Some poignant photographs in this posting of young Australian men setting off to fight in the early stages of the Second World War. The message scrawled in chalk on the side of the train (below, at left) reads, “Berlin first stop. Look out Hitler, we’ll be there soon.” Little did they know it would be five long, hard years of fighting and countless deaths before that aphorism would come true.
The 6th division AIF troops first fought in North Africa against the Italians at Tobruk and was then sent to Greece to fight the German advance. About 39 per cent of the Australian troops in Greece on 6 April 1941 were either killed, wounded or became prisoners of war. The division then fought in the Pacific War on the Kokoda Trail campaign in the New Guinea theatre until the end of the war.
I wonder how many of the men, smiling and leaning out of the train carriage or departing on a troop ship, returned to these shores?
The last photograph in the posting is so very eloquent it actually moved me to tears. The women being hoisted aloft to kiss her loved one last time – clutching her handbag, complete with rumpled, lumpy stockings. To the right (and this is what caught my eye), a man looks straight at the camera while another right next to him has this distant melancholy look on his face as though he is not actually there. A portent of things to come.
Brave men, fighting in the only war that Australians have had to fight for their own freedom, not at the whim of a colonial power or overseas ally in some far of distant land. Brave men and women – we wouldn’t be here without them.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Museum of Sydney for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Installation view of the exhibition Home Front: Wartime Sydney 1939-45 at the Museum of Sydney Historic Houses Trust of NSW Photos: Jenni Carter
Installation view of the exhibition Home Front: Wartime Sydney 1939-45 at the Museum of Sydney showing at centre, a detail of Members of the Wardens’ Women’s Auxiliary making for the scene of an incident (c. 1943, below) by an anonymous photographer Historic Houses Trust of NSW Photo: Jenni Carter
In May 1942 three Japanese midget submarines entered Sydney Harbour in an attempt to sink allied ships, bringing the once far away war to the shores of the harbourside city and shaking the country to its core. Coinciding with the 70th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Sydney Harbour, Home Front: Wartime Sydney 1939-45 a new exhibition opening 31 March at the Museum of Sydney, explores the experience of the women, men and children who rallied together to support the war effort from home.
Unprepared for another world war, Australians initially referred to the conflict as ‘the phoney war’, however it wasn’t long before propaganda posters were plastered around Sydney, censorship and food rationing became the norm, and tank traps and barbed wire replaced bronzed bodies on Sydney beaches. For six long years the world seemed to come to Sydney as soldiers, sailors and airmen from many nations called Sydney home, making wartime an exciting and thrilling period for some, while for others it was a long and lonely time interrupted by the occasional letter from a loved one serving overseas.
Almost 40,000 Australians lost their lives with the war leaving a lasting impact at home and transforming the lives of generations of Australians, in particular the lives of women, says Curator Annie Campbell. “As well as having to cope with war related anxieties and stress, many women were ‘manpowered’ to work in wartime industries such as ammunitions factories and aircraft construction. Everyone had to make sacrifices on the home front, however despite wartime shortages and rationing, women were expected and actively encouraged to look smart, which often involved some innovative thinking. One of my favourite objects in the exhibition is a wedding dress made out of parachute silk and mosquito net for a war bride, later worn by her sister and two girlfriends on their special days.
While the troops were busy on the battlefields, Sydneysiders prepared for the possibility of an enemy invasion on home soil. An anti-submarine boom net was installed across Sydney Harbour to keep out attacking forces, bomb shelters were constructed in Hyde Park and protective timbers were placed around landmark buildings. In 1942 blackout restrictions were introduced to limit the effectiveness of air raids, all Sydney lights were switched off and car, train and tram headlights were masked, giving the city a sinister feel. But it wasn’t all doom and gloom, large numbers of people were ready to have fun in Sydney and the Trocadero on George Street became a mecca for white American servicemen, while the Booker T Washington Club in Albion Street Surry Hills serviced the African-American GI’s,” says Campbell.
Highlights of the exhibition include the microphone used by Prime Minister Robert Menzies to announce that Australia was at war, remnants of the Japanese midget submarines that attacked Sydney, over 100 photographs and artworks depicting wartime Sydney, and a short documentary featuring historic footage. Over 200 wartime Sydney mementoes will also feature in the exhibition including propaganda posters, warden’s memorabilia, letters from soldiers serving overseas and a selection of wartime fashions.
Exhibition dates: 27th March – 9th September, 2012
Curator: Malcolm Daniel, Curator in Charge of the Department of Photography at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
WARNING: this posting contains photographs of nudity. If you do not like please do not look.
Many thankx to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Franck-François-Genès Chauvassaignes (French, 1831 – after 1900) Untitled [Female Nude in Studio] 1856-1859 Salted paper print from glass negative 19.1 x 15.2cm (7.5 x 6 in.) Metropolitan Museum of Art Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 1998 Public domain
This corner of a painter’s atelier somewhere in France in the middle of the nineteenth century is scarcely tethered to time or place; it could as easily be a loft in New York today or, had photography existed four centuries earlier, a studio in the Italian Renaissance. What is surprising here is the absence of even the thinnest disguise – no swags of drapery, elaborate coiffure, or skeins of beads as are commonly found in the work of other purveyors of “studies for artists.” Here, the model is utterly naked. With her intelligent head and dirty feet, this young woman helped found the matter-of-fact modelling sorority joined a decade later by Édouard Manet’s Olympia.
Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website
Félix-Jacques-Antoine Moulin (French, 1800 – after 1875) Untitled [Two Standing Female Nudes] c. 1850 Daguerreotype Visible: 14.5 x 11.1cm (5 11/16 x 4 3/8 in.) Metropolitan Museum of Art The Rubel Collection, Purchase, Anonymous Gift and Lila Acheson Wallace Gift, 1997 Public domain
Although Moulin was sentenced in 1851 to a month in jail for producing images that, according to court papers, were “so obscene that even to pronounce the titles… would be to commit an indecency,” this daguerreotype seems more allied to art than to erotica. Instead of the boudoir props and provocative poses typical of hand-coloured pornographic daguerreotypes, Moulin depicted these two young women utterly at ease, as unselfconscious in their nudity as Botticelli’s Venus.
Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website
Unknown photographer (French) [Seated Female Nude] c. 1850 Daguerreotype 9.1 x 6.9cm (3 9/16 x 2 11/16 in.) Metropolitan Museum of Art Gilman Collection, Gift of The Howard Gilman Foundation, 2005 Public domain
This daguerreotype was surely intended to serve artistic purposes, but the odd twist of the body and the strange relationship of the three visible limbs seem to render it inappropriate for artistic emulation. Such tension between an artistic ideal and realistic means – between the classicism of an academic pose and the awkwardness of the camera’s rendering of human movement – seems emblematic of the dilemma faced by the nascent medium striving to be an art.
Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website
Julien Vallou de Villeneuve (French, 1795-1866) [Standing Female Nude] c. 1853 Salted paper print from paper negative 12 x 16cm (4 3/4 x 6 5/16 in.) Metropolitan Museum of Art Purchase, Lila Acheson Wallace Gift, 1993 Public domain
A student of the painter Jean François Millet (1814-1875) and a lithographer of scenes of daily life, costume, and erotica in the 1820s and 1830s, Vallou reportedly took up photography in the early 1840s. Because his early photographs have not been identified, it has been assumed that they depicted naked women, a subject for which it was to improper to acknowledge authorship.
Between 1851 and 1855, Vallou made a series of small-scale paper photographs of female nudes that he marketed (and legally registered) as models for artists. Vallou’s nudes have long been associated with those of Gustave Courbet (1819-1877), who is known to have used photographs in his painting process. Though no absolute one-to-one correspondence can be pointed to, there are some striking similarities in pose, and the heavy, soporific quality of Vallou’s models is very close to Courbet’s concept of the nude.
Text from the Metropolitan Muesum of Art website
Eugène Durieu (French, 1800-1874) Untitled [Seated Female Nude] 1853-1854 Albumen silver print from glass negative 6 13/16 × 4 11/16 in. (17.3 × 11.9cm) Metropolitan Museum of Art Gilman Collection, Purchase, Mr. and Mrs. Henry R. Kravis Gift, 2005 Public domain
Durieu was a lawyer and early advocate and practitioner of photography in France who, in 1853-1854, made a series of photographic studies of nude and costumed figures as models for artists. The French Romantic painter Eugène Delacroix helped him pose the figures and later praised the prints, from which he sketched, as “palpable demonstrations of the free design of nature.” While the painter saw the accurate transcription of reality as a virtue of photography, Durieu knew that a good photograph was not simply the result of the correct use of the medium but, more significantly, an expression of the photographer’s temperament and vision. In an important article he emphasised the interpretative nature of the complex manipulations in photography and explained that the photographer must previsualise his results so as to make a “picture,” not just a “copy.”
This photograph proves Durieu’s point: through the elegant contours of the drapery, the smooth modelling of the flesh, and the grace and restraint of the pose, the picture attains an artistic poise that combines Delacroix’s sensuality with Ingres’s classicism, and rivals both.
Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website
Charles Alphonse Marlé (French, 1821 – after 1867) Untitled [Standing Male Nude] c. 1855 Salted paper print from paper negative 25.7 x 17.6cm (10 1/8 x 6 15/16 in.) Metropolitan Museum of Art Purchase, Ezra Mack Gift and The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 1991
Marlé’s photograph was probably intended as an aid for painters and sculptors. The jury-rigged arrangement of podium, books, and potted tree, as well as the painting held in the background by a studio assistant, may strike the modern viewer as an incongruous contrast to the heroic gesture of the model. Marlé and those who bought his photograph, however, would have been absorbed by the grand academic pose and likely would have thought the awkward accoutrements of little consequence.
Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website
Nadar (French, Paris 1820 – 1910 Paris) [Standing Female Nude] 1860-1861 20.2 x 13.3cm (7 15/16 x 5 1/4 in.) Metropolitan Museum of Art Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 1991 Public Domain
Famed for his portraits of writers, artists, and left-wing politicians, Nadar is known to have photographed only three female nudes. This one was made at the behest of the painter Jean-Léon Gérôme to assist in the process of painting Phryné before the Areopagus, displayed at the Salon of 1861. Gérôme’s painting depicts the moment when the famous courtesan Phryné, on trial for impiety, is suddenly unveiled by her lawyer; persuaded by Phryné’s divine beauty, the jurors acquit her.
Like Phryné, who is said to have modelled for the ancient Greek painter Apelles and other artists of antiquity, Nadar’s model, Marie-Christine Leroux (1820-1863), was widely sought by artists of her time and was the basis for the character Musette in Henri Murger’s Scènes de la vie de bohème.
Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website
Depicting the human body has been among the greatest challenges, preoccupations, and supreme achievements of artists for centuries. The nude – even in generalised or idealised renderings – has triggered impassioned discussions about sin, sexuality, cultural identity, and canons of beauty, especially when the chosen medium is photography, with its inherent accuracy and specificity. Through September 9, 2012, Naked before the Camera, an exhibition of more than 60 photographs selected from the renowned holdings of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, surveys the history of this subject and explores some of the motivations and meanings that underlie photographers’ fascination with the nude.
“In every culture and across time, artists have been captivated by the human figure,” commented Thomas P. Campbell, Director of the Metropolitan. “In Naked before the Camera, we see how photographers have used their medium to explore this age-old subject and create compelling new images.”
The exhibition begins in the 19th century, when photographs often served artists as substitutes for live models. Such “studies for artists” were known to have been used by the French painter Gustave Courbet, whose Woman with a Parrot (1866), for instance, is strikingly similar to photographer Julien Vallou de Villeneuve’s Female Nude of 1853. Even when their stated purpose was to aid artists, however, the best of these 19th-century photographs of the nude were also intended as works of art in their own right. Two recently acquired photographs, made in the mid-1850s by an unknown French artist, are striking examples. Not only are they larger than all other photographic nudes from the time, they stand out due to an extraordinary surface pattern that interrupts the images and suggests a view through gossamer or a photograph printed on finely pleated silk rather than paper. The elegant Female Nude harkens back to an Eve or Venus and is vignetted by the camera lens as if seen through a peephole, while her male counterpart is shown in strict profile in a pose that recalls precedents from antiquity. Each figure draws from the past while being presented in a strikingly modern way, without any equivalent among other 19th-century studies for artists.
Not all photographers of the nude were motivated by artistic desire. The second section of Naked before the Camera includes photographs made for medical and forensic purposes, as ethnographic studies, as tools to analyse anatomy and movement, and – not surprisingly – as erotica. The lines between such categories were not always clearly drawn; some photographers called their images “studies for artists” merely to evade the censors, while viewers of the G. W. Wilson Studio’s Zulu Girls (1892-93) or Paul Wirz’s ethnographic photographs of scantily clad Indonesians from the 1910s and 1920s were undoubtedly titillated by the blending of exoticism and eroticism.
Beginning in the fertile period of modernist experimentation that followed on the heels of World War I, photographers such as Brassaï, Man Ray, Hans Bellmer, André Kertész, and Bill Brandt found in the human body a perfect vehicle for both visual play and psycho-sexual exploration. In Distortion #6 (1932) by André Kertész, a woman’s body is stretched and pulled in the reflections of a fun-house mirror – a figure from a Surrealist dream that stands in stark contrast to the images of perfect feminine beauty by earlier photographers.
In mid-20th-century America, photographers more often communicated an intimate connection with their subjects. Following the example of Alfred Stieglitz’s famed portraits of Georgia O’Keeffe, photographers such as Edward Weston, Harry Callahan, and Emmet Gowin made many nude studies of their wives. Callahan’s photograph of his wife and daughter, Eleanor and Barbara, Chicago (1954), for instance, gives the viewer access to a private, tender moment of intimacy.
In the wake of the sexual revolution of the 1960s and the AIDS crisis that began in the 1980s, artists began to think of the body as a politicised terrain and explored issues of identity, sexuality, and gender. Diane Arbus’s Retired man and his wife at home in a nudist camp one morning, N.J. (1963) and A naked man being a woman, N.Y.C. (1968), Larry Clark’s untitled image (1972-1973) from the series Teenage Lust, and Hannah Wilke’s Snatch Shot with Ray Gun (1978) are among the works featured in the concluding section of the exhibition.
