liberal arts college north of Death Valley meditating on the intimacy and violence that coexists in male-only spaces. Complicating the conventional image of the fighter, Thomas Dworzak‘s acclaimed series Taliban consists of portraits found in photographic studios in Kandahar following the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, these vibrant portraits depict Taliban fighters posing hand in hand in front of painted backdrops, using guns and flowers as props with kohl carefully applied to their eyes. Trans masculine artist Cassils‘ series Time Lapse, 2011, documents the radical transformation of their body through the use of steroids and a rigorous training programme reflecting on ideas of masculinity without men. Elsewhere, artists Jeremy Deller, Robert Mapplethorpe and Rineke Dijkstra dismantle preconceptions of subjects such as the wrestler, the bodybuilder and the athlete and offer an alternative view of these hyper-masculinised stereotypes.

The exhibition examines patriarchy and the unequal power relations between gender, class and race. Karen Knorr‘s series Gentlemen, 1981-83, comprised of 26 black and white photographs taken inside men-only private members’ clubs in central London and accompanied by texts drawn from snatched conversations, parliamentary records and contemporary news reports, invites viewers to reflect on notions of class, race and the exclusion of women from spaces of power during Margaret Thatcher’s premiership. Toxic masculinity is further explored in Andrew Moisey‘s 2018 photobook The American Fraternity: An Illustrated Ritual Manual which weaves together archival photographs of former US Presidents and Supreme Court Justices who all belonged to the fraternity system, alongside images depicting the initiation ceremonies and parties that characterise these male-only organisations.

With the rise of the Gay Liberation Movement through the 1960s followed by the AIDS epidemic in the early 1980s, the exhibition showcases artists such as Peter Hujar and David Wojnarowiz, who increasingly began to disrupt traditional representations of gender and sexuality. Hal Fischer‘s critical photo-text series Gay Semiotics, 1977, classified styles and types of gay men in San Francisco and Sunil Gupta’s street photographs captured the performance of gay public life as played out on New York’s Christopher Street, the site of the 1969 Stonewall Uprising. Other artists exploring the performative aspects of queer identity include Catherine Opie‘s seminal series Being and Having, 1991, showing her close friends in the West Coast’s LGBTQ+ community sporting false moustaches, tattoos and other stereotypical masculine accessories. Elle Pérez‘s luminous and tender photographs explore the representation of gender non-conformity and vulnerability, whilst Paul Mpagi Sepuya‘s fragmented portraits explore the studio as a site of homoerotic desire.

During the 1970s women artists from the second wave feminist movement objectified male sexuality in a bid to subvert and expose the invasive and uncomfortable nature of the male gaze. In the exhibition, Laurie Anderson‘s seminal work Fully Automated Nikon (Object/Objection/Objectivity), 1973, documents the men who cat-called her as she walked through New York’s Lower East Side while Annette Messager‘s series The Approaches, 1972, covertly captures men’s trousered crotches with a long-lens camera. German artist Marianne Wex‘s encyclopaedic project Let’s Take Back Our Space: ‘Female’ and ‘Male’ Body Language as a Result of Patriarchal Structures, 1977, presents a detailed analysis of male and female body language and Australian indigenous artist Tracey Moffatt‘s awkwardly humorous film Heaven, 1997, portrays male surfers changing in and out of their wet suits.

Further highlights include New York based artist Hank Willis Thomas, whose photographic practice examines the complexities of the black male experience; celebrated Japanese photographer Masahisa Fukase‘s The Family, 1971-1989, chronicles the life and death of his family with a particular emphasis on his father; and Kenneth Anger‘s technicolour experimental underground film Kustom Kar Kommandos, 1965, explores the fetishist role of hot rod cars amongst young American men.

Press release from the Barbican Art Gallery

Installation view of Masculinities: Liberation through Photography at Barbican Art Gallery on February 19, 2020 in London, England showing Hank Willis Thomas’ series Unbranded: Reflections in Black by Corporate America 1968-2008 2005-2008 (below)
Photo: Tristan Fewings/Getty Images for Barbican Art Gallery

Room 13-14

Reclaiming the Black Body

Giving visual form to the complexity of the black male experience, this section foregrounds artists who over the last five decades have consciously subverted expectations of race, gender and the white gaze by reclaiming the power to fashion their own identities.

From Samuel Fosso’s playfully staged self-portraits, taken in his studio, in which he performs to the camera sporting flares and platforms boots or flirtatiously revealing his youthful male physique (below) to Kiluanji Kia Henda’s fictional scenarios in which he adopts the troubled personas of African men of power, the works presented here reflect on how black masculinity challenges the status quo (below).

The representation of black masculinity in the US is born out of a violent history of slavery and prejudice. Unbranded: Reflections in Black by Corporate America 1968-2008 by Hank Willis Thomas (below) draws attention to the ways in which corporate America has commodified the African American male experience while simultaneously perpetuating and reinforcing cultural stereotypes. Similarly, Deana Lawson’s powerful work Sons of Cush, 2016, highlights how the black male figure is often ‘idealised (in their physical beauty) and pathologised by the culture (as symbols of violence or fear)’.

