So many words, so much verbiage about the work of American artist Saul Leiter (1923-2013).
I’d rather not add to that noise.
It is well to reinforce the meaning of an image with text but it is not necessary.
Just be aware …. of the beauty of the image and your feelings towards it.
Lucidly, appreciate the integrity of the image.
Nothing more but certainly nothing less.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
PS. It’s wonderful to see the earlier black and white work, breadcrumb trail of the colour work to come.
Many thankx to Foam for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“Photographs are often treated as important moments, but really they are fragments and souvenirs of an unfinished world.”
Saul Leiter
“I may be old-fashioned. But I believe there is such a thing as a search for beauty – a delight in the nice things in the world. And I don’t think one should have to apologise for it.”
Saul Leiter, In No Great Hurry, 2013
“His photos feel – as Akiko Atake puts it – like “quiet stolen glimpses”; moments plucked from the everyday and preserved in the eye of Leiter’s camera.”
“I’ve always felt a closeness to Japan in Leiter’s work; the photographs in the snow; the women under their umbrellas; the improbable perspectives and revolutionary compositions reminiscent of Japanese woodblocks, ukiyo-e; the presence of the seasons and the verticality of the compositions evoking Japanese scroll paintings, kakajiku; the beauty he found in cracks and broken surfaces, in the unfinished, the worn out, the imperfect – the endurance of the elements and the effects of time. There is a “mono no aware”* beauty to his photographs, in the color work especially – an acute awareness of the beauty of the transient, of the ephemeral, which might explain, in part, their magical and poetic essence.”
“Leiter was destined to become a rabbi like his father, but moved to New York to be a painter, then choosing photography – which appalled his father. Beginning in 1948, Leiter using an Argus C3 camera, then a Leica and a Rolleiflex
In the 2012 documentary, In No Great Hurry, Saul Leiter said: “There are the things that are out in the open, and there are the things that are hidden, and life has more to do, the real world has more to do with what is hidden.” These tender and graceful depictions of “the things that are hidden” – images that Leiter rarely showed – retain their essential mystery, defying interpretation.”
* mono no aware = a Japanese concept that describes a poignant awareness of the transient nature of existence, a sensitivity to the beauty of things that are fleeting, and a gentle sadness at their passing
Leiter’s love of beauty, Bonnard, Japan, Buddhism, Ukiyo-e prints, Japanese scroll paintings, “ma” (space), kyūdō, haiku.
“The unorthodox and seemingly disproportionate compositions… the emphasis on shapes; the presence of calligraphy; unusual viewpoints and perspectives, everyday subject matter; the ubiquity of women; and a fondness for the ordinary and the ephemeral”
~ Leiter’s complex and impressionistic photographs are as much about evoking an atmosphere as nailing the decisive moment.
~ Leiter was a keen observer as life unfolded before him, somehow finding a way to reliably pluck a sublime split-second out of a mundane moment. ‘I like to take things that are very common and to find something in them,’ he once said.
~ Photographs are often considered important moments, but according to Leiter they are tiny fragments of an unfinished world. Such is his own world: little fragments of images juxtaposed and conjoined, amassing and forming vast, ever-expanding fields.
~ He photographed that which obstructs, hides, encloses, and thus reveals new depths of reality.
~ Everything is a matter of balance, exactitude and humility in the works of this man, who nonetheless accorded great importance to imperfection.
Foam is proud to present a major retrospective exhibition of the celebrated American artist Saul Leiter (1923-2013). Leiter is seen as one of the most important photographers of the 1950’s in the United States and a pioneer of colour photography. This exhibition brings together over 200 works, consisting of photography, both black-and-white and colour, as well as his abstract paintings. His eclectic oeuvre reveals a practice using shadow, light, and reflections to craft layered compositions.
About the artist
Saul Leiter (1923-2013) began painting and photographing in his teenage years, gaining an early recognition for his paintings. After moving to New York in 1946, he turned to photography as a profession while continuing to paint. His abstract forms and groundbreaking compositions possess a painterly quality that distinguishes them from the works of other photographers of that era. His work significantly contributed to the emergence of what is now known as the New York School of photography.
In 1957, he began working for major publications like Esquire and Harper’s Bazaar, balancing his commercial success with his personal passion for street photography in his Manhattan neighbourhood. Leiter’s groundbreaking work in colour photography gained widespread acclaim with the release of his first book, Early Colour (2006). By the time of his death in 2013, Leiter had achieved international recognition, with his work featured in numerous museum exhibitions and publications worldwide.
Text from the Foam website
Installation views of the exhibition Saul Leiter – An Unfinished World at Foam, Amsterdam
Saul Leiter remained dedicated to painting throughout his career, producing many gouaches (opaque watercolours), which were essential to his artistic expression. While most of his works are abstract, with large areas of colour, some feature playful lines that suggest landscapes or figures. His expressive use of colour is distinctive, often favouring muted tones like soft violets, mauves, and faded ochres or yellows. Although Leiter is best known for his photography, his paintings reflect a similarly poetic and intimate vision of the world.
Text from the Foam Facebook page
Installation view of the exhibition Saul Leiter – An Unfinished World at Foam, Amsterdam showing Leiter’s photograph The Pull (c. 1960, below)
Leiter was a keen observer as life unfolded before him, somehow finding a way to reliably pluck a sublime split-second out of a mundane moment. ‘I like to take things that are very common and to find something in them,’ he once said.
Installation view of the exhibition Saul Leiter – An Unfinished World at Foam, Amsterdam showing Leiter’s photograph
Foam is proud to present a major retrospective exhibition of the celebrated American artist Saul Leiter (1923-2013). Leiter is seen as one of the most important photographers of the 1950’s in the United States, and a pioneer of colour photography. This exhibition brings together over 200 works, consisting of photography, both black-and-white and colour, as well as his abstract paintings. His eclectic oeuvre reveals a practice using shadow, light, and reflections to craft layered compositions. For nearly sixty years, Leiter photographed daily, capturing everyday moments of New York City life. With various techniques and mediums, and the use of telephoto lenses, Leiter would enhance the painterly quality of his images and transform seemingly mundane street scenes into visual poetry. New York, a symbol of modernity in the 1950s, became the backdrop for Leiter’s aesthetic discoveries.
By shooting in the rain and snow, and using windows and other reflective surfaces, he created abstract images. A red umbrella, a green traffic light, or the yellow flash of a passing taxi add an unexpected play of colour to his photographs. In the 1940s and 1950s, Leiter was virtually the only non-commercial photographer to work in colour. The use of aged or damaged film allowed him to include surprising compositions with shifts in light and colour. Once lost to obscurity, his work was rediscovered in the mid 2010s for its ground-breaking role in the emergence of colour photography.
By shooting in the rain and snow, and using windows and other reflective surfaces, he created abstract images. A red umbrella, a green traffic light, or the yellow flash of a passing taxi add an unexpected play of colour to his photographs. In the 1940s and 1950s, Leiter was virtually the only non-commercial photographer to work in colour. The use of aged or damaged film allowed him to include surprising compositions with shifts in light and colour. Once lost to obscurity, his work was rediscovered in the mid 2010s for its ground-breaking role in the emergence of colour photography.
Leiter was a self-taught photographer whose strong sense of curiosity made him a lifelong student. He maintained his experimental and spontaneous approach throughout his career, which is evident in both his street photography and fashion work.
Upon his death in 2013, Leiter left behind a remarkable collection of approximately 15,000 black-and-white prints, at least 40,000 colour slides, a similar number of black-and-white negatives and over 4000 paintings, only a handful of which have been seen publicly. The exhibition An Unfinished World offers visitors the chance to admire the endless poetry of Saul Leiter’s artistic practice through his paintings, photography and unique view on the world around him.
“This ambidextrous painter and photographer recognised no limits. If, in the silence of his studio, his movement inscribed on paper imperceptible little rhythmic abbreviations, like an everyday exercise, his gaze penetrated the tumult of the city, challenging what draws the eye and scrutinising what is not seen.”
“If only we give them just a little more attention, these voices also tell us that the images are fragments containing enigmas, and that they journey through time and endure, intact, despite the darkness that may prevail in the world.”
“For nearly sixty years, Leiter photographed daily, capturing everyday moments of New York City life. With various techniques and mediums, and the use of telephoto lenses, Leiter would enhance the painterly quality of his images and transform seemingly mundane street scenes into visual poetry. New York, a symbol of modernity in the 1950s, became the backdrop for Leiter’s aesthetic discoveries. By shooting in the rain and snow, and using windows and other reflective surfaces, he created abstract images. A red umbrella, a green traffic light, or the yellow flash of a passing taxi add an unexpected play of color to his photographs. In the 1940s and 1950s, Leiter was virtually the only non-commercial photographer to work in color. The use of aged or damaged film allowed him to include surprising compositions with shifts in light and color.”
Curators: Hujar’s biographer John Douglas Millar, Hujar’s close friend the artist and master printer Gary Schneider, with Raven Row’s director Alex Sainsbury
And then there is Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987).
Using contextless backgrounds and simple settings, Hujar’s non-judgmental portraits of friends and lovers rely on the slight twist of the head, the drop of a shadow, the photographer’s look and subjects pose, performance, that curves and bends reality into a presence that is magnetic, magical, eternal.
Hujar’s direct, intimate photographs, suggestive of both love and loss, proffer a mirror to strength and determination / to friendship / to love. His pictures gather, together, a feeling for the freedom of people and places, that essence of being true to yourself (getting to the bone as Harrison Adams puts it). A direct connection between the photographer and subject captured by the camera revealed to the world.
You might have guessed I am in love with his photographs.
Thus, it is a great delight to post on this exhibition at Raven Row in London which looks to be an absolute delight, Hujar’s photographs simply and beautifully presented in the space.
His images reveal themselves over time, expounding his love of life and his intimate and free engagement with the world around him.
That is Hujar’s music, his signature.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ Harrison Adams. Photography in the First Person: Robert Mapplethorpe, Peter Hujar, Nan Goldin and Sally Mann (Dissertation). Yale University, 2018 quoted on the “Peter Hujar” Wikipedia page Nd [Online] Cited 14/03/2025
Further postings on this incredible artist on Art Blart can be found at
Many thankx to Raven Row for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
One aspect of this intimate quality was Hujar’s ability to connect with his sitters. One of his models was quoted after an unsuccessful session as saying:
“We couldn’t ‘reveal’. As an actor you have to reveal. And Hujar’s big thing was that you had to reveal. I know that now, but I didn’t know it at the time. In other words, blistering, blazing honesty directed towards the lens. No pissing about. No posing. No putting anything on. No camping around. Just flat, real who-you-are…You must strip down all the nonsense until you get to the bone. That’s what Peter wanted and that was his great, great talent and skill.”
This is the first exhibition to take on the full breadth of Peter Hujar’s later photography. Hujar was a central figure in the downtown scene of 1970s and early 80s New York, but at his death in 1987 from AIDS-related pneumonia his work was largely unknown to a broader art world. Now it is widely admired for its austere elegance and emotional charge. Hujar’s principal concern was with forms of portraiture – of his friends and denizens of the downtown scene, whom he encountered on the street, shot in his apartment studio or sought out backstage. He also turned his attention to animals, whom he photographed with particular empathy, as well as to architectural, landscape and street photography.
Eyes Open in the Dark concentrates on his later work, when his emergence from a debilitating depression in 1976 brought about a new expansiveness. The exhibition also reveals the darkening tone of his photography in the early 1980s, as the AIDS crisis devastated his community, and his work entered into dialogue with the younger artist David Wojnarowicz. Peter Hujar – Eyes Open in the Dark is curated by Hujar’s biographer John Douglas Millar, and Hujar’s close friend, the artist and master printer Gary Schneider, with Raven Row’s director Alex Sainsbury. As well as lifetime prints it will include prints of little-known works specially prepared by Gary Schneider, working closely with the artist’s Estate.
Stephen Lloyd Varble (American, 1946-1984) was a notorious American performance artist, playwright, and fashion designer in lower Manhattan during the 1970s. His work challenged mainstream conceptions of gender and exposed the materialism of the established, institutionalised world.
This is the first exhibition to take on the full breadth of Peter Hujar’s later photography. Hujar was a central figure in the downtown scene of 1970s and early 80s New York, but at his death in 1987 from AIDS-related pneumonia his work was largely unknown to a broader art world. Now it is widely admired for its austere elegance and emotional charge.
Hujar’s principal concern was with forms of portraiture – of his friends and denizens of the downtown scene, whom he encountered on the street, shot in his apartment studio or sought out backstage. He also turned his attention to animals, whom he photographed with particular empathy, as well as to architectural, landscape and street photography. Eyes Open in the Dark concentrates on his later work, when his emergence from a debilitating depression in 1976 brought about a new expansiveness. The exhibition also reveals the darkening tone of his photography in the early 1980s, as the AIDS crisis devastated his community, and his work entered into dialogue with the younger artist David Wojnarowicz.
Peter Hujar – Eyes Open in the Dark is curated by Hujar’s biographer John Douglas Millar, and Hujar’s close friend, the artist and master printer Gary Schneider, with Raven Row’s director Alex Sainsbury. As well as lifetime prints it will include prints of little-known works specially prepared by Gary Schneider, working closely with the artist’s Estate.
The exhibition is free to attend and open Wednesday to Sunday, 11am to 6pm, no booking required. Please note that some images in this exhibition feature explicit sexual content.
David Wojnarowicz (American, 1954-1992) Untitled 1989 From Sex Series (for Marion Scemama) 1988-1989 Gelatin silver print
One of Wojnarowicz’s most remarkable pieces here is the “Sex Series (for Marion Scemama),” a miracle of technical prowess and visual intensity. Wojnarowicz began it in 1988, a year after the photographer Peter Hujar, his close friend and former lover, died of AIDS. These photomontages combine stock photographs with circular insets salvaged from Hujar’s porn collection [among other insets of, for example, police, medical, money, religion and life], which he’d thrown away after his diagnosis.
Much of Wojnarowicz’s work is about sex in an age of death. During the AIDS crisis, sexual activity, particularly that of gay men, was demonized. Resisting the dogma and censorship of the Right’s conservatism and the Left’s moralism alike, the “Sex Series” vibrates with anxious and desirous energy, a mood amplified by the eerie reversal of the printing process, in which light and dark have been inverted to create a near negative.
Exhibition dates: 6th October, 2024 – 6th April, 2025
Curator: Andrea Nelson, associate curator in the department of photographs, National Gallery of Art
Martha Rosler (American, b. 1943) Cleaning the Drapes 1967-1972, printed 2007 From the series House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home Inkjet print Image: 44.2 x 60.4cm (17 3/8 x 23 3/4 in.) National Gallery of Art Gift of the Collectors Committee and Pepita Milmore Memorial Fund
Martha Rosler originally distributed photocopies from this series, House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home, as flyers at anti – Vietnam War demonstrations. She made the original photomontages by combining gritty news photographs of fighting in Vietnam with homerelated advertisements culled from glossy women’s magazines. Here Rosler paired a woman cleaning patterned drapes with two tired soldiers smoking amid rocks and sandbags. The woman’s vacuum wand points to and echoes the soldiers’ rifles. The jolting collision of war imagery and affluent domestic space gives visual form to the description of the conflict as “the living room war” – so called because it appeared on television news nightly.
Wall text from the exhibition
“Ce n’est pas une pipe mais de la photographie, sous toutes ses formes variables et multivalentes”
René Magritte’s 1929 painting Ceci n’est pas une pipe is also known as La Trahison des images … The Treachery of Images.
Treachery – the betrayal of trust – is an apposite word in relation to photography of the 1970s. Finally, once and for all, documentary photography in America broke free of the West Coast fine art photography tradition of mainly white male artists and the “aura” of the fine art print (Walter Benjamin). Photography betrayed the trust placed in the authenticity of the image and its link to the “truth” of reality represented in the photograph to become a medium of variability, in concept, execution and outcome. Photography became whatever you wanted it to be.
Documentary photography and its link to the reality of the referent – its assumed representation of a truth that existed in reality – began to be subsumed into the whole of photography, just part of a conceptual, art, performative, staged, street, cameraless, documentary, fashion, photojournalist, activist, amoebic (from the Greek ἀμοιβή amoibe, meaning “change”), and viral (Paul Virilio) medium.
Photography had always been a medium of communication but now became multi-perspectival – whether that be imaginings of the mind relayed through photographs, conceptual ideas about the world and how we interact with it created and staged through photographs, or new colour photography that challenged the orthodoxy of fine art black and white West Coast American photography.
As Anne-Marie Willis observes on the On This Date In Photography website, “any curator who would challenge the orthodox Beaumont Newhall-style photo history limited to images that are distinctively photographic, aesthetic, and “Straight” … would open a Pandora’s box full of photographs pervasive across so many fields, of such limitless subject matters, and crossing so many disciplines that their histories in photography would be obscured.”1
This is the alleged treachery of multi-perspectival photography, the betraying of photographic histories that stretched back to the beginnings of the medium… but it had to be done for photography to fully open itself up to the imaginings of the human and the media flows of the world. “It was a time when photography challenged the art photography norm: photography should not, could not be restricted to what was considered ‘art’.”2
Thus, it is a great joy to see photographs from this stimulating exhibition, photographs that challenge the established “norm” of what photography should be. But what is surprising to me when looking at the complete list of photographs in this exhibition is the important artists who changed the face of photography in the 1970s who are not represented at all or only have one or two images on show:
Gordon Parks 0 Garry Winogrand 1 Lee Friedlander 2 Diane Arbus 1 Robert Mapplethorpe 0 Robert Heinecken 0 Richard Avedon 0 Andy Warhol 1 Polaroid Cindy Sherman 0 Barbara Kruger 0 Nan Goldin 1 Stephen Shore 1
Diane Arbus, who was instrumental in changing portrait photography at the time, only has one photograph in the exhibition; Barbara Kruger and Robert Heinecken, both “para-photographers” whose work stood “beside” or “beyond” traditional ideas associated with photography have none; Stephen Shore who, along with William Eggleston, was responsible for making colour photography acceptable in art photography has only one photograph.
But most surprisingly of all, Cindy Sherman whose Untitled Film Stills were made predominantly between 1977-1980 and who casts herself as clichés or feminine types, becoming both the artist and subject in the work … is not there at all. Her loss, her evisceration, and the absence of “arguably one of the most significant bodies of work made in the twentieth century and thoroughly canonized by art historians, curators, and critics,”3 is unfathomable.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ Anne-Marie Willis quoted in Dr James McArdle. “DECEMBER 14: CONTEXT,” on the On This Date In Photography website 15/12/2019 [Online] Cited 26/02/2025
2/ Ibid.,
3/ Exhibition Catalogue, New York, Museum of Modern Art, Cindy Sherman, 2012, p. 18 quoted in the “Untitled Film Stills” page on the Wikipedia website
Many thankx to the National Gallery of Art for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Martha Rosler (American, b. 1943) Roadside Ambush 1967-1972, printed 2007 Inkjet print Image/sheet: 50.8 x 61cm (20 x 24 in.) National Gallery of Art Gift of the Artist and Mitchell-Innes and Nash
Rosler originally distributed photocopies of House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home at anti–Vietnam War demonstrations. “I saw House Beautiful not as art,” she later reflected. “I wanted it to be agitational.” The artist created the original photomontages, from which these collages are derived, by combining news photographs of scorched battlefields in Vietnam with glossy advertisements for US homes, layering images of soldiers within cut-out silhouettes of men from polo-shirt advertisements; and splicing pictures of soldiers’ burials with those of military marches. By tying the destruction abroad to untroubled affluence at home, Rosler gave visual form to the description of the conflict as “the living-room war” – so called because it was the first war to be televised.
The exhibition The ’70s Lens: Reimagining Documentary Photography examines how new approaches to documentary photography that emerged during the 1970s reflected a radical shift in American life – and in the medium itself.
The 1970s was a decade of uncertainty in the US – soaring inflation, energy crises, the Watergate scandal, and protests about pressing social issues – and the profound upheaval that rocked the country formed the backdrop for a revolution in documentary photography. Now on view at @ngadc, The ’70s Lens: Reimagining Documentary Photography explores this compelling and contested moment of reinvention when the genre’s association with objectivity and truthfulness came into question. Featuring works from over eighty artists, the exhibition delves into how the camera was used to examine life in the US from a diverse range of perspectives, and in doing so, transformed the practice of documentary photography.
The ’70s Lens: A Conversation with Anthony Hernandez
Artist Anthony Hernandez discusses 50 years of work with curator Andrea Nelson on October 24, 2024. The conversation celebrates the exhibition The ’70s Lens: Reimagining Documentary Photography (October 2024 – April 2025).