Press release from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website
Unknown photographer (French) [Nude with Mirror] c. 1850 Daguerreotype Dimensions: visible: 7 x 5.7cm (2 3/4 x 2 1/4 in.) Metropolitan Museum of Art The Rubel Collection, Purchase, Lila Acheson Wallace Gift, 1997 Public domain
Julien Vallou de Villeneuve (French, 1795-1866) [Reclining Female Nude] c. 1853 Salted paper print from paper negative 11.8 x 16.0cm (4 5/8 x 6 5/16 in.) Metropolitan Museum of Art Purchase, Lila Acheson Wallace Gift, 1993 Public domain
A student of the painter Jean François Millet and a lithographer of scenes of daily life, costume, and erotica in the 1820s and 1830s, Vallou reportedly took up photography in the early 1840s, but his early photographs have not been identified. Perhaps they depicted naked women, a subject for which it was improper to acknowledge authorship.
Between 1851 and 1855, however, Vallou made a series of photographs of female nudes that he marketed (and legally registered) as models for artists. Vallou’s nudes have long been associated with those of Gustave Courbet, who is known to have used photographs in his painting process. Although no absolute one-to-one correspondence can be pointed to, the heavy soporific quality of Vallou’s models is very close to Courbet’s concept of the nude, and the reclining figure displayed here is strikingly similar in pose to the painter’s Woman with a Parrot (1866), on view in the galleries for nineteenth-century painting.
Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website
Gustave Le Gray (French, 1820-1884) Nu féminin allongé sur un canapé Récamier (Female nude lying on a Recamier sofa) c. 1856 Albumen silver print from glass negative 21.7 x 32.9cm (8 9/16 x 12 15/16 in.) Metropolitan Museum of Art Gilman Collection, Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 2005 Public domain
The central figure in French photography of the 1850s, Le Gray was a master of many genres including landscape and seascape, architectural photography, and portraiture. Only four nude studies by Le Gray are known, however, each in a single example. In this striking image, the photographer departed from the usual academic treatment of the nude, such as he might have learned from his years in the painting studio of Paul Delaroche, in favor of a more psychologically charged spirit. The daybed’s velvet upholstery, the tassels on the pillow, and the heavy curtain fabric have a reassuring and familiar presence, but the serpentine locks of hair evoke Medusa and hint at strangulation, while the legs and feet cross and tense in the manner of a crucifixion. Withdrawn in sleep – or is it death? – the beautiful young woman reminds one of a drowning victim, an Ophelia freshly recovered from the Seine, a theme favoured by the painters and poets of Paris.
Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website
Unknown photographer (French) [Standing Female Nude] c. 1856 Salted paper print from collodion glass negative 43.4 x 28.3cm (17 1/16 x 11 1/8 in.) Metropolitan Museum of Art Purchase, Louis V. Bell, Harris Brisbane Dick, Fletcher, and Rogers Funds and Joseph Pulitzer Bequest; Edwynn Houk and Hans P. Kraus Jr., Alfred Stieglitz Society, Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, Anonymous, Adam R. Rose and Peter R. McQuillan, Joseph M. Cohen, Susan and Thomas Dunn, Kurtz Family Foundation, W. Bruce and Delaney H. Lundberg, Christian Keesee Charitable Trust, and Robert A. Taub Gifts; and Funds from various donors, 2012 Public domain
The original impulse behind these boldly ambitious figure studies may have been to aid a painter or sculptor, but they are nonetheless without parallel in the early history of photography. Enlarged to the size of drawn académies – drawings of the live model that were a standard part of art instruction in France – their scale alone sets them apart from the more modest productions of Vallou de Villeneuve, Durieu, and other artists of the 1850s. More unusually, the images are interrupted by a surface pattern that gives the impression that the photographs are printed on finely pleated silk rather than paper – likely the result of a technical error. Instead of wiping clean his glass-plate negatives and starting over as virtually all other photographers would have done, this artist recognised that the pattern created a veil that, like time or memory, removed the images from their merely utilitarian purpose and elevated them from the mundane to the realm of art.
Just as the eye and mind may be pleasantly torn between bravura brushwork and the ostensible subject of a painting, there is a tension here between the beauty of the subject – the elegant female draped in gossamer; the strict profile and geometric setting of the male – and the visible traces of their creation, such as the flowing surface pattern and the strong vignetting of the female, which suggests a view spied through a peephole.
Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website
Unknown photographer (French) [Standing Male Nude] c. 1856 Salted paper print from collodion glass negative 43.4 x 28.4cm (17 1/16 x 11 3/16 in.) Metropolitan Museum of Art Purchase, Louis V. Bell, Harris Brisbane Dick, Fletcher, and Rogers Funds and Joseph Pulitzer Bequest; Edwynn Houk and Hans P. Kraus Jr., Alfred Stieglitz Society, Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, Anonymous, Adam R. Rose and Peter R. McQuillan, Joseph M. Cohen, Susan and Thomas Dunn, Kurtz Family Foundation, W. Bruce and Delaney H. Lundberg, Christian Keesee Charitable Trust, and Robert A. Taub Gifts; and funds from various donors, 2012 Public domain
Oscar Gustav Rejlander (British born Sweden, 1813-1875) Ariadne 1857 Albumen silver print from glass negative Mount: 16 1/16 in. x 13 1/16 in. (40.8 x 33.2cm) Image: 8 1/4 x 6 1/2 in. (21 x 16.5cm); oval Metropolitan Museum of Art Gilman Collection, Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 2005 Public domain
Working in a place – Victorian England – where any photographic nude was considered offensive because the process implied not only the “nastiness” of the artist and vendor, but also “the degradation of the person who serves as model on the occasion,” Rejlander sought to ally his work with that of noted painters. This nude study is one of a series based on figures in the work of Raphael, Titian, Correggio, Rubens, Murillo, and Gainsborough; the precedent here is Titian’s Venus and Adonis, and Rejlander’s intention was to show how the painter adhered to or strayed from the ways a real body can twist and turn. Critic A. H. Wall defended the propriety of Rejlander’s Studies from the Nude, saying, “Refined and ennobled by art, real beauty, palpable flesh and blood, speaks of nothing but its own inherent loveliness.”
Such references to painting did not always afford adequate protection, however. Writing of Rejlander’s famous Two Ways of Life, photographer and critic Thomas Sutton wrote, “There is no impropriety in exhibiting such works of art as Etty’s Bathers Surprised by a Swan or the Judgment of Paris but there is impropriety in allowing the public to see photographs of nude prostitutes, in flesh-and-blood truthfulness and minuteness of detail.”
Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website
Unknown photographer (French) [Female Nude with Mask] c. 1870 Albumen silver print from glass negative 26 x 19.1cm (10 1/4 x 7 1/2 in.) Metropolitan Museum of Art Gilman Collection, Gift of The Howard Gilman Foundation, 2005 Public domain
Even as she seems to part her tresses to expose her naked body, the model here masks her face in an effort to conceal her identity. While drawing, painting, and sculpture of the human figure commonly involve elements of transformation, idealisation, or the combination of features from various models, photography usually presents a recognisable image of its subject. It was not uncommon, therefore, for models who routinely posed nude for artists in other media to hide their faces when standing naked before the camera. For the viewer – not always an artist looking for help in figure drawing – the mask added an element of erotic frisson.
Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website
Louis Igout (French, 1837-1881)(Photographer) A. Calavas (French)(Editor) Plate from Album d’Études – Poses c. 1880 Albumen silver prints from glass negatives Metropolitan Museum of Art Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 1993 Public domain
This album is an excellent example of the type of photography produced in the nineteenth century as an aid to artists in the study of contour, modelling, and proportion, and as a vocabulary of expression, gesture, and pose sanctioned by the art of antiquity and the Old Masters. Groupings representing Cain and Abel, the Drunken Silenus, Hercules and Antaeus, the Dying Gaul, the Cnidian Aphrodite, and others are recognisable among the photographs. Single prints showing sixteen small images, such as the page shown here, served as a type of stock catalogue, allowing clients to survey a broad range of possible poses and order larger prints of those which best served their needs.
Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website
Louis Igout (French, 1837-1881)(Photographer) A. Calavas (French)(Editor) Plate from Album d’Études – Poses (details) c. 1880 Albumen silver prints from glass negatives Metropolitan Museum of Art Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 1993 Public domain
Thomas Eakins (American, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 1844–1916 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) [Thomas Eakins and John Laurie Wallace on a Beach] c. 1883 Platinum print 25.5 x 20.4cm (10 1/16 x 8 1/16 in.), irregular Metropolitan Museum of Art David Hunter McAlpin Fund, 1943 Public domain
The great American painter and photographer Thomas Eakins was devoted to the scientific study of the human form and committed to its truthful representation. While he and his students at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts were surrounded by casts of classical sculpture, Eakins declared that he did not like “a long study of casts. … At best they are only imitations, and an imitation of imitations cannot have so much life as an imitation of life itself.” Photography provided an obvious solution.
This photograph, in which Eakins and a student affected the elegant contrapposto stances of classical sculpture, was probably taken during an excursion with students to Manasquan Inlet at Point Pleasant, New Jersey, during the summer of 1883. Valuing his photographs not only as studies for paintings but also for their own sake, Eakins carefully printed the best images on platinum paper. In this case, he went to the additional trouble of enlarging the original, horizontally formatted image and cropping it vertically to better contain the perfectly balanced figures.
Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website
Albert Londe (French, 1858-1917) Paul Marie Louis Pierre Richer (French, 1849-1933) [Male Musculature Study] c. 1890 Albumen silver print Image: 14.9 x 9.6cm (5 7/8 x 3 3/4 in.) Mount: 14.9 x 9.9cm (5 7/8 x 3 7/8 in.) Metropolitan Museum of Art Gift of Charles Isaacs and Carol Nigro, 2012
Author of a treatise on the importance of the camera in medical practice, Albert Londe declared, “the photographic plate is the scientist’s true retina.” In collaboration with a laboratory director and professor of anatomy at the École des Beaux-Arts, Londe found that photographs intended for physiological analysis could also serve artistic applications. Their careful portraits of athletes – whether taken with stop-action cameras specially designed by Londe or in static poses such as the example here – were used in scientific texts on musculature and became templates for illustrations to aid artists in rendering ideally proportioned figures.
Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website
Guglielmo Plüshow (Italian born Germany, 1852–1930) [Young Male Nude Seated on Leopard Skin] 1890s-1900s Albumen silver print from glass negative 22.2 x 16.2cm (8 3/4 x 6 3/8 in.) Metropolitan Museum of Art Museum Accession Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication
Censors have long struggled to keep pace with evolving technology and expanding distribution networks of photographic erotica. In nineteenth-century France, government officials regularly seized thousands of photographs similar to the daguerreotype displayed here, which were deemed lewd.
Male nudity has frequently been subject to stricter control than pornography featuring women. The Arcadian photographs of Plüshow and his cousin and student Wilhelm von Gloeden were avidly collected in the late nineteenth century, but in the 1930s many of their prints and negatives, considered deviant by the Italian Fascist government, were destroyed. For much of the twentieth century, it was illegal in the United States to mail photographs that might be judged prurient, forcing photographers to mask genitalia and pubic hair with strategic props or with overpainting that could be easily removed by purchasers. Sale of erotic male physique magazines and bodybuilder pin-ups, ostensibly circulated to promote fitness, was legalised in a 1962 Supreme Court ruling, which concluded that “portrayals of the male nude cannot fairly be regarded as more objectionable than many portrayals of the female nude that society tolerates.”
Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website
Attributed to Alphonse Bertillon (French, 1853–1914) Assasination of C. Lecomte 711 Rue des Martyrs 1901-1908 From Album of Paris Crime Scenes Gelatin silver print Overall: 24.3 x 31cm (9 9/16 x 12 3/16in.) Page: 23 x 29cm (9 1/16 x 11 7/16 in.) Metropolitan Museum of Art Gilman Collection, Purchase, The Howard Gilman Foundation Gift, 2001 Public domain
Alphonse Bertillon, the chief of criminal identification for the Paris police department, developed the mug shot format and other photographic procedures used by police to register criminals. Although the images in this extraordinary album of forensic photographs were made by or under the direction of Bertillon, it was probably assembled by a private investigator or secretary who worked at the Paris prefecture. Photographs of the pale bodies of murder victims are assembled with views of the rooms where the murders took place, close-ups of objects that served as clues, and mug shots of criminals and suspects. Made as part of an archive rather than as art, these postmortem portraits, recorded in the deadpan style of a police report, nonetheless retain an unsettling potency.
Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website
Attributed to Alphonse Bertillon (French, 1853–1914) Untitled 1901-1908 From Album of Paris Crime Scenes Gelatin silver print Overall: 24.3 x 31cm (9 9/16 x 12 3/16in.) Page: 23 x 29cm (9 1/16 x 11 7/16 in.) Metropolitan Museum of Art Gilman Collection, Purchase, The Howard Gilman Foundation Gift, 2001 Public domain
Attributed to Alphonse Bertillon (French, 1853–1914) Untitled 1901-1908 From Album of Paris Crime Scenes Gelatin silver print Overall: 24.3 x 31cm (9 9/16 x 12 3/16in.) Page: 23 x 29cm (9 1/16 x 11 7/16 in.) Metropolitan Museum of Art Gilman Collection, Purchase, The Howard Gilman Foundation Gift, 2001 Public domain
Lady Ottoline Violet Anne Cavendish-Bentinck Morrell (British, 1873-1938) [Cavorting by the Pool at Garsington] c. 1916 Gelatin silver print 8.8 x 6.3cm (3 7/16 x 2 7/16 in.) Metropolitan Museum of Art Gilman Collection, Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 2005 Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication
Rebelling against the narrow values of upper-class Edwardian society, Lady Ottoline Morrell, an eccentric hostess to Bloomsbury, surrounded herself in London and on her estate at Garsington with a large circle of friends including Bertrand Russell, W. B. Yeats, D. H. Lawrence, T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Aldous Huxley, and E. M. Forster. These images of an improvised dance show Lady Ottoline’s ten-year-old daughter, Julian, and her slightly older companions embroiled in a naked whirl, pagan in its exuberance, that reflects the emancipated attitudes of the photographer’s circle.
Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website
Lady Ottoline Violet Anne Cavendish-Bentinck Morrell (British, 1873-1938) [Cavorting by the Pool at Garsington] c. 1916 Gelatin silver print 8.8 x 6.2cm (3 7/16 x 2 7/16 in.) Metropolitan Museum of Art Gilman Collection, Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 2005 Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication
In his early attempts to merge the realism of photography with the expressive effect of abstract art, Weston honed in on close-up details of his subjects. That the faces of his models were often cropped or averted served practical as well as aesthetic purposes, enabling the photographs to be read as figure studies rather than as individual portraits while also protecting the privacy of the friends and lovers who served as models.
One of the most radically abstract of Brassaï’s nudes, this image was published in 1933 in the inaugural issue of the avant-garde magazine Minotaure. With the figure’s head and legs cut off by the picture’s edges, the twisting, truncated torso seems to float in space like an apparition – an ambiguous, organic form with an uncanny resemblance to a phallus. This transformation of the female figure into a fetish object is a hallmark of Surrealism that reflects the important influence of Freud’s psychoanalytic theory on European art of the early twentieth century.
Brassaï made his name as a chronicler of the night, with images that ranged from reflections on wet cobblestones to the denizens of bars and brothels. Like so many of his photographs, Introductions at Suzy’s was not an impromptu scene caught by an undetected observer but rather a carefully constructed tableau meant to highlight the dynamic between buttoned-up bourgeois clients and Suzy’s bevy of prostitutes, naked but for their bracelets and high heels. The “client” was actually Brassaï’s friend and bodyguard; the “girls,” however, were not stand-ins.
A keen observer of Parisian nightlife in the 1930s, Brassaï was drawn to the visual conundrums and optical innuendos of everyday life. The play of reflections and absences in this image, made in a Paris brothel, suggests the materialization of subconscious impulses. Evoking Freud’s definition of desire as the sensation arising from a perceived absence of remembered pleasure, this blatantly sexual scene suggests but withholds a specific narrative.
Although Kertesz had long been interested in mirrors, reflections, and the idea of distorting the human figure, he did not seriously investigate their photographic possibilities until 1933, when the risqué French magazine Le Sourire commissioned him to make a series of figure studies. Using a funhouse mirror from a Parisian amusement park, Kertesz, who had never photographed nudes before, spent four weeks making about two hundred negatives.
Kertész accentuated the narrow ribcage and long waist of the ideal contemporary woman by photographing his model in a carnival mirror. If the top half of this beautiful nude resembles those Modigliani painted, the swell of the haunch recalls Mannerist nudes and their nineteenth-century revivals, especially Ingres’ grande odalisque.
Man Ray’s photograph of an arm is cropped so abstractly that it seems to metamorphose into other body parts – a knee, a calf, a thigh – or into some utterly unidentifiable yet heroic form. This image appeared on the cover of Formes Nues (1935), which also included the work of Brassaï, László Moholy-Nagy, Franz Roh, and George Platt Lynes, among others.
In the magazine’s introduction, Man Ray wrote, “were it not for the fact that photography permits me to seize and to possess the human body and face in more than a temporary manner, I should quickly have tired of this medium.”
Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website
Paul Outerbridge Jr. (American, New York 1896 – 1959 Laguna Beach, California) Nude with Mask and Hat c. 1936 Carbro print 43.3 x 30.0cm (17 1/16 x 11 13/16 in.) Metropolitan Museum of Art Warner Communications Inc. Purchase Fund, 1977
Outerbridge was a successful commercial photographer, but although he found such work stimulating, he also made photographs as a means of personal expression throughout his career. Photographing nude models in colour in the 1930s was challenging – not only in the difficulty of correctly capturing skin tones using complicated new processes, but also because finding a venue to publish or exhibit the work was unlikely. Although he began by posing his models in the manner of painted masterpieces, Outerbridge’s compositions became increasingly provocative in the late 1930s. The sexualised charge and commercial palette of works such as this were not in keeping with attitudes of the period and were not shown during the artist’s lifetime.
In his nightmarish tableaux of mutilated and reassembled dolls posed in domestic interiors, Bellmer grappled with the base condition of the human body and with the bodily fragment as fetish object. Mannequins and dolls – simultaneously familiar and strange – supplied the material for his primal expressions of terror and awe, which often evoked the innocent violence and latent sexuality of childhood games. Whether they are read as Freudian emblems of the uncanny or as ominous harbingers of Nazi atrocities, Bellmer’s images exemplify the Surrealist view of the female body as the source of simultaneous fascination and revulsion.
Charis Wilson, the model for this series, admitted to being shocked upon seeing Weston’s nudes for the first time, as she had previously known only the romantically retouched photographs of depilated bodies then popular. In studying Weston’s work she found, “I couldn’t get past the simple amazement at how real they were. Then I began to see the rhythmic patterns, the intensely perceived sculptural forms, the subtle modulations of tone, of which these small, perfect images were composed. And I began to appreciate the originality of the viewpoint that had selected just these transitory moments and made them fast against the current of time.”
By 1950, Penn was a well-known Vogue portrait and fashion photographer but had already made, privately, a major series of nudes – a personal but lesser-known body of work. During the week, he photographed models wearing fashionable clothes for the magazine, but weekends and evenings he made studies of female nudes. The women were full-bodied and the photographs unorthodox, recalling the form and spirit of archaic fertility idols.
Muses throughout his career, Callahan’s wife and daughter played, posed, and aged before his lens. With their attention to the physicality of light, however, Callahan’s photographs transcend mere family portraiture by calling attention to the simple beauty of life’s fleeting moments. “He just liked to take the pictures of me,” Eleanor recalled in her nineties. “In every pose. Rain or shine. And whatever I was doing. If I was doing the dishes or if I was half asleep. And he knew that I never, never said no. I was always there for him. Because I knew that Harry would only do the right thing.”
Eleanor Callahan died in February 2012 at the age of ninety-five.
Arbus’s interest in the tension between revelation and concealment comes into starkest focus in the portraits she made at Sunshine Park, a family nudist camp in New Jersey. While nudism might be considered the ultimate form of exposure, it often required a different kind of cover-up. As the artist remarked in an unpublished article written for Esquire magazine in 1966: “For many of these people, their presence here is the darkest secret of their lives, unsuspected by relatives, friends, and employers in the outside world, the disclosure of which might bring disgrace.”
Sexuality and mortality – which many would say are central preoccupations of humankind – are key to Morrisroe’s biography and art. The son of a drug-addicted mother, a teenage hustler, and a precocious punk queer, Morrisroe carried a bullet (shot by a disgruntled john) in his chest from the age of eighteen and consequently walked with a limp that added one more element to his outsider self-image. Sex and death were persistent themes in his work, with pronounced poignancy after his 1986 AIDS diagnosis. In this work, Morrisroe has taken a page from a gay S&M magazine, cut out the shapes of two naked men, and used the sheet as a negative to print a unique image in which the figures – literally absent – appear as dark silhouettes against a netherworld of sexual activity.
Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website
The Metropolitan Museum of Art 1000 Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street New York, New York 10028-0198 Phone: 212-535-7710
If you want a good read about the life and times of Weegee then Mark Svetov’s ‘Life and Death (Mostly Death) in the Streets’ (2010) on American Suburb X website is the way to go. I can’t really add much to this excellent piece of writing in terms of the history of the man and the social milieu in which he surrounded himself. What I can comment on are my personal feelings about his photographs.
Weegee’s photographs are no masterpieces of fine art printing, they are rough and direct, and I love them all the more for this quality. Their roughness – all sellotaped over, edges cut at odd angles, drawn and written on – only adds to their power and immediacy. If you can call photographs of dead bodies in the street vibrant and alive, then these photographs are just that. Svetov sees Weegee as the quintessential noir photographer; I see him not so much as that but as a sensitive, formalist photographer, a wonderful collagist and an artist who is a precursor to the pop art of the mid-late 1950s (think Warhol’s screen prints of the electric chair, or his mangled car crash series).
In the installation photographs of the exhibition Weegee: Murder Is My Business at the Photo League, New York (1941, see below) you get a sense of this master of assemblage, the animator and promoter (another pop trait!) at work. The large prints are casually pinned to the back board, surrounded by drawings of guns with smoke emanating from their barrels, cause of death certificates, photographs of Weegee himself “On the Spot”, Weegee’s press pass, newspaper clippings about the man and his work (including a photograph of his tiny bedroom) where Weegee “introduces” himself to his audience. The photographs flow around the room, from Faces, to Murder and Society. People are drawn into the aura of these photographs, you can see them leaning forward to take in every detail. They peer intently at the them trying to decipher every nuance of the narrative being told (the frequent hats lying about, the discarded pistols, the hand emerging from underneath the draped sheet).
As Svetov notes, Weegee’s news pictures were never haphazard snapshots, for they always seem perfectly arranged. Underneath the spontaneity and the humanism imparted by the artist is that fact that Weegee is a master of formalism. He knows exactly how to structure the picture plane as a classical pianist knows how to bring alive the themes of a Mozart sonata.
Usually arriving before any other photographer because he lived opposite the police station and had a police radio in his car, Weegee “cased the joint” as I would put it, prowling quickly around the scene to get the best angle, the best shot before other photographers arrived or the scene was closed off by police. This instinctive framing only comes through having a good eye and through training that eye – so that what to shoot and how to crop the scene “in camera” becomes second nature.
Evidence of the formal structure implicit in Weegee’s photographs can be seen in my analysis of two photographs Line-Up for Night Court (c. 1941, below) and Police officer and assistant removing body of Reception Hospital ambulance driver Morris Linker from East River, New York (August 24, 1943, below). In the first image the epicentre (or the enigma if you like) of the photograph is the dance of hands at the lower centre of the image, formed by two triangles and emphasised by two radial diagonals. The top points of the upper triangle are anchored by the men and women at both windows (see detail photographs), the patriarchal men in suit and tie at one window – a detective, a chief of police? – separated from the woman at another. Weegee’s splits this triangle with his frieze of faces showing the depths of human despair, despondency and ambivalence.
The second image has a much more complicated structure. In the first analysis we observe the different horizontal, vertical and diagonal planes as they march up the photograph. The “heart” of this image, where the yellow lines cross, is actually a point of absence. Look at the real photograph: it is the heart shaped empty space between the man’s outstretched hands that form the emotional centre of the image. In the second analysis we can simplify this down into a zigzagging line that passes directly through this point. To see this, to assess this and visualise the flowing movement in a split second is in any visual language outstanding. Weegee wasn’t averse to manipulating his images to achieve the desired result. The photograph Hold up man killed (November 24, 1941, below) shows his notations over the top of the image, the crop he envisaged and the words “Take out hat” and “Make sock black” so that he achieved the desired dynamic within the photograph.
Weegee was a master of flash and the use of foreshortening – to create atmosphere in the first instance and used as a visual entre into the photographs in the second. Sometimes he combines both. The policeman at left in Line-Up for Night Court is both out of focus and the highlights (his face) are blown out by the flash. Does this matter: not one iota, for the policeman “grounds” the whole left hand side of the image. Again, in Murder (c. 1940, below) the backside of the policeman is blown out by the flash but this only leads the eye of the viewer to the foreshortened body of the murder victim nestled in the crook of his knee and then onto the starkly lit pram, beyond.
Finally, in Hold up man killed (November 24, 1941, below) the feet of the hold up man actually lead the viewer into the space between the two policeman’s shoes were the Surgeon from Gouverneur Hospital crouches over the body. Weegee also loved to weave detail into his images, so that even though the story is about human content, as Svetov observes, it is just as much about human materiality as well: notice the reflection of people in the car bonnet in At an East Side Murder (1943, below) at lower left and then the procession of worn shoes and the bagginess of the trousers – I didn’t realised they wore their trousers so baggy in the 1940s!
Svetlov sees Weegee’s photographs as containing an almost sacred squalor, a brash but anguished cry in an endless nightscape with nothing judgemental or distanced about them. I concur with the last part for Weegee was a man of the people whom he photographed. On the other points I am less sure: to me they are about light not darkness.
They are about the aftermath of atrocity, of living, human beings dealing with death and its consequences. I see nothing sacred about this squalor. The photographs are about shining a light into darkness, the darkness that every human being must confront: the fact that we all have to die, somewhere, sometime, in the end.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the International Center of Photography for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“People are so wonderful that a photographer has only to wait for that breathless moment to capture what he wants on film… and when that split second of time is gone, it’s dead and can never be brought back.”
“For the pictures… I was on the scene; sometimes drawn there by some power I can’t explain, and I caught the New Yorkers with their masks off… not afraid to Laugh, Cry, or Make Love. What I felt I photographed, laughing and crying with them.”
Arthur Fellig (aka Weegee, 1899-1968)
“Weegee’s work is connected by an umbilical cord to darkness; his images emerged from Gotham City’s nocturnal penumbra, spectrally streaked by streetlights, lit brightly only where there was a human focus, a tabloid John Alton at work.
Weegee called it his “Rembrandt light” as he caught the human protagonists in the white glare of his photo flash, the scene otherwise enveloped in darkness. Weegee’s news pictures were never haphazard snapshots, albeit they were taken by a man who had happenstance and chance as his helpmates; he and his camera, with its flash, seem to have a fateful meeting with his human subjects; pictures seem perfectly arranged, and what we focus on is their human content. Weegee is the quintessential noir photographer.”
Mark Svetov. “Life and Death (Mostly Death) in the Streets (2010)” on American Suburb X website May 2012 [Online] Cited 28/08/2012
Text and captions from the original Murder Is My Business exhibition:
~ “Introducing Weegee” ~ “Due to an increase in MURDERS The Photo League presents 2nd Edition of “MURDER IS MY BUSNESS” by Weegee” ~ “Weegee Lives For His Work And Thinks Before Shooting” (newspaper headline on the “Weegee” board at left) ~ “This space reserved for the latest muders” ~ “MURDER Manhattan bloodbath” ~ “Arthur Fellig Photographer / Do not disturbe / Except in case of Fire, Murder or Snow Storm” (caption underneath photograph) ~ “Why did you kill your Sweetie”? (caption underneath photograph) ~ “HUMAN BODY MINUS HEAD FOUND ON STREET” (caption underneath photograph) ~ “Cop & human head in package” (caption underneath photograph) ~ “Killed her husband after drinking brawl” (caption underneath photograph) ~ “Just a cheap murder” (caption underneath photograph) ~ “My man” (caption underneath photograph) ~ “Who done that” (caption underneath photograph)
“Weegee’s captions provided a visceral vernacular for the almost-sacred squalor of his imagery (see “Weegee’s Words” for a sampling). Taken together, they packed more than a mere punch; they were a brash but anguished cry in an endless nightscape. More than mere documents of a violent era, they also exuded a humanity that could only come from the photographer himself. There was nothing judgmental or distanced in Weegee’s work; he was the antithesis of the “slickers” who worked for glossy magazines. He remained a man essentially from the same New York working-class as the people he chose to photograph.”