Hank Willis Thomas (American, b. 1976)
The Johnson Family
1981/2006
From the series Unbranded: Reflections in Black by Corporate America 1968-2008
2005-08

Concerned with the literal and figural objectifications of the African American male body, in his complex series Unbranded Hank Willis Thomas redeploys magazine adverts featuring African Americans made between 1968 – a pivotal moment in the struggle for civil rights – and 2008, which witnessed the accession of Barack Obama to the US presidency. By digitally stripping the ads of all text, branding and logos, Thomas draws attention to the ways in which corporate America has commodified the African American experience while simultaneously perpetuating and reinforcing cultural stereotypes.

Hank Willis Thomas (American, b. 1976)
It’s the Real Thing!
1978/2008
From the series Unbranded: Reflections in Black by Corporate America 1968-2008
2005-2008

Samuel Fosso (Cameroonian, b. 1962)
Self-portrait
1975-1977
From the series 70s lifestyle
Courtesy Jean Marc Patras, Paris
© Samuel Fosso

Installation view of Masculinities: Liberation through Photography at Barbican Art Gallery on February 19, 2020 in London, England showing a photograph from Kiluanji Kia Henda’s series The Last Journey of the Dictator Mussunda Nzombo Before the Great Extinction Act I
Photo: Tristan Fewings/Getty Images for Barbican Art Gallery

Hilary Lloyd (British, b. 1964)
Colin #2
1999
Courtesy Galerie Neu, Berlin; Sadie Coles HQ, London; Greene Naftali, New York
© Hilary Lloyd

Installation view of Masculinities: Liberation through Photography at Barbican Art Gallery on February 19, 2020 in London, England showing part of Marianne Wex’s encyclopaedic project Let’s Take Back Our Space: ‘Female’ and ‘Male’ Body Language as a Result of Patriarchal Structures, 1977
Photo: Tristan Fewings/Getty Images for Barbican Art Gallery

Room 15-16

Women on Men: Reversing the Male Gaze

As the second-wave feminist movement gained momentum through the 1960s and ’70s, female activists sought to expose and critique entrenched ideas about masculinity and to articulate alternative perspectives on gender and representation. Against this background, or motivated by its legacy, the artists gathered here have made men their subject with the radical intention of subverting their power, calling into question the notion that men are active and women passive.

In the early 1970s pioneers of feminist art such as Laurie Anderson (below) and Annette Messager consciously objectified the male body in a bid to expose the uncomfortable nature of the dominant male gaze. In contrast, filmmakers such as Tracey Moffatt (below) and Hilary Lloyd (above) turn the tables on male representations of desire to foreground the power of the female gaze.

In his humorous series The Ideal Man, 1978 (below), Hans Eijkelboom invited ten women to fashion him into their image of the ‘ideal’ man. Through this act Eijkelboom reverses the male to female power dynamic and inverts the traditional gender hierarchy.

Laurie Anderson (American, b. 1947)
Man with a Cigarette
1973
From the series Fully Automated Nikon (Object/Objection/Objectivity)

Laurie Anderson (American, b. 1947)
Two men in a car
1973
From the series Fully Automated Nikon (Object/Objection/Objectivity)

Anderson photographed men who called to her or whistled her on the street. In her artist statement she writes about one experience,

“As I walked along Houston Street with my fully automated Nikon. I felt armed, ready. I passed a man who muttered ‘Wanna fuck?’ This was standard technique: the female passes and the male strikes at the last possible moment forcing the woman to backtrack if she should dare to object. I wheeled around, furious. ‘Did you say that?’ He looked around surprised, then defiant ‘Yeah, so what the fuck if I did?’ I raised my Nikon, took aim began to focus. His eyes darted back and forth, an undercover cop? CLICK.

As it turned out, most of the men I shot that day had the opposite reaction. When i confronted them, the acted innocent, then offended, like some nasty invisible ventriloquist had ticked them into saying dirty words against their will. By the time I took their pictures they were posing, like taking their picture was the least I could do.”

“I decided to shoot pictures of men who made comments to me on the street. I had always hated this invasion of my privacy and now I had the means of my revenge. As I walked along Houston Street with my fully automated Nikon, I felt armed, ready. I passed a man who muttered ‘Wanna fuck?’ This was standard technique: the female passes and the male strikes at the last possible moment forcing the woman to backtrack if she should dare to object. I wheeled around, furious. ‘Did you say that?’ He looked around surprised, then defiant. ‘Yeah, so what the fuck if I did?’ I raised my Nikon, took aim, began to focus. His eyes darted back and forth, an undercover cop? CLICK.”

Anderson takes the power from her male pursuers, allowing them nothing more than the momentary fear that their depravity has just been captured in a picture.

Tracey Moffatt (Australian, b. 1960)
Heaven (still)
1997
Video tape (28 minutes)
© Tracey Moffatt / DACS Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney, Australia

“A playful video that glories in the female gaze and objectification of men. It zeros in on the Australian national sport, surfing, and in particular on several dozen good-looking muscular men changing into or out of their swimming trunks. This ritual is usually conducted in parking lots or on sidewalks, always near cars and sometimes inside them; it usually but not always involves a beach towel wound carefully around the torso. Ms Moffatt begins by shooting her subject unseen from inside a house and gradually moves closer and closer, engaging some in conversations that are never heard. The soundtrack alternates between the ocean surf and the sounds of drumming and chanting, male rituals of another, more authentic Australian culture. By the tape’s end, the artist’s voyeurism has shifted to participation; the camera shows her free hand, the one not holding the camera, darting into view, trying to undo the towel of the last surfer.”