Anthony Hernandez (b. 1947, Los Angeles, California) has crafted a richly varied oeuvre, ranging from a distinctive style of black-and-white street photography to colour photographs of abstracted details of his surroundings. Much of Hernandez’s work focuses on his native Los Angeles, revealing a unique insight into the people and landscape of the much-pictured city. Hernandez is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship (2018), the Rome Prize (1999) and has been named a United States Artists Fellow (2009).
Eggleston is celebrated for his use of colour photography, which he began experimenting with in the late 1960s. Eggleston’s 1976 exhibition Colour Photographs, held at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, is considered a pivotal moment in the development of colour photography as a contemporary art form and widely credited with increasing recognition of the medium.
Since first picking up a camera in 1957, Eggleston has photographed his family, friends and the people that he encountered in his everyday life, particularly in his native Memphis. Eggleston is said to find the beauty in the everyday and his work has inspired many present day photographers, artists and filmmakers, including Martin Parr, Sofia Coppola, David Lynch and Juergen Teller.
Anthony Friedkin (American, b. 1949) Young Man, Troupers Hall, Hollywood 1969 From the series The Gay Essay Gelatin silver print National Portrait Gallery Gift of Mary and Dan Solomon
In 1969, Anthony Friedkin was only 19 years old when he set out to document the queer communities of San Francisco and Los Angeles. The resulting project, The Gay Essay, is an expressive and nuanced portrait. Friedkin charts various facets of the culture, from street life and protests to parades and drag performances.
Friedkin’s photographs record the beginnings of the gay liberation movement in California. With a respectful intimacy he pictures individuals living true to themselves while defying prevailing social norms.
Wall text from the exhibition
Mel Bochner (American, 1940-2025) Misunderstandings (A Theory of Photography) (details) 1970 10 offset lithographs on notecards and envelope Sheet (each): 12.7 x 20.32cm (5 x 8 in.) National Gallery of Art, Gift of Mary and Dan Solomon
When Mel Bochner started documenting his works of sculpture with a camera, he realised that his practice had “become about photography without [my] wanting it to.” He studied the history of the medium and found conflicting ideas about what photography is or should be. By illustrating these “misunderstandings” with quotes from notable figures and sources, Bochner underscored the gap between a photograph itself and what it purports to represent. He even fabricated three of the quotations, further playing on photography’s tenuous relationship to truth. The photograph of the artist’s hand and forearm is also a misunderstanding: it is much smaller than the actual body part it depicts. It also appears to be a negative of a Polaroid photograph, but Polaroids exist only as positive prints.
Wall text from the exhibition
Mel Bochner was a key figure in the Conceptual Art movement of the 1960s and 70s. Bochner was part of a group of artists who challenged the traditional notion of art as a physical object to be admired for its aesthetic qualities and instead sought to explore the ideas and concepts behind the object, often using language and text as their medium.
Bochner’s early works were influenced by his interest in mathematics and logic, which he applied to create intricate geometric patterns. As his practice evolved, he incorporated language and words into his artwork, exploring the relationship between language, thought, and perception.
Anthony Barboza (American, b. 1944) New York City 1970s Gelatin silver print Image/sheet: 23.7 × 16.1cm (9 5/16 × 6 1/4 in.) National Gallery of Art Pepita Milmore Memorial Fund
Anthony Barboza’s photography has been integral in shaping the image of Black America. A founding member of the Kamoinge Workshop, a group of Black photographers formed in New York in 1963, Barboza went on to establish a thriving commercial and personal practice focused largely on Black subjects. His affirmative representations of African Americans in daily life – like this photograph of two ultra-stylish men standing in front of a hotel coffee shop in midtown Manhattan – contributed to an empowering narrative for the Black community in the face of inequality and adversity. Describing his approach to making pictures on the street, Barboza commented, “”The photograph finds you, you don’t find the photograph.”
Wall text from the exhibition
Anthony Barboza (American, b. 1944) New York City 1970s Gelatin silver print Image: 23.7 × 15.9cm (9 5/16 × 6 1/4 in.) National Gallery of Art Pepita Milmore Memorial Fund
Lee Friedlander (American, b. 1934) Hillcrest, New York 1970 Gelatin silver print Image: 20.3 x 30.5cm (8 x 12 in.) National Gallery of Art Patrons’ Permanent Fund
The fracturing of the image plane, where multiple, diverse realities are represented within one photograph, deconstructing the reality of fine art photography. ~ Marcus
Lee Friedlander’s layered compositions wittily observe connections between American life and commerce. In this dizzying photograph, Friedlander captures himself, at center, in a sideview mirror while at a filling station. In the reflection behind him we see a strip mall with the stores’ signs reversed. Near and far vie for attention and parts of the composition are blocked from our view.
The photograph with a World War I memorial similarly features vertical elements that break up the composition into separate frames. At left, the memorial’s soldier with rifle – who appears to be on guard – goes completely unnoticed as pedestrians make their way along a street full of storefronts.
Wall text from the exhibition
Kenneth Josephson (American, b. 1932) Wyoming 1971 From the History of Photography series Gelatin silver print Image: 22.8 x 14.1cm (9 x 5 9/16 in.) National Gallery of Art Patrons’ Permanent Fund
Kenneth Josephson’s conceptual photography experiments with playful illusion to explore and question his medium. Josephson was a graduate among the first generation of photography candidates from the Illinois Institute of Design. A student of such masters as Aaron Siskind, Harry Callahan, and Minor White, Josephson went on to teach for 35 years at the Art Institute of Chicago, where he routinely taught the “Introduction to Photography” course as it inspired him to continue experimentation.
“This photograph of a photograph held in space causes the viewer to question assumptions about truthful representation according to size and scale; it also draws attention to the principle that photographic reality is constructed through an artist’s ideas and choices. The subject of the photograph is photography itself, and the ways that life is documented, manipulated, trivialised, and celebrated with photographs.”
Lewis Baltz (American, 1945-2014) Tract House #4 1971 From the portfolio The Tract Houses Gelatin silver print Image/sheet: 14.5 × 22.5cm (5 11/16 × 8 7/8 in.) National Gallery of Art Corcoran Collection (Gift of the artist)
Lewis Baltz’s The Tract Houses captures the austere geometry of the shoddily built homes that sprang up in California’s suburban landscape beginning in the mid-1940s. Straight-edge architectural details, positioned strictly parallel to the picture plane, recall the reductive forms of minimalist art. Entire, recently constructed houses appear forlorn. None of the pictures include shadows, clouds, or people. Baltz’s series is a powerful critique of the transformation of the American landscape into an unending terrain of anonymous architecture. At the same time, the exquisitely rendered tones and textured surfaces emphasise the subtle beauty to be found in this bleak environment.
Wall text from the exhibition
With his iconic, minimalist photographs of suburban landscape, Lewis Baltz was at the forefront of a revolutionary shift in the medium of photography. Baltzs work exemplifies the ways in which photography started to loose the bonds of its isolation within its own segregated history and aesthetics and began to take its place among other media. In the late 1960s and early 1970s Baltz became fascinated by the stark, man-made landscape rolling over Californias then still-agrarian terrain. His earliest portfolio, The Tract Houses (1971), and his preliminary forays into a minimal aesthetic, The Prototype Works (1967-1976), illuminate his drive to capture the reality of a sprawling Western ecology gone wild.
Diane Arbus (American, 1923-1971) A young man and his girlfriend with hot dogs in the park 1971 Gelatin silver print Image: 37.7 x 36.5cm (14 13/16 x 14 3/8 in.) National Gallery of Art, Corcoran Collection Gift of Stephen G. Stein
Diane Arbus prowled New York’s public spaces looking for humor and strangeness in the everyday. Here a young couple walks in Central Park, wearing similar clothes, hairstyles, and dejected expressions. Arbus’s carefully composed but disorienting photograph – the subjects are in crisp focus while the background is blurred – compels us to look anew at the familiar. Is this couple unhappy in love or expressing the uncertainty of the times? Arbus made this photograph the year she died. Her influence on documentary photography would continue through the decade.
Wall text from the exhibition
Eleanor Antin (American, b. 1935) Philip Steinmetz (American, 1944-2013) (photographer) 100 Boots (details) 1971-1973 51 halftone prints (postcards) image/sheet (each): 11.5 x 17.75cm (4 1/2 x 7 in.) National Gallery of Art Pepita Milmore Memorial Fund
In this epic visual narrative, black rubber boots stand in for a fictional hero traveling from California to New York City. Eleanor Antin created temporary installations with the boots, had them photographed (by Philip Steinmetz), and made 51 postcards, copies of which she mailed to approximately 1,000 people and institutions involved in the arts. The journey starts at a Bank of America and ends at Central Park – after a visit to the Museum of Modern Art, where the boots and a set of postcards and photographs were later exhibited. Using the postal service, Antin bypassed the traditional gallery system, which had long overlooked women artists. While many of these scenes are humorous, the empty army boots also recall the Vietnam War and the soldiers who did not come home.
Wall text from the exhibition
100 Boots, 1971-1973
For her 51-piece instalment 100 Boots Eleonor Antin positioned one hundred ordinary black rubber boots on various locations all over Southern California and consequently in New York City. She took photos, printed them on postcards and assembled a mailing list of about a thousand names – mainly artists, writers, critics, galleries, universities and museums – who received the various postcards over a period of two and a half years between 1971 and 1973. The first card, 100 Boots Facing the Sea, was mailed on the Ides of March, 1971, unannounced and without further comment. A few weeks later it was followed by 100 Boots on the Way to Church and three weeks thereafter by the next one.
In a total of 51 photographs, Eleanor Antin documented the travels of the 100 Boots, her so called “hero” – from a beach close to San Diego to a church, to a bank, to the supermarket, trespassing, under the bridge, to a saloon and on their travels eastward. Finally, on May 15th, 1973 100 Boots arrived at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. By this time, 100 Boots had long become an epic visual narrative and a picaresque work of conceptual art.
Henry Wessel (American, 1942-2018) Walapai, Arizona 1971 Gelatin silver print Image: 26.51 x 39.85cm (10 7/16 x 15 11/16 in.) National Gallery of Art Gift of Mary and Dan Solomon and Patrons’ Permanent Fund
In 1975 New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape opens at the International Museum of Photography in Rochester, N.Y. It includes photographs by Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Joe Deal, Frank Gohlke, Nicholas Nixon, John Schott, Stephen Shore, and Henry Wessel Jr.
“Henry Wessel began taking photographs while majoring in psychology at Pennsylvania State University in the mid-1960s. Travel throughout the United States in subsequent years led him to direct his gaze increasingly to details of human interaction with the natural and man-made environment. Wessel’s move to the West Coast in the early 1970s inspired him to incorporate light and climate into his work. His inclusion in the seminal exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape, organised in 1975 by the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, solidified his reputation as a keen observer of the American topography.”
Text from Pacific Standard Time at the Getty
John Simmons (American, b. 1950) Will on Chevy, Nashville, Tennessee 1971, printed 2024 Gelatin silver print Image: 30.48 x 20.32cm (12 x 8 in.) National Gallery of Art Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
A fashionably dressed older man crosses the street with his umbrella. A young woman turns to look at the camera while holding hands with a man in uniform. These were people John Simmons encountered while studying art at Fisk University in Nashville. Raised on Chicago’s South Side, Simmons had first published photographs as a teenager in the African American newspaper Chicago Defender. Refuting white-centered media’s failure to show positive imagery of the Black experience, Simmons has focused on people enjoying everyday life.
“I always feel like my subject and I were meant to share that moment together,” he has said. “So many of the pictures I take, it was like our paths were meant to cross.”
Wall text from the exhibition
Simmons began his career at 15 as a photographer for the oldest African American-owned newspaper, The Chicago Daily Defender in 1965. Over his decades long career, he’s photographed icons of the Civil Rights Movement, turbulent protests and demonstrations, famed musicians and poignant intimate moments of everyday life. “I’m glad to see photographs I took back in my teens are still relevant today,” he says.
Helen Levitt frequently made photographs of children on the streets of New York City, exploring their relationships to the urban setting as they played, imagined, and discovered together. After decades of working in black and white, Levitt became an early advocate of color documentary photography. Color allowed her to tell a fuller story of everyday life. Here, the green of the boy’s T-shirt is echoed in the poster and frame behind him. “I thought my photographs would be closer to reality if I got the color of the streets,” she said. “Black and white is an abstraction.”
Wall text from the exhibition
Bill Owens (American, b. 1938) Ronald Reagan 1972 From the series Suburbia Gelatin silver print Image: 16.4 x 21.6cm (6 7/16 x 8 1/2 in.) National Gallery of Art Patrons’ Permanent Fund
Over the course of a year, Bill Owens made photographs of the housing developments that had recently sprung up outside of Oakland and San Francisco. With an eye to humor, he captured the apparent conformity and materialism of the new suburbs. Here, a home is decorated for Christmas. At center, Nativity figures sit atop a television console showing an old film featuring Ronald Reagan, who had been a movie actor before becoming a politician. Owens also respected the liberation that many suburbanites felt, as well as their determination to build better lives. In his book Suburbia (1972), he included quotations from his subjects describing the opportunities and challenges they faced in their new environments.
Wall text from the exhibition
Owens began his photographic career in the late 1960s as a staff photographer for a local newspaper in Livermore, California. During this period, he began his most noteworthy project, “Suburbia,” which would become a major body of work in American documentary photography.
“Suburbia” was published as a book in 1973, featuring Owens’ images and conversations with suburban dwellers. The project’s goal was to investigate the goals, aspirations, and inconsistencies of suburbia life, offering a critical yet sympathetic study of the American Dream.
Owens’ images depicted scenes of backyard barbecues, family gatherings, children at play, and the myriad rituals and social interactions that constituted suburban areas. He highlighted both the humor and the underlying intricacies of suburban life through his good observation and direct attitude.
What distinguished Owens’ work was his ability to see past the surface and capture the soul of his subjects. His images conveyed a sense of realism by portraying suburbanites in their natural settings and enabling their tales to flow through genuine moments captured in time.
Owens’ art struck a chord with a large audience because it highlighted a huge societal transition in America during the 1970s. Owens’ images challenged the idealized image of suburban life by exposing the hardships, wants, and inconsistencies inherent in the pursuit of the American Dream.
Anonymous. “Bill Owens,” on the Photo.com website Nd [Online] Cited 06/20/2025
See how documentary photography transformed during the 1970s.
The 1970s was a decade of uncertainty in the United States. Americans witnessed soaring inflation, energy crises, and the Watergate scandal, as well as protests about pressing issues such as the Vietnam War, women’s rights, gay liberation, and the environment. The country’s profound upheaval formed the backdrop for a revolution in documentary photography. Activism and a growing awareness and acceptance of diversity opened the field to underrepresented voices. At the same time, artistic experimentation fueled the reimagining of what documentary photographs could look like.
Featuring some 100 works by more than 80 artists, The ’70s Lens examines how photographers reinvented documentary practice during this radical shift in American life. Mikki Ferrill and Frank Espada used the camera to create complex portraits of their communities. Tseng Kwong Chi and Susan Hiller demonstrated photography’s role in the development of performance and conceptual art. With pictures of suburban sprawl, artists like Lewis Baltz and Joe Deal challenged popular ideas of nature as pristine. And Michael Jang and Joanne Leonard made interior views that examine the social landscape of domestic spaces.
The questions these artists explored – about photography’s ethics, truth, and power – continue to be considered today.
Text from the National Gallery of Art
Lee Friedlander (American, b. 1934) Doughboy. Stamford, Connecticut 1973 Gelatin silver print Image: 17.8 x 27cm (7 x 10 5/8 in.) National Gallery of Art Robert B. Menschel Fund
William Eggleston has said that he has “a democratic way of looking around,” where nothing is more important or less important. For him, everyday subjects are not boring but instead offer visual richness. Here, that richness has a pronounced edge. Eggleston directed his lens up to a red ceiling with a single bare lightbulb at center. We glimpse only the top of a doorframe and a fragment of an explicit poster. The saturated, bloodlike color that dominates the composition is shocking, even menacing. It also challenged Eggleston technically as he developed his skills with dye imbibition printing. Commonly known as dye transfer, the process was labor intensive but allowed for customisation and a wide range of colours and tones.
Viewers of a certain age will recognize this setting as the parking lot of a Howard Johnson’s restaurant. HoJos, as they were nicknamed, were once ubiquitous along America’s highways. The cheery saturated colors belie the scene’s subject: a couple having a bad travel day. A man in suit and tie works under the hood of a beat-up Chevy Impala. His partner, wearing a pale pink skirt and top, arms crossed, appears frustrated. The cars zooming by seem to mock their immobility. Part of Mitch Epstein’s Recreation series, which documented Americans engaging in leisure activities, the photograph today evokes melancholy and nostalgia. Explaining his early turn to colour film, the artist said, “The world is in color, so why not photograph in color?”
Wall text from the exhibition
I started to work in colour, which was a radical, and some thought foolish, move in 1973. Colour photography was not yet a medium for serious photography – it was used almost exclusively for slick advertising and illustration. Within a month of shooting in colour, though, I wanted to do nothing else…
As I developed, I learned that a photograph is other than the thing itself photographed, and this freed me to think about how I could use photography to fictional effect, even while my pictures were drawn from the real world…
Photography remains a tool with which I form and sharpen my response to the world around me. Anything and everything is photographable in an infinite number of ways. That excites me.
Mitch Epstein in Lewis Blackwell. PhotoWisdom: Master Photographers on Their Art quoted quoted in “Mitch Epstein – Meet The Master Photographer,” on the Milkbooks website Nd [Online] Cited 06/02/2025
Adams’ photographic vision is extra ordinary and I cannot fault his individual photographs. I become engrossed in them. I breathe their atmosphere. He has a resolution, both in terms of large format aesthetic, the aesthetic of beauty and of using materials, light and composition… that seems exactly right. He possesses that superlative skill of few great photographers, and by that I mean: sometimes he has true compassion** / parallel to a religious compassion, but not based on something higher / just perfect human. In some of his photographs (such as East from Flagstaff Mountain, Boulder County, Colorado 1975) he possesses real forgiveness, in others there is the perfection of cruel, the perfection of de/composition.
** achieved by Arbus, Atget and sometimes by Clift, Gowin.
And then, each image holds small clues vital to the overall conversation that is the accumulation of his work and it is in their collective accumulation of meaning that Adams’ photographs grow and build to shatter not just the American silence on environmental issues, but the deafening silence of the whole industrialised world. In their holistic nature, Adams’ body of work becomes punctum and because of this his work produces other “things”, things as great as anything the French literary theorist, essayist, philosopher, critic, and semiotician Roland Barthes wrote about. As in Barthes’ seminal work Camera Lucida, Adams’ work reminds us that the “photograph is evidence of ‘what has ceased to be’. Instead of making reality solid, it reminds us of the world’s ever changing nature.”1
Marcus Bunyan. “The quiet of the great beyond,” on the exhibition American Silence: The Photographs of Robert Adams at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, May – October 2022 on Art Blart: art and cultural memory archive website, September 25, 2022 [Online] Cited 06/02/2025
1/ Anonymous. “Roland Barthes,” on the Wikipedia website Nd [Online] Cited 23/09/2022
Michael Jang (American, b. 1951) Study Hall 1973 Gelatin silver print 15.5 × 23.5cm (6 1/8 × 9 1/4 in.) National Gallery of Art Charina Endowment Fund
In Study Hall, Michael Jang’s extended family sits together on a couch reading comics and a television guide, a messy tray of Kraft Teez Dip and potato chips on the table in front of them. The covers of the decidedly not studious publications block their faces, becoming stand-ins for their portraits. In Aunts and Uncles (nearby), relatives are caught joking around while posing for an official family portrait in silly sunglasses.
Jang’s humorous photographs of his Chinese American family and the trappings of their suburban lives offer a refreshing take on the often staid genre of family portraiture. They also debunk the 1970s stereotype – think The Brady Bunch – that the “all-American” family could only be white.
Wall text from the exhibition
In his series The Jangs, Michael Jang photographed family at home. His humorous photographs of their suburban lives expanded the concept of the “all-American” family – the Chinese American Jangs didn’t look like The Brady Bunch.
In Study Hall, Jang’s cousins and aunt sit together on a couch reading comics and a television guide, a messy tray of potato chips and dip on the table in front of them. The covers of decidedly not studious publications block their faces, becoming stand-ins for their portraits.
Jang’s delightful series was almost entirely forgotten. The photographs, which he had first made while a student, sat in a box in the artist’s house for decades while he established a career as a commercial photographer.
In the 2000s, Jang reconsidered this series and shared it with museums, which began adding the photographs to their collections. His photographs took on a new light in the wake of a rise of anti-Asian hate during the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2021, Jang wheat pasted images from The Jangs on buildings in San Francisco’s Chinatown.