Mark Svetov. “Life and Death (Mostly Death) in the Streets (2010)” on American Suburb X website May 2012 [Online] Cited 28/08/2012
Gangland murders, gruesome car crashes, and perilous tenement fires were for the photographer Weegee (1899-1968) the staples of his flashlit black-and-white work as a freelance photojournalist in the mid-1930s. Such graphically dramatic and sometimes sensationalistic photographs of New York crimes and news events set the standard for what has since become known as tabloid journalism. In fact, for one intense decade, between 1935 and 1946, Weegee was perhaps the most relentlessly inventive figure in American photography. A surprising new exhibition at the International Center of Photography (1133 Avenue of the Americas at 43rd Street), titled Weegee: Murder Is My Business and organised by ICP Chief Curator Brian Wallis, will present some rare examples of Weegee’s most famous and iconic images, and will consider his early work in the context of its original presentation in historical newspapers and exhibitions, as well as Weegee’s own books and films.
Taking its title from Weegee’s self-curated exhibition at the Photo League in 1941, Murder Is My Business looks at the urban violence and mayhem that was the focus of his early work. As a freelance photographer at a time when New York City had at least eight daily newspapers and when wire services were just beginning to handle photos, Weegee was challenged to capture unique images of newsworthy events and distribute them quickly. He worked almost exclusively at night, setting out from his small apartment across from police headquarters when news of a new crime came chattering across his police-band radio receiver. Often arriving before the police themselves, Weegee carefully cased each scene to discover the best angle. Murders, he claimed, were the easiest to photograph because the subjects never moved or got temperamental.
Weegee’s rising career as a news photographer in the 1930s coincided with the heyday of Murder Inc., the Jewish gang from Brownsville who served as paid hitmen for The Syndicate, a confederation of mostly Italian crime bosses in New York. As a wave of governmental and legal crackdowns swept the city between 1935 and 1941, the rate of organised murders of small-time wiseguys and potential stool pigeons increased dramatically. Weegee often worked closely with the police but also befriended high-profile criminals like Bugsy Siegel, Lucky Luciano, and Legs Diamond. Weegee called himself the “official photographer for Murder Inc.” and claimed to have covered 5,000 murders, a count that is perhaps only slightly exaggerated. In asserting the true nature of his business, Weegee proudly displayed his check stub from LIFE magazine that paid him $35 for two murders, slightly more, he said, for the one that used more bullets.
Selling his photographs to a variety of New York newspapers in the 1930s, and later working as a stringer for the short-lived daily newspaper PM (1940-1948), Weegee established a highly subjective approach to both photographs and texts that was distinctly different from that promoted in most dailies and picture magazines. Utilising other distribution venues, Weegee also wrote extensively (including his autobiographical Naked City, published in 1945) and organised his own exhibitions at the Photo League, the influential photographic organisation that promoted politically committed pictures, particularly of the working classes. In 1941, Weegee installed two back-to-back exhibitions in the League’s headquarters. This visibility helped promote Weegee’s growing reputation as a news photographer, and he began stamping his prints “Weegee the Famous.” The general acceptance of his punchy photographic style, which did not shy away from lower-class subjects and humanistic narratives, led to the acquisition of his work by the Museum of Modern Art and inclusion in two group shows there, in 1943 and 1945.
“Weegee has often been dismissed as an aberration or as a naive photographer, but he was in fact one of the most original and enterprising photojournalists of the 1930s and ’40s. His best photographs combine wit, daring, and surprisingly original points of view, particularly when considered in light of contemporaneous press photos and documentary photography. He favoured unabashedly low-culture or tabloid subjects and approaches, but his Depression-era New York photographs need to be considered seriously alongside other key documentarians of the thirties, such as Dorothea Lange, Robert Capa, Walker Evans, and Berenice Abbott,” said Wallis.
The exhibition will feature over 100 original photographs, drawn primarily from the comprehensive Weegee Archive of over 20,000 prints at ICP, as well as period newspapers, magazines, and films. It will also include partial reconstructions of Weegee’s studio and his Photo League exhibition. The four galleries will each feature a touch-screen monitor allowing visitors to explore further details regarding the images and artefacts in that room.
Curators: Keith F. Davis, Senior Curator of Photography and Jane L. Aspinwall, Assistant Curator of Photography at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art
Timothy H. O’Sullivan (American born Ireland, 1840-1882) Sand Dunes, Carson Desert, Nevada 1867 Albumen print Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art Gift of Hallmark Cards, Inc.
Of all the photographers who accompanied the Western surveys of this era, O’Sullivan remains the most admired, studied and debated. This is a result of the distinctly individual quality of his seeing – his particular union of fact and point of view; his understanding of what it meant to make a documentary photograph. O’Sullivan’s work remains inspiring and instructive: the clues it holds – to the nature of photography, 19th-century visual culture and the construction of photographic history – challenge and enlarge each new generation of viewers.
~ Press release
About the only decent sized Timothy O’Sullivan photographs online are here on Art Blart – in this posting and one I did earlier of Framing the West: The Survey Photographs of Timothy H. O’Sullivan at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Although some of the photographs from the earlier posting are reproduced again here there are also four new ones, and for that we should be thankful for there are so few quality images to look at on the web.
Following my last posting where I ruminated on the nature of photography, we note that O’Sullivan’s understanding of what it meant to make a documentary photograph was embodied in his distinctly individual way of seeing. As the above quotation observes, this was “his particular union of fact and point of view.” With this in mind, the photograph I would like you to focus on in this posting is Cave-in, Gould & Curry Mine, Virginia City, Nevada (1868, below) – a prescient abstract expressionist photograph almost eighty years before their advent. The fallen beams remind me of huge ice crystals in a rock cave and then you notice the pick axe at top left and leg and booted foot at right. Hang on a minute, there is another foot tucked underneath!
To have the temerity to photograph this scene in this way and this point in time in the history of photography is outstanding. Imagine being O’Sullivan coming upon this vista, framing the cave-in with beams at left and right of the image plane and detritus at the bottom. He could have left it at that, but no, he hints at the presence of a man, out of frame, doing what exactly we don’t know. It is this plaisir and jouissance that give this photograph its pleasure and pain.
The knowledge that we know this scene, as the subject knows himself or herself, gives the photograph its pleasure; the fact that we don’t know what is beyond the edge of the frame, who the man is and what he is doing, fractures these structures and challenges the readers position as subject.
As the viewer transgresses the act of pleasurable looking, of enjoying the formal characteristics and textures of the photograph, doubt sets in – what is the man doing, why is he there? As we transgress the pleasure principle the painful principle of what Lacan calls jouissance kicks in. The viewer suffers a crisis of doubt and, conversely, the pattern of the fallen beams of wood and the axe now create a more threatening, claustrophobic atmosphere.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Timothy H. O’Sullivan (American born Ireland, 1840-1882) Pyramid and Domes, Pyramid Lake, Nevada 1867 Albumen print Overall: 7 3/4 x 10 5/8 inches (19.69 x 26.99cm) Mat (exhibition): 20 x 24 inches (50.8 x 60.96cm) Framed: 23 3/8 x 27 1/2 x 1 5/8 inches (59.37 x 69.85 x 4.13cm) Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art Gift of Hallmark Cards, Inc.
Timothy H. O’Sullivan (American born Ireland, 1840-1882) Tufa formation, Anaho Island, Pyramid Lake, Nevada 1867 Albumen print Overall: 7 3/4 x 10 5/8 inches (19.69 x 26.99cm) Mat (exhibition): 20 x 24 inches (50.8 x 60.96cm) Framed: 23 3/8 x 27 1/2 x 1 5/8 inches (59.37 x 69.85 x 4.13cm) Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art Gift of Hallmark Cards, Inc.
Timothy H. O’Sullivan (American born Ireland, 1840-1882) Geyser Mouth in Ruby Valley, Nevada 1868 Albumen print 7 7/8 x 10 5/8 inches (20 x 26.99cm) Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art Gift of Hallmark Cards, Inc..
Timothy H. O’Sullivan (American born Ireland, 1840-1882) Obsidian hill, Mono Lake, California 1868 Albumen print Overall: 7 3/4 x 10 5/8 inches (19.69 x 26.99cm) Mat (exhibition): 20 x 24 inches (50.8 x 60.96cm) Framed: 23 3/8 x 27 1/2 x 1 5/8 inches (59.37 x 69.85 x 4.13cm) Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art Gift of Hallmark Cards, Inc.
Timothy H. O’Sullivan (American born Ireland, 1840-1882) Mono Lake, California 1868 Albumen print Overall: 7 3/4 x 10 5/8 inches (19.69 x 26.99cm) Mat (exhibition): 20 x 24 inches (50.8 x 60.96cm) Framed: 23 3/8 x 27 1/2 x 1 5/8 inches (59.37 x 69.85 x 4.13cm) Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art Gift of Hallmark Cards, Inc.
Timothy H. O’Sullivan (American born Ireland, 1840-1882) Shoshone Falls, Idaho 1868 Albumen print Overall: 7 3/4 x 10 5/8 inches (19.69 x 26.99cm) Mat (exhibition): 20 x 24 inches (50.8 x 60.96cm) Framed: 23 3/8 x 27 1/2 x 1 5/8 inches (59.37 x 69.85 x 4.13cm) Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art Gift of Hallmark Cards, Inc.
Timothy O’Sullivan (American, 1842-1882) Cañon de Chelle, Walls of the Grand Canon about 1200 feet in height 1873 Albumen print Smithsonian American Art Museum Museum purchase, from the Charles Isaacs Collection made possible in part, by the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen Endowment
The photographs made by Timothy H. O’Sullivan as part of the United States Geological Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel, or King Survey, comprise an iconic and richly varied body of work. The first of the great post-Civil War Western expeditions, the King Survey was organised under the authority of the U.S. Army Topographical Engineers. Between 1867 and 1872, Clarence King, the geologist in charge, and his party studied a vast swath of terrain, approximately 100 by 800 miles, encompassing the path of the soon-to-be-completed transcontinental railroad, from the border of California eastward to Cheyenne, Wyoming.
The survey’s official photographer, Timothy H. O’Sullivan, was talented, resourceful and imaginative. In four seasons with King’s group – 1867, 1869 and 1872 – he created a diverse body of photographs: geological studies, landscapes, views of miners and mining operations, records of cities and settlements, studies of the survey itself and self-reflexive meditations on his own presence in the West.
Of all the photographers who accompanied the Western surveys of this era, O’Sullivan remains the most admired, studied and debated. This is a result of the distinctly individual quality of his seeing – his particular union of fact and point of view; his understanding of what it meant to make a documentary photograph. O’Sullivan’s work remains inspiring and instructive: the clues it holds – to the nature of photography, 19th-century visual culture and the construction of photographic history – challenge and enlarge each new generation of viewers.
The King Survey of the Great Basin, from 1867 to 1872, was the model for the other “great surveys” of the 19th-century American West. Rare and iconic works by Timothy H. O’Sullivan, the King Survey’s official photographer, will be featured in an exhibition at The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art from April 7 through Sept. 2. Keith F. Davis and Jane L. Aspinwall, respectively senior and assistant curators of photography at the Nelson-Atkins, organised Timothy O’Sullivan: The King Survey Photographs.
“There is good reason that O’Sullivan remains so influential after all these years,” said Davis. “Visually speaking, he was the world’s greatest poker player. He always kept his cards close to his vest. His images are at once boldly straightforward and deeply mysterious, a perfect combination of intuition and calculation. His genius lies, in part, in making such originality appear so effortless.”
There are 60 photographs in the exhibition. Nine were borrowed from the American Geographical Society in Milwaukee, WIS; and the remainder are from the holdings of the Nelson-Atkins. Accompanying the exhibition is a major book, co-authored by Davis and Aspinwall, with contributions by three esteemed scholars: John P. Herron, Francois Brunet, and Mark Klett.
“O’Sullivan continues to influence generations of photographers because of his purely individual melding of fact and point of view,” said Aspinwall. “He was a complicated character, a hearty adventurer, a photographic explorer and innovator, with a bit of the daredevil thrown in the mix.” The book emphasises the context of O’Sullivan’s photographs: his best known images in relation to the complete body of his survey work, the function of the photographs within the survey enterprise, and the scientific and cultural importance of the survey itself. In creating the book, Davis and Aspinwall became engaged in their own kind of “survey,” working from opposite ends of the subject back toward a common centre.
“Jane focused on the evidence of the photographs themselves, tracking down every view and putting them into chronological order,” said Davis. “I began with an overview of the history of western exploration and then attempted to describe the King Survey and O’Sullivan’s career in detail. The meeting point, the crux of the whole project, was O’Sullivan’s remarkable photographs.” Davis became fascinated with O’Sullivan’s work 40 years ago, and his respect for the richness and longevity of his work has increased over the years. “Someone once said that writing a biography usually entails a process of ‘falling out of love’ with one’s subject,” said Davis. “That’s absolutely not true in this case. This exhibition and book have resulted in a newer and deeper admiration for a truly one-of-a-kind photographic achievement. That’s O’Sullivan’s gift to us – and we want to share it. Timothy H. O’Sullivan: The King Survey Photographs gives visitors a new appreciation of the visual history of the 19th-century American West, while presenting some of the museum’s rarest treasures for public view.
Press release and text from the Nelson-Atkins website
Timothy H. O’Sullivan (American born Ireland, 1840-1882) Long Ravine Bridge, CPRR, California 1867 Albumen print Overall: 7 3/4 x 10 5/8 inches (19.69 x 26.99cm) Mat (exhibition): 20 x 24 inches (50.8 x 60.96cm) Framed: 23 3/8 x 27 1/2 x 1 5/8 inches (59.39 x 69.85 x 4.14cm) Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art Gift of Hallmark Cards, Inc.