New York Times

Installation view of Masculinities: Liberation through Photography at Barbican Art Gallery on February 19, 2020 in London, England showing part of Hans Eijkelboom’s series The Ideal Man, 1978

Glossary of Terms by CN Lester

Homosociality: Typically non-romantic and/or non-sexual same-sex relationships and social groupings – may sometimes include elements of homoeroticism, as they are frequently interdependent phenomena.

Normativity: The process by which some groups of people, forms of expression and types of behaviour are classified according to a perceived standard of what is ‘normal’, ‘natural’, desirable and permissible in society. Inevitably, this process designates people, expressions and behaviours that do not fit these norms as abnormal, unnatural, undesirable and impermissible.

Hegemonic Masculinity: ‘Hegemonic’ means ‘ruling’ or ‘commanding’ – hegemonic masculinity, therefore, indicates male dominance and the forms of masculinity occupying and perpetuating this dominant position. The term was coined in the 1980s by the scholar R. W. Connell, drawing on the Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci’s notion of cultural hegemony.

Hierarchy: Across many cultures throughout history, and continuing into the present moment throughout large parts of the world, gender functions as a hierarchy: some gender categories and gender expressions are granted higher value and more power than others. Men are often higher up the gender hierarchy than women, but the gender hierarchy is affected by racism, disablism, ageism, transphobia and other factors; in the West, men in their thirties are likely to be considered higher up the gender hierarchy than men in their eighties, for example.

Gender roles: Specific cultural roles defined by the weight of gendered ideas, restrictions and traditions. Men and women are often expected, sometimes forced, to occupy oppositional gender roles: aggressor versus victim, protector versus nurturer and so on. Many gender roles are specific to intersections of race, class, sexuality, religion and disabled status – examples of these types of gender roles can be seen in the stereotypes of the Jezebel or the Dragon Lady.

Patriarchy: Literally ‘the rule of the father’, a patriarchy is a society or structure centred around male dominance and in which women (and those of other genders) are not treated as or considered equal.

Queer: A slur, a term of reclamation and a specific and radical site of community and activism in solidarity with many kinds of difference, and specifically opposed to heteronormativity and cisnormativity. Queer studies and queer theory are important emerging fields of study.

Gender identity: Identity refers to what, who, and how someone or something is, both in the way this is understood as selfhood by an individual, and also the self as it is shaped and positioned by the world. Gender identity can be a surprisingly difficult term to pin down and is perhaps best understood as the stated truth of a person’s gender (or lack of gender), which is in itself the sum of many different factors.

Fetishisation: To turn the subject into a fetish, sexually or otherwise. Fetishisation in terms of gender and desire frequently occurs in conjunction with objectification and power. Men and women of colour are frequently fetishised by white people, in society and in artistic practice, through different stereotypes and limitations. Trans and disabled people are also subject to fetishisation, particularly in bodily terms. Kobena Mercer’s critical essay on Robert Mapplethorpe, ‘Reading Radical Fetishism’,1 and David Henry Hwang’s play and afterword to M. Butterfly (1988) both explore the notion of fetishisation.

1/ Kobena Mercer, ‘Reading Racial Fetishism: The Photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe’, in Emily Apter and William Pietz, eds, Fetishism as Cultural Discourse (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 307-29.

Critical race theory: A branch of scholarship emerging from the application of critical theory to the study of law in the 1980s, critical race theory (CRT) is now taken as an approach and theoretical foundation across both academic and popular discourse. CRT names, examines and challenges the social constructions and functions of race and racism. Rejecting the idea of race as a ‘natural’ category, CRT looks instead to the cultural, structural and legal creation and maintenance of difference and oppression. Scholars working in this field include Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva and Patricia Williams.

Me Too movement: ‘#MeToo is a movement that was founded in 2006 to support survivors of sexual violence, in particular black and brown girls, who were in the program that we were running. It has grown since then to include supporting grown people, women, and men, and other survivors, as well as helping people to understand what community action looks like in the fight to end sexual violence’ – Tarana Burke, founder of the Me Too movement.

Male gaze: A term coined by film critic Laura Mulvey, the notion of the male gaze develops Jean-Paul Sartre’s concept of le regard (the gaze) to take into account the power differentials and gender stereotyping inherent in ways of looking within patriarchal, sexist culture. The male gaze refers to how the world – and women in particular – are looked at and presented from a cisgender, straight, frequently white male perspective. In visual art the male gaze can be understood in multiple ways, from the male creator of the work, to men within the work viewing women or the world around them, to the (assumed) male viewer of the work itself. Many women artists have countered the male gaze through deconstruction and through the creation and promotion of works that centre the ‘female gaze’.