Susan Meiselas (American, b. 1948) Lena on the Bally Box, Essex Junction, Vermont 1973 Gelatin silver print Image: 22 x 32.5cm (8 11/16 x 12 13/16 in.) National Gallery of Art Anonymous Gift in honor of Sarah Greenough and Andrea Nelson
The final and most essential selection in this posting – Susan Meiselas’ 1972-1975 Carnival Strippers series – goes behind the “front” to document the lives of women who performed striptease for small-town carnivals in New England, Pennsylvania and South Carolina. “Meiselas’ frank description of these women brought a hidden world to public attention, and explored the complex role the carnival played in their lives: mobility, money and liberation, but also undeniable objectification and exploitation. Produced during the early years of the women’s movement, Carnival Strippers reflects the struggle for identity and self-esteem that characterised a complex era of change.” (Booktopia)
Intense, intimate and revealing, the series proves that we can think we know something (the phenomenal) and yet photography reveals how strange and different each world is – whether that be in trying to understand the mind of the artist and what they intended in a constructed photograph or, in this case, having an impression of someone else’s life, a life we can perceive (through the “presence” of the photograph) but never truly know (the noumenal).
Susan Meiselas (American, b. 1948) Tentful of Marks, Tunbridge, Vermont 1974 Gelatin silver print Image: 19.7 x 29.4cm (7 3/4 x 11 9/16 in.) National Gallery of Art, Corcoran Collection Museum Purchase, Photography Acquisition Fund
In Tentful of Marks, Susan Meiselas trains her camera from backstage on the legs and high heels of a carnival dancer. The all-male audience – the “marks” of the title – are in sharp focus, and they crowd around the small stage, lustfully gawking up at her. Meiselas spent three summers documenting women who performed striptease at small-town carnivals in New England, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina. In addition to making photographs, she recorded audiotapesof conversations with the dancers, giving them agency to describe their experience. Meiselas saw her project as a collaboration. Merging listening and looking, it expanded perspectives on a largely invisible and – from the dancers’ perspective – misunderstood world.
Wall text from the exhibition
Installation view of the exhibition The ’70s Lens: Reimagining Documentary Photography at the National Gallery of Art, Washington showing at left, Milton Rogovin’s photograph Jimmy Webster with His Father, Verne (1973, below); and at right, Jimmy Webster (1985)
Milton Rogovin (American, 1909-2011) Jimmy Webster with His Father, Verne 1973 Gelatin silver print Image: 17.4 x 15.5cm (6 7/8 x 6 1/8 in.) National Gallery of Art Gift of Pierre Cremieux and Denise Jarvinen
Verne Webster, sitting on his front stoop, looks guardedly at the camera while sheltering his toddler son Jimmy in a protective embrace. This is an early work from Milton Rogovin’s 30-year series documenting Buffalo’s Lower West Side. The project focused on a six-block neighbourhood that was among Buffalo’s most diverse and most impoverished. Rogovin asked permission to photograph his subjects, let them choose their poses and settings, and gave them free prints. He returned every decade or so to photograph the same individuals. A nearby picture shows Jimmy 12 years later. Looking back at Rogovin’s photographs in 2003, Jimmy Webster said, “Whenever you look at his photographs, you just see people for who they are.”
Wall text from the exhibition
John Baldessari (American, 1931-2020) Throwing three balls in the air to get a straight line: (best of thirty-six attempts) 1973 Colour offset photolithographs National Gallery of Art Library David K. E. Bruce Fund
West Coast conceptual art has a whimsical air. Artists such as John Baldessari and Ed Ruscha created scenarios that lampoon both the pretense of “high art” and the self-seriousness of conceptual art, particularly as the latter was developing in New York. Beneath the humor, however, their works spoke to more substantive issues like artistic failure and social mores. In 1973 Baldessari photographed his 36 attempts to throw three balls in the air to form a straight line. He never succeeded but included his 12 best attempts in a portfolio.
Wall text from the exhibition
Henry Wessel (American, 1942-2018) Utah 1974 gelatin silver print Image: 26.5 x 39.7cm (10 7/16 x 15 5/8 in.) National Gallery of Art Patrons’ Permanent Fund
Stephen Shore (American, b. 1947) Holden Street July 13, 1974 Chromogenic print Image: 20.5 x 25.4cm (8 1/16 x 10 in.) National Gallery of Art Diana and Mallory Walker Fund
Stephen Shore’s photograph may appear casual, but it is carefully constructed. The vertical of the lamppost draws our attention to the shadowed foreground. Buildings and sidewalks on each side act as perspective lines that meet in the brighter background. Shore was exploring how three-dimensional space is rendered in two dimensions, particularly in a colour photograph. He was also examining where a once-powerful New England industrial town abruptly ended and the verdant countryside began. The lack of people, saturated colours, and clarity of detail – made possible by using a large-format 8 × 10 camera – give the picture an air of timelessness but also hyperreality.
Wall text from the exhibition
Thomas Barrow (American, 1938-2024) Dart 1974, printed 1994 From the series Cancellations Gelatin silver print 23.9 × 34.6cm (9 7/16 × 13 5/8 in.) National Gallery of Art Randi and Bob Fisher Fund
In Dart, Thomas Barrow photographed a huge arrow that appears to have plunged from the threatening clouds above into a parking lot shared by Snappy Photos, a Goodwill drop-off bin, and a K-Mart. The work is part of his series Cancellations, documenting the suburban sprawl overtaking much of the United States. Barrow “cancelled” his images before printing by slashing the negatives with an icepick. (“Cancelling” refers to the practice of defacing a printing plate or negative to ensure no more official prints can he made from it.) This action calls attention to the photograph’s surface and its materiality, which in turn emphasise the choices Barrow made in its production.
Wall text from the exhibition
Thomas F. Barrow is an artist working with photography more than he is a photographer… For Barrow, the ideas are what matter, not the material they are realized with.
Barrow’s Cancellations series is an early expression of this artistic philosophy. Created between 1973-1981, it began when Barrow moved from Rochester, New York to Albuquerque, New Mexico to teach at UNM. Like many photographers of this era (Lewis Baltz, Frank Gohlke, Robert Adams) Barrow was struck by the transformation underway with the (sub)urbanization of the Western landscape. However, he was inspired to do more than document with his camera; he wanted to challenge his viewers while subverting some fundamental truths of photography. Inspired by a cancelled Marcel Duchamp etching (a process where the etching plate is defaced to indicate that no more official prints may be made), he began defacing his negatives with an ice pick and hole punch, “cancelling” them before making the images.
Almost 40 years later, it’s still unclear whether Barrow is canceling the photograph or the scene in the picture. He is certainly calling attention to the matrix that produced the photograph, an unheard of practice at the time and still rare today. By defacing his negatives, he has created photographs that are as much about the physical image as they are about the subject in the photograph.
David Ondrik. “Cancellations by Thomas Barrow,” in Fraction Magazine Issue 49 on the Fraction Magazine website Nd [Online] Cited 07/02/2025
Blythe Bohnen (American, 1940-2022) Self-Portrait: Triangular Motion, Small 1974 From the series Self-Portraits: Studies in Motion Gelatin silver prints National Gallery of Art Gift of Herbert and Paula Molner
Most self-portraits offer some idea of the artist’s physical appearance and perhaps psychological state. The focus of Blythe Bohnen’s intentionally distorted self-portraits, however, is altogether different. Bohnen was interested in the physical element of artmaking – specifically, the role of her body’s movements or gestures in the creative process. Photographs usually capture an instant, but Bohnen instead used exposures of several seconds and the precise, predetermined gestures identified in her titles to distill the essence of motion. The portraits, blurry and disorienting, become more of a performance in time, condensed into a single image.
For the works in his series Altered Landscape, John Pfahl playfully juxtaposed the organic and natural with the manipulated and constructed. In this picture, he placed six oranges on a path in the woods. Typically, if the fruits were all the same size they would appear to grow smaller the farther from the camera they were located. Here, however, the artist has reversed that expectation, with the smallest orange sitting nearest the camera and the largest in place at the top of the picture. Through his staging, Pfahl makes the viewer aware of how a camera, by recording three-dimensional space onto a two-dimensional surface, actually produces a distorted view.
Wall text from the exhibition
In 1981, Peter C. Bunnell observes in his Introduction to James Alinder’s book Altered Landscapes: The Photographs of John Pfahl, “Our momentary, fragmented and captured vision of disorder and emotion has been replaced by a cool rendering of purposefulness as if to accord another dimension of positivism to the moving force of contemporary human awareness. Pfahl’s work is an attack on the problems of space and, ultimately, existence from a rational point of view.”
Forty years later, these photographs seem not so much rational, or picturesque, as spiritual. The human construction touches the earth lightly, almost reverentially. As Pfahl notes, utmost care is taken not to alter the actual subject in a way he would consider harmful to his positivist respect for nature. In this delicate footprint, these photographs are very prescient of the dangers of our own Anthropocene – of climate change, of raging bushfires, drought, flood and bio-exinction. We are literally destroying this planet and its creatures. Bunnell states, “Pfahl’s imagery is a sure manifestation of the belief that society can produce an art suitable to its nature and, in this case, a specific kind of photographic presence that expresses current societal values.”
Unfortunately, it’s all too late. The lesson has not been learned.
Marcus Bunyan on the exhibition John Pfahl Altered Landscapes at Joseph Bellows Gallery, La Jolla, California, November – December 2019
Anthony Hernandez (American, b. 1947) Washington, DC #11 1975 Gelatin silver print Image: 18.1 × 27.31cm (7 1/8 × 10 3/4 in.) National Gallery of Art Corcoran Collection (Museum Purchase)
Anthony Hernandez cleverly uses the crook of a woman’s raised arm to frame a fruit seller on the street behind her. A Los Angeles – based photographer, Hernandez was invited to Washington, DC, in 1975 to participate in The Nation’s Capital in Photographs, a bicentennial documentary project organized by the Corcoran Gallery of Art. Ignoring the city’s monuments, Hernandez captured life in commercial downtown areas where the architecture and people on the street defined the landscape. This sparsely populated composition evokes urban alienation. Neither figure seems aware of the other, and both look small against the austere modern building and grate-covered sidewalk that fill the background.
Wall text from the exhibition
Anthony Hernandez’s 1970s photographs of urban inhabitants are often focused on odd-looking people staring right at the camera. His subjects often appear surprised and slightly perturbed, as if caught unaware in private moments of thought or conversation.
Following two years of study at East Los Angeles College and two years of service in the United States Army as a medic in the Vietnam War, Hernandez took up photography in earnest around 1970. He walked the streets of his native Los Angeles, observing its inhabitants. In order to work quickly and intuitively, he would pre-focus the camera and then wait for subjects to come into the zone of focus – only briefly bringing the camera to his eye as he walked past them. He repeated this strategy in other cities, including London, Madrid, Saigon, and Washington, D.C.
Joanne Leonard (American, b. 1940) Memo Center with Wall Plaque c. 1975 Gelatin silver print Image: 33.3 × 43.1cm (13 1/8 × 16 15/16 in.) National Gallery of Art Gift of the Artist in honor of her daughter, Julia Marjorie Leonard
Dotted curtains, a flowered light switch plate, and a humorous wall plaque add a personal touch to this carefully framed picture of a so-called memo center – an area near a wall phone where notes could be jotted down that was popular in 1970s homes. A practitioner of what she called “intimate documentary,” feminist artist Joanne Leonard recorded familiar but often overlooked domestic spaces traditionally associated with women. She explained, “Through my work as an artist I’ve discovered that the realms of the personal and the public are rarely as separate as I once imagined.”
Wall text from the exhibition
In the 1970s Leonard began examining how domestic spaces are transformed through the presence of technology by photographing the interiors of her neighbours’ homes in West Oakland, California, later moving on to other locations. She captured personal objects in bedrooms and found repetition in the common appliances present in kitchen after kitchen. She also documented the proliferation of “memo centers” – areas where notes could be jotted down near the location of a telephone, which at this time was still tethered in place by a cord.
Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) Gallery label from 2022
Joanne Leonard (American, b. 1940) Lupe’s Kitchen Window, San Leandro, California c. 1975 Gelatin silver print Image: 41.8 x 43.1cm (16 7/16 x 16 15/16 in.) National Gallery of Art Gift of the Artist in honor of her daughter, Julia Marjorie Leonard
Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987) Susan Sontag 1975 Gelatin silver print Image: 37.15 x 37.15cm (14 5/8 x 14 5/8 in.) National Gallery of Art Stephen G. Stein Employee Benefit Trust
Robert Cumming (American, 1943-2021) 67-Degree Body Arc Off Circle Center 1975, printed 2022 Inkjet print Image: 148.59 x 185.42cm (58 1/2 x 73 in.) National Gallery of Art Gift of David Knaus
Sometimes Cumming used his own body as an eccentric subject, as in “67-degree body arc off circle center” from 1975. Shown in profile with his hips thrust forward, his torso arched back and his neck and head awkwardly aligned with the angle of his legs, he’s a mathematical or scientific demonstration whose geometry turns the graceful rationality of Leonardo da Vinci’s “Vitruvian Man” on its ear. The title’s geometric forms drawn around his body on the surface of the photograph might have been made with an oversized pen-nib, into which the hand on Cumming’s hip is discreetly hidden.
The artist’s photograph, like a drawing, is an artifice.
His work as a painter, sculptor and performance artist informed his distinctive, often witty approach to images made with a camera, which Cumming began to explore in 1969 and continued for more than a decade. Artists as diverse as Eve Sonneman, Jan Groover, Lew Thomas, Judy Fiskin and Lewis Baltz were blurring traditional boundaries in different but Conceptually cogent ways. Photography would never be the same.
Francesca Woodman (American, 1958-1981) House #3 c. 1975-1976, printed 1997-2004 Gelatin silver print Image: 16.1 x 16.3cm (6 5/16 x 6 7/16 in.) National Gallery of Art Gift of the Heather and Tony Podesta Collection
At the far end of a decrepit room, the phantom-like figure of the photographer appears to be merging with, or emerging from, the wall. In contrast to the sharply rendered interior, she is an ethereal blur whose face can barely be made out. Both the creator and subject of most of her work, Francesca Woodman staged dreamlike performances that explore self-portraiture, the female body, and architectural space. Although sometimes carefully planned, they more often represented her spontaneous, imaginative responses to an environment. Woodman made this photograph in an abandoned house in Providence when she was in her late teens.
Wall text from the exhibition
The 1970s was a decade of uncertainty in the United States. Americans witnessed soaring inflation, energy crises, and the Watergate scandal, as well as protests about the Vietnam War, women’s rights, gay liberation, and the environment. The profound upheaval that rocked the country formed the backdrop for a revolution in documentary photography. Activism and growing support of multiculturalism opened the field to underrepresented voices, while artistic experimentation fuelled the reimagining of what documentary photographs could look like.
The ’70s Lens: Reimagining Documentary Photography examines this compelling and contested moment of reinvention when documentary photography’s automatic association with objectivity and truthfulness came into question. The photographs on view record subjects, communities, and landscapes previously overlooked and expand the boundaries of the genre. During this turbulent decade, documentary practice became more deeply entwined with fine art, while conceptual and performance artists used the medium to preserve their ideas and record their actions. An openness to individual expression and a turn from black and white to color film further transformed a field previously celebrated for accurately representing the world and its social ills.
Drawn primarily from the National Gallery’s collection and featuring some 100 photographs by more than 80 artists, The ’70s Lens is on view from October 6, 2024, through April 6, 2025, in the West Building.
“The profound upheaval in American life during the 1970s inspired artists to question the objective nature of documentary photography,” said Kaywin Feldman, director of the National Gallery. “The extraordinary photographs on view in this exhibition explore their diverse and compelling responses, revealing relevant connections to today’s thinking about community and who gets to represent it, as well as broader concepts including photographic truth, equity, and environmental responsibility.”
The Exhibition
Organised thematically, The ’70s Lens: Reimagining Documentary Photography examines how the many documentary approaches that emerged during the 1970s reflected a radical shift in American life – and in photography itself.
Seeing Community
Spurred by the civil rights movement and a growing recognition of the rich ethnic and cultural diversity within the United States, photographers – especially from the Black, Latinx, and LGBTQ+ communities – reclaimed documentary practice to represent the fullness of their lives. Responding to a history of misrepresentation by outsiders, Anthony Barboza, Frank Espada, Mikki Ferrill, Nan Goldin, Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe, John Simmons, among others, focused their cameras on close-knit neighborhoods, often their own, building trusting relationships with the people they photographed. These artists worked collaboratively with their subjects to challenge preconceived notions of their communities.
Experimental Forms
Influenced by the groundbreaking photographs made by Roy DeCarava and Robert Frank beginning in the 1950s, a new generation of documentary photographers used the camera to visualise the world and their place in it. By combining clear-eyed observation with individual expression, artists such as Jim Goldberg, Sophie Rivera, and Shawn Walker revealed the complexity of the human condition from a more personal perspective. Others, such as Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander, Anthony Hernandez, and Garry Winogrand, focused their attention on the irony and ambivalence rooted in American culture of the time, depicting everyday life with a psychological frankness. Together their revitalization of portraiture and street photography merged documentary practice with fine-art photography.
Conceptual Documents
Documentary photography became central to the practice of many conceptual artists in the 1970s. For them, the idea behind a work was more important than the finished object. John Baldessari, Thomas Barrow, and Robert Cumming interrogated the conventions of photography’s widely assumed objectivity and truthfulness by highlighting the difference between photographic appearance and reality. Others, like Susan Hiller and Dennis Oppenheim, used the camera to record their creative process, often integrating photographs with texts to address larger social issues about gender and the environment.
Performance and the Camera
Documentary photography was also integral to performance-based art during the 1970s. Many artists used the medium to record their otherwise ephemeral actions – including those who made performances specifically for the camera. This photographic documentation became a new form of art inseparable from the overall conception of the performance. Senga Nengudi in collaboration with Maren Hassinger explored the elasticity of the body through choreographed actions. Ana Mendieta and Francesca Woodman examined their identities through interventions in the environment, while Tseng Kwong Chi, Marcia Resnick, and David Wojnarowicz staged journeys and constructed histories that pushed the boundaries between truth and fiction.
Life in Color
The art world’s embrace of color film in the 1970s transformed documentary photography. Commercial color processes had existed for more than 50 years, but serious documentary photography was strictly associated with black-and-white prints. Color photography’s status changed gradually over the decade, and especially in the wake of an exhibition of William Eggleston’s mundane but incisive photographs at the Museum of Modern Art in 1976. Pictures of everyday life made in color by William Christenberry, Mitch Epstein, Richard Misrach, and John Valadez held an immediacy that fascinated viewers and offered a new framework for reflecting on contemporary life.
Alternative Landscapes
The 1970s witnessed a radical shift in how landscapes were understood and photographed. Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, and Joe Deal challenged popular ideas of nature as pristine and timeless with pictures of environmental destruction and suburban sprawl. From grain elevators to roadside motels, Frank Gohlke and John Schott focused on structures that form the built environment, revealing how humans have shaped their surroundings. The artists in this section documented with an austere eye, and at times subversive wit, a rampant consumer culture and the damage done in the name of progress.
Intimate Documentary
Many photographers in the 1970s turned their cameras on themselves and close family members to analyze the social landscape of domestic spaces. Often informed by second-wave feminism, they prioritized interiors and life at home as topics for artistic examination. Joanne Leonard has described her narrative-rich scenes of everyday life as “intimate documentary,” while Bill Owens observed the rise of suburbia as both a place and a mentality. Concerned that documentary photography was losing its activist force, Martha Rosler and Eleanor Antin engaged with politics – especially the home front during the Vietnam War – more directly.
Sunil Gupta documented the emergence of a gay public space in New York’s Greenwich Village during the 1970s. The India-born Gupta had arrived from his adopted home in Montreal in 1976 to study business, but quickly decided instead to fine-tune his photographic skills. Energized by the overtly gay environment – a result, in part, of LGBTQ+ demonstrations in 1969 known as the Stonewall uprising – he started photographing people on the streets. Not impartial, Gupta was enthralled by those he encountered, including two stylishly dressed men who seem to acknowledge Gupta’s camera. In the Christopher Street series, Gupta recorded the then extraordinary act of being openly gay – a practice both political and deeply personal.
Still moved by this project, the artist has recently started making large-scale prints from his original negatives.
Wall text from the exhibition
This series was shot in New York in 1976 when I spent a year studying photography with Lisette Model in the New School… I spent my weekends cruising with my camera, it was the heady days after Stonewall and before AIDS when we were young and busy creating a gay public space such as hadn’t really been seen before.