Timothy H. O’Sullivan (American born Ireland, 1840-1882) Montezuma Silver Works, Oreana, Nevada 1867 Albumen print Overall: 7 3/4 x 10 5/8 inches (19.69 x 26.99cm) Mat (exhibition): 20 x 24 inches (50.8 x 60.96cm) Framed: 23 3/8 x 27 1/2 x 1 5/8 inches (59.37 x 69.85 x 4.13cm) Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art Gift of Hallmark Cards, Inc.
Timothy H. O’Sullivan (American born Ireland, 1840-1882) Sioux Hot Springs, near Humboldt Salt Marsh, Nevada 1867 Albumen print Overall: 7 3/4 x 10 5/8 inches (19.69 x 26.99cm) Mat (exhibition): 20 x 24 inches (50.8 x 60.96cm) Framed: 23 3/8 x 27 1/2 x 1 5/8 inches (59.37 x 69.85 x 4.13cm) Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art Gift of Hallmark Cards, Inc.
Timothy H. O’Sullivan (American born Ireland, 1840-1882) Steamboat Springs, Nevada 1868 Albumen print Overall: 7 3/4 x 10 5/8 inches (19.69 x 26.99cm) Mat (exhibition): 20 x 24 inches (50.8 x 60.96cm) Framed: 23 3/8 x 27 1/2 x 1 5/8 inches (59.37 x 69.85 x 4.13cm) Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art Gift of Hallmark Cards, Inc.
Timothy H. O’Sullivan (American born Ireland, 1840-1882) Quartzites, Summit, East Humboldt Mountains, Nevada 1868 Albumen print Overall: 7 3/4 x 10 5/8 inches (19.69 x 26.99cm) Mat (exhibition): 20 x 24 inches (50.8 x 60.96cm) Framed: 23 3/8 x 27 1/2 x 1 5/8 inches (59.37 x 69.85 x 4.13cm) Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art Gift of Hallmark Cards, Inc.
Timothy H. O’Sullivan (American born Ireland, 1840-1882) Fissure, Steamboat Springs, Nevada 1868 Albumen print Image: 8 3/4 x 11 7/16 inches (22.23 x 29.05cm) Mat (exhibition): 20 x 24 inches (50.8 x 60.96cm) Framed: 23 3/8 x 27 1/2 x 1 5/8 inches (59.37 x 69.85 x 4.13cm) Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art Gift of the Hall Family Foundation
Timothy H. O’Sullivan (American born Ireland, 1840-1882) Longitude Butte, Ruby Valley, Nevada 1868 Albumen print Overall: 7 3/4 x 10 5/8 inches (19.69 x 26.99cm) Mat (exhibition): 20 x 24 inches (50.8 x 60.96cm) Framed: 23 3/8 × 27 1/2 x 1 5/8 inches (59.37 x 69.85 x 4.13cm) Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art Gift of Hallmark Cards, Inc.
Timothy H. O’Sullivan (American born Ireland, 1840-1882) Sugar Loaf Mountain, near Virginia City, Nevada 1868 Albumen print Overall: 7 3/4 x 10 5/8 inches (19.69 x 26.99cm) Mat (exhibition): 20 x 24 inches (50.8 x 60.96cm) Framed: 23 3/8 x 27 1/2 x 1 5/8 inches (59.37 x 69.85 x 4.13cm) Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art Gift of Hallmark Cards, Inc.
Timothy H. O’Sullivan (American born Ireland, 1840-1882) Shaft of Savage Mine, Virginia City, Nevada 1868 Albumen print Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art Gift of Hallmark Cards, Inc.
Timothy H. O’Sullivan (American born Ireland, 1840-1882) Cave-in, Gould & Curry Mine, Virginia City, Nevada 1868 Albumen print Overall: 7 x 7 1/2 inches (17.78 x 19.05cm) Mat (exhibition): 20 x 24 inches (50.8 x 60.96cm) Framed: 23 3/8 x 27 1/2 x 1 5/8 inches (59.37 x 69.85 x 4.13cm) Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art Gift of Hallmark Cards, Inc.
Timothy H. O’Sullivan (American born Ireland, 1840-1882) Clarence King in Uinta Mountains, Utah 1869 Albumen print Overall: 11 1/8 x 8 1/8 inches (28.26 x 20.64cm) Mat (exhibition): 24 x 20 inches (60.96 x 50.8cm) Framed: 27 1/2 x 23 3/8 x 1 5/8 inches (69.85 x 59.37 x 4.13cm) Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art Gift of Hallmark Cards, Inc.
Timothy H. O’Sullivan (American born Ireland, 1840-1882) Cottonwood Lake, Wasatch Mountains, Utah 1869 Albumen print Overall: 7 3/4 x 10 1/2 inches (19.69 x 26.67cm) Mat (exhibition): 20 x 24 inches (50.8 x 60.96cm) Framed: 23 3/8 x 27 1/2 x 1 5/8 inches (59.37 x 69.85 x 4.13cm) Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art Gift of Hallmark Cards, Inc.
Timothy H. O’Sullivan (American born Ireland, 1840-1882) Lake in Conejos Cañon, Colorado 1874 Albumen print Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division
The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art 4525 Oak Street Kansas City, MO 64111
“[Photography is] the BEYOND visualisation of a world, the transcendence of time and space that leads, in great photographs, to a recognition of the discontinuous nature of life but in the end, to its ultimate persistence.” Dr Marcus Bunyan
Exhibition dates: 3rd April – 26th August, 2012
Curator: Paul Martineau, Associate Curator of Photographs at the J. Paul Getty Museum
“To get from the tangible to the intangible (which mature artists in any medium claim as part of their task) a paradox of some kind has frequently been helpful. For the photographer to free himself of the tyranny of the visual facts upon which he is utterly dependent, a paradox is the only possible tool. And the talisman paradox for unique photography is to work “the mirror with a memory” as if it were a mirage, and the camera is a metamorphosing machine, and the photograph as if it were a metaphor… Once freed of the tyranny of surfaces and textures, substance and form [the photographer] can use the same to pursue poetic truth.”
Minor White quoted in Beaumont Hewhall (ed.,). The History of Photography. Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1982, p. 281
“Carol Jerrems and I taught at the same secondary school in the 1970’s. In a classroom that was unused at that time, I remember having my portrait taken by her. She held her Pentax to her eye. Carols’ portraits all seemed to have been made where the posing of her subjects was balanced by an incisive naturalness (for want of a better description). As a challenge to myself I tried to look “natural”, but kept in my consciousness that I was having my portrait taken. Minutes passed and neither she nor her camera moved at all.
Then the idea slipped from my mind for just a moment, and I was straightaway bought back by the sound of the shutter. What had changed in my face? – probably nothing, or 1 mm of muscle movement. Had she seen it through the shutter? Or something else – I don’t know.”
Australian artist Ian Lobb on being photographed by the late Carol Jerrems
There is always something that you can’t quite put your finger on in an outstanding portrait, some ineffable other that takes the portrait into another space entirely. I still haven’t worked it out but my thoughts are this: forget about the pose of the person. It would seem to me to be both a self conscious awareness by the sitter of the camera and yet at the same time a knowing transcendence of the visibility of the camera itself. In great portrait photography it is as though the conversation between the photographer and the person being photographed elides the camera entirely.
Minor White, in his three great mantras, the Three Canons, observes:
Be still with yourself Until the object of your attention Affirms your presence
Let the Subject generate its own Composition
When the image mirrors the man And the man mirrors the subject Something might take over
Freed from the tyranny of the visual facts something else emerges.
Celebrities know only too well how to “work” the camera but the most profound portraits, even of celebrities, are in those moments when the photographer sees something else in the person being photographed, some unrecognised other that emerges from the shadows – a look, a twist of the head, the poignancy of the mouth, the vibrancy of the dancer Josephine Baker, the sturdiness of the gaze of Walt Whitman with hands in pockets, the presence of the hands (no, not the gaze!) of Picasso. I remember taking a black and white portrait of my partner Paul holding a wooden finial like a baby among some trees, a most beautiful, revealing photograph. He couldn’t bear to look at it, for it stripped him naked before the lens and showed a side of himself that he had never seen before: vulnerable, youthful, beautiful.
Why do great portrait photographers make so many great portraits? Why can’t this skill be shared or taught? Why can’t Herb Ritts (for example) make a portrait that goes beyond a caricature? Why is it that what can be taught is so banal that it has no value?
In photography, maybe we edit out what is expected and then it seems that photography does something that goes beyond language; it goes beyond function that can be described as a part of speech, metonym or metaphor. When this something else takes over I think it is truly “unrecognised” in the best portraits (and landscape / urban photographs) – and it is fantastic and wonderful.
This is my understanding, then, of perception and vision – [which is] the ability to see this certain something in the mind (previsualisation) before seeing it through the viewfinder (or not, for example standing beside the camera not looking through it) – to then be able to reveal it in the physicality of the print. It is a liminal moment in time and space.
I believe this is the reality of photography itself in its absolute essential form – and here I am deliberately forgetting about post-photography, post-modernism, modernism, pictorialism, ism, ism – getting down to why I really like photography:
the BEYOND visualisation of a world, the transcendence of time and space that leads, in great photographs, to a recognition of the discontinuous nature of life but in the end, to its ultimate persistence.
This is as close as I have got so far…
Dr Marcus Bunyan August 2012
Many thankx to the J. Paul Getty Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photograph for a larger version of the image.
Mariana Cook (American, b. 1955) Barack and Michelle Obama, Chicago May 26, 1996 Selenium-toned gelatin silver print The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Edward Weston (American, 1889-1958) Igor Stravinsky 1935 Gelatin silver print The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Coy Watson Jr. (American, 1912-2009) Joe Louis – “The Brown Bomber”, Los Angeles, February 1935 1935 Gelatin silver print The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Portraits of Renown surveys some of the visual strategies used by photographers to picture famous individuals from the 1840s to the year 2000. “This exhibition offers a brief visual history of famous people in photographs, drawn entirely from the Museum’s rich holdings in this genre,” says Paul Martineau, curator of the exhibition and associate curator of photographs at the J. Paul Getty Museum. “It also provides a broad historical context for the work in the concurrent exhibition Herb Ritts: L.A. Style, which includes a selection of Ritts’s best celebrity portraits.”
Photography’s remarkable propensity to shape identities has made it the leading vehicle for representing the famous. Soon after photography was invented in the 1830s, it was used to capture the likenesses and accomplishments of great men and women, gradually supplanting other forms of commemoration. In the twentieth century, the proliferation of photography and the transformative power of fame have helped to accelerate the desire for photographs of celebrities in magazines, newspapers, advertisements, and on the Internet. The exhibition is arranged chronologically to help make visible some of the overarching technical and stylistic developments in photography from the first decade of its invention to the end of the twentieth century.
A wide range of historical figures are portrayed in Portraits of Renown. A photograph by Alexander Gardner of President Lincoln documents his visit to the battlefield of Antietam during the Civil War. Captured by Nadar, a portrait of Alexander Dumas, best known for his novels The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers, shows the author with an energetic expression, illustrating the lively personality that made his writing so popular. Baron Adolf De Meyer’s portrait of Josephine Baker, an American performer who became an international sensation at the Folies Bergère in Paris, showcases her comedic charm, a trait that proved central to her popularity as a performer. An iconic portrait of the silent screen actress, Gloria Swanson, created by Edward Steichen for Vanity Fair reveals both the intensity of its sitter and the skill of the artist. A picture of Pablo Picasso by his friend Man Ray portrays the master of Cubism with a penetrating gaze.
Yves St. Laurent, Andy Warhol, and Grace Jones are among the contemporary figures included in the exhibition. Fashion designer Yves St. Laurent was photographed by Marie Cosindas using instant color film by Polaroid. The photograph, made the year his first boutique in New York opened, graced the walls of the store for ten years. A Cosindas portrait of Andy Warhol shows the artist wearing dark sunglasses, which partially conceal his face. Warhol, who was fascinated by celebrity, delighted in posing public personalities like Grace Jones for his camera.
Press release from the J. Paul Getty Museum website
Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) James Joyce 1928 Gelatin silver print The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Baron Adolf De Meyer (American born France, 1868-1946) Portrait of Josephine Baker 1925 Collotype print 39.1 x 39.7cm The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
In 1925 Josephine Baker, an American dancer from Saint Louis, Missouri, made her debut on the Paris stage in La Revue nègre (The Black Review) at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, wearing nothing more than a skirt of feathers and performing her danse sauvage (savage dance). She was an immediate sensation in Jazz-Age France, which celebrated her perceived exoticism, quite the opposite of the reception she had received dancing in American choruses. American expatriate novelist Ernest Hemingway called Baker “the most sensational woman anybody ever saw – or ever will.”
Baron Adolf de Meyer, a society and fashion photographer, took this playful portrait in the year of Baker’s debut. Given the highly sexual nature of her stage persona, this portrait is charming and almost innocent; Baker’s personality is suggested by her face rather than her famous body.
Text from the J. Paul Getty website
Edward Steichen (American, 1879-1973) John Barrymore as Hamlet 1922 Gelatin silver print The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1964-1946) Georgia O’Keeffe: A Portrait 1918 Gelatin silver print The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Arnold Genthe (American born Germany, 1869-1942) Anna Pavlowa About 1915 Gelatin silver print 33.5 x 25.2cm (13 3/16 x 9 15/16 in.) The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
The Russian ballerina Anna Pavlowa (or Pavlova) so greatly admired Arnold Genthe’s work that she made the unusual decision to visit his studio, rather than have him come to her rehearsals. The resulting portrait of the prolific dancer, leaping in mid-air, is the only photograph to capture Pavlowa in free movement. Genthe regarded this print as one of the best dance photographs he ever made.
Text from the J. Paul Getty website
Alvin Langdon Coburn (British born United States, 1882-1966) Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens) Negative December 21, 1908; print 1913 Photogravure 20.6 x 14.8cm (8 1/8 x 5 13/16 in.) The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) [Self-Portrait] Negative 1907; print 1930 Gelatin silver print 24.8 x 18.4cm (9 3/4 x 7 1/4 in.) The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Edward Steichen (American, 1879-1973) Rodin – Le Penseur (The Thinker) 1902 Gelatin-carbon print The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Sarah Choate Sears (American, 1858-1935) [Julia Ward Howe] About 1890 Platinum print 23.5 x 18.6cm (9 1/4 x 7 5/16 in.) The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Julia Ward Howe (May 27, 1819 – October 17, 1910) was an American poet and author, known for writing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” and the original 1870 pacifist Mother’s Day Proclamation. She was also an advocate for abolitionism and a social activist, particularly for women’s suffrage.