Installation view of 'Masculinities: Liberation through Photography' at Barbican Art Gallery on February 19, 2020 in London, England

Installation views of Masculinities: Liberation through Photography at Barbican Art Gallery on February 19, 2020 in London, England
Photo: Tristan Fewings/Getty Images for Barbican Art Gallery

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European photographic research tour exhibition: ‘Berenice Abbott: Portraits of Modernity’ at Huis Marseille, Amsterdam Part 1

Exhibition dates: 7th September – 1st December, 2019

Visited September 2019 posted June 2020

Curator: Estrella de Diego, Professor of Modern Art at the Complutense University of Madrid

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) 'George Antheil' 1927 (installation view)

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
George Antheil (installation view)
1927
Gelatin silver print
The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, Photography Collection
The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan

George Antheil was an American avant-garde composer, pianist, author, and inventor whose modernist musical compositions explored the modern sounds – musical, industrial, and mechanical – of the early 20th century.

This was one of the most memorable photography exhibitions of my European sojourn during August – October 2019, in the most beautiful of gallery spaces. I was so very lucky to complete my time in Europe before the current pandemic arrived.

I will comment more on the exhibition in Part 2 of the posting, but suffice to say it was a real pleasure to see the work of Berenice Abbott side by side with the photographs of Eugène Atget, an artist she did much to champion (including printing his photographs). Her portraits of Atget taken in the year of his death were magnificent. They provide a portal between old and new, between the artist looking back on his work (his life), and the 20th century artist realising that they have to accommodate Atget within their future kinēsis … and in so doing, Abbott pictures an artist whose spirit possessed all of Old Paris.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

All iPhone photographs by Dr Marcus Bunyan. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image. See Part 2 of the posting.

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) 'George Antheil' 1927 from the exhibition 'Berenice Abbott: Portraits of Modernity' at Huis Marseille, Amsterdam, Sept - Dec, 2019

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
George Antheil
1927
Gelatin silver print
The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, Photography Collection
The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations © Getty Images/Berenice Abbott

Installation views of the exhibition Berenice Abbott: Portraits of Modernity at Huis Marseille, Amsterdam
Photos: Dr Marcus Bunyan

This autumn Huis Marseille will present a large retrospective of the famous American photographer Berenice Abbott (1898-1991). This is the first time that an extensive selection of her work, held by important American collections, will be shown in the Netherlands. Abbott is one of the key figures in the history of 20th-century photography. Her legacy is not only an eclectic photographic oeuvre but also a strong opinion on the role of photography in society, to which she gave expression in numerous publications. Her work forms a bridge linking the artistic avant-garde in the ‘Old World’ with the emerging art scene of the 1920s and 1930s in New York.

Modernity

The idea of modernity pervades all of Berenice Abbott’s work: from her portraits of pioneering artists and intellectuals, and her astonishing views of the city of New York, to her photos of scientific themes, documenting the results of various physics experiments. Abbott’s oeuvre also reflects her own modernism, her constant desire to be on the front line, and her exceptional talent for not just noticing the changes that were going on around her but for depicting them to striking effect. Berenice Abbott was an enthusiastic proponent of modernism in photography, and was strongly opposed to pictoralism, the painterly style that dominated photography in the early 20th century. In her view a good photograph was shaped by the specific characteristics of photography itself, and not by those of painting.

Lost Generation

In 1918 Berenice Abbott left her birthplace Ohio and moved to New York to study sculpture, where she soon gravitated towards Greenwich Village, a hotbed of avant-garde and radical artists, bohemians, and others whose lifestyles put them outside the American mainstream. In 1921 she arrived in Paris and joined the artistic community of Montparnasse on the famous left bank of the Seine. Its writers and artists included many American expats who, disillusioned by the senseless violence of the First World War and by Prohibition in America, had taken refuge in Europe. The American writer Gertrude Stein called them the ‘lost generation’, a generation to which Abbott also belonged, which questioned traditional values and favoured an alternative kind of life. Abbott would go on to portray many of these writers, including Djuna Barnes and Edna St. Vincent Millay.

Portrait photographer

Abbott’s life as a photographer began in 1923, in the Parisian studio of the famous American photographer, Dadaist and Surrealist Man Ray. As his assistant she learned the technical, artistic and commercial aspects of portrait photography. In 1926, with financial support from the immensely rich American art collector Peggy Guggenheim, she opened her own Paris studio. Her clients were mostly expats, socialites, bohemians, writers, artists and the ‘new women’ who, like herself, were willing to live on the margins of society in order to be free. Many had broken ties with their origins and their gender, such as the journalist Janet Flanner, the publisher Jane Heap, and the writer Sylvia Beach. Abbott immortalised them in assertive, powerful portraits. Beach was also the publisher of James Joyce’ Ulysses (1922), a book that Abbott greatly admired, and she portrayed the writer, his wife and daughter on several occasions.

Eugène Atget

Through Man Ray in Paris Abbott met the photographer Eugène Atget, with whose work she felt an immediate visual and artistic affinity. For decades Atget had documented Paris in plain, unadorned images, and with a keen eye for seemingly unimportant details. After his death in 1927 Abbott looked after a large part of his oeuvre, promoting it tirelessly in America through exhibitions and books. The present exhibition therefore also includes a small selection of photos by Eugène Atget, which Abbott printed from the original negatives in 1956.