Ana Mendieta (Cuban-American, 1948-1985) Untitled 1977-1978 From the Silueta Series Gelatin silver print Image: 33.8 x 49.5cm (13 5/16 x 19 1/2 in.) National Gallery of Art Gift of the Collectors Committee
In her Silueta Series, Cuban American artist Ana Mendieta used the outline of her body to carve and shape silhouettes into the land. Informed by her interest in Afro-Cuban ritual, her fusion of performance and earthworks explored spiritual connections between nature and the female body. Mendieta’s exile with her family from Communist Cuba to the United States in the 1960s left her with a deep sense of loss. She remarked, “I have no motherland; I feel a need to join with the earth.” Photography was crucial in documenting these ephemeral pieces, preserving them before they were lost to the elements. Hauntingly beautiful, the pictures enable Mendieta’s practice to be both transitory and enduring.
Wall text from the exhibition
Larry Fink (American, 1941-2023) Studio 54, New York City May 1977 From the series Social Graces Gelatin silver print 37.2 × 38cm (14 5/8 × 14 15/16 in.) National Gallery of Art Gift of Tony Podesta Collection, Washington, DC
In the photography of Lynne Cohen, you won’t see a single person. But you’ll find their traces everywhere. Her images feel haunted by people, as if the action has just ended or has yet to begin. Despite their absence, however, people are the true subject of the artist’s gaze. Former Gallery curator Ann Thomas explained in her essay for the 2001 National Gallery of Canada exhibition No Man’s Land: The Photography of Lynne Cohen: “While her photographs do not include human beings, they are on occasion more revealing about human behaviour than any group portrait.”
From her earliest photographs in 1971 to her final works before her death in 2014, Cohen made deadpan images of interior spaces, training her lens on the everyday peculiarities of living rooms, offices, banquet halls, social clubs, learning centres, salons, laboratories and shooting ranges. Her signature style used flat lighting, deep focus and symmetrical compositions to lend her works what she termed “a cool, dispassionate edge.” The works can be funny, sinister, maddening, familiar, bizarre and often surreal.
Although in later years Cohen would make prints large enough to envelope the viewer – introducing colour and shifting her choice of subject from domestic interiors and clubhouses to more restricted environments, such as military installations – her conceptual mission never wavered from the start. Her photography investigates how setting makes a simulation of experience, how reality is more engineered than we may care to recognize and how the spaces we design also design us in turn.
Chris Hampton. “Lynne Cohen: Art Surrounds Us,” on the National Gallery of Canada website November 22, 2024 [Online] Cite 07/02/2025
Joanne Leonard (American, b. 1940) Dining Area and Patterned Wallpaper, Blake Street, Berkeley, California c. 1977 Gelatin silver print Image: 18 x 17.7cm (7 1/16 x 6 15/16 in.) National Gallery of Art Gift of the Artist in honor of her daughter, Julia Marjorie Leonard
David Wojnarowicz (American, 1954-1992) Arthur Rimbaud in New York (Diner) 1978-1979 Gelatin silver print Image: 17.15 x 24.13cm (6 3/4 x 9 1/2 in.) National Gallery of Art Gift of Funds from Heather Muir Johnson
“Transition is always a relief. Destination means death to me. If I could figure out a way to remain forever in transition, in the disconnected and unfamiliar, I could remain in a state of perpetual freedom.”
~ David Wojnarowicz , Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration
David Wojnarowicz made a series of pictures featuring friends donning a homemade mask of the 19th-century French poet Arthur Rimbaud. Staged at sites around New York that were significant to the photographer, the surrogate self-portraits explore parallels between Wojnarowicz and Rimbaud – both gay artists who rebelled against the social mores of their times. The historical figure with its unchanging expression appears alone or apart from others, a man eerily out of time. The series also documents many of the then vibrant spaces of gay life shortly before the AIDS epidemic ravaged the city’s gay community. Wojnarowicz died from AIDS-related complications at the age of 37.
Wall text from the exhibition
Sophie Rivera (American, 1938-2021) Untitled 1978 Gelatin silver print Image/sheet: 25.4 x 25.4cm (10 x 10 in.) National Gallery of Art Estate of Martin Hurwitz
Bathed in light against a dark background, each sitter in Sophie Rivera’s portrait series of fellow New Yorkers of Puerto Rican descent, known as Nuyoricans, addresses the viewer directly. To find her subjects, Rivera asked passersby in her Harlem neighborhood if theywere Puerto Rican. If so, she invited them to her home to have their pictures taken. The mutual trust between artist and subject is reflected in the sitters’ grace and dignity.
Rivera, who defined herself as “an artist, Latino, and feminist,” sought to make Nuyoricans part of the distinguished history of American portrait photography. As she noted, “I have attempted to integrate my cultural heritage into an artistic continuum.”
Wall text from the exhibition
Rivera’s monumental portraits of Puerto Ricans in New York (or Nuyoricans) counteract the stereotypes that have circulated in the mass media. The artist found her subjects by asking passersby outside her building if they were Puerto Ricans. If they said yes, she invited them to her studio and photographed them against a dark background. Rivera’s subjects remain anonymous but never powerless. Her direct photographs allow the unassuming individuality of everyday people to speak for itself.
Our America: The Latino Presence in American Art, 2013
Multidisciplinary artist John Valadez has long been committed to depicting the lived experiences of Chicanx Angelenos like himself. Using the camera to record the world around him, Valadez first made photographs principally as source material for his drawings and paintings. In 1978 he exchanged black and white for colour film and made a series of powerful full-length portraits. His subjects included people he knew, such as the stylish young couple dressed for a birthday party, as well as people he encountered on the street, like the two men sporting identical clothes. Valadez’s aim, he said, was to capture people who weren’t being seen – by doing so, he has become a key chronicler of Chicanx identity.
Tseng Kwong Chi leaps into the air in front of the Brooklyn Bridge, mimicking the joy of a first time visitor to New York. This work is from Tseng’s series East Meets West, which was inspired in part by the thaw in Chinese – United States relations following President Nixon’s visit to Beijing in 1972. A performance artist and photographer, Tseng made self-portraits as his adopted persona, Ambiguous Ambassador, at popular spots across the country. Assuming the guise of a Chinese official, Tseng – wearing what is now called a Mao suit – mischievously exposed cultural biases and notions of “the other” in American society. He made his selfies with a shutter release cable, which is visible in his right hand.
Wall text from the exhibition
Tseng Kwong Chi, known as Joseph Tseng prior to his professional career (Chinese: 曾廣智; c. 1950 – March 10, 1990), was a Hong Kong-born American photographer who was active in the East Village art scene in the 1980s.
Tseng was part of a circle of artists in the 1980s New York art scene including Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf, and Cindy Sherman. Tseng’s most famous body of work is his self-portrait series, East Meets West, also called the “Expeditionary Series”. In the series, Tseng dressed in what he called his “Mao suit” and sunglasses (dubbed a “wickedly surrealistic persona” by the New York Times), and photographed himself situated, often emotionlessly, in front of iconic tourist sites. These included the Statue of Liberty, Cape Canaveral, Disney Land, Notre Dame de Paris, and the World Trade Center. Tseng also took tens of thousands of photographs of New York graffiti artist Keith Haring throughout the 1980s working on murals, installations and the subway. In 1984, his photographs were shown with Haring’s work at the opening of the Semaphore Gallery’s East Village location in a show titled “Art in Transit”. Tseng photographed the first Concorde landing at Kennedy International Airport, from the tarmac. According to his sister, Tseng drew artistic influence from Brassai and Cartier-Bresson.
In these images Tseng inhabits a persona he referred to as the “Ambiguous Ambassador.” Wearing a Mao suit (the grey uniform associated with the Chinese Communist Party) and mirrored sunglasses, he poses next to landmarks and monuments, many of them emblems of American national identity. Like the Untitled Film Stills of Cindy Sherman – also produced in the late 1970s – East Meets West is a groundbreaking photographic work that illuminates the changeable and socially constructed nature of identity. It is also a rare piece of conceptual art to specifically reflect on the racialised experiences of Asian people in the United States. …
A gay man, Tseng was well-aware of the signifying power of dress, gesture, and posture. His donning of the Mao suit can be understood as racial camp – a playful, self-protective manoeuvre that did not prevent Tseng from being misinterpreted but did allow him to take control of the manner of the misreading. To those who perceived the levity with which Tseng wore the suit, something was revealed about his ironic sensibility. The dissonance of his appearance – the fact that the suit looked both “natural” and “unnatural” on him was not effaced but highlighted, at least to the knowing beholder. But when people were unable to see past type, the misconception did not come at the cost of Tseng’s psychic humiliation.
Tseng went on to create roughly 150 images comprising East Meets West. His performance of “Chineseness” in these photographs reveals his acute awareness of the stereotypes of Euro-American Orientalism. His blank, robotic demeanour in images such as Disneyland, California invite stock associations of the Chinese as “Yellow Peril,” and the repetition of this pose in numerous photographs would seem to tap into White America’s century-long dread of being overrun by Asian immigrants. In other images, Tseng’s stylishness and humor come through – some of the earliest photographs picture him coolly strolling the boardwalk and beaches of the popular gay vacation spot of Provincetown, Massachusetts, appearing more like a character from a French New Wave film than a visitor from the People’s Republic of China. The shutter release Tseng plainly grasps in many pictures reminds us that he is the author of these varied depicted realities; that, even as he presents himself to the Orientalist gaze, he is in command of the means of representation. Given that racial identities circulate and perpetuate via staged images – and that European American assumptions have traditionally driven those images – this is a significant gesture.
The Gullah Geechee – enslaved people who labored on the Sea Island plantations, and their descendants – built communities all along the eastern coast of the US, from North Carolina to Florida…
From 1977 to 1982, Moutoussamy-Ashe visited Daufuskie, building relationships with the Gullah Geechee people and snapshotting rare pictures of their quotidian life. Born in Chicago, Illinois, the photographer had just returned from a six-month independent study in west Africa before she traveled to the island. At the time of her initial visit, there were only 80 permanent residents left on Daufuskie, a drastic drop from the thousands of Gullah people who had once resided there. Today, just 3% of the island’s population is Black.
Moutoussamy-Ashe’s series of monochrome images include candids of weddings, stills of a church gathering and everyday portraits of the island, showing a way of life that is treasured and fast fading.
Like many historic Black alcoves, Daufuskie has been altered by decades of gentrification. After the American civil war, many Gullah people who were already on Daufuskie made the island their permanent home once the plantation owners had left. They cultivated the land and preserved their rich culture and language, an English-based creole. But development, unfair zoning practices and other challenges have caused a sharp decrease in the Black population on the island.
Moutoussamy-Ashe’s photos offer a more private understanding of Black folks in Daufuskie, one not defined by white developers who have turned Daufuskie into a destination for tourists. The area is a placid haven in Moutoussamy-Ashe’s images. Jake and his Boat Arriving on Daufuskie’s Shore, Daufuskie Island, SC, for instance, features a man paddling a boat across a rippling river. Swooping trees frame either side of the man, who peacefully rows the vessel. The landscape looks expansive, with the scenery appearing to go on for miles. Such scenes of stillness would become rare as residents were largely driven out by the encroachment of others.
Between 1977 and 1981, Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe made extended visits to Daufuskie Island in South Carolina. The island’s relative isolation from the mainland allowed its inhabitants, who descended directly from enslaved people, to keep their distinct Gullah language and culture. Moutoussamy Ashe’s landscapes, still lifes, and portraits convey a holistic impression of the community. She captured residents’ dignity and joy – as in this photograph of a bride in fuzzy slippers, sharing a laugh with her maid of honor – but she also recorded their uncertainty in the face of development. Daufuskie’s permanent Gullah population had dwindled to 85 residents by the time Moutoussamy-Ashe published her photographs as a book in 1982.
“I see myself as a fine-arts photographer with a documentary foundation,” Shawn Walker has explained. “I look for the truth within the image, the multi-layers of existence and the ironies in our everyday lives.” Walker grounded his photographic practice in the Harlem community where he was born and raised. He joined the Kamoinge Workshop and learned from a collective of Black photographers. Inspired by Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man (1952), Walker created a series of self-portraits that reveal only his silhouette. Here, the photographer pictures his reflection in a window while looking directly at us: “I look into the intersections of dark and light, into the shadows that grow the seeds of existence.”
Wall text from the exhibition
Jim Goldberg (American, b. 1953) Vickie Figueroa 1981 Gelatin silver print Image/sheet: 35.4 x 27.6cm (13 15/16 x 10 7/8 in.) National Gallery of Art Corcoran Collection, Gift of the Artist
“My dream was to become a schoolteacher. Mrs. Stone is rich. I have talents but not opportunity. I am used to standing behind Mrs. Stone. I have been a servant for 40 years. Vickie Figueroa.”
Jim Goldberg (American, b. 1953) Clyde Norbert 1978 From the series Rich and Poor Gelatin silver print Corcoran Collection Gift of the Artist, 1994
Framed against a tall window, Clyde Norbert appears slight, flanked by his modest but carefully ordered possessions. The caption in Norbert’s own words speaks to his contrasting bold ambition: “I am going to build an empire.” In his series Rich and Poor, Jim Goldberg made portraits of both wealthy and marginalised San Franciscans where they lived. He radically shifted the relationship between photographer and subject by asking the people he photographed to respond to his pictures by writing directly on them. He believed this collaboration, which he referred to as “total documentation,” “would bring an added dimension, a deeper truth” than a photograph alone.
Wall text from the exhibition
The ’70s Lens: Reimagining Documentary Photography poster
National Gallery of Art National Mall between 3rd and 7th Streets Constitution Avenue NW, Washington
Apparently, “the exhibition presents photography by one of Germany’s most important artists.”
Until recently I had never heard of this artist and I have been studying photography for over 35 years.
Allegedly, “many of Klemm’s photographs have become “icons of contemporary history” and have shaped the cultural memory of several generations.”
What does that even mean – “icons of contemporary history” – it’s just art speak that means absolutely nothing!
If we actually look at the work there are some really strong photographs here that form a cohesive body of work which interrogates the reality of a country that was divided for decades, which examine the postwar formation of German culture and identity.
“[The exhibition] includes pictures from every sphere of society: from politics, culture and the economy, photos that capture unique and often tense moments as well as plain everyday life, photos of demonstrations, protests, and of immigrants, of cultural events, mass gatherings, and urban spaces.” (Text from ifa website)
While Klemm’s photographs combine the documentary and the artistic in German press photography, her artistic voice is not a lone voice in the wilderness documenting Germany before and after reunification. Variously (but not exclusively) we have from the 1930s onwards and reaching its social reality apotheosis in the 1970s-1980s artists such as Friedrich Seidenstücker, Benjamin Katz, Chargesheimer, Michael Schmidt, Helga Paris, Günter Zint, Wendelin Bottländer, Andreas Horlitz, Christa Mayer, Sibylle Bergemann, Tata Ronkholz, Thomas Struth, Wilhelm Schürmann, Volker Döhne, Elfriede Mejchar, Hildegard Heise, and Timm Rautert.
At their best Klemm’s photographs are essential – (in the sense ‘in the highest degree’): from late Latin essentialis, from Latin essentia (see essence) – which is, the intrinsic nature or indispensable quality of something … which determines its character. That is what Klemm so vibrantly and insightfully captures, the true essence of an event which is then marked down in history. “Her sure sense of the true essence of an event allows her to capture moments that tell stories far beyond what the pictures seem to show at first glance.” In the highest degree, Klemm’s photographs “offer an insight into the most significant aspects of social life in both the Federal Republic of Germany and the GDR”
But she is not alone in this endeavour and to argue that her photographs are “icons of history” and that she is one of Germany’s most important artists is pure hokum. Why curators and/or media people continue to write this stuff is beyond me…
Just let the artist tell her stories and the photographs will speak for themselves.
Strength, insight, essence.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
The exhibition presents photography by one of Germany’s most important artists. Barbara Klemm’s work, spanning forty years, bears witness to the historical development and present-day reality of a country that was divided for decades. Many of her pictures have become icons of contemporary history, shaping the cultural memory of several generations.
An exhibition by ifa – Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen e. V. ifa is funded by the German Federal Foreign Office, the state of Baden-Württemberg, and the city of Stuttgart.
Barbara Klemm’s works bear witness to the historical development and present-day reality of a country that was divided for decades. Many of her pictures have become icons of contemporary history, shaping the cultural memory of several generations. It is a body of photographic work that blends documentation and artistic inspiration in a way that is rarely encountered in the German press.
With the exhibition Barbara Klemm: Light and Dark. Photographs from Germany, the ifa – Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen presents photographs by one of Germany’s leading photographers. At GfZK, they will be shown in Germany for the first time in 15 years
Most of the photographs shown in the exhibition were taken for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Starting in 1959, Barbara Klemm began her career at this newspaper working as a laboratory assistant and in plate production. From 1970, she became an editorial photographer focusing primarily on political and feature photography. However, her photographs are far more than coverage photos taken for the moment. They offer an insight into the most significant aspects of social life in both the Federal Republic of Germany and the GDR. A central focus of the exhibition is on photographs taken in East and West Germany before and after reunification. These images portray diverse aspects of social life, including politics, culture, and business. They depict a wide range of social realities – precarious and everyday situations, demonstrations, protests, migrant life, as well as cultural events, mass gatherings and urban space.
With an unerring instinct for the essence of a situation, the photographer captures moments that reveal far more than what is portrayed on the surface. Her photographs, as Barbara Klemm herself describes, reveal the “distillation of an action” – and, in doing so, the distillation of history itself.
Photography as documentation and artistic inspiration
Many of Klemm’s photographs have become “icons of contemporary history” and have shaped the cultural memory of several generations. It is a photographic work that combines documentation and artistic inspiration in a way rarely found in the German press. Barbara Klemm adds her own perspective to the supposedly objective documentary and follows the design rules of art in her image compositions.
Although these photographs were mostly commissioned by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung – for which Barbara Klemm worked from 1959 as a laboratory assistant and in cliché production, and from 1970 as an editorial photographer specialising in politics and the arts section – they are far more than reportage images made for the day.
Social insights from East and West Germany before and after reunification
The images show the most important areas of social life in the Federal Republic of Germany and the GDR. A clear focus of the exhibition is on photographs taken in East and West Germany before and after reunification. There are pictures from all areas of social life – from politics, culture and the economy – of precarious and everyday situations of social reality, of demonstrations, protests and the lives of immigrants as well as of cultural events, mass events and urban spaces.
About the exhibition
Many of her pictures have become “icons of contemporary history”, shaping the cultural memory of several generations. She has created a body of photographs which combine the documentary and the artistic in a manner seldom encountered in German press photography. She adds her own perspective to the documentary genre, following artistic principles of composition. Although the majority of these photos were commissioned for the daily newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung they represent far more than coverage of the day’s events. Barbara Klemm first joined the newspaper in 1959, working in the photo lab and producing photographic plates, before becoming a photographer on the editorial board for art, culture and politics in 1970. Her commissioned work for the newspaper took her to many of the most important events and places in the Federal Republic of Germany, the German Democratic Republic and in numerous other countries. Photos of East and West Germany before and after unification are clearly the focus of this exhibition. It includes pictures from every sphere of society: from politics, culture and the economy, photos that capture unique and often tense moments as well as plain everyday life, photos of demonstrations, protests, and of immigrants, of cultural events, mass gatherings, and urban spaces. And again and again, Barbara Klemm portrays people in those rare moments of being that make life so special.
Barbara Klemm’s photographs stand for concrete social reality. Her sure sense of the true essence of an event allows her to capture moments that tell stories far beyond what the pictures seem to show at first glance. These photos are “action in condensed form”, as Klemm puts it, and thus also a condensed image of history. Her photos of the fall of the Berlin Wall are a dramatic climax to her own narrative of history, and in retrospect, her earlier photos from both sides of the Wall seem to be tracing the two Germanies on their path towards reunification, while her later photos closely observe the consequences of the new order.
Text from ifa – Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen website
Daido Moriyama (Japanese, b. 1938) Ebina, Kanagawa 1969 From A Hunter Gelatin silver print 23 x 35″ Courtesy of the Daido Moriyama Photo Foundation and The Photographers’ Gallery
I have so many exhibitions lined up in the next few weeks that there will be some mid-week postings!
It is a great privilege and pleasure to be able to publish these photographs by master Japanese photographer Daido Moriyama (Japanese, b. 1938), many of which were unknown to me. Thank you to The Photographers’ Gallery for allowing me to do so…
Moriyama’s photographic style is unmistakable. “Renowned for his bold are, bure, boke aesthetic – grainy, blurry and out-of-focus images that defy photographic convention”, Moriyama’s contrasty, slightly high key, sometimes flash photographs of unusual perspectives and intimate glances capture “something that’s mysterious and unknown in everyday life.”
This buying exhibition highlights the quieter, more reflective moments of Moriyama’s work. I know only too well what sensitivity and envisioning it takes to picture these intimacies of everyday life … almost inconsequential until they are bought into the photographer’s consciousness in a resolved manner (previsualisation), then through negative and print and eye into the consciousness of the viewer.