Sarah Choate Sears (American, 1858-1935) John Singer Sargent About 1890 Gelatin silver print The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Although John Singer Sargent was the most famous American portrait painter of his time, he apparently did not like to be photographed. The few photographs that exist show him at work, as he is here, sketching and puffing on a cigar. His friend Sarah Choate Sears, herself a painter of some note, drew many of her sitters for photographs from the same aristocratic milieu as Sargent did for his paintings.
Text from the J. Paul Getty website
Nadar (Gaspard Félix Tournachon) (French, 1820-1910) [Sarah Bernhardt as the Empress Theodora in Sardou’s “Theodora”] Negative 1884; print and mount about 1889 Albumen silver print 14.6 x 10.5 cm (5 3/4 x 4 1/8 in.) The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
J. Wood (American, active New York, New York 1870s-1880s) L.P. Federmeyer 1879 Albumen silver print 14.8 x 10 cm (5 13/16 x 3 15/16 in.) The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Julia Margaret Cameron (British born India, 1815-1879) Ellen Terry at Age Sixteen Negative 1864; print about 1875 Carbon print 24.1cm (9 1/2 in.) The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
This image of Ellen Terry (1847-1928) is one of the few known photographs of a female celebrity by Julia Margaret Cameron. Terry, the popular child actress of the British stage, was sixteen years old when Cameron made this image. This photograph was most likely taken just after she married the eccentric painter, George Frederick Watts (1817-1904), who was thirty years her senior. They spent their honeymoon in the village of Freshwater on the Isle of Wight where Cameron resided.
Cameron’s portrait echoes Watt’s study of Terry titled Choosing (1864, National Portrait Gallery, London). As in the painting, Terry is shown in profile with her eyes closed, an ethereal beauty in a melancholic dream state. In this guise, Terry embodies the Pre-Raphaelite ideal of womanhood rather than appearing as the wild boisterous teenager she was known to be. The round (“tondo”) format of this photograph was popular among Pre-Raphaelite artists.
Cameron titled another print of this image Sadness (see 84.XZ.186.52), which may suggest the realisation of a mismatched marriage. Terry’s anxiety is plainly evident – she leans against an interior wall and tugs nervously at her necklace. The lighting is notably subdued, leaving her face shadowed in doubt. In The Story of My Life (1909), Terry recalls how demanding Watts was, calling upon her to sit for hours as a model and giving her strict orders not to speak in front of distinguished guests in his studio.
This particular version was printed eleven years after Cameron first made the portrait. In order to distribute this image commercially, the Autotype Company of London rephotographed the original negative after the damage had been repaired. The company then made new prints using the durable, non-fading carbon print process. Thus, this version is in reverse compared to Sadness. Terry’s enduring popularity is displayed by the numerous photographs taken of her over the years. Along with the two portraits by Cameron, the Getty owns three more of Terry by other photographers.
Charles DeForest Fredricks (American, 1823-1894) [Mlle Pepita] 1863 Albumen silver print 9 x 5.4cm (3 9/16 x 2 1/8 in.) The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
André Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri (French, 1819-1889) [Rosa Bonheur] 1861-1864 Albumen silver print 8.4 x 5.2cm (3 5/16 x 2 1/16 in.) The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Rosa Bonheur, born Marie-Rosalie Bonheur (16 March 1822 – 25 May 1899), was a French artist, mostly a painter of animals (animalière) but also a sculptor, in a realist style. Her best-known paintings are Ploughing in the Nivernais, first exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1848, and now at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, and The Horse Fair (in French: Le marché aux chevaux), which was exhibited at the Salon of 1853 (finished in 1855) and is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York City. Bonheur was widely considered to be the most famous female painter of the nineteenth century.
Mathew B. Brady (American, about 1823-1896) Walt Whitman About 1870 Albumen silver print 14.6 x 10.3cm The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Mathew B. Brady (American, about 1823-1896) Robert E. Lee 1865 Albumen silver print The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
John Robert Parsons (British, about 1826-1909) [Portrait of Jane Morris (Mrs. William Morris)] Negative July 1865; print after 1900 Gelatin silver print 22.9 × 19.2cm (9 × 7 9/16 in.) The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Nadar (Gaspard Félix Tournachon) (French, 1820-1910) George Sand (Amandine-Aurore-Lucile Dupin) About 1865 Albumen silver print The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Amandine-Aurore-Lucile Dudevant, née Dupin, took the pseudonym George Sand in 1832. She was a successful Romantic novelist and a close friend of Nadar, and during the 1860s he photographed her frequently. Her writing was celebrated for its frequent depiction of working-class or peasant heroes. She was also a woman as renowned for her romantic liaisons as her writing; here she allowed Nadar to photograph her, devoid of coquettish charms but nevertheless a commanding presence.
This portrait is a riot of textural surfaces. The sumptuous satin of Sand’s gown and silken texture of her hair have a rich tactile presence. Her shimmering skirt melts into the velvet-draped support on which she leans, creating a visual triangle with the careful centre part of her wavy hair. The portrait details the exquisite laces, beads, and buttons of her gown, but her face, the apex of the triangle, is out of focus. Sand was apparently unable to remain perfectly still throughout the exposure, and the slight blurring of her facial features erases the unforgiving details that the years had drawn upon her.
Text from the J. Paul Getty website
Alexander Gardner (American born Scotland, 1821-1882) President Lincoln, United States Headquarters, Army of the Potomac, near Antietam, October 4, 1862 1862 Albumen silver print 21.9 x 19.7cm (8 5/8 x 7 3/4 in.) The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Twenty-six thousand soldiers were killed or wounded in the Battle of Antietam on September 17, 1862, after which Confederate General Robert E. Lee was forced to retreat to Virginia. Just two weeks after the victory, President and Commander-in-Chief Abraham Lincoln conferred with General McClernand and Allan Pinkerton, Chief of the nascent Secret Service, who had organised espionage missions behind Confederate lines.
Lincoln stands tall, front and centre in his stovepipe hat, his erect and commanding posture emphasised by the tent pole that seems to be an extension of his spine. The other men stand slightly apart in deference to their leader, in postures of allegiance with their hands covering their hearts. The reclining figure of the man at left and the shirt hanging from the tree are a reminder that, although this is a formally posed picture, Lincoln’s presence did not halt the camp’s activity, and no attempts were made to isolate him from the ordinary circumstances surrounding the continuing military conflict.
Text from the J. Paul Getty website
Alexander Gardner (American born Scotland, 1821-1882) President Lincoln, United States Headquarters, Army of the Potomac, near Antietam, October 4, 1862 (detail) 1862 Albumen silver print 21.9 x 19.7cm (8 5/8 x 7 3/4 in.) The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Pierre Louis Pierson (French, 1822-1913) Napoleon III and the Prince Imperial about 1859 Albumen silver print from a wet collodion glass negative 21 x 16cm (8 1/4 x 6 5/16 in.) The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
The Prince Imperial, son of Napoleon III, sits strapped securely into a seat on his horse’s back, a model subject for the camera. An attendant at the left steadies the horse so that the little prince remains picture-perfect in the centre of the backdrop erected for the photograph. The horse stands upon a rug that serves as a formalising element, making the scene appear more regal. The Emperor Napoleon III himself stands off to the right in perfect profile, supervising the scene with his dog and forming a framing mirror-image of the horse and attendant on the other side.
Pierre-Louis Pierson placed his camera far enough back from the Prince to capture the entire scene and all the players, but this was not the version sold as a popular carte-de-visite. The carte-de-visite image was cropped so that only the Prince upon his horse was visible.
Text from the J. Paul Getty website
Nadar (Gaspard Félix Tournachon) (French, 1820-1910) Alexander Dumas [père] (1802-1870) / Alexandre Dumas 1855 Salted paper print Image (rounded corners): 23.5 x 18.7cm (9 1/4 x 7 3/8 in.) The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles Public domain
The writer Alexander Dumas was Nadar’s boyhood idol. Nadar’s father had published Dumas’s first novel and play, and a portrait of Dumas hung in young Nadar’s room. The son of a French revolutionary general and a black mother, Dumas arrived in Paris from the provinces in 1823, poor and barely educated. Working as a clerk, he educated himself in French history and began to write. In 1829 he met with his first success; with credits including The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo, published in 1844 and 1845, respectively, his fame and popularity were assured.
Nadar was the first photographer to use photography to enhance the sitter’s reputation. Given Dumas’s popularity, this mounted edition print, signed and dedicated by him, was likely intended for sale.
Dumas is represented as a lively, vibrant man. The self-restraint of his crossed hands, resting on a chair that disappears into the shadows, seems like an attempt to contain an undercurrent of boundless energy that threatened to ruin the necessary stillness of the pose and appears to have found an outlet through Dumas’s hair. Around the time of this sitting, the prolific Dumas and Nadar were planning to collaborate on a theatrical spectacle, which was ultimately never staged.
Text from the J. Paul Getty website
Unknown maker (American) Portrait of Edgar Allan Poe 1849 Daguerreotype The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles Public domain
“A noticeable man clad in black, the fashion of the times, close-buttoned, erect, forward looking, something separate in his bearing … a beautifully poetic face.”
~ Basil L. Gildersleeve to Mary E. Phillips, 1915 (his childhood recollection of Poe)
Many of Edgar Allan Poe’s contemporaries described him as he appears in this portrait: a darkly handsome and intelligent man who possessed an unorthodox personality. Despite being acknowledged as one of America’s greatest writers of poetry and short stories, Poe’s life remains shrouded in mystery, with conflicting accounts about poverty, alcoholism, drug use, and the circumstances of his death in 1849. Like his life, Poe’s poems and short stories are infused with a sense of tragedy and mystery. Among his best-known works are: The Raven, Annabel Lee, and The Fall of the House of Usher.
This daguerreotype was made several months before Poe’s death at age 40. After his wife died two years earlier in 1847, Poe turned to two women for support and companionship. He met Annie Richmond at a poetry lecture that he gave when visiting Lowell, Massachusetts. Although she was married, they developed a deep, mutual affection. Richmond is thought to have arranged and paid for this portrait sitting. Poe is so forcibly portrayed that historians have described his appearance as disheveled, brooding, exhausted, haunted, and melancholic.
For reasons that are not entirely clear, relatively few daguerreotypes of notable poets, novelists, or painters have survived from the 1840s, and some of the best we have are by unknown makers. The art of the daguerreotype was one in which the sitter’s face usually took priority over the maker’s name, and many daguerreotypists failed to sign their works. This is the case with the Getty’s portrait of Poe.
Charles Richard Meade (American, 1826-1858) Portrait of Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre 1848 Daguerreotype, hand-coloured The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles Public domain
By New Year’s Day of 1840 – little more than one year after William Henry Fox Talbot had first displayed his photogenic drawings in London and just four to five months after the first daguerreotypes had been exhibited in Paris at the Palais d’Orsay in conjunction with a series of public demonstrations of the process – Daguerre’s instruction manual had been translated into at least four languages and printed in at least twenty-one editions. In this way, his well-kept secret formula and list of materials quickly spread to the Americas and to provincial locations all over Europe. Photography became a gold rush-like phenomenon, with as much fiction attached to it as fact.
Nowhere was the daguerreotype more enthusiastically accepted than in the United States. Charles R. Meade was the proprietor of a prominent New York photographic portrait studio. He made a pilgrimage to France in 1848 to meet the founder of his profession and while there became one of the very few people to use the daguerreotype process to photograph the inventor himself.
A daguerreotype was (and is) created by coating a highly polished silver plated sheet of copper with light sensitive chemicals such as chloride of iodine. The plate is then exposed to light in the back of a camera obscura. When first removed from the camera, the image is not immediately visible. The plate must be exposed to mercury vapours to “bring out” the image. The image is then “fixed” (or “made permanent on the plate”) by washing it in a bath of hyposulfite of soda. Finally it is washed in distilled water. Each daguerreotype is a unique image; multiple prints cannot be made from the metal plate.
“We return again and again to look at these fleeting, fetishistic images, to confirm their documentary status, that they do exist – to confirm our pleasure, the scopophilic desire for pleasurable looking.” Dr Marcus Bunyan
Exhibition dates: 9th June – 26th August, 2012
Curator: Thomas Seelig
Participating artists: Lara Almarcegui, Dimitry Astakhov, Sammy Baloji, Walead Beshty, Ursula Biemann, Fernando Brito, Moyra Davey, Lukas Einsele, Cédric Eisenring / Thomas Julier, Michael Elmgreen / Ingar Dragset, Alfredo Jarr, Jérôme Leuba, Market Photo Workshop, Erica Overmeer, Trevor Paglen, Willem Popelier, Gosha Rubchinskiy, Jules Spinatsch, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Fiona Tan, Jonas Unger, Unknown Taliban, Lidwien van de Ven, wearethe99percent
The word status (noun) can mean the position of an individual in relation to another or others, especially in regard to social or professional standing. The word derives from the Latin posture, from stãre to stand. What is the standing of these photographs (as documents)? What does their posturing suggest, when the time of contemporary photographs has become but a series of disconnected presents/presence.
Mike Featherstone observes that, “Postmodern everyday culture is a culture of stylistic diversity and heterogeneity (comprising different parts or qualities), of an overload of imagery and simulations which lead to a loss of the referent or sense of reality. The subsequent fragmentation of time into a series of presents through a lack of capacity to chain signs and images into narrative sequences leads to a schizophrenic emphasis on vivid, immediate, isolated, affect-charged experiences of the presentness of the world – of intensities.“1
It is these intensities that we confront in the (Facebook) frenzy of contemporary photography. It is this schizophrenic inability to sustain a coherent identity that the photographs in this posting address. The words embedded in the media statement give ample latitude for the exploration of these immediacies: complex network, loose associations, immediate relationships, current status, apparent jumps and various themes to name but a few. But Annette Kuhn notes, “The truth / authenticity potential of photography is tied in with the idea that seeing is believing. Photography draws on an ideology of the visible as evidence. The eye of the camera is neutral, it sees the world as it is: we look at a photograph and see a slice of the world. To complete the circuit of recording, visibility and truth set up by the photograph, there has to be someone looking at it …”2 Kuhn continues, “A photograph, however much it may pretend to authenticity, must always in the final instance admit that it is not real, in the sense that what is in the picture is not here, but elsewhere.”3
The photograph evacuates its own meaning, its status as document; its posturing lies elsewhere. This very quality of absence may augment the voyeuristic pleasure of the spectator’s look.4 We return again and again to look at these fleeting, fetishistic images, to confirm their documentary status, that they do exist – to confirm our pleasure, the scopophilic desire for pleasurable looking. In the end we can ask, what do the photographs of a fake Prada shop in the desert, the perfect pink circles of identity / identical absence represent?