Changing New York

The heart of the exhibition is formed by Abbott’s photos of New York City. When she returned to New York in 1929 she felt an immediate urge to photograph the city itself, with its enormous contrasts and contradictions, a city that changed constantly and was never the same from moment to moment. In 1935 she received a substantial grant from the Federal Art Project, a government initiative that was intended to create jobs and boost the economy following the crisis years, and this allowed her to begin work in earnest. She called her project Changing New York; it was also published in book form in 1939, with texts by her partner Elizabeth McCausland. Her camera transformed New York into a living being, with an extraordinary character, which visitors can experience to this day as they move through its busy streets and stare amazed at the modern beauty of its skyscrapers. Shops, people, bridges, streets, interiors, construction sites, iconic buildings seen from outside or from above – everything comes together to create a portrait of the city.

Science

In the late 1930s Abbott became deeply interested in science, and saw that photography could play a role as spokesperson. The cerebral world of science needed the vitality and imaginative powers of photography to reach a wider audience. Moreover, the scientific interpretation of the world was not reserved for scientists alone; any citizen ought to be able to consider a scientific question, and photography could serve as an intermediary. With this goal in mind, for years Abbott did darkroom experiments with all kinds of camera techniques. In 1957 the Physical Science Study Committee of the renowned Massachusetts Institute of Technology hired her services to provide photographic illustrations for new and influential schoolbooks.

Curation

The exhibition was created in collaboration with Fundación MAPFRE, a Spanish non-profit organisation with which Huis Marseille has worked regularly over the last ten years – most recently in 2016 for the Stephen Shore retrospective in Huis Marseille. It was curated by Estrella de Diego, Professor of Modern Art at the Complutense University of Madrid, and has been shown in Barcelona and Madrid.

Loans

The exhibition comprises almost 200 vintage photographs generously loaned from the New York Public Library, the Museum of the City of New York, the International Center of Photography (NY), the George Eastman House (Rochester, NY), the Howard Greenberg Gallery (NY) and the MIT Museum (Cambridge, Massachusetts), together with a selection of Abbott’s publications on loan from the Rijksmuseum library and other collections.

Publication

Estrella de Diego, Julia van Haaften, Berenice Abbott: Portraits of Modernity, Madrid (Fundación Mapfre) 2019.

Text from the Huis Marseille website

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) 'Jean Cocteau' 1927 (installation view)

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Jean Cocteau (installation views)
1927
Gelatin silver print
The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, Photography Collection
The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
Photos: Dr Marcus Bunyan

Jean Cocteau, the author of so many memorable films and works of literature, is shown embracing a sort of mask that perhaps alludes to the repeated play of mirrors that runs through his Orphic Trilogy. He represents the kind of masculinity that Abbott renders in her portraits of homosexual activists such as André Gide and Cocteau or the ‘new men’ who had ceased to be certain of their identity – like the characters in the novels of George Bernard Shaw or Thomas Hardy – and had adopted a less monolithic masculinity. This trait can also be found in D.H. Lawrence, and in James Joyce, who sat for Abbott in 1928.

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) 'Janet Flanner in Paris' 1927 (installation view)

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Janet Flanner in Paris (installation view)
1927
Gelatin silver print
The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, Photography Collection
The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Berenice Abbott: Portraits of Modernity at Huis Marseille, Amsterdam showing at right the image Janet Flanner in Paris, 1927
Photo: Eddo Hartmann

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) 'Janet Flanner in Paris' 1927 from the exhibition 'Berenice Abbott: Portraits of Modernity' at Huis Marseille, Amsterdam, Sept - Dec, 2019

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Janet Flanner in Paris
1927
Gelatin silver print
The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, Photography Collection
The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations

Abbott’s portraits depict some of the modern intellectuals with whom she associated in New York’s Greenwich Village following her arrival there from the native Ohio. These included people who also had links with Paris, such as the writer and journalist Janet Flanner, a personal friend of the writer Djuna Barnes. Abbott gave Flanner an ambiguous aspect; with her cropped hair and masculine dress she is another representative of the strong ‘New Women’. Abbott photographed many of these New Women who were prepared to live on the margins of society in order to safeguard their freedom.

Installation view of the exhibition 'Berenice Abbott: Portraits of Modernity' at Huis Marseille, Amsterdam showing at left, the photograph of 'Janet Flanner' (1927); and at second left, 'Eugène Atget' (1927)

Installation views of the exhibition Berenice Abbott: Portraits of Modernity at Huis Marseille, Amsterdam showing in the top image at left, the photograph of Janet Flanner (1927, above); and at second left, Eugène Atget (1927, below)
Photos: Dr Marcus Bunyan

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) 'Eugène Atget' 1927 (installation view)

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Eugène Atget (installation view)
1927
Gelatin silver print
The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, Photography Collection
The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Eugène Atget
1927
Gelatin silver print
The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, Photography Collection
The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Eugène Atget (installation view)
1927
Gelatin silver print
International Center of Photography
Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan

In 1927 Berenice Abbott produced two portraits, front-facing and in profile, of Eugène Atget, the photographer who was adored by the Surrealists and who captured the mood of late 19th-century Paris. The portraits, reminiscent of a documentary work – of police records, almost – highlight Abbott’s extraordinary skill as a portrait photographer. Atget provided the inspiration for Abbott’s wonderful portrait of New York City, Changing New York. She made generous efforts to promote the French photographer’s work, even acquiring his negatives after his death.