The images are memorable and unforgettable. Buy one!
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to The Photographers’ Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“It may look like I’m just pointing the camera at what’s in front of me. But I’m trying to photograph what people see, but don’t notice – something that’s mysterious and unknown in everyday life.”
Daido Moriyama
Daido Moriyama (Japanese, b. 1938) Untitled 1968 From Japan: A Photo Theater Gelatin silver print 14 x 17″ Courtesy of the Daido Moriyama Photo Foundation and The Photographers’ Gallery
Daido Moriyama (Japanese, b. 1938) Camera Mainichi, Hiroshima 1974 Gelatin silver print 11 x 14″ Courtesy of the Daido Moriyama Photo Foundation and The Photographers’ Gallery
Daido Moriyama (Japanese, b. 1938) Hokkaido 1978 Gelatin silver print 10 x 12″ Courtesy of the Daido Moriyama Photo Foundation and The Photographers’ Gallery
Daido Moriyama (Japanese, b. 1938) Hokkaido 1978 Gelatin silver print 11 x 14″ Courtesy of the Daido Moriyama Photo Foundation and The Photographers’ Gallery
Daido Moriyama (Japanese, b. 1938) Cherry Blossom, Zushi, Kanagawa 1982 Gelatin silver print 18 x 22″ Courtesy of the Daido Moriyama Photo Foundation and The Photographers’ Gallery
Screenshot
Daido Moriyama (Japanese, b. 1938) How to Make Beautiful Photos 1987 Gelatin silver print 11 x 14″ Courtesy of the Daido Moriyama Photo Foundation and The Photographers’ Gallery
Born in Osaka, Japan, in 1938, Daido Moriyama’s celebrated career has been shaped by constant reinvention and experimentation. Over six decades, he has become renowned for his bold are, bure, boke aesthetic – grainy, blurry and out-of-focus images that defy photographic convention. A pivotal figure in the radical Provoke movement of the late 1960s, Moriyama redefined photography, unbound by traditional constraints, capturing fragments of reality that “cannot be expressed in language as it is.”
Moriyama is best known for recording the freneticism and anonymity of life in the city, Encounters reveals his lesser-explored ability to show beauty and stillness in the everyday. Softly lit city streets, rendered in grainy textures, evoke a surreal and poetic visual language that embraces imperfection. Fleeting moments of calm and intimacy are paired with whimsical glimpses of animals and delicate vignettes of nature – blossoms, snowflakes and quiet, weathered corners of urban sprawl – revealing an unexpected tenderness amongst his raw and gritty aesthetic.
In recent years, Moriyama has described his work as a visual diary, shooting pictures daily to document the ever-changing landscape of urban life. His enduring question- “What is photography?”-remains an open one which continues to probe the medium’s position between the objective and the subjective, the illusory and the real.
Text from The Photographers’ Gallery website
Daido Moriyama (Japanese, b. 1938) Japan Photo Theater 1968 Gelatin silver print 11 x 14″ Courtesy of the Daido Moriyama Photo Foundation and The Photographers’ Gallery
Daido Moriyama (Japanese, b. 1938) Asahi Journal 1969 Gelatin silver print 11 x 14″ Courtesy of the Daido Moriyama Photo Foundation and The Photographers’ Gallery
Daido Moriyama (Japanese, b. 1938) A Hunter 1972 Gelatin silver print 11 x 14″ Courtesy of the Daido Moriyama Photo Foundation and The Photographers’ Gallery
Daido Moriyama (Japanese, b. 1938) Shinjuku 2002 Gelatin silver print 10 x 12″ Courtesy of the Daido Moriyama Photo Foundation and The Photographers’ Gallery
The Print Sales Gallery at The Photographers’ Gallery will be showing a gentler side of the iconic Japanese photographer Daido Moriyama’s work this Spring. Following 2023’s major retrospective at The Photographers’ Gallery, which offered an in-depth exploration into his groundbreaking career, Daido Moriyama: Encounters takes a more intimate approach. Focusing on a smaller selection of photographs, this selling exhibition highlights the quieter, more reflective moments of Moriyama’s work. “It may look like I’m just pointing the camera at what’s in front of me. But I’m trying to photograph what people see, but don’t notice – something that’s mysterious and unknown in everyday life.”
Born in Osaka, Japan, in 1938, Daido Moriyama’s celebrated career has been shaped by constant reinvention and experimentation. Over six decades, he has become renowned for his bold are, bure, boke aesthetic – grainy, blurry and out-of-focus images that defy photographic convention. A pivotal figure in the radical Provoke movement of the late 1960s, Moriyama redefined photography, unbound by traditional constraints, capturing fragments of reality that “cannot be expressed in language as it is.”
Moriyama is best known for recording the freneticism and anonymity of life in the city, Encounters reveals his lesser-explored ability to show beauty and stillness in the everyday. Softly lit city streets rendered in grainy texture evoke a surreal and poetic visual language that embraces imperfection. Fleeting moments of calm and intimacy paired with whimsical glimpses of animals and delicate vignettes of nature – blossoms, snowflakes and quiet, weathered corners of urban sprawl – reveal an unexpected tenderness amongst his usual raw and gritty aesthetic.
This selling exhibition marks the Print Sales Gallery’s new representation of Daido Moriyama. All prints on show and from Moriyama’s archive are available to buy, in a range of sizes. Prices start at £1,200 + VAT. All profits from Print Sales support The Photographers’ Gallery’s public programme.
Print Sales at The Photographers’ Gallery
Print Sales at The Photographers’ Gallery is a dedicated space for discovering and buying fine-art photographic prints, with all proceeds supporting The Photographers’ Gallery public programme. Representing a roster of international photographers – from established names to emerging talent – a curated series of selling exhibitions each year brings you the best of both sought-after classics and brand-new contemporary work.
Press release from The Photographers’ Gallery
Daido Moriyama (Japanese, b. 1938) Untitled, from Record No. 14 2010 Gelatin silver print 18 x 22″ Courtesy of the Daido Moriyama Photo Foundation and The Photographers’ Gallery
Daido Moriyama (Japanese, b. 1938) Untitled, from Record No. 18 2011 Gelatin silver print 14 x 17″ Courtesy of the Daido Moriyama Photo Foundation and The Photographers’ Gallery
Daido Moriyama (Japanese, b. 1938) Untitled, from Record No. 22 2012 Gelatin silver print Courtesy of the Daido Moriyama Photo Foundation and The Photographers’ Gallery
Daido Moriyama (Japanese, b. 1938) Untitled, from K 2017 Gelatin silver print 14 x 17″ Courtesy of the Daido Moriyama Photo Foundation and The Photographers’ Gallery
Daido Moriyama (Japanese, b. 1938) Untitled, from K 2017 Gelatin silver print 10 x 12″ Courtesy of the Daido Moriyama Photo Foundation and The Photographers’ Gallery
Daido Moriyama (Japanese, b. 1938) Untitled, from Record No. 35 2017 Gelatin silver print 10 x 12″ Courtesy of the Daido Moriyama Photo Foundation and The Photographers’ Gallery
Daido Moriyama (Japanese, b. 1938) Untitled, from Ango 2017 Gelatin silver print 23 x 35″ Courtesy of the Daido Moriyama Photo Foundation and The Photographers’ Gallery
The Photographers’ Gallery 16-18 Ramillies Street London W1F 7LW
Raúl Cañibano grew up in both Havana and the eastern part of the country, and in 1998 he returned to the east to develop his series Tierra guajira (Country Land), a project strongly linked to his childhood memories. There, rural life and labor remained little changed despite the vast social and political waves that had swept across the nation in the intervening years.
This is an exhibition on a subject that I had little knowledge of before constructing the posting.
Imagine
Being born after the Cuban Revolution in 1953.
Being a child during the Bay of Pigs Invasion in 1961 (a clandestine invasion of Cuba by a brigade of Cuban exiles planned and executed by the CIA, with the support of the US government) and the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 (when nuclear missile sites were being built by the Soviet Union on the island of Cuba).
The fear of invasion and nuclear war.
Imagine
Growing up in a nation full of national fervour and revolutionary heroes, a “cult of personality”.
Growing up in country that defied the United States of America to stand on its own two feet but was plagued by shortages of foods, fuel, and other necessities, where “hundreds of thousands of Cubans, especially skilled workers and wealthy investors, emigrated to the United States (principally to Miami, Florida), Spain, and other countries”1 even as the country drew closer to the Soviet Union.
Growing up in a country where prominent dissidents were jailed and repressive laws enacted.
Imagine
Living under a communist regime where, when Soviet troops withdrew in 1991, there was high unemployment, energy conservation and severe internal “shortages of food, medical supplies, raw materials, and fuel which were exacerbated by the ongoing U.S. trade embargo.”1
Imagine
Growing up gay in a country where during The First Period (1965-1979) LGBTQ+ individuals were imprisoned in labor camps called Unidades Militares de Ayuda a la Producción (UMAPs); and during The Second Period (1980-2004) “the homophobia possessed by the government led to more acts of oppression toward LGBTQ+ individuals, but the government also extended more rights to gays.”2
Imagine
Growing up to be an artist, a photographer, living and working under the regime.
Living in a country as a creative person and trying to subversively comment on the precarious nature of life in present-day Cuba (questioning the power of photography and its relationship to political authority) without ending up in prison.
Despite these conditions of becoming, Cuban photographers continue to photograph their own lives and the life and spirit of the people. Through reality, myth and fantasy, through rituals, personal history, queer identity, race and gender they examine Cuban culture and history from a constructive and/or critical perspective.
The light of the artist and the light of the people shines on.
Many thankx for the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Installation views of the exhibition Navigating the Waves: Contemporary Cuban Photography at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston showing at left, Adrián Fernández’s Untitled No. 1 2017 (below) from the series Pending Memories (Memorias pendientes); and at right in the banner image a reproduction of Liudmila & Nelson’s photograph Absolut Revolution – La Isla (Absolut Revolution – The Island) 2002 (below)
Liudmila & Nelson (active Cuba, founded 1994) Liudmila Velazco (Cuban born Russia, b. 1969) Nelson Ramírez de Arellano (Cuban born Germany, b. 1969) Absolut Revolution – La Isla (Absolut Revolution – The Island) 2002 From the series Absolut Revolution Gelatin silver print 15 1/2 × 23 in. (39.3 × 58.4cm) The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston The Madeleine P. Plonsker Collection, Gift of Madeleine and Harvey Plonsker
The José Martí monument holds a powerful, symbolic place in the history and psyche of the nation. From its base, Fidel Castro routinely addressed vast crowds gathered in the expansive Plaza de la Revolución. Is Liudmila & Nelson’s imagining of a flooded Havana meant to represent the nation, battered by forces beyond its control, still standing strong, or a revolution that has sacrificed the lives of its people for its own survival? Where art and literature are scrutinised by official censors, it pays to retain plausible deniability, even in photography, a medium often thought to be unambiguously truthful.
Installation view of the exhibition Navigating the Waves: Contemporary Cuban Photography at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
Navigating the Waves: Contemporary Cuban Photography traces the evolution of photography in Cuba over nearly five decades, from the 1960s to early 2000s.
The exhibition looks at contemporary Cuban photography from its role in promoting the Cuban Revolution after Fidel Castro’s 1959 takeover of the Batista government to engaging in social and political critique following the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union. Over the subsequent years, Cuban photographers created powerful personal expressions by exploring individual identity, the body and spirit, Afro-Cuban heritage, and the margins of society, all while navigating the changing prescriptions and proscriptions of official cultural policy.
Showcasing approximately 100 images, Navigating the Waves: Contemporary Cuban Photography celebrates the acquisition and promised gift to the MFAH of some 300 photographs from Chicago-based collectors Madeleine and Harvey Plonsker.
Text from the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston website
Installation view of the exhibition Navigating the Waves: Contemporary Cuban Photography at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston showing at left, Reynier Leyva Novo’s Un día feliz FC No. 11 (A Happy Day FC No. 11) 2016 (below); and at right the section “Celebrating the Revolution” including at third right, Alberto Korda’s Heroic Guerrilla (Guerillero heroico) 1960 (below); at second right, Raúl Corrales’ Caballería (Cavalry) 1960 (below); and at right, Osvaldo Salas’ Five Points of Fidel (Cinco puntos de Fidel) 1982 (below)
Reynier Leyva Novo (Cuban, b. 1983) Un día feliz FC No. 11 (A Happy Day FC No. 11) 2016, printed 2024 From the series Un día feliz From the series A Happy Day Inkjet print 39 3/4 × 39 3/4 in. (101 × 101cm) The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Museum purchase funded by Joan Morgenstern, Jereann Chaney, and Carl Niendorff
In meticulous digital postproduction, Reynier Leyva Novo removed Fidel Castro from a photograph by Alberto Korda, the photographer most credited with establishing the iconography of the triumphant revolution and its leaders. Here, Castro’s presence is suggested only by the photographers stretching to film and photograph him addressing the crowds gathered below in the Plaza de la Revolución. What would modern-day Cuba look like without the imagery of its charismatic leader that fed a cult of personality for half a century? This is what Leyva Novo asks in his series Un día feliz (A Happy Day), begun in the year of Castro’s death.
Navigating the Waves: Contemporary Cuban Photography
Just 90 miles from one another, Cuba and the United States are uneasy neighbours. For American tourists, Havana was a permissive playground with cabarets, casinos, beaches, and brothels until Fidel Castro’s revolutionary forces overthrew the Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista on January 1, 1959, asserted the nation’s independent status, and cracked down on organised crime and prostitution. The new government nationalised many foreign-owned sectors of the economy in 1960, prompting the United States to impose a crippling trade embargo that remains in place. The botched invasion by anti-Castro exiles at the Bay of Pigs in 1961, covertly backed by the CIA, and the construction of Soviet nuclear missile sites in Cuba the following year, turned these close neighbours into seemingly permanent adversaries.
Beyond a few iconic images, the rich photographic production of Cuban artists of the past 65 years largely fell out of view for American audiences because of this estrangement. Inspired by an exhibition of work by young Cuban photographers organised by Houston’s FotoFest International in 1994, the Museum has since built a deep and representative collection that reveals the ways photographers have pictured the realities and aspirations of the Cuban people while skirting the prescriptions of their government’s propagandists and the proscriptions of its censors.
This exhibition celebrates the recent acquisition of some 300 Cuban photographs assembled by the Chicago-based collector Madeleine Plonsker during nearly two decades of visits to the island, an acquisition that propels the Museum to the forefront of institutions collecting Cuban photography.
Celebrating the Revolution: The “Epic” Generation and Contemporaries
Immediately after Fidel Castro’s forces toppled the Cuban dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista on January 1, 1959, photographers rose to the challenge of depicting the heroes of the revolution for a largely illiterate populace on the island and a curious world beyond. Alberto Korda, Raúl Corrales, and Osvaldo Salas were given entrée to the most exclusive circles of power, granted access to all important events, and provided with a platform of mass communication in the official newspapers and magazines. Celebrating the accomplishments of the new government, they came to be known as the “epic” generation. Other photographers of the early post-revolution years paid tribute to the aging veterans of the late 19th-century war for independence from Spain and to the rural peasants and urban labourers who sustained the island.
Alberto Korda’s portrait of Che Guevara, stoic and implacable at a memorial for victims of an explosion in Havana’s harbour, is undoubtedly the best known of all Cuban photographs. The image sat mostly unused in the artist’s files from 1960 to 1967, when Che was captured and assassinated by government forces in Bolivia while trying to organize a popular revolution. He was lionised in Cuba as the exemplar of revolutionary self-sacrifice, and Korda’s portrait of him came to function like a secular image of a martyred saint, appearing on everything from billboards to refrigerator magnets and tattoos to book covers.
Raúl Corrales (Cuban, 1925-2006) Caballería (Cavalry) 1960 Gelatin silver print The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Gift of the estate of Esther Parada
Raúl Corrales’s Cavalry records an event at which the nationalisation and expropriation of a plantation owned by the United Fruit Company were celebrated by reenacting a famous scene from Cuba’s late 19th-century war for independence from Spain. With reenactments such as this, the triumph of the revolution was linked to a decades-long struggle to shake off the bonds of colonialism. Corrales’s photograph of smiling guerrillas wearing matching straw hats, riding horses, and waving Cuban flags also conjures associations with heroic 19th-century history paintings.
The title of this photograph, taken in 1982, links Fidel Castro’s gesture to a crucial speech 20 years earlier aimed at President John F. Kennedy amid the Cuban Missile Crisis. Castro outlined five conditions for Cuba’s consent to the withdrawal of Soviet missiles from its territory:
1/ Ending the economic blockade and other commercial and economic pressures 2/ Ending subversive activities 3/ Ending pirate attacks 4/ Ending violations of Cuban airspace 5/ Withdrawal from the Guantanamo Naval Base and its return to the Cuban government.
At the time, however, Castro was unaware that President Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev were already discussing missile withdrawal without Cuba’s participation.
Installation view of the exhibition Navigating the Waves: Contemporary Cuban Photography at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston showing at left the section “Celebrating the Revolution” including at left, Alberto Korda’s Heroic Guerrilla (Guerillero heroico) 1960 (above); at second left, Raúl Corrales’ Caballería (Cavalry) 1960 (above); and at third right, Osvaldo Salas’ Five Points of Fidel (Cinco puntos de Fidel) 1982 (above)
Celebrating the acquisition of some 300 Cuban photographs from the Chicago-based collectors Madeleine and Harvey Plonsker, Navigating the Waves: Contemporary Cuban Photography traces the medium’s evolution in Cuba over nearly six decades – from promoting the Revolution following Fidel Castro’s 1959 overthrow of the Batista government, to engaging in social and political critique in more recent times as the triumph of the Revolution increasingly gave way to economic hardship and political repression. Particularly in the years after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuban photographers created powerful personal expressions by exploring individual identity, the body and spirit, Afro-Cuban heritage, and the margins of society, all while navigating the fluctuating prescriptions and proscriptions of official cultural policy.
The exhibition of some 100 works will be on view September 29, 2024 through March 16, 2025, in the Museum’s Nancy and Rich Kinder Building for modern and contemporary art.
“With the acquisition of the Madeleine P. Plonsker Collection, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, now boasts the most complete collection anywhere of post-Revolution Cuban photography, with an emphasis on the years since 1990: nearly 700 works by more than 80 Cuban artists,” commented Gary Tinterow, director and Margaret Alkek Williams Chair of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. “We are enormously grateful to Mrs. Plonsker, who assembled the collection through the lasting relationships she forged with artists over many visits to Cuba from 2005 to 2020.”
“The strengths of the Plonsker Collection are unparalleled, in terms of telling the complex and compelling story of post-Revolution Cuban photography,” commented Malcolm Daniel, Gus and Lyndall Wortham Curator of photography at the MFAH. “Combined in this exhibition with works already in the Museum’s holdings, the collection allows us to chronicle that story from the ‘epic generation,’ whose work would define the image of the Cuban Revolution, to the succeeding generations of photographers, who questioned the power of photography and its relationship to political authority and who created highly personal work in the context of a greater awareness of international contemporary art.”
Prologue: The “Epic” Generation
The exhibition begins with a brief prologue featuring works by the so-called “epic” generation of photographers – Alberto Korda, Raul Corrales and Osvaldo Salas among them – who used the medium to further the ideals of the Cuban Revolution, celebrating its heroes and promoting its ambitions. It opens with Korda’s iconic portrait of Che Guevara, Guerrillero Heroico (1960), the most widely reproduced and recognised of all Cuban photographs.
Gallery 1: Life in Post-Revolution Cuba
The first gallery presents images of daily life in Cuba, primarily from the 1990s and early 2000s, beginning with photographs that reference patriotic themes: the Cuban flag, veterans, a military parade and public portraits of 19th-century Independence hero José Martí and Cuban leader Fidel Castro. While ostensibly honoring the new Cuba, many of the images question both the power of photography and its relationship to political authority. An Untitled 1992 photograph by José Figueroa depicts dozens of freshly made prints of Alberto Korda’s iconic portrait of Che laid out on a bed – Figueroa was Korda’s longtime printer – and suggests the ubiquity of that iconic image as both propaganda and commodity. Other photographs in this section of the exhibition depict the hardships and aspirations of rural Cubans in the post-revolutionary era as well as the day-to-day joys of life divorced from political concerns. Photographers in this section include Pedro Abascal, Raúl Cañibano, María Cienfuegos Leiseca, José Julián Martí, Humberto Mayol and Eduardo Muñoz Ordoqui.