What are we really seeing? Do they really exist, do we really exist. Is living really believing?
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ Featherstone, Mike. Consumer Culture and Postmodernism. London: Sage Publications, 1991, p. 124 2/ Kuhn, Annette. The Power of the Image: Essays on Representation and Sexuality. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985, pp. 27-28
3/ Ibid., pp. 30-31
4/ Ibid., pp. 30-31
Many thanx to Fotomuseum Winterthur for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photograph for a larger version of the image.
Photographer Willem Popelier (Eindhoven, 1982) found by accident 91 photographs and two films made by two girls on a publicly accessible computer. This was the start of a long-running project in which Popelier researched the role of photography on the internet and in social media. The result is the exhibition, Showroom Girls, an intimate portrait of one of the girls in the form of pictures and texts by her hand that Popelier found online.
Webcam
Whilst working on another project, Showroom, Popelier was looking for showroom computers which visitors use to take pictures of themselves by using the computer’s webcam. He discovered that people leave these pictures on the computer in the shop. Popelier started to collect these images. Photographs of anonymous people who portray themselves in the public domain and upon occasion rather obsessively.
On one particular computer Popelier found almost a hundred pictures made by two girls. After more research he discovered that the girls had produced around two hundred images in almost an hour. A large number of these shots were removed, but the girls had left a number on purpose. One of the girls wore a necklace stating her name. Popelier started to look for her on the internet and found both girls on various websites such as Hyves, Facebook and Twitter. Via the internet Popelier got access to the tweets of one of the girls, but also managed to find her address and even her school results. And all of this he found legally, without hacking into any secret or inaccessible data. With all the collected material he put together the exhibition Showroom Girls.
Text from the Foam website
wearethe99percent.tumblr.com Tumblr website, since August 2011
A few years after the digital turn the shift from analog to digital image production and archiving, Fotomuseum Winterthur explores the current state of the document and the documentary image in the exhibition Status – 24 Contemporary Documents. Whereas the term “status” used to have a thoroughly positive connotation, indicating a confident display of one’s own condition or state, today we ask about the “status” of things almost with a sense of apprehension, knowing full well that situations are often uncertain, precarious, and usually in flux. This uncertainty carries over into the field of photography. The rapid dissemination and availability of images and videos in print media, on the Internet, on social platforms such as Facebook, Google, Twitter, or Flickr have led to new forms of communication through documentary images. Often we do not know who took the picture, nor do we know how the picture has made its way to us. How are these photographic documents to be understood? How do the schemata of seeing, understanding, deleting, and saving function in our contemporary multi-media environment?
The 24 exemplary “documents” selected for this exhibition come together in a complex network of loose associations and immediate relationships, which attempts to capture the current status of the documentary image. The apparent jumps between various themes and media formats, between official press images (Vladimir Putin fishing) and anthropological studies of the family image (the Vox Populi work by Fiona Tan) correspond to our current viewing experience as alternating between high and low, surface and depth. The conquest of unknown territory and the quiet contemplation of a personal theme form two poles of the exhibition. Whereas Trevor Paglen uses meticulous, scientific precision to offer proof of hidden US satellites operating in the night sky, Sammy Baloji, Jérôme Leuba, and Lara Almarcegui rescue removed sites or unusual biographies from oblivion. In 2009 Almarcegui was able to photograph the overgrown lots in East London that have now been built up and will be the sites of the Summer Olympics 2012.
The exhibition Status – 24 Contemporary Documents pursues the traces photography leaves behind, travelling at both analog and digital speeds. Through her video camera, Moyra Davey delves into a volume of photographs that is important to her, Portraits in Life and Death by Peter Hujar, and thereby creates a parable of decelerated reading and looking. Willem Popelier examines the shifting identities and presentations of the self through his work Showroom Girls, which offers an exemplary reflection on a younger generation’s behaviour in social networks. Conceived and realised by Jules Spinatsch, the 24-hour panorama of the trading floor of the German stock exchange in Frankfurt – a site highly familiar from media images – enables us to witness the simultaneous recording, receiving, and saving of information in the form of a 14-meter wall installation, whose individual components will come together at Fotomuseum Winterthur over the course of the opening day of the exhibition on June 8, 2012 and depict a complete calendar day.
The exhibition is organised by Thomas Seelig, curator at Fotomuseum Winterthur.
Press release from the Fotomuseum Winterthur website
Organised by the museum in close collaboration with the William Eggleston Artistic Trust in Memphis
William Eggleston (American, b. 1939) Untitled 1960 Courtesy Cheim & Read, New York and Peder Lund, Oslo Eggleston Artistic Trust Photo Courtesy Vegard Kleven, Oslo
“As these rediscovered prints reveal, the man who made colour photography into an artform worked brilliantly in monochrome – and his eye for unsettling detail is every bit as sharp”
Sean O’Hagan
These are magnificent, intelligent photographs. They are works from the master that show that Eggleston found his own style early on.
His understanding of the “quietness” of space and form within the picture plane is already fully developed and his aesthetic decision to use grainy, black and white high speed film just adds to the stillness and eeriness of the photographs.
His signature style, his unique messianic voice, really shines through in these recently discovered images which could be seen to be BC – before the beginning of colour (photography) as eulogised by the museum establishment.
Highlights in these photographs include:
~ The pose of the women caught mid-stride, about to put the telephone back in its cradle
~ The man and the woman frozen mid-conversation in a minimal hotel lobby(?) with the shroud of a dark man on the plaque behind
~ The barren hotel room with old air conditioner, vinyl chair, floral bedspread and newspapers strewn over the floor (remeniscent of the spaces of so many of his later colour photographs)
~ And my favourite, Untitled (1960, below), the bulk of the heavy car looming out of the murk at the bottom of the picture frame, the intransigent windscreen wipers, the rain and the blurred traffic moving behind. You can almost touch and taste the atmosphere of this moment, in this day, of that year…
The wondrous thing is that Eggleston’s voice transfers beautifully through into the saturation of his later colour dye-transfer prints. His pared down vision of “Southern” life and world become unmistakably his own in the colour photographs.
Unlike the Japanese photographer Daido Moriyama, whose panache in his black and white photographs is matched only by the shallowness of his colour work, here Eggleston lays the ground work for the rest of his monumental career.
Great to see these early photographs. I’m so glad they found them!
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Nederlands Fotomuseum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs to view a larger version of the image.
William Eggleston (American, b. 1939) Untitled 1960 Courtesy Cheim & Read, New York and Peder Lund, Oslo Eggleston Artistic Trust Photo Courtesy Cheim & Read, New York
William Eggleston (American, b. 1939) Untitled 1966 Private collection, Oslo. Courtesy Peder Lund Eggleston Artistic Trust Photo Courtesy Cheim & Read, New York
The American photographer William Eggleston (1939) is known as one of the first major pioneers of artistic colour photography. His book William Eggleston’s Guide was one of the most influential photography books of the 20th century and still inspires many today. Eggleston’s black-and-white photographs are less well-known. In Before Color, the Nederlands Fotomuseum highlights this famous photographer’s earliest work, which was only recently discovered. The photographs show that Eggleston found his own style early on. Inspired by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Eggleston used a 35mm camera and fast black-and-white film to photograph the American way of life in the early 1960s. We see his own surroundings: suburban Memphis, with its diners, car parks and supermarkets, as well as the houses and domestic interiors of the people who lived there. Before Color by William Eggleston will be on display from 16 June until 26 August.
Black-and-white snapshots
When Eggleston started taking photographs in the early 1960s, he was particularly inspired by the French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson and his book The Decisive Moment from 1952. Contrary to the big names in American photography at the time – who were preoccupied with the stunning landscape, like Ansel Adams – Cartier-Bresson took snapshots of everyday life. Eggleston found this approach very appealing. Using a 35mm camera and fast black-and-white film he began photographing his own surroundings. These were predominantly shaped by suburban Memphis, with its diners, car parks and supermarkets, but he also focused on the houses and domestic interiors of the people who lived there.
Breaking a tradition
At the same time Eggleston experimented with colour photography. Together with Joel Meyerowitz, Joel Sternfeld and others, he broke the long tradition of black-and-white photography by working in colour and focusing on subjects from daily life. In 1972 he completed an extensive series of 2,200 photographs entitled Los Alamos, which provided a unique picture of life in America in the ’60s and early ’70s. He discovered the deep and saturated colours of the so-called dye-transfer printing technique, originally a commercial application that he perfected and that would become his international trademark. His first solo exhibition in 1976 was also the first exhibition in the Museum of Modern Art devoted to colour photography. The exhibition was accompanied by what would become the acclaimed and influential book William Eggleston’s Guide.
Before Color
Eggleston would later abandon black-and-white film altogether and his earliest work was forgotten. So it was a surprise when a box of his black-and-white photographs was recently found in the archives of the William Eggleston Artistic Trust in Memphis. The photographs were exhibited for the first time in 2010 at the Cheim & Read Gallery in New York and published in the book Before Color (Steidl, 2010).
Before Color exhibition
This is the first time that Before Color has been exhibited in the Netherlands and includes nearly 40 photographs from William Eggleston’s early career. The images show that Eggleston found his personal style and photographic motifs early on and provide a wonderful picture of the American way.
Press release from the Nederlands Fotomuseum website
William Eggleston (American, b. 1939) Untitled 1960 Courtesy Cheim & Read, New York and Peder Lund, Oslo Eggleston Artistic Trust Photo Courtesy Cheim & Read, New York
William Eggleston (American, b. 1939) Untitled Nd Courtesy Cheim & Read, New York and Peder Lund, Oslo Eggleston Artistic Trust Photo Courtesy Cheim & Read, New York
William Eggleston (American, b. 1939) Untitled Nd Courtesy Cheim & Read, New York and Peder Lund, Oslo Eggleston Artistic Trust Photo Courtesy Cheim & Read, New York
William Eggleston (American, b. 1939) Untitled
Nd
Courtesy Cheim & Read, New York and Peder Lund, Oslo
Eggleston Artistic Trust
Photo Courtesy Cheim & Read, New York
William Eggleston (American, b. 1939) Untitled Nd Courtesy Cheim & Read, New York and Peder Lund, Oslo Eggleston Artistic Trust Photo Courtesy Cheim & Read, New York
William Eggleston (American, b. 1939) Untitled Nd Courtesy Cheim & Read, New York and Peder Lund, Oslo Eggleston Artistic Trust Photo Courtesy Cheim & Read, New York
William Eggleston (American, b. 1939) Untitled Nd Courtesy Cheim & Read, New York and Peder Lund, Oslo Eggleston Artistic Trust Photo Courtesy Cheim & Read, New York
William Eggleston (American, b. 1939) Untitled Nd Courtesy Cheim & Read, New York and Peder Lund, Oslo Eggleston Artistic Trust Photo Courtesy Cheim & Read, New York
The history of the “South” and what it is to be “Southern” cannot easily be separated from its horrific legacy of abject cruelty and malevolence against African Americans… of slavery, lynching, segregation, Jim Crow laws and lasting prejudice…
William Eggleston: Before Color is then surely a tour into this menace and heinous history and into the “Southern” legacy. In fact with the absence of color in this work, it is a significantly stronger embodiment of this history and of this malice. Although 90% of the book is absent of African American subjects, one can’t help but “feel” them in almost all of the pictures. The photographs, mainly consisting of white Memphis residents in the 1950-60’s, and their homes, cars and places, are also then filled by a default and implication with blacks. There is also a palpable undertone and a foreshadowing of the socio-economic decay that will fall on to this city and much of the South. As you look at the pictures, you “see” what “they” have done and the legacy that has been created, what has and what will occur. The atmosphere is dreary and ugly, there is no “Southern charm”. In photographs of newly constructed houses for example, through Eggleston’s gaze, the places are already giving hints to coming decay. It is as if the legacy has become an omen and what has been reaped, for generations now, everyone will sow.
Doug Rickard. “William Eggleston – “Before Color” (2010),” on the ASX website January 12, 2013 [Online] Cited 22/01/2013. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
William Eggleston (American, b. 1939) Untitled 1960 Private collection, Oslo. Courtesy Peder Lund Eggleston Artistic Trust Photo Courtesy Cheim & Read, New York
William Eggleston (American, b. 1939) Untitled 1960 Private collection, Oslo. Courtesy Peder Lund Eggleston Artistic Trust Photo Courtesy Cheim & Read, New York
William Eggleston (American, b. 1939) Untitled c. 1968 William Eggleston/2010 Eggleston Artistic Trust Courtesy Cheim & Read, New York
William Eggleston (American, b. 1939) Untitled c. 1970 William Eggleston/2010 Eggleston Artistic Trust. Courtesy Cheim & Read, New York
William Eggleston (American, b. 1939) Untitled c. 1970 William Eggleston/2010 Eggleston Artistic Trust. Courtesy Cheim & Read, New York
Nederlands Fotomuseum Wilhelminakade 332 3072 AR Rotterdam The Netherlands
Each year nearly two hundred million tons of limestone – virtually the only natural resource in Japan – are cut to produce the cement necessary to build the nation’s many cities, as well as to make additives used in paper, medicine, and food products. Hatakeyama was drawn to this industrial subject from a young age; his first artistic explorations took the form of paintings of the cement factory that he passed each day as a child. For Lime Hills, his earliest photographic series, Hatakeyama returned to the area near his hometown on the northeastern coast of Japan to investigate the nearby limestone quarries and their corresponding factories. Over the next five years he broadened his scope to include mines throughout Japan, from Hokkaido in the north to Okinawa in the south. Reflecting on the physical connection between these sites and civilisation, the artist later noted: “If the concrete buildings and highways that stretch to the horizon are all made from limestone dug from the hills, and if they should all be ground to dust and this vast quantity of calcium carbonate returned to its precise points of origin, why then, with the last spoonful, the ridge lines of the hills would be restored to their original dimensions.”