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Eugène Atget
1927
Gelatin silver print
International Center of Photography

Installation view of the exhibition Berenice Abbott: Portraits of Modernity at Huis Marseille, Amsterdam showing Abbott’s photographs of Eugène Atget
Photo: Eddo Hartmann

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) James Joyce, Paris 1920 (installation view)

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
James Joyce, Paris (installation view)
1920
Gelatin silver print
The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, Photography Collection
The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) 'Audrey McMahon' 1925-1946 (installation view)

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Audrey McMahon (installation view)
1925-1946
Gelatin silver print
The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, Photography Collection
The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan

Audrey McMahon was the Director of the New York region of the Federal Art Project from 1935 to 1943; the region she oversaw included New York City, New Jersey, and Philadelphia. Born in New York City in 1898, she attended the Sorbonne, and she was the director of the College Art Association. …

Her approach to the administration of the Federal Art Project attempted to give the artists employed a great deal of freedom, and as she recalled later, “It is gratifying to note… that almost all of the painters, sculptors, graphic artists, and muralists who recall those days remember little or no artistic stricture.”

Text from the Wikipedia website

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) 'Jane Heap' 1929-1931 (installation view)

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Jane Heap (installation view)
1929-1931
Gelatin silver print
International Center of Photography
Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan

Jane Heap (November 1, 1883 – June 18, 1964) was an American publisher and a significant figure in the development and promotion of literary modernism. Together with Margaret Anderson, her friend and business partner (who for some years was also her lover), she edited the celebrated literary magazine The Little Review, which published an extraordinary collection of modern American, English and Irish writers between 1914 and 1929. Heap herself has been called “one of the most neglected contributors to the transmission of modernism between America and Europe during the early twentieth century.”

Text from the Wikipedia website

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Jane Heap
1929-1931
Gelatin silver print
International Center of Photography
Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan

Wall text from the exhibition 'Berenice Abbott: Portraits of Modernity' at Huis Marseille, Amsterdam

Installation views of the exhibition Berenice Abbott: Portraits of Modernity at Huis Marseille, Amsterdam
Photos: Dr Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition 'Berenice Abbott: Portraits of Modernity' at Huis Marseille, Amsterdam showing at left, Eugène Atget's photo 'Eclipse, Paris' 1912

Installation views of the exhibition Berenice Abbott: Portraits of Modernity at Huis Marseille, Amsterdam with in the bottom image at left, Eugène Atget’s photo Eclipse, Paris 1912
Photos: Dr Marcus Bunyan

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) 'L'éclipse' April 1912 (installation view)

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)
L’éclipse (installation view)
April 1912
Printed in 1956 by Berenice Abbott
Gelatin silver print
Courtesy of George Eastman Museum
Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)
Pendant l’éclipse
1912
Albumen print

Although the moon is not visible in this photograph by Eugène Atget, its presence and appeal are implied. The crowd gathered in Paris’s Place de la Bastille on April 17, 1912, was observing a solar eclipse through viewing apparatuses. Atget, rather than recording the astronomical event itself, turned his attention to its spectators. Though Atget made more than 8,500 pictures of Paris and its environs in a career that spanned over thirty years – most documenting the built environment – this photograph is an unusual example that focuses on a crowd of people.

Text from the MoMA website

Installation view of the exhibition 'Berenice Abbott: Portraits of Modernity' at Huis Marseille, Amsterdam showing the photographs of Eugène Atget with at second right 'Avenue des Gobelins' 1925

Installation views of the exhibition Berenice Abbott: Portraits of Modernity at Huis Marseille, Amsterdam showing the photographs of Eugène Atget with at second right Avenue des Gobelins, 1925
Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)
Avenue des Gobelins
1925
Albumen print

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) 'Interior of a worker's room, Rue de Romainville, 19th arr.' c. 1910 (installation view)

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)
Interior of a worker’s room, Rue de Romainville, 19th arr. (installation view)
c. 1910
Printed in 1956 by Berenice Abbott
Gelatin silver print
Courtesy of George Eastman Museum
Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) 'Courtyard, 7 Rue de Valence, 5th arr.' June 1922 (installation view)

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)
Courtyard, 7 Rue de Valence, 5th arr. (installation view)
June 1922
Printed in 1956 by Berenice Abbott
Gelatin silver print
Courtesy of George Eastman Museum
Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)
Courtyard, 7 Rue de Valence, 5th arr.
June 1922
Gelatin silver print
In portfolio: 20 photographs by Eugène Atget, 1856-1927. New York : Berenice Abbott, 1956, no. 13.
Library of Congress

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) 'Rue St. Rustique' March 1922 (installation view)

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)
Rue St. Rustique (installation view)
March 1922
Printed in 1956 by Berenice Abbott
Gelatin silver print
Courtesy of George Eastman Museum
Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)
Rue St. Rustique
March 1922
Gelatin silver print
In portfolio: 20 photographs by Eugène Atget, 1856-1927. New York : Berenice Abbott, 1956, no. 9.
Library of Congress