Gallery 2: Memory, the Body, and Identity
The second section of the exhibition marks a pivotal shift in Cuban photography. As the nation plunged into economic, social and political crisis following the collapse of the Soviet Union [1991] and the loss of its financial support, a time that Castro dubbed the “Special Period,” many photographers turned from documentation of the public sphere to a more personal and poetic exploration of the private realm. Photographers treated the body, often their own, as the path through which to examine their present situation through the lens of Afro-Cuban rituals, personal history, queer identity, race and gender. This particularly rich section features exceptional work by Juan Carlos Alom, Arien Chang Castán, José Manuel Fors, Alejandro González, Eduardo Hernandez Santos, Cirenaica Moreira, René Peña, and others.
Gallery 3: Myth and Reality
In the final section of the exhibition, composed primarily of work made since 2005, photographers address the current political, social and economic situation more directly than in previous years – but slyly still, in order not to run afoul of government dictates and official arbiters of culture. This most recent generation of photographers, born well after the Revolution, came of age in the depths of the Special Period, and began their artistic careers with a greater awareness of international contemporary art. Again, national symbols appear – the Cuban flag, currency, stamps, historic events – but this time with a knowing nod to their emptiness. The precarious nature of life in present-day Cuba and the widespread desire for emigration are common subjects.
This gallery includes work by Adrián Fernández, Alejandro González, Glenda Léon, Liudmila & Nelson, Yasser Piña Peña, Sandra Ramos, Esterio Segura, Lisette Solórzano, and others.
Press release from the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
Installation view of the exhibition Navigating the Waves: Contemporary Cuban Photography at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston showing at right, Adrián Fernández’s Untitled No. 1 2017 (below) from the series Pending Memories (Memorias pendientes)
Inspired by industrial remnants, unfinished construction projects, propaganda billboards, and carnival decorations, Adrián Fernández collaborated with architects, engineers, and computer specialists to combine a lens-based photograph (the landscape) with a digitally constructed image of the back of a fictional structure. It is easy to imagine this structure, set along the Malecón (Havana’s seaside esplanade), as the remains of a once-grand declaration, facing north like a challenge to the United States and as a greeting to anyone arriving in Havana by sea. Fernández intends this image to be a metaphor for today’s teetering ruins of the Cuban Revolution’s grand ambitions.
Installation view of the exhibition Navigating the Waves: Contemporary Cuban Photography at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston showing at left the wall text for the section “Picturing Life: Joys and Hardships in Postrevolution Cuba”
Picturing Life: Joys and Hardships in Postrevolution Cuba
As Cuba increasingly adopted Soviet-style economic, social, political, and cultural policies beginning in the 1970s, many photographers referenced patriotic themes such as the Cuban flag, a military parade, and public portraits of Fidel Castro and independence hero José Martí. While ostensibly honouring the new Cuba, some of these artists began questioning both the power of photography and its relationship to political authority. Given the government’s control of culture, however, any criticism of the island’s situation was necessarily masked behind politically defensible images. Some photographers stepped away entirely from government-sanctioned subjects, styles, and platforms, and instead frankly depicted the hardships and aspirations of rural Cubans in the post-revolutionary era, as well as the day-to-day joys of life – particularly in childhood – divorced from political concerns.
Wall text from the exhibition
Installation view of the exhibition Navigating the Waves: Contemporary Cuban Photography at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston showing at second right, José A. Figueroa’s Untitled 1992 from the series The Image (below)
José A. Figueroa (Cuban, b. 1946) Untitled 1992, printed 2023 From the series The Image Gelatin silver print 40 x 50cm The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Museum purchase funded by Joan Morgenstern in honor of Raquel Carrera
Over the course of decades, Alberto Korda’s protégé and longtime printer José Figueroa printed thousands of copies of Korda’s iconic portrait of Che Guevara. As he worked to fulfil the never-ending demand for Guerrillero heroico, in 1992, 25 years after Che’s death, Figueroa photographed dozens of fresh prints laid out on his bed to dry, an image that revealed his own awareness of the changing nature and role of photography in Cuba from servant of the socialist revolution to commodity and social commentary.
Installation view of the exhibition Navigating the Waves: Contemporary Cuban Photography at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston showing at second left, Eduardo Muñoz Ordoqui’s Untitled 1992 from the series Zoo-Logos (below); and at third right, Eduardo Muñoz Ordoqui’s Untitled 1992 from the series Zoo-Logos (below)
The challenge for Cuban artists has long been to find a way to portray life candidly and critically without triggering the attention of censors. For Eduardo Muñoz Ordoqui, this process began with trips to Havana’s zoo, where he photographed visitors, employees, caged animals, and even the adjacent slaughterhouse, where horses were killed to feed the large cats. By the 1990s, the zoo had become home to neglected creatures enduring their confinement as best they could, a metaphor for the extreme circumstances of life in 1990s Cuba.
Installation views of the exhibition Navigating the Waves: Contemporary Cuban Photography at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
Installation view of the exhibition Navigating the Waves: Contemporary Cuban Photography at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston showing at right, María Cienfuegos Leiseca’s Untitled 2011 from the series La familia se retrata (below)
María Cienfuegos Leiseca (Cuban, b. 1974) Untitled 2011 From the series La familia se retrata From the series Family Portrayed Inkjet print 15 11/16 × 23 5/8 in. (39.9 × 60 cm) The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston The Madeleine P. Plonsker Collection, museum purchase funded by the Caroline Wiess Law Accessions Endowment
In Cuba, a narrow island spanning just 118 miles at its widest point, beach excursions are common, often bringing together several generations of a family. For her series of family portraits at the beach, María Cienfuegos Leiseca asked her subjects to choose how they wished to be represented. Unlike the solemn, carefully posed formal portraits seen throughout art history, Cienfuegos Leiseca’s photographs capture the spontaneity of a joyous family reunion.
Installation view of the exhibition Navigating the Waves: Contemporary Cuban Photography at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston showing at third right, Alfredo Sarabia Fajardo’s Untitled 2017 from the series Casa Redonda (below)
Alfredo Sarabia Fajardo (Cuban, b. 1986) Untitled 2017, printed 2021 From the series Casa Redonda From the series Round House Inkjet print 13 9/16 × 20 1/2 in. (34.5 × 52cm) The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Museum purchase funded by Madeleine Plonsker
The family Volkswagen dating to his childhood has become a playground for Alfredo Sarabia Fajardo’s young children and a way to connect to his father who died when the younger Alfredo was just six. “I frequently travel with my family, just as my father did with me, even using the same or similar objects,” the photographer explained. “As a natural consequence of this, I reactivate the memories of my childhood, refresh the nostalgia, and end up reliving some of those experiences. I like to think of it as a creative legacy that gets renewed, embodying the very spirit of a journey.”
Installation view of the exhibition Navigating the Waves: Contemporary Cuban Photography at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston showing at left the wall text for the section “Turning Inward: Memory, the Body, and Identity”
Turning Inward: Memory, the Body, and Identity
With the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, Cuba lost its principal political ally, trade partner, and financial supporter. The nation plunged into desperate economic times, which Fidel Castro dubbed a “special period in a time of peace.” Basic necessities such as food and fuel were rationed, if available at all, even as governmental control of social and cultural life eased. Working with expired or improvised materials, many photographers turned from documentation of the public sphere to a more personal and poetic exploration of the private realm, taking Cuban photography into new aesthetic and social territory. Often, photographers used their own bodies as vehicles to examine Afro-Cuban ritual, personal history, sexual identity, race, and gender.
Gory originally presented this series – perhaps the most prominent example of experimental Cuban photography of the 1980s – as an installation of nine photographs. Eight are photomontages in which a pool ladder in the foreground gives access to an alternate world in the middle distance; the final image presents the empty pool, with an aura of abandonment. When first shown, each photograph was accompanied by a text fragment from Michael Ende’s The Mirror in the Mirror: A Labyrinth (1984). The first of those phrases began: “Like a swimmer who has gotten lost under a layer of ice, I look for a place to emerge, but there is no place. All life long I swim holding my breath.”
Installation views of the exhibition Navigating the Waves: Contemporary Cuban Photography at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
Installation view of the exhibition Navigating the Waves: Contemporary Cuban Photography at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston showing at right top, Alejandro González’s Untitled 2008 from the series Conducta impropia (below); and at second right, Alejandro González’s 2:57 am, 24 de dic de 2005, Vedado, La Habana, Cuba 2005 from the series AM-PM (below)
Alejandro González (Cuban, b. 1974) Untitled 2008 From the series Conducta impropia From the seres Improper Behaviour Chromogenic print 23 × 22 15/16 in. (58.4 × 58.3cm) The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston The Madeleine P. Plonsker Collection, Gift of Madeleine and Harvey Plonsker
Not without setbacks, major advances in LGBTQ+ legal rights had occurred in Cuba by the 2000s, and most legal prohibitions against homosexuality had been lifted. Alejandro González was on hand for the second annual event in observance of the International Day Against Homophobia in 2008. There, he carried out the first part of a series titled Improper Behavior – large, extreme close-up portraits of participants, so close that the subjects’ gender becomes hard to identify. Although frontal and straightforward as a mugshot, they are nonetheless assertive of power rather than subservient to it.
The title of Alejandro González’s series Conducta impropia is an intentional reference to the 1984 documentary of the same name by Cuban exiles Néstor Almendros and Orlando Jiménez Leal detailing the Castro government’s oppression of Cuba’s gay population.
Alejandro González (Cuban, b. 1974) 2:57 am, 24 de dic de 2005, Vedado, La Habana, Cuba 2005 From the series AM-PM Inkjet print 21 1/4 × 21 1/4 in. (54 × 54cm) The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston The Madeleine P. Plonsker Collection, museum purchase funded by the Caroline Wiess Law Accessions Endowment
“In 2005, I started getting interested in social topics and people,” Alejandro González has said. “I was seeing what was happening in society, and I was feeling that I was not participating.” A night creature himself at age 31, Alejandro González began with a candid look at youth culture in the wee hours of the morning along Havana’s 23rd Street, a hub of nightlife. Using a Rolleiflex camera, with its square format and characteristically low vantage point, his method was straightforward, and his pictures – almost always made with the permission of his subjects – felt undeniably authentic.
Installation view of the exhibition Navigating the Waves: Contemporary Cuban Photography at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston showing at right top, Alejandro González’s Untitled 2008 from the series Conducta impropia (above); and at second right, Alejandro González’s 2:57 am, 24 de dic de 2005, Vedado, La Habana, Cuba 2005 from the series AM-PM (above); and at third right, Alejandro González’s Untitled 2008 from the series Conducta impropia (below)
Alejandro González (Cuban, b. 1974) Untitled 2008 From the series Conducta impropia From the series Improper Behaviour Chromogenic print 23 3/8 × 17 3/8 in. (59.3 × 44.2cm) The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston The Madeleine P. Plonsker Collection, museum purchase funded by the Caroline Wiess Law Accessions Endowment
A month after beginning his series Improper Behaviour with close-up portraits, Alejandro González continued the project by photographing jubilant young people at a gay pride party at Mi Cayito, a popular gay beach east of Havana that little more than a decade earlier had been subject to police raids, arrests, fines, and threats of imprisonment.
Installation view of the exhibition Navigating the Waves: Contemporary Cuban Photography at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston showing at left the wall text from the section “Questioning the Revolution: Cuban Photography in the Twentieth-First Century”
Questioning the Revolution: Cuban Photography in the Twentieth-First Century
Artists of the present generation were born long after the glory days of the Cuban Revolution and came of age in the hardship years of the 1990s. Nonetheless, they began their artistic careers with a greater awareness of international contemporary art. Working in a more conceptual and experimental manner, these artists address the current political, social, and economic situation more pointedly, albeit slyly, so as not to run afoul of government dictates and official arbiters of culture. For many, the very symbols that once celebrated the new nation – its flag, currency, stamps, passports, and more – have become vehicles for a veiled critique of the current state of Cuban society. The precarious nature of life in present-day Cuba and the widespread desire for emigration have become common subjects.
Installation views of the exhibition Navigating the Waves: Contemporary Cuban Photography at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
Installation view of the exhibition Navigating the Waves: Contemporary Cuban Photography at the Museum of Fine Arts showing at left, Houston Liudmila & Nelson’s photograph Absolut Revolution – La Isla (Absolut Revolution – The Island) 2002
Installation view of the exhibition Navigating the Waves: Contemporary Cuban Photography at the Museum of Fine Arts
Born, raised, and schooled in Havana, Jorge Luis Álvarez Pupo continued to think of himself as Cuban even when residing abroad. His series Wandering Paths is a visual reflection on the theme of migration. Now living and working in Belgium, Álvarez Pupo said the series takes “as inspiration the moment I realised that I myself had become an immigrant, even when visiting my own country. It reflects on people who have been forced to leave their environment to face the unknown, which is not always welcoming.”
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston 1001 Bissonnet Street Houston, TX 77005
Opening hours: Wednesday 11am – 5pm Thursday 11am – 9pm Friday 11am – 6pm Saturday 11am – 6pm Sunday 12.30pm – 6pm Closed Monday and Tuesday, except Monday holidays Closed Thanksgiving Day and Christmas Day
Nicolás Muller (Spanish born Hungary, 1913-2000) Tangier 1940, printed 2005 by J. M. Castro Prieto Printed with pigmented inks on cotton paper 623 x 610 mm Acquired in 2006 with a charge to the Guitarte legacy
What an enchanted life!
Nicolás Muller was a Hungarian photographer but the rise of Nazism forced him to flee his homeland in 1938 because he was Jewish.. to Paris to continue his work, then temporary shelter in Portugal before finally finding sanctuary in Tangier under the Spanish protectorate where he “published two notable books: Estampas marroquíes (Moroccan Prints) and Tánger por el Jalifa (Tangier by the Khalifa). These works revealed a mature artist, deeply sensitive to his surroundings and possessing a mastery of his craft.” (Press release)
“… in the 1930s Muller worked in a humanist, documentary vein, evincing a strong sense of sympathy for the world of labour and the most modest members of society. His interest in the working man’s experience would remain a hallmark of his photographs. As the social and political contexts changed, he photographed agricultural labourers and dockers in the ports of Marseille and Porto, then children and street vendors in Tangiers, and life in the countryside.”1
Off to Madrid for the first time to mix with underground intelligentsia where he met a beautiful woman who was to become his wife (moving to Madrid permanently in 1947, for love!), living in Spain under a fascist dictator (oh the irony, of one who had fled fascism!)
Then to become one of Spain’s greatest photographic visual storytellers, capturing the essence of the Spanish countryside and its people, the peasants and the sacred myths of the cultures of Spain, the mountain towns and the cities, the artists and the intellectuals. The passion and the people.
In Morocco it’s the blinding light and the open space of his photographs; in Spain it’s the intensity of his vision revealing something sensual and intimate in his photographs. Rich, textured, engaged / engaging.
“I learned that photography can be a weapon, an authentic document of reality. […] I became an engaged person, an engaged photographer.”
At heart always a humanist photographer he seems to me to be a romantic and I love that. I want to see more of his photographs, particularly his early photographs in Hungary and Paris which I have never seen.
Nicolás Muller is my secret pleasure. He deserves to be more widely recognised in the history of photography.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ Press release on the exhibition Nicolás Muller (1913-2000). Traces of exile from the Château de Tours website quoted in Art Blart: art and cultural memory archive, May 10, 2015 [Online] Cited 28/02/2025
Many thankx to the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Fore more photographs of the artist’s work please see the previous posting on the exhibition ‘Nicolás Muller (1913-2000). Traces of exile’ at the Château de Tours, November 2014 – May 2015
Nicolás Muller (Spanish born Hungary, 1913-2000) Desnudo. Tangier 1940, printed 2005 by J. M. Castro Prieto Printed with pigmented inks on cotton paper 724 x 610 mm Acquired in 2006 with a charge to the Guitarte legacy
Within the hallowed halls of the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, a collection of photographs whispers stories of exile, resilience, and the vibrant cultural tapestry of a bygone era. These are the works of Nicolás Muller, a Hungarian-born photographer who, through his lens, became one of Spain’s most influential visual storytellers. This current exhibition at the prestigious academy offers a profound look at his impact, reminding us of the power of photography to transcend borders and capture the essence of humanity.
Muller’s life reads like a historical novel. Born in Hungary in 1913, he belonged to a remarkable generation of Hungarian photographers – a group that included giants like Robert Capa, Brassaï, Moholy-Nagy, and André Kertész. But the rise of Nazism forced him to flee his homeland in 1938, beginning a journey of exile that would shape his life and work.
Paris became his first refuge, where he contributed to prestigious publications like France Magazine, Paris-Match, and Regard. However, the shadow of war followed him. As a Jew, Muller was again forced to move, seeking temporary shelter in Portugal. Even there, he was not safe, facing expulsion by the Salazar regime’s secret police.
His wandering eventually led him to Tangier, a cosmopolitan city in Morocco, where he found a semblance of stability. From 1940 to 1947, Muller established a successful portrait studio, capturing the diverse faces of the city. During this time, under the Spanish Protectorate, he also collaborated with the newspaper España and published two notable books: Estampas marroquíes (Moroccan Prints) and Tánger por el Jalifa (Tangier by the Khalifa). These works revealed a mature artist, deeply sensitive to his surroundings and possessing a mastery of his craft.
In 1944, a pivotal encounter with Fernando Vela, a prominent intellectual and co-founder of the Revista de Occidente, brought Muller to Madrid for the first time. Three years later, he made Madrid his permanent home, opening a studio on Serrano Street, near the iconic Puerta de Alcalá.
Post-war Madrid was a city recovering from the ravages of conflict and under the weight of Franco’s dictatorship. Yet, Muller’s studio became a beacon of light and a haven for intellectuals, artists, and writers who yearned for intellectual freedom. His studio wasn’t just a place for portraits; it was a salon, a vibrant hub where minds met and ideas were exchanged.
Imagine the scene: the warm glow of studio lights, the quiet hum of conversation, the friendly presence of Muller’s dogs. Within those walls, giants of Spanish thought and culture gathered: Baroja and Azorín, elder statesmen of literature; philosophers like Pedro Laín Entralgo and Xavier Zubiri; poets like Gabriel Celaya and Gerardo Diego; writers like Ignacio Aldecoa and María Zambrano. Once a week, Muller himself would venture out to the nearby Café Gijón, joining the lively discussions of poets and painters.
This gathering at Muller’s studio echoed the legendary salons of 19th-century Paris, particularly that of Nadar. Like Nadar, Muller created a visual record of his time, capturing the faces of a generation that shaped Spain’s intellectual and artistic landscape. His portraits are more than just images; they are intimate glimpses into the souls of these remarkable individuals.
But Muller’s work extended far beyond the confines of his studio. He ventured across Spain, documenting its landscapes, towns, monuments, and people. His photographs offer a poignant portrayal of a country grappling with its past and striving for a new identity. His books, such as España Clara (Clear Spain) and numerous regional guides, are now treasured historical documents, offering a window into a Spain that has changed but not disappeared.
In 1980, after a rich and eventful career, Muller passed the torch to his daughter, Ana, also a talented photographer, and retired to the coastal town of Andrín, Asturias. It wasn’t until the 1990s, with a major retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Madrid and a comprehensive catalog, that Muller’s work received the widespread recognition it deserved. He was finally acknowledged as one of Spain’s most important photographers, a status he shares with his admired colleague, Catalá-Roca.
Now, this important body of work is being celebrated at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, offering a new generation the chance to connect with Muller’s vision. His photographs remind us of the power of art to transcend borders, to connect us to the past, and to illuminate the human experience. They are a testament to the enduring impact of a wandering lens that found its home in Spain and captured the soul of a nation.
Press release from the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando
Nicolás Muller (Spanish born Hungary, 1913-2000) Bailarina Tajara. Larache (Tajara dancer. Larache) 1942, printed 2005 by J. M. Castro Prieto Printed with pigmented inks on cotton paper 623 x 610 mm Acquired in 2006 with a charge to the Guitarte legacy
Nicolás Muller (Spanish born Hungary, 1913-2000) Fiesta del Mulud II 1942, printed 2005 by J. M. Castro Prieto Printed with pigmented inks on cotton paper 724 x 610 mm Acquired in 2006 with a charge to the Guitarte legacy
Nicolás Muller (Spanish born Hungary, 1913-2000) Pio Baroja paseando por el Retiro (Pio Baroja strolling through the Retiro) 1950, printed 2005 by J. M. Castro Prieto Printed with pigmented inks on cotton paper 623 x 610 mm Acquired in 2006 with a charge to the Guitarte legacy
The Museum’s photography room displays a selection of works by photographer Nicolás Muller that are part of the Academy’s collection. In addition, bibliographic and photographic material from the Pedro Melero / Marisa Llorente collection and a portrait of the photographer from the Ana Muller collection are on display.
In the cultural wasteland of autocratic Spain, the photographer Nicolás Muller (Hungary, 1913 – Asturias, 2000) was, together with Catalá-Roca, the greatest and most influential Spanish photographer. A prominent member of the privileged group of Hungarian photographers of his generation – Robert Capa, Brassaï, Moholy-Nagi, André Kertész… – like them, he had to leave his country fleeing Nazism in 1938, to settle in Paris, where he actively collaborated in the famous weeklies France Magazine, Paris-Match and Regard. Of Jewish origin, the German occupation condemned him to a new and precarious exile in Portugal, a country from which he was arrested and expelled by the PIDE, the political police of the Salazar dictatorship. Finally, his long journey as a wandering Jew led him to Tangier, an open city where he lived and worked until 1947.
In Tangier he set up a portrait studio, which soon became the most prestigious and visited in the city. During the Spanish Protectorate of Morocco, Muller collaborated with the newspaper España and published two of his best books, Estampas marroquíes and Tánger por el Jalifa, which were added to those published in Hungary and which showed a photographer in full maturity, cultured, delicate, committed and deeply knowledgeable of all the secrets of his trade. In 1944, with the help of his great friend Fernando Vela, co-founder of the Revista de Occidente and director of España, he came to Madrid for the first time, where he exhibited his photographs at the Palace Hotel. Three years later he left Tangier for good, to move to Madrid. After working in two portrait studios, in 1947 he took up residence in a bright gallery on Calle Serrano, a stone’s throw from the Puerta de Alcalá.
In a shabby and intimidated Madrid, his studio soon became the most prestigious in the city and a back room and meeting point for a group of intellectuals and artists close to the liberal ideas led by Ortega y Gasset and Fernando Vela, from the Revista de Occidente. In that culturally depressed time, marked by the obsolescence of an aesthetically exhausted photographic officialdom, Muller represented one of the few windows open to modernity. In the shadow of the spotlights in his studio, in the presence of his friendly dogs, the most notable artists and intellectuals of the day met for years: Baroja and Azorín, as foster parents, Pedro Laín Entralgo, Lorenzo Goñi, Fernando Vela, Gabriel Celaya, Dionisio Ridruejo, Rodrigo Uría, Xavier Zubiri, Gerardo Diego, Pío and Julio Caro Baroja, Ignacio Aldecoa, María Zambrano… And once a week, the photographer would go to the nearby Café Gijón to join the well-known gathering known as the poets and painters, made up of Martínez Novillo, Benjamín Palencia, Pablo Serrano, Zabaleta, Pancho Cossío, Paco García Pavón, Gabriel Celaya and Cristino Mallo.
The gatherings in Muller’s studio, given the distance in time, are comparable only to the councils held a century earlier in the Parisian studio of the first Nadar, on the Boulevard des Capucines. Like the great French portraitist, Muller was building an admirable Parnassus, made up of more than a hundred portraits of painters, sculptors, poets, novelists and philosophers from that Madrid aggrieved by pain, hunger, fear and ration cards, which contrasted with the frivolous and offensive euphoria of the disrespectful mandarins and the rich speculators, to use the words of Dionisio Ridruejo. For these portraits alone, Muller would deserve a place of honour in the history of Spanish and universal photography.
But, unlike his Madrid colleagues at the time – Gyenes, Amer Ventosa, Ibáñez – whom he surpassed in talent, in addition to his work in the studio, from the very day of his arrival in the capital, Muller deployed an intense professional activity that led him to travel around Spain and portray its towns, its monuments, its landscapes and its people. The fruit of that titanic work are his numerous and excellent books, unfortunately not available today, such as España Clara (1966) and a dozen guides to the various provinces and regions of Spain, such as those produced in the Basque Country (1967), Andalusia (1968), Cantabria (1969) and La Mancha (1970). This series was followed by those dedicated to the Landscapes of Spain, Spanish Popular Architecture, Spanish Romanesque and the Jewish footprint in Spain, with texts by Azorín, Sáinz de Robles, Luis Rosales, Julio Caro Baroja, Gerardo Diego, Dionisio Ridruejo, Torrente Ballester, Fernando Vela and Laín Entralgo. In 1980, after a turbulent and well-lived professional life, in which he came to penetrate the roots of grief, successive exiles, love, friendship and melancholy, he left his Madrid studio in the hands of his daughter Ana Muller, an excellent professional, and retired to his small chosen homeland, in Andrín, Asturias, on the seashore.
Following his retrospective exhibition, Nicolás Muller. Fotógrafo, held in 1994 at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Madrid and the extraordinary catalogue published by Lunwerg Editores, Muller began to be recognised as the most important Spanish photographer of his time; a status he shares with his admired Catalá-Roca, with whom he shared many common points: curiosity, talent, a love of the arts, a joy for his work and a deep knowledge of the secrets of life and his craft. Since 1994, his exhibitions have multiplied in Spain and in various countries in Europe and America. Among them, Nicolás Muller. Obras maestras (2013) and Nicolás Muller, una mirada compromiso (2020) stand out, which is still touring various countries in Europe.
With the fall of communism in Hungary, Muller began to be known and admired in his country as well, after the retrospective exhibition of his photographs, held with great solemnity in his hometown and inaugurated by Arpad Gönez, the first Hungarian president of the democratic era. This exhibition was followed by others, among which Nicolas Muller. A retrospective look stands out, held in Budapest, organised by the Embassy of Spain and the House of Hungarian Photographers, six years after the death of the master. An emotional and well-deserved tribute to this great professional, Hungarian by birth, Spanish by adoption and, above all, a wandering Jew and citizen of the world.
Publio López Mondéjar Academic. Section of Image Arts
Text from the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando website
Nicolás Muller (Spanish born Hungary, 1913-2000) Pintando el barco. Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (Painting the boat. Las Palmas de Gran Canaria) 1964, printed 2005 by J. M. Castro Prieto Printed with pigmented inks on cotton paper 623 x 610 mm Acquired in 2006 with a charge to the Guitarte legacy
Nicolás Muller (Spanish born Hungary, 1913-2000) Monjitas en Lanzarote (Nuns in Lanzarote) 1964, printed 2005 by J. M. Castro Prieto Printed with pigmented inks on cotton paper 724 x 610 mm Acquired in 2006 with a charge to the Guitarte legacy
Nicolás Muller (Spanish born Hungary, 1913-2000) Pablo Serrano 1965 Vintage silver gelatin print
Pablo Serrano Aguilar (8 March 1908, Crivillén, Teruel – 26 November 1985, Madrid) was a Spanish abstract sculptor.
Nicolás Muller (Spanish born Hungary, 1913-2000) Soledad. Cudillero (Solitude. Cudillero) 1965, printed 2005 by J. M. Castro Prieto Printed with pigmented inks on cotton paper 623 x 610 mm Acquired in 2006 with a charge to the Guitarte legacy
Nicolás Muller (Spanish born Hungary, 1913-2000) País Vasco (the Basque Country) 1966, printed 2005 by J. M. Castro Prieto Printed with pigmented inks on cotton paper 623 x 610 mm Acquired in 2006 with a charge to the Guitarte legacy
Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando C. de Alcalá, 13, Centro, 28014 Madrid, Spain
There are some haunting photographs in this posting on the work of American photographer Deborah Turbeville but unfortunately I can make little comment on her work.
Despite trawling through numerous sites looking at her images – there is not much online – and more importantly having not seen the exhibition, I find that I have no real handle on the photographic series.
A couple of photographs from the Passport, Comme des Garçons, Block Island and Unseen Versailles series, plus a few photocollage which investigate the nature of photography and its fragility in this posting doesn’t allow me to understand the full sweep of her artistic work… which is a great pity.
The only way to really understand and feel Turbeville’s work is to visit The Photographers’ Gallery and immerse yourself in the artist’s world. Unfortunately I cannot do that.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to The Photographers’ Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“When I’m making photographs, I think of films”
Deborah Turbeville, 1985
Deborah Turbeville: Photocollage – Exhibition Trailer – The Photographers’ Gallery
Deborah Turbeville: Photocollage highlights the work of a truly innovative, American fashion photographer, Deborah Turbeville (1932-2013) who transformed fashion imagery into avant-garde art. Her signature dreamlike and melancholic style became recognisable with her earliest works in the 1970s: enigmatic female figures, cloudy skies, wintry nature and abandoned, decaying surroundings. She deliberately distanced herself from the typical glamourous, polished aesthetic that dominated fashion at the time.
An interview on the exhibition Deborah Turbeville: Photocollage with Nathalie Herschdorfer, Exhibition Curator, and Karen McQuaid, Senior Curator, The Photographers’ Gallery.
Deborah Turbeville’s signature dreamlike and melancholic style became recognisable with her earliest works in the 1970s: enigmatic female figures, cloudy skies, wintry nature and abandoned, decaying surroundings. She deliberately distanced herself from the typical glamourous, polished aesthetic that dominated fashion at the time.
Deborah Turbeville: Photocollage presents Turbeville’s trailblazing photographic explorations, from fashion photos to her very personal work. Bringing together unique pieces, the exhibition reveals Turbeville’s highly personal artistic universe, which has been credited with transforming fashion imagery into avant-garde art.
She experimented with the developing process, from the darkroom to the studio table. She ripped, cut and tore her photographs; manipulated, pinned and glued them together to create unique hybrid objects. Deborah Turbeville: Photocollage is a new appreciation of Turbeville’s ground-breaking contribution to the history of photography.
Text from The Photographers’ Gallery website
Unseen Versailles
Jacqueline Onassis commissioned Turbeville to photograph the Palace of Versailles during her tenure as an editor at the American publishing house Doubleday. With help from Onassis she gained access to the labyrinth of hidden chambers and antechambers which were off limits to tourists. She photographed barren rooms, Baroque furniture covered with sheets, broken statues, and curtains thick with dust. The curator of the estate initially blocked the introduction of props, but Onassis eventually gained her permission to bring in models in period costumes. Unseen Versailles won the American Book Award in 1982 and enabled Turbeville to find a readership outside fashion magazines.
Wall text from the exhibition
Installation views of the exhibition Deborah Turbeville: Photocollage at The Photographers’ Gallery, London
Deborah Turbeville: Photocollage at The Photographers’ Gallery, London (until 23 February 2025), celebrates Turbeville’s trailblazing photographic explorations, from fashion photos to her very personal work. To coincide with the exhibition, we’re looking at some of her photographic series in more detail, starting with the Passport series!
Turbeville’s Passport series of collages, which accompanied a novella she wrote with the same name, demonstrates her very cinematic, narrative approach to photography.
Fixed to wrinkled brown paper with unusually large T-pins, the series heavily features portrait photographs. The gelatin silver prints all have slightly varying hues of black and white; their torn edges overlap, each revealing a different fragment. The torn sections of women’s faces stand out against grainy backgrounds, like a ghostly white sky. Turbeville selected images, largely from her archives, showing repeated shots positioned together, repurposing her work to create new experimental compositions that felt cinematic in style. Alongside the images, fragments of her unpublished novella are cut out and pasted, so that the series can be read narratively as well as visually.
Unlike many of her contemporaries, Turbeville considered photography to be more than just a means of pictorial representation. Curious about the materials and nature of photography, she was inescapably interested in its fragility. Her photocollages suggested new possibilities for photography, which had, until then, cleaved very closely to reality. Collage became a form of manual work which allowed her to create three-dimensional objects and a chance to gather up her own images and give them new depth. She embraced the visible imperfections in a handmade, narrative style that gives her work a unique stylistic voice.
Text from The Photographers’ Gallery Instagram page
For her second spread in Vogue Magazine, Deborah Turbeville photographed designers with their models and muses in a February 1975 editorial titled “European Fashion: The Movers”. Here, she captured the British doyenne of dressmaking, Jean Muir, with her friends modelling her designs.
Deborah Turbeville is remembered today as a pioneering figure in fashion photography, known for her melancholic, dreamlike imagery that diverged from conventional standards. Born in 1932 in Stoneham, Massachusetts, USA, she initially pursued acting before being discovered by fashion designer Claire McCardell, who employed her as an assistant and model. Through McCardell, Turbeville met Diana Vreeland, then editor of Harper’s Bazaar, which launched her editorial career. However, she soon lost interest in conventional editorial work, turning instead to photography as an outlet for artistic expression and experimentation.
In the 1960s, after buying her first camera, Turbeville began early experimentation in photography. Her creative direction was refined through a workshop with photographer Richard Avedon and art director Marvin Israel. Moving from fashion editing to photography, she worked for magazines like Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, though she always insisted she was not a traditional fashion photographer. Rather, she used fashion within her work to tell emotionally charged stories, setting herself apart from the industry’s glamorous norms.
One of her most iconic works is the Bathhouse series for Vogue in 1975, featuring models posed in a dilapidated bathhouse. The images conveyed vulnerability, decay and isolation, starkly contrasting with the glossy fashion photography of the time. Although controversial, the series exemplified Turbeville’s atmospheric aesthetic – soft focus, grainy textures and muted tones. She often distressed her photographs to give them an aged appearance, blurring the lines between fashion photography and fine art.
Turbeville’s work rejected the conventions of fashion industry ideals, choosing instead to explore themes of memory, loss and feminine vulnerability. Her approach stood in contrast to contemporaries like Helmut Newton and Guy Bourdin, whose images typically celebrated female sensuality. In contrast, Turbeville’s subjects appeared introspective and distant, encouraging viewers to engage with them on a deeper, emotional level.
In 1981, Turbeville was commissioned by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis to photograph the abandoned rooms of the Palace of Versailles, which resulted in the book Unseen Versailles. The images of faded grandeur reflected her fascination with decay and received critical acclaim, winning an American Book Award.
Her body of work extended beyond fashion to other notable publications, including Studio St. Petersburg, The Voyage of the Virgin Maria Candelaria, and Newport Remembered. Throughout her career, she consistently merged fashion with fine art, creating images defined more by atmosphere and emotion than style alone.
Her photocollages show her experimental approach to constructing compositions. Her photographs are just one element among several. She builds up mysterious narratives through overlapping layers of pinned, ripped, cut, creased and taped images, found objects and printed texts. These layers are built up on heavy brown paper – a complete departure from the glossy white pages of fashion magazines. Her Passport series of collages, which accompanied a novella she wrote with the same name, demonstrates her very cinematic, narrative approach to photography.
Turbeville’s influence on future generations of photographers is significant. She opened doors for more experimental, avant-garde approaches to fashion photography, transforming it from a commercial medium into a space for artistic exploration. Her rejection of industry norms allowed her to create a distinctive visual language that continues to inspire photographers and artists today.
Turbeville once remarked that she was more interested in creating “atmosphere and mood” than simply photographing clothes, a sentiment that underpinned her career. By embracing imperfection, decay and the passage of time, she redefined fashion photography as more than a vehicle for selling clothes.
Turbeville’s career represents a turning point in fashion photography. Her dreamlike, melancholic style and innovative approach broke industry conventions, transforming fashion photography into a medium for personal and artistic expression. Her legacy continues to inspire, and her influence remains enduring long after her death in 2013.
“Fashion takes itself more seriously than I do. I’m not really a fashion photographer.”
Deborah Turbeville in The New Yorker
Deborah Turbeville: Photocollage opens at The Photographers’ Gallery this Autumn, from 9 October 2024 – 23 February 2025. Presenting the work of the truly innovative American photographer, Deborah Turbeville (1932-2013), the exhibition will feature a selection of her personal vintage photocollages and editorial work.
Deborah Turbeville revolutionised the world of fashion photography, transforming it from its commercial clean standard into an art form. Turbeville deliberately distanced herself from the typical glamorous, polished aesthetic that dominated fashion at the time. Her signature dreamlike and melancholic style became recognisable with her earliest works in the 1970s: enigmatic female figures, cloudy skies, wintry nature and abandoned, decaying surroundings.
Turbeville’s work for the fashion industry launched her career, which lasted over four decades. Between 1975 and 2013, her photographs were published in Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and New York Times Magazine. She also worked for fashion houses including Comme des Garçons, Guy Laroche, Charles Jourdan, Calvin Klein, Emanuel Ungaro and Valentino. At a time when fashion photography was dominated by men, Turbeville chose a path that ran counter to that of her male peers, like Richard Avedon, Irving Penn, Helmut Newton and Guy Bourdin.
Soft focus and overexposure brought a surreal and dusty tone to her black, white and sepia-toned work. Her models resemble ghostly apparitions as they wander through deserted buildings and landscapes. The exhibition includes her most controversial photograph, Bath House, New York City, 1975, part of a swimsuit photoshoot for Vogue, which featured five models, slouching and stretching in an abandoned bathhouse. The picture was so unlike the traditional fashion imagery of the time it prompted a public outcry.
Turbeville was undeterred and continued to produce images with an element of decay, saying “the idea of disintegration is really the core of my work.”
Other works on show include images from Turbeville’s 1981 American Book Award-winning series Unseen Versailles, and her first photocollage magazine, Maquillage (1975).
Turbeville’s experimentation extended from the darkroom to the studio table as she unpicked the developing process. She ripped, cut and tore her photographs; manipulated, pinned and glued them. Her handmade collages are hybrid objects – as much diaries as book maquettes, sketchbooks as photographic novels – all from a pre-digital age.
Describing her work, she said “I destroy the image after I’ve made it, obliterate it a little so you never have it completely there.”
Turbeville developed a highly personal artistic universe, which has been credited with transforming fashion imagery into avant-garde art. Although she did not achieve the same recognition as her male counterparts in her lifetime. Deborah Turbeville: Photocollage is a new opportunity to consider and celebrate Turbeville’s ground-breaking contribution to the history of photography.
Deborah Turbeville: Photocollage is organised by The Photographers’ Gallery, produced by Photo Elysée in collaboration with MUUS Collection. The exhibition is curated by Nathalie Herschdorfer, Director of Photo Elysée, and Karen McQuaid, Senior Curator at The Photographers’ Gallery.
The accompanying catalogue Deborah Turbeville: Photocollage is published by Thames & Hudson and available at The Photographers’ Gallery’s bookshop at £55.
Deborah Turbeville short biography
Deborah Turbeville was born in Stoneham, Massachusetts, USA in 1932. She moved to New York with ambitions to study drama when she was 19. Instead she was discovered by the fashion designer Claire McCardell, who hired Turbeville as an assistant and house model. While working for McCardell, she met Diana Vreeland, the famed editor of Harper’s Bazaar. Their introduction led to Turbeville being offered a job as an editor at the magazine.
Disinterested in her editorial work at Harper’s Bazaar and later at Mademoiselle, she began experimenting with photography in the 1960s. She took part in a workshop led by Richard Avedon and art director Marvin Israel in 1966. From there, she began her photographic career, mainly working for magazines like Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and Mirabella.
In 1981, Turbeville was commissioned by Jaqueline Onassis, then an editor at Doubleday, to photograph disused rooms in the Palace of Versailles. The book, Unseen Versailles, won an American Book Award, for its rare look into the Palace’s off-limits decaying grandeur.
Turbeville published many books of her photography, including Studio St. Petersburg, The Voyage of the Virgin Maria Candelaria and Newport Remembered. Posthumous publications include Comme des Garçons 1981, a series of photographs she took during the 1980s in collaboration with the fashion house and its designer, Rei Kawakubo.
Turbeville died in 2013, having left an indelible mark on the world of photography. Her work is collected by major institutions worldwide, including the National Portrait Gallery, Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Getty Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Baldwin Lee (Chinese-American, b. 1951) Untitled 1983-1989 Vintage gelatin silver print 16 x 20 inches Collection of the artist, Courtesy of Howard Greenberg Gallery
“A good image is created by a state of grace. Grace expresses itself when it has been freed from conventions, free like a child in his early discovery of reality. The game is then to organise the rectangle.”
Chilean photographer Sergio Larraín Echeñique
figure ground
I have written previously on the excellent work of the Chinese-American photographer Baldwin Lee in his eponymously named exhibition at Joseph Bellows Gallery in 2022. Since then I have spent further time with his photographs, specifically during recent research for my posting on the exhibition A Long Arc: Photography and the American South since 1845 at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond (October 2024 – January 2025) and then again for this posting.
There are more photographs in this posting from Lee’s journey of discovery through the American South in the 1980s photographing Black communities with this 4 x 5 view camera, a journey that was as much a revelation for the people of those communities (literally, shining a light on their existence) as it was for the photographer himself (a self-reflective understanding of what was important to the photographer, discovering his subject).
“The process I adopted in successive road trips during my seven-year project involved splitting time between revisiting places I had previously photographed and seeking out new locations. The families who lived on this street in Rosedale, Mississippi, knew me from prior visits. Children were always thrilled at my arrival, and they delighted in taking turns shrouding their heads under my black focusing cloth that allowed them to peer at the dim image projected on the ground glass of my view camera.” (Text from the Guardian website)
This is what is so important about Baldwin Lee’s photographs. He grounds the figures in his photographs in the glass of his large format camera (standing proud) even as he grounds his figures in the history and culture of the American South, its Black history, its joy and impoverishment. As he himself says, his photographs are “personal stories about events that are momentous”, events in the lives of the participants inflected by how the photographer approaches his subject matter, how he interacts with what is in front of him, influenced by his own history of growing up a Chinese-American and by what he had already thought and felt about the subject, the American South.