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) 'Ragpicker's Hut' 1910 (installation view)

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)
Ragpicker’s Hut (installation views)
1910
Printed in 1956 by Berenice Abbott
Gelatin silver print
Courtesy of George Eastman Museum
Photos: Dr Marcus Bunyan

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)
Street diversions (or B organ)
1898-1899
Gelatin silver print
In portfolio: 20 photographs by Eugène Atget, 1856-1927. New York : Berenice Abbott, 1956, no. 16
Library of Congress

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) 'Street Pavers' 1899-1900 (installation view)

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)
Street Pavers (installation views)
1899-1900
Printed in 1956 by Berenice Abbott
Gelatin silver print
Courtesy of George Eastman Museum
Photos: Dr Marcus Bunyan

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)
Street Pavers
1899-1900
Gelatin silver print
In portfolio: 20 photographs by Eugène Atget, 1856-1927. New York : Berenice Abbott, 1956, no. 12
Library of Congress

Abbott saw in Eugène Atget a documentary photographer who revealed in his photographs of Paris a city frozen in time, a city that one might almost describe as antiheroic. Abbott understood that all documentary photography (and an photograph can be documentary, free from fault lines) contains a larger amount of autobiography, and Atget’s photography tells the story of a man and his camera traipsing around the city to seek out its nooks and crannies. To take a photo is to think with your eyes and with your brain. To observe is to be part of the scene.

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) 'Butcher's shop, Rue Christine' c. 1923 (installation view)

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)
Butcher’s shop, Rue Christine (installation view)
c. 1923
Printed in 1956 by Berenice Abbott
Gelatin silver print
Courtesy of George Eastman Museum
Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)
Butcher’s shop, Rue Christine
c. 1923
Gelatin silver print
In portfolio: 20 photographs by Eugène Atget, 1856-1927. New York : Berenice Abbott, 1956, no. 17
Library of Congress

The surrealists were fascinated by Eugène Atget and his shifting play with Paris’s innermost structure, his phantasmagorias. In contrast with this, Abbott emphasises the documentary characteristics of Atget, at first glance a ‘realist’ photographer who captured the deserted landscapes of the city described by Albert Valentin in 1928 as “cerebral landscapes”. Atget photographed the everyday, the events in the house next door, expressing the sense of encountering the strange in the familiar and the familiar in the strange – rather like Abbott did, years later.

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) 'Mannequin' 1926-27 (installation view)

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)
Mannequin (installation views)
1926-1927
Printed in 1956 by Berenice Abbott
Gelatin silver print
Courtesy of George Eastman Museum
Photos: Dr Marcus Bunyan

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)
Mannequin
1926-1927
Gelatin silver print
In portfolio: 20 photographs by Eugène Atget, 1856-1927. New York : Berenice Abbott, 1956, no. 15.
Library of Congress

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) 'Shop, Avenue des Gobelins' 1925 (installation view)

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)
Shop, Avenue des Gobelins (installation view)
1925
Printed in 1956 by Berenice Abbott
Gelatin silver print
Courtesy of George Eastman Museum
Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)
Shop, Avenue des Gobelins
1925
Albumen print

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)
Bar interior, 15 Rue Boyer, 20th arr.
1900-1911
Albumen print

Installation view of the exhibition Berenice Abbott: Portraits of Modernity at Huis Marseille, Amsterdam showing Aerial View of New York by Night at centre and New York Stock Exchange at centre right
Photos: Dr Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Berenice Abbott: Portraits of Modernity at Huis Marseille, Amsterdam showing at left, Aerial View of New York by Night (1936, below)
Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan

Bernice Abbott. 'Night View, New York City' 1932

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Aerial View of New York by Night
March 20, 1936
Gelatin silver print
International Center of Photography

The changes in points of view in [the book] Changing New York – which sometimes seem like a juggling act or a pirouette, ways of seeing form above and from outside – are what convert the most emblematic or familiar places into landscape seen for the first time. And then there is the beautiful photograph of New York at night, the image that offers a full view, the one captured whole by our gaze” an exercise in light that prefigures Abbott’s later photographs on scientific themes.

Installation view of the exhibition 'Berenice Abbott: Portraits of Modernity' at Huis Marseille, Amsterdam showing at right, Abbott's New York Stock Exchange (1933)

Installation view of the exhibition 'Berenice Abbott: Portraits of Modernity' at Huis Marseille, Amsterdam showing Abbott's New York Stock Exchange (1933)

Installation views of the exhibition Berenice Abbott: Portraits of Modernity at Huis Marseille, Amsterdam showing Abbott’s New York Stock Exchange (1933, below)
Photos: Dr Marcus Bunyan

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
New York Stock Exchange
1933
Gelatin silver print
International Center of Photography

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) 'Washington Square, looking north' April 16, 1936 (installation view)

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Washington Square, looking north (installation views)
April 16, 1936
Gelatin silver print
Museum of the City of New York
Gift of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1949
Photos: Dr Marcus Bunyan

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) 'From Trinity Church Yard' March 1, 1938 (installation view)

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
From Trinity Church Yard (installation view)
March 1, 1938
Gelatin silver print
International Center of Photography
Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
John Watts statue, from Trinity Churchyard looking toward One Wall Street, Manhattan
March 1, 1938
Gelatin silver print
Wikipedia, Public domain

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) 'Broadway near Broome Street, Manhattan' 1935 (installation view)

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Broadway near Broome Street, Manhattan (installation views)
1935
Gelatin silver print
The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Arts, Prints and Photographs, Photography Collection
The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
Photos: Dr Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Berenice Abbott: Portraits of Modernity at Huis Marseille, Amsterdam showing at bottom left, Lamport Export Company, 507-511 Broadway, Manhattan October 7, 1935; and at top right, Broadway and Thomas Street 1936
Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) Broadway and Thomas Street 1936 (installation view)

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Broadway and Thomas Street (installation view)
1936
Gelatin silver print
The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Arts, Prints and Photographs, Photography Collection
The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Berenice Abbott: Portraits of Modernity at Huis Marseille, Amsterdam showing at third right, Abbott’s 5th Avenue, No’s 4, 6, 8 March 20, 1936
Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Berenice Abbott: Portraits of Modernity at Huis Marseille, Amsterdam showing Abbott’s 5th Avenue, No’s 4, 6, 8 March 20, 1936
Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan

Berenice Abbott (1898-1991) '5th Avenue, No's 4, 6, 8' 1936

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
5th Avenue, No’s 4, 6, 8
March 20, 1936
Gelatin silver print
International Center of Photography

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Tempo of the City II, Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street looking west from Seymour Building, 503 Fifth Avenue
September 6, 1938
Gelatin silver print
The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection
Wikipedia, Public domain

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) 'Allen Street, No's 55-57, Manhattan' 1937 (installation view)

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Allen Street, No’s 55-57, Manhattan (installation view)
1937
Gelatin silver print
The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Arts, Prints and Photographs, Photography Collection
The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
Photo: Dr Marcus Bunyan

Huis Marseille
Keizersgracht 401
1016 EK Amsterdam
Phone: +31 20 531 89 89

Opening hours
Tuesday – Sunday, 11 – 18 h

Huis Marseille website

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Exhibition dates: 14th August – 1st November, 2020

Acting

Acting Out

Interpretation

Alternatives

Benjamin J. Falk (American, 1853-1925)

Specialty

Napoleon Sarony (American, 1821-1896)

Fanny Lily Gipsey Davenport (English-American, 1850-1898)

A.M. Nikodem

Louise and Caroline Bergman

Exhibition dates: 26th June – 27th October, 2019Visited September 2019 posted September 2020

Touching with the eye

Exhibition dates: 26th July, 2020 – 3rd January, 2021

Clouds and the Limitations of Photography

Clouds & Combination Printing

Painted Clouds and Combination Prints with Hand-Drawn Clouds

Combination Prints with Cloud Negatives Made from Life

Combination Prints with Cloud Negatives Made from Life

Combination Prints with Cloud Negatives Made from Life

Clouds and Landscape on a Single Negative

Painted Clouds and Combination Prints with Hand-Drawn Clouds

Clouds and Landscape on a Single Negative

Painted Clouds and Combination Prints with Hand-Drawn Clouds

Painted Clouds and Combination Prints with Hand-Drawn Clouds

Combination Prints with Cloud Negatives Made from Life

Clouds and Landscape on a Single Negative

Combination Prints with Cloud Negatives Made from Life

Clouds and Landscape on a Single Negative

Exhibition dates: 21st August, 2020 – onwards

Exhibition dates: 13th September – 4th December 2019Visited September 2019 posted July 2020

Digital walk through of the exhibition Brassaï at Foam, Amsterdam in September 2019

Paris de nuit / Paris at night

Portraits – artists, writers and friends

Graffiti

Minotaure

Personages

Sleep

Exhibition dates: 3rd December, 2019 – 13th December, 2020

Exhibition dates: 4th April 2020 – 11th April 2021

The third secret

Artist and Medium

The Paintings for the Temple

De Fem – Drawings

The Blue Books

Botanical Studies

Exhibition dates: 7th September – 1st December, 2019

Visited September 2019 posted June 2020

Old New York, new New York

Exhibition dates: 20th February – 17th May 2020? Coronavirus

D-Construction: deliberate masculinities in a discontinuous world

Introduction

Room 1-4

Disrupting the Archetype

Room 5-6

Male Order: Power, Patriarchy and Space

Room 7-8

Too Close to Home: Family and Fatherhood

Room 9-12

Queer Masculinity

Room 13-14

Reclaiming the Black Body

Room 15-16

Women on Men: Reversing the Male Gaze

Glossary of Terms by CN Lester

Exhibition dates: 7th September – 1st December, 2019

Visited September 2019 posted June 2020

Modernity

Lost Generation

Portrait photographer

Eugène Atget

Changing New York

Science

Curation

Loans

Publication

Exhibition dates: 26th June – 27th October, 2019
Visited September 2019 posted September 2020

Exhibition dates: 13th September – 4th December 2019
Visited September 2019 posted July 2020