Lee’s pictorial compositions, his “photographic seeing” (John Szarkowski’s phrase) is concerned with a felt response to a visual problem… how to conceive a cogent, empathetic picture structure both choreographically and visually. Adapting Szarkowski we could say that in Lee’s photographs the relationship of figure to figure is as centrally important as the relationship of figure to ground and frame.
Here is compassion, here is empathy, here is focus, stillness, culture, humanity. Here is a “state of grace” existing between the mind and feelings of the photographer and the organisation of the people and stories within the image… so much so that there is often a “revelation of spirit” in the subsequent prints by Lee (after Minor White, one of Baldwin Lee’s teachers).
Thus, Lee’s photographs show an impeccable “balance” in the image between figure and ground (touching the earth) – whether that be compositionally, emotionally or historically.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Ogden Museum of Southern Art for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Baldwin Lee (Chinese-American, b. 1951) Natchez, Mississippi 1984 Vintage gelatin silver print 16 x 20 inches Collection of the artist Courtesy of Joseph Bellows Gallery
Is there an image of yours that stands out or is a favourite?
“As I rounded a corner several miles north of Natchez, Mississippi, a stunning sight – a brilliant pink stucco house framed by a blooming wisteria arbor caused me to pull over. I was compelled to knock on the door and found myself and Mr. and Mrs. Fulton, an elderly black couple standing in the cramped dimly lit kitchen whose illumination came from a bare-bulb hanging from the ceiling. Pushed up against a tattered refrigerator was a Formica table upon which provided a foundation for structure made of Kellog Cornflakes boxes. Each box bore a photograph of a beaming face. Boneheadedly I asked Mrs. Fulton if she liked cornflakes. With her gaze lowered she replied no. She then told me she disliked taking meals by herself now that her children had grown and gone.”
Anonymous. “Baldwin Lee,” on the PhotoWork Foundation website Nd [Online] Cited 06/01/2025
Curated Conversation with Baldwin Lee
On Saturday, October 5, Ogden Museum of Southern Art celebrated the opening of “Baldwin Lee” with a free Curated Conversation.
Taking place in the Museum’s historic Patrick F. Taylor Library, Prospect New Orleans’ Director of Curatorial Affairs, Andrew Rebatta, and photographer Baldwin Lee engaged in a lively conversation celebrating “Baldwin Lee,” a landmark solo exhibition at Ogden Museum of Southern Art highlighting Lee’s work.
Lee shared stories from his 5 decade career as a student, educator and practicing artist. Topics of discussion include Lee’s formal education with Minor White and Walker Evans (two of the 20th centuries’ most influential photographers) and his 1980s journey of self-discovery photographing the American South – which resulted in making nearly 10,000 photographs and producing one of the most important visual documents of and about the American South in the past half century.
Baldwin Lee (Chinese-American, b. 1951) Columbia, South Carolina 1984 Vintage gelatin silver print 16 x 20 inches Collection of the artist, Courtesy of Howard Greenberg Gallery
‘Dusty streets and bare feet coexist alongside the South Carolina Statehouse on Gervais Street. A short focal length lens emphasised the difference in scale between the foreground and background figures. An archaic flash bulb, a sealed glass orb containing spun magnesium and pure oxygen, ignited during the exposure illuminating the children closest to the camera. It was positioned higher than the camera and to its right’
Text from The Guardian website
Baldwin Lee (Chinese-American, b. 1951) Untitled 1983-1989 Gelatin silver print 16 x 20 inches Collection of the artist
Baldwin Lee (Chinese-American, b. 1951) Montgomery, Alabama 1984 Vintage gelatin silver print 16 x 20 inches Collection of the artist Courtesy of Joseph Bellows Gallery
Baldwin Lee (Chinese-American, b. 1951) Untitled 1983-1989 Gelatin silver print 16 x 20 inches Collection of the artist
Baldwin Lee (Chinese-American, b. 1951) Monroe, Louisiana 1984 Gelatin silver print 16 x 20 inches Collection of the artist
Baldwin Lee (Chinese-American, b. 1951) Monroe, Louisiana 1983 Gelatin silver print 16 x 20 inches Collection of the artist
Baldwin Lee (Chinese-American, b. 1951) Untitled 1983-1989 Gelatin silver print 16 x 20 inches Collection of the artist
Baldwin Lee (Chinese-American, b. 1951) Montgomery, Alabama 1984 Gelatin silver print 16 x 20 inches Collection of the artist
‘Southerners savour the sweetness and solace that comes at the end of searingly hot summer days at twilight. The quiet ushers in a deep peace. The other side of tranquility and beauty is ominousness and menace. The viewers of this photograph are invited to interpret its meaning. If there is an inclination toward wholeness this is a scene of contentment. Southerners approach this image with caution. Black southerners would probably not gather so publicly for fear of retributive reactions. White southerners probably have their own reasons to meet’
Text from The Guardian website
Baldwin Lee (Chinese-American, b. 1951) Untitled 1983-1989 Gelatin silver print 16 x 20 inches Collection of the artist
Baldwin Lee (Chinese-American, b. 1951) Vicksburg, Mississippi 1983 Gelatin silver print 20 x 16 inches Collection of the artist
Baldwin Lee was born in Brooklyn, New York and raised in Manhattan’s Chinatown. He studied photography at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) with photographer Minor White. Later, he would receive an MFA from Yale School of Art, where he studied with photographer Walker Evans. In 1982, Lee became the first Director of Photography within the Art department at the University of Tennessee. The following year, he set out from Knoxville with a 4 x 5 view camera on a journey of self-discovery photographing his adopted homeland – the American South.
Lee’s artistic goal was to partially re-trace and re-photograph the 1930s-40s routes made across the South by his mentor Walker Evans. Unlike Evans’ iconic depression-era photographs, Lee would eventually focus on documenting Black Americans, many of whom were living in poverty on the fringes of society. Over the next seven years, Lee traveled thousands of miles crisscrossing the South, making nearly 10,000 photographs – producing one of the most important visual documents of and about the American South in the past half century.
With this work, Lee had found his primary subject, and credits his many years of working within Black communities throughout the South as having a “political” effect on his life and art. The compassion Lee felt for those he photographed resonates within his work. Although, Lee’s 1980s photographs were known and respected by his fellow photographers and collectors, until recently this work has remained largely unknown and under-appreciated by a wider public.
In the fall of 2022, Hunter’s Point Press published “Baldwin Lee,” a book consisting of the artist’s 1980s Southern photographs. The book has since become an instant classic and was shortlisted as one of the best photo books of 2022 by “Aperture Magazine,” “TIME” and the International Center for Photography. The first edition of “Baldwin Lee” sold out in less than a month and is presently on its third edition of publication. The book’s success led to solo exhibitions at Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York City, Joseph Bellows Gallery, La Jolla, California and David Hill Gallery, London, England. After nearly 40 years, Baldwin Lee is finally being recognized for his groundbreaking work.
The exhibition Baldwin Lee will feature a selection of over 50 gelatin silver prints culled from thousands of images Lee made across the South in the 1980s. Many of these photographs will be exhibited for the first time. The exhibition will include compelling portraits of Black Americans, as well as a collection of landscape, cityscape and still-life images that visually encapsulate the Reagan-era American South.
Text from the Ogden Museum of Southern Art website
Baldwin Lee (Chinese-American, b. 1951) Lakeland, Florida 1984 Vintage gelatin silver print 16 x 20 inches Collection of the artist Courtesy of Howard Greenberg Gallery
Baldwin Lee (Chinese-American, b. 1951) Richmond, Virginia 1986 Gelatin silver print 16 x 20 inches Collection of the artist
Baldwin Lee (Chinese-American, b. 1951) Vicksburg, Mississippi 1984 Gelatin silver print 16 x 20 inches, Collection of the artist
Baldwin Lee (Chinese-American, b. 1951) Waterproof, LA 1986 Gelatin silver print 16 x 20 Collection of the artist
Baldwin Lee (Chinese-American, b. 1951) Lula, Mississippi 1984 Vintage gelatin silver print 16 x 20 inches Collection of the artist Courtesy of Joseph Bellows Gallery
Baldwin Lee (Chinese-American, b. 1951) Nashville, Tennessee 1983 Gelatin silver print 16 x 20 inches Collection of the artist
Baldwin Lee (Chinese-American, b. 1951) Untitled 1983-1989 Gelatin silver print 16 x 20 inches Collection of the artist
Baldwin Lee (Chinese-American, b. 1951) Plain Dealing, Louisiana 1984 Gelatin silver print 16 x 20 inches Collection of the artist
Baldwin Lee (Chinese-American, b. 1951) Mobile, Alabama 1985 Gelatin silver print 16 x 20 inches Collection of the artist
Baldwin Lee (Chinese-American, b. 1951) Defuniak Springs, Florida 1984 Gelatin Silver Print 16 x 20 inches Collection of the Artist
Baldwin Lee (Chinese-American, b. 1951) Untitled 1983-1989 Gelatin silver print 16 x 20 inches Collection of the artist
Baldwin Lee (Chinese-American, b. 1951) Rosedale, Mississippi 1984 Archival pigment print 40 x 50 inches Collection of the artist
‘The process I adopted in successive road trips during my seven-year project involved splitting time between revisiting places I had previously photographed and seeking out new locations. The families who lived on this street in Rosedale, Mississippi, knew me from prior visits. Children were always thrilled at my arrival, and they delighted in taking turns shrouding their heads under my black focusing cloth that allowed them to peer at the dim image projected on the ground glass of my view camera. They were more than eager to arrange themselves for this photograph’
Text from The Guardian website
Baldwin Lee (Chinese-American, b. 1951) Valdosta, Georgia 1985 Archival pigment print 40 x 50 inches Collection of the artist
Baldwin Lee (Chinese-American, b. 1951) Chattanooga, Tennessee 1983 Vintage gelatin silver print 16 x 20 inches Collection of the artist
Baldwin Lee (Chinese-American, b. 1951) Untitled 1983-1989 Gelatin silver print 16 x 20 inches Collection of the artist
Baldwin Lee (Chinese-American, b. 1951) Rosedale, Mississippi 1985 Gelatin silver print 16 x 20 inches Museum Purchase with Funds Provided by The Charles D. Urstadt Chairman Emeritus Acquisition Fund
Baldwin Lee (Chinese-American, b. 1951) Walls, Mississippi 1984 Gelatin silver print 16 x 20 inches
Ogden Museum of Southern Art 925 Camp Street, New Orleans, LA
Karl Blossfeldt (German, 1865-1932) Lichtnelke Before 1932 Gelatin silver print Courtesy Universität der Künste, Berlin, Universitätsarchiv, in Zusammenarbeit mit der Photographischen Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur, Köln
Karl Blossfeldt’s photographs have been associated with Modernism, Surrealism and New Objectivity / New Vision.
“Hailed as a master for discovering a hitherto ‘unknown universe’ and for his exemplary technical feats as a photographer Blossfeldt’s work is, nevertheless, decidedly subjective as author Hanako Murata notes in her excellent essay on the artist Material Forms in Nature: The Photographs of Karl Blossfeldt(2014). “Not only did he carefully select, arrange, and in some cases physically modify his specimens, but his meticulous attention to detail and image refinement continued throughout each step of production, beginning with his negatives.” Blossfeldt uses the logic of the plant and the logic of his mind to achieve his final vision. A/symmetry as art form.” (MB 2015)
Love them or hate them there are still few photographs like them in the history of photography. Magnificent photographs.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Die Photographische Sammlung / SK Stiftung Kultur, Cologne for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“In contrast to sketched enlargements, which always contain a subjective element, these images present pure nature, so they are likely to provide inspiring material for students. In many cases, these photographs were made by enlarging small details that students could not easily make out in evening light. This considerably facilitates projects. I probably have more than a thousand of such photographs, from which, however, I can only slowly make prints.” ~ Karl Blossfeldt
This was written by Karl Blossfeldt in a letter dated April 11, 1906, to the administration of the educational institution of the art school where he taught from 1899 to 1930. The original letter is displayed in the current exhibition, along with other documents and publications, in a showcase. The quote provides insight into Blossfeldt’s pedagogical practice and highlights his appreciation for documentary photography and its potential for enlargement.
Press release from Die Photographische Sammlung
Installation views of the exhibition Karl Blossfeldt – Photography in the Light of Art at the Die Photographische Sammlung / SK Stiftung Kultur, Cologne
Installation views of the exhibition Karl Blossfeldt – Photography in the Light of Art at the Die Photographische Sammlung / SK Stiftung Kultur, Cologne showing in the bottom image, Farngewächse (Ferns)
With 271 original prints, the oeuvre of Karl Blossfeldt (1865-1932) is being presented in this scope for the first time in two decades. A consistent photographic oeuvre unfolds impressively, which emerged in the context of art education and was only discovered as an independent artistic approach a few years before Blossfeldt’s death. Today it ranks among the classics of photographic history and is mentioned in the same breath as August Sander and Albert Renger-Patzsch. In terms of reception, Blossfeldt’s photographs are regarded above all as prototypical of the artistic movements of New Objectivity and New Vision.
The exhibition is based on the holdings of the Berlin University of the Arts, the institution at whose predecessor school Blossfeldt himself trained as a sculptor and where he taught the subject of “modelling from living plants” for three decades from 1899. It was there that he created his plant photographs, which he used as illustrative models to teach his students about the variety of forms and details of the botanical world. The precise observation and artistic realisation of the vegetal forms were to serve as creative inspiration for designs in the field of applied art and architecture. In addition to photographs, Blossfeldt also made bronze casts of plant forms as teaching aids – albeit in much smaller numbers – and used them in class. Exemplary pieces are included in the presentation as well as handwritten letters, which provide insights into school procedures and contain statements on the relationship between natural and artistic forms.
Photography was an elementary means of expression for Karl Blossfeldt, which he used specifically for his own purposes. He photographed the heavily processed plant material in multiple enlargements and against a neutral background of light or dark tones. The photographs are of great formal power and concentration, which, beyond their function as teaching pieces, formulate a pictorial language that departs from the representational and leads to abstraction. In particular, Blossfeldt’s two publications “Urformen der Kunst” (1928) and “Wundergarten der Natur” (1932), which appeared during his lifetime, illustrate his own artistic interest in the photographic image. They impressively show how intensively he researched his subject area and how much he appreciated the aesthetic expressive possibilities of the plant as well as its mysteriously magical aura.
A comprehensive catalog presenting the Berlin Blossfeldt collection will be published by Schirmer / Mosel. The publication and exhibition are based on many years of cooperation with the Photographische Sammlung / SK Stiftung Kultur.
Text from the Die Photographische Sammlung website
Karl Blossfeldt (German, 1865-1932) Osmundaceae – Königsfarngewächse (Osmundaceae – Royal fern family) Nd Gelatin silver print 20.0 x 28.4cm Courtesy Universität der Künste, Berlin, Universitätsarchiv, in Zusammenarbeit mit der Photographischen Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur, Köln
Karl Blossfeldt (German, 1865-1932) Adiantum pedatum (Northern maidenhair fern – young rolled up fronds) Nd Gelatin silver print Courtesy Universität der Künste, Berlin, Universitätsarchiv, in Zusammenarbeit mit der Photographischen Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur, Köln
Karl Blossfeldt (German, 1865-1932) Haarfarn (Adiantum pedatum), Junge gerollte Wedel, 20-fach (Hair fern (Adiantum pedatum), young rolled fronds, 20x) Nd Gelatin silver print Courtesy Universität der Künste, Berlin, Universitätsarchiv, in Zusammenarbeit mit der Photographischen Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur, Köln
Karl Blossfeldt (German, 1865-1932) Akelei (Aquilegia chrysantha), Blüte (Columbine (Aquilegia chrysantha), flower) Nd Gelatin silver print Courtesy Universität der Künste, Berlin, Universitätsarchiv, in Zusammenarbeit mit der Photographischen Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur, Köln
Karl Blossfeldt (German, 1865-1932) Ziegelrote Brennwinde (Cajophora lateritia), Frucht, 10-fach (Brick-red morning glory (Cajophora lateritia), fruit, 10-fold) Nd Gelatin silver print Courtesy Universität der Künste, Berlin, Universitätsarchiv, in Zusammenarbeit mit der Photographischen Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur, Köln
The exhibition features 271 original prints by Karl Blossfeldt and 13 corresponding bronzes, created in the context of his teaching at the educational institution of the Royal Museum of Applied Arts in Berlin. They come from a collection of over 600 original photographs from the archive of the Berlin University of the Arts, the predecessor of the named educational institution. Blossfeldt himself was trained as a sculptor there and later taught the subject “Modelling after Living Plants” at the same school. To familiarize his students with the diversity and details of the botanical world, he continuously developed new plant images. He chose his subjects based on his botanical and art historical knowledge, exploring the Berlin surroundings and the local botanical garden. The detailed observation of plant forms and their free artistic interpretation were intended to serve as inspiration for designs in applied arts and architecture.
Photography became an essential means of expression for Karl Blossfeldt, which he used with specifically crafted equipment for his purposes. He photographed the occasionally heavily modified plant material in multiple enlargements against a neutral light or dark background, producing images of great formal strength that vividly demonstrate the diversity of the plant world. Walter Benjamin’s insightful reaction to Blossfeldt’s photographs was correspondingly admiring: “The diversity of forms in nature is infinitely great. Of the approximately two billion people living on earth, there are no two who are completely alike. The same applies to the entire plant and animal world. Everywhere variations, everywhere mutations of a basic type.” (Walter Benjamin: “News from Flowers,” in: Die Literarische Welt, November 23, 1928)
Ultimately, Blossfeldt’s works have asserted themselves as independent artworks beyond their function as teaching aids. They start from the representational and lead to an abstract, typifying visual language that invites many associations. Particularly, the publications “Urformen der Kunst” (Art Forms in Nature), 1928, and “Wundergarten der Natur” (Wonders of Nature), 1932, which appeared during Blossfeldt’s lifetime, show how intensively he had explored his subject matter and how much he appreciated the aesthetic possibilities of plants and their mysteriously magical aura.
A comprehensive catalog presenting the Berlin Blossfeldt collection is published by Schirmer/Mosel Verlag (600 pages, 733 colour illustrations, €98, German/English, texts by Gabriele Conrath-Scholl, Angela Lammert, Norbert Palz, Dietmar Schenk, Claudia Schubert). The publication and exhibition are based on the long-standing cooperation between the Universität der Künste, Berlin (Berlin University of the Arts) and the Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur, Cologne.
Press release from Die Photographische Sammlung
Karl Blossfeldt (German, 1865-1932) Schönmalve (Abutilon), Samenkapseln, 6-fach (Abutilon, seed capsules, 6-fold) Nd Gelatin silver print Courtesy Universität der Künste, Berlin, Universitätsarchiv, in Zusammenarbeit mit der Photographischen Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur, Köln
Karl Blossfeldt (German, 1865-1932) Traubenholunder (Elderberry) Nd Gelatin silver print Courtesy Universität der Künste, Berlin, Universitätsarchiv, in Zusammenarbeit mit der Photographischen Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur, Köln
Karl Blossfeldt (German, 1865-1932) Osterluzei (Easter Lily) Before 1928 Gelatin silver print Courtesy Universität der Künste, Berlin, Universitätsarchiv, in Zusammenarbeit mit der Photographischen Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur, Köln
Karl Blossfeldt (German, 1865-1932) Bohne (Phaseolus), Keimling (Bean (Phaseolus), seedling) Nd Gelatin silver print Courtesy Universität der Künste, Berlin, Universitätsarchiv, in Zusammenarbeit mit der Photographischen Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur, Köln
Karl Blossfeldt (German, 1865-1932) Ackerschachtelhalm (Equisetum arvense), Sommertrieb (Field horsetail (Equisetum arvense), summer shoot) Before 1926 Gelatin silver print Courtesy Universität der Künste, Berlin, Universitätsarchiv, in Zusammenarbeit mit der Photographischen Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur, Köln
Karl Blossfeldt (German, 1865-1932) Winterschachtelhalm (Winter Horsetail) Before 1927 Gelatin silver print Courtesy Universität der Künste, Berlin, Universitätsarchiv, in Zusammenarbeit mit der Photographischen Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur, Köln
Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur Im Mediapark 7, 50670 Köln Phone: +49 221/888 95
Opening hours: The ongoing exhibitions are open daily from 2pm to 7pm. With the exception of being closed on Wednesdays.
Art Blart _ art and cultural memory archive 
You must be logged in to post a comment.