These small-scale photographs offer visions of the excavated land that at first glance seem idyllic. Often shooting in the golden evening light with a large-format camera, Hatakeyama captured the sculptural contours of the processed earth, infusing it with the luminous glow seen in many Romantic landscape paintings of the nineteenth century. Yet the Romantic tradition, which highlighted the awesome terror of nature, is upended in Hatakeyama’s pictures, which instead uncover unexpected pleasures in the tamed and built environment, ultimately suggesting the artificiality of conventional notions of beauty.
In 2003 Hatakeyama was invited to the Camargue, near Fos-sur-Mer, France, to photograph the landscape surrounding a steel factory located on the eastern edge of the Rhône delta. He worked from two perspectives, shooting on the factory grounds as well as from the surrounding landscape, much of which is conserved as a nature park. His photographs contrast the idyllic serenity of the flat plains where the Rhône river meets the Mediterranean Sea with the dramatic clouds of steam – formed when the coke used in steel making is doused in cool water – that often rise above this terrain.
Upon discovering this impressive phenomenon the artist reflected: “The etymology of ‘atmosphere’ is the ancient Greek words for vapor (atmos) and sphere (sphaira). Once I learned this, the air that filled the Camargue and the steam from the factory seemed to fuse into one before my eyes. It no longer felt strange to see signs of humanity in the sky and the land, or to sense nature in the cloud of steam from the factory. And I began to feel that it would no longer be possible to draw a clear line at the border between nature and the artificial.” Through Hatakeyama’s lens, the factory seems at once tranquil and volatile, surrounded by the golden light, billowing pastel clouds, and thick atmosphere found in many early twentieth-century paintings of industrial sites. Like the Impressionists, who embraced modern life by finding their subjects in new technologies, Hatakeyama presents new landscapes that complicate the conventional boundaries between nature and industry.”
Wall text from the exhibition
From July 28 through November 4, 2012, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) will present the work of one of Japan’s most important contemporary photographers in the exhibition Naoya Hatakeyama: Natural Stories. This will be the artist’s first solo exhibition in a U.S. museum and the first presentation of his work on the West Coast.
Organised by the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography in association with SFMOMA, the exhibition gathers work spanning Naoya Hatakeyama’s entire career, including more than 100 photographs and two video installations, offering viewers new insight into the artist’s practice and place in the rich history of Japanese photography. The presentation at SFMOMA, the sole U.S. venue for this internationally traveling retrospective, is overseen by Lisa J. Sutcliffe, assistant curator of photography.
Hatakeyama is known for austere and beautiful large-scale color pictures that capture the extraordinary powers routinely deployed to shape nature to our will – and, in the case of his photographs made after the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, the equally powerful impact of natural forces on human activities. Whether photographing factories, quarries, mines, or tsunami-swept landscapes, Hatakeyama has developed a thorough and analytical method for observing the ways in which the human and natural worlds have both coexisted and clashed. “For the past 25 years Naoya Hatakeyama has made pictures that focus on the complicated relationship between man and nature,” says Sutcliffe. “Approaching his subjects from diverse perspectives and across time, he redefines the ways in which we visualize the natural world.”
Hatakeyama has long been interested in the relationship between human industry and the natural environment. His early series of photographs of limestone quarries, Lime Hills (1986-1991), references the Romantic painterly tradition of the sublime, but links it to the relentless pursuit of raw materials for modern development. After observing that “the quarries and the cities are like negative and positive images of a single photograph,” Hatakeyama began to investigate urban centers built from limestone and concrete. In Underground (1999), he explores the pitch-black depths of Tokyo’s underbelly from the tunnels of the Shibuya River, revealing the ecosystems of the city’s sewer network that often go unseen. Nearly a decade later he returned to the subject, photographing the remnants of decaying limestone quarries underneath Paris in Ciel Tombé (2007).
Several of Hatakeyama’s photographic series capture scenes of destruction with calm precision. Contemplating the abandoned structures surrounding a disused coal mine, Zeche Westfalen I/II Ahlen (2003/2004) includes images of a German factory hall seemingly suspended in midair at the moment of its demolition. For the Blast series (2005), the photographer used a high-speed motor-driven camera to document explosions in an open-cast limestone mine, framing the instant of impact in a series of still photographs. The exhibition will present the U.S. debut of Twenty-Four Blasts (2011), a video installation of his still photographs from Blast that transforms these explosions into a found sculptural event.
Hatakeyama has applied his measured and unsentimental method of observation to landscapes in transition around the world. In the series Atmos (2003), his representations of tranquil French landscapes include steam clouds generated by steelworks. Also made in France, the series Terrils (2009-10) pictures the massive conical hills created by coal mining, documenting landscapes transformed by the human exploitation of natural resources. Considering a different type of human impact on the natural world, Hatakeyama observes the conquest of the Swiss Alps by tourism in Another Mountain (2005), invoking the sublime both through choice of subject matter and through the contrast in scale between man and nature.
The most recent series in the exhibition, Rikuzentakata (2011), records the aftermath of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami that devastated northeastern Japan. For Hatakeyama, the disaster struck very close to home: his hometown of Rikuzentakata in Iwate Prefecture was left in ruins, his mother was killed, and the house he grew up in was destroyed. Although these are some of the most personal photographs the artist has ever exhibited, they are remarkably unsentimental, displaying the same clarity and refinement that mark the rest of his work. The video installation Kesengawa (2002-2010), named after the river that flows through Rikuzentakata, presents his personal photographs of the area made before the tsunami, creating a poignant dialogue with the 2011 series.
While photographing Japanese quarries and factories for Lime Hills, Hatakeyama became intrigued by the regular explosions designed to free limestone from the cliffs. He was interested in the violence and force of the blasts as well as in the engineers’ deep understanding of the “nature” of the rock. Working with these experts, he was able to calculate exactly how close he could place his remote controlled, motorised camera to the blast to capture the explosion in still frames. The striking large-scale photographs this method produced dramatise the tension between the slow geologic formation of the rocks and the split-second detonation that destroys them. Distilling his study to a series of frozen moments of intense scrutiny, Hatakeyama emphasises the volatile character of the blast, offering a perspective that cannot be seen by the naked eye. In the video projection Twenty-Four Blasts, presented in the next room, these explosions are set to motion, serving as documentation of the mining process while also reflecting an understanding of the blast as a sculptural event.
In Zeche Westfalen I/II, Ahlen, a series taken in Germany, Hatakeyama used a remote-controlled camera shutter to photograph the destruction of the Zeche Westfalen coal plant at the time of detonation. An industrial centre since the mid-nineteenth century, the area is experiencing new development as mines are destroyed to make way for commercial and residential growth. These pictures serve as a record of one such transition, trapping the building as it hovers in midair in the moments just before its destruction. Although photography is often used to capture an image of something before it is gone, these pictures reveal Hatakeyama’s interest in documenting destruction analytically and in real time, as a celebration of the future rather than an elegy to the past.
After photographing the limestone quarries around Japan, Hatakeyama realised that the urban fabric of Tokyo resembles a mirror image of the excavated earth when viewed from above. As he later wrote, “the quarries and the cities are like negative and positive images of a single photograph.” This revelation led him to photograph the city from great heights and, later, to document the tunnels snaking beneath it. The Shibuya River, diverted beneath Tokyo like a sewer, echoes the chambers Hatakeyama observed within the quarries, yet it is shrouded in darkness and mystery. His abstract and often theatrically lit pictures of the underground river, illuminated by a strobe at the centre of each composition, investigate the process of photographing complete darkness.
Long interested in exploring the subterranean landscapes of France, where limestone was quarried in the carrières below Paris beginning in the thirteenth century, Hatakeyama followed his Tokyo pictures with a Parisian series. For Ciel Tombé he photographed the tunnels beneath the Bois de Vincennes, a wooded park to the east of the city. The series title, which translates literally as “fallen sky,” is a term often used to describe the collapsed ceilings in Parisian underground tunnels. The resulting pictures, which share the dramatic lighting of his Shibuya River series, emphasise the fragility of a built environment exposed to the ravages of time. Hatakeyama has remarked that in these tunnels, “the sky has now become an ancient layer of earth permeating below the city [in which] we live.”
During 2009 and 2010 Hatakeyama was a photographer in residence in the Nord-Pas de Calais, a region in northern France along the Belgian border. A historically contested area often in the path of wars between France and its neighbours, the Nord became a major centre for industry in the nineteenth century due to its wealth of coal mines, steel mills, and textile factories. Today the landscape is marked by terrils, slag heaps composed of waste products from the mining process, which in the context of the region’s current economic troubles serve as monumental reminders of a prosperous industrial past.
Hatakeyama’s photographs explore the terrain from different perspectives, with conical towers of slag looming in nearly every picture. While some of the pictures expose the burnt orange soil just beneath the earth’s surface, others soften the mining site with a wintry, atmospheric haze. By transforming this man-made wasteland to the point that the viewer can no longer determine its contours, Hatakeyama reveals a complex natural environment that incorporates human developments. According to the artist, “history is not simply a list of events, but a human narrative which weaves together time and memory. The interweaving of passing time and the memory of events creates the fabric where History appears as a pattern from which each individual perceives his own personal story.” In these pictures Hatakeyama maps the traces of one such story on the landscape through the conical forms of the mining deposits. These “hills” not only serve as reminders of the ways in which the land has been used but also evoke the long-established cultural role of mountains as mythological symbols.
Naoya Hatakeyama’s series Rikuzentakata (2011) documents the devastating aftermath of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami in Japan. Throughout the series of sixty C-prints, Hatakeyama’s photographs depict scenes of torn landscapes and levelled homes, demolished villages and massive piles of detritus pummelled beyond recognition. The images serve as records of disaster, seemingly driven by an intense need to bear witness to collective trauma. Hatakeyama’s photographs, however, emerged from a painful and personal grief: the series focuses on the near-destruction of the artist’s hometown, an event which resulted in both his mother’s death and the deaths of many friends and neighbours. Rikuzentakata bears the ethical weight and responsibility of photojournalism even as its genesis comes out of a deeply felt loss and the ambiguity of survivor’s guilt. Hatakeyama suggests that what’s lost can never be fully recovered, but that with time, those wounds can slowly heal and life can begin again.
Curator: Thomas Schmutz, Curator and Deputy Director at Aargauer Kunsthaus
Many thankx to the Aargauer Kunsthaus for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Art Ringger (Swiss, b. 1946) Eastbourne 1996 Black-and-white photograph on aluminium, embossed 20.3 x 30.3cm Aargauer Kunsthaus Aarau / deposited by the Andreas Züst Collection
Art Ringger (Swiss, b. 1946) Quimperlé 1997 Black-and-white photograph on aluminium, embossed 19.9 x 29.7cm Aargauer Kunsthaus Aarau / deposited by the Andreas Züst Collection
Hannah Villiger (Swiss, 1951-1997) Arbeit 1979 Black-and-white photograph on baryte paper, matt 125 x 189.5cm Aargauer Kunsthaus Aarau / deposited by a private collection
Claudia Böhm Leda 1991 Black-and-white photograph with retouching colour on paper 40 x 56cm Aargauer Kunsthaus Aarau / deposited by the Andreas Züst Collection
Installation view of the exhibition Light Sensitive – Photo Art from the Collection at Aargauer Kunsthaus showing photographs from Balthasar Burkhard’s work Das Knie (The Knee) 1983 Photo: Dominic Büttner, Zurich
Balthasar Burkhard (Swiss, 1944-2010) Das Knie (The Knee) (detail) 1983 Photography on baryta paper in original iron frame and on colour canvas 270 x 91cm, photography; 150.3 x 50.3cm, colour canvas
The exhibition Light Sensitive presents works from the rich photography holdings of the Aargauer Kunsthaus. In addition, it shows photographs of urban spaces by Andreas Tschersich and works by Bianca Dugaro.
Light Sensitive is a presentation of works from the collection of the Aargauer Kunsthaus that focuses on the medium of photography. The exhibition delves into the museum’s rich and quite substantial holdings of over 800 photographic works, sounding out core themes. In the process, two thematic focus areas come to the fore: on the one hand an exploration of the human body and on the other an examination of abstract, architectural or public space.
The 20th century has seen a major shift in the status of photography as an artistic medium, a change reflected by the holdings of the Aargauer Kunsthaus. Starting out with rather small-scale works of a documentary nature, photography graduated to photo art and today naturally takes its place among the wide range of artistic media. The exhibition Light Sensitive takes us on a journey of discovery through the collection, contrasting big names with unexpected work. A series of large-scale cityscapes by Berlin-based Swiss artist Andreas Tschersich as well as works by Swiss artist Bianca Dugaro complement the presentation.
Included in the exhibition are works by, among others Claudia Böhm, Balthasar Burkhard, Marie-Antoinette Chiarenza / Daniel Hauser, Hans Danuser, Silvie Defraoui, Achim Duchow, Olivia Etter, Nicolas Faure, Marc-Antoine Fehr, Peter Fischli / David Weiss, Katrin Freisager, Max Grüter / Patrick Rohner, Simone Hopferwieser, Markus Käch, Heiner Kielholz, Fred Knecht Engelbert, Rudolf Lichtsteiner, Urs Lüthi, Max Matter, Billy Eduard Albert Meier, Claudio Moser, Marianne Müller, Anita Niesz, Guido Nussbaum, Sigmar Polke, Markus Raetz, Ursina Rösch, Annelies Štrba, Beat Streuli, Hannah Villiger.
Press release from the Aargauer Kunsthaus website
Installation view of the exhibition Light Sensitive: Photo Art from the Collection at Aargauer Kunsthaus showing the work of Andreas Tschersich including at left, Peripher 1903 (Detroit) 2011 (below); and at second left, Peripher 1337 (New York City) Nd (below) Photo: Dominic Büttner, Zurich
Andreas Tschersich (Swiss, b. 1971) Peripher 1903 (Detroit) 2011 C-Print / Diasec 198 x 167cm
Andreas Tschersich (Swiss, b. 1971) Peripher 1337 (New York City) Nd C-Print / acrylic glass
Andreas Tschersich (Swiss, b. 1971) Peripher 1827 (Detroit) Nd C-Print / acrylic glass
“This engagement with the place makes it become a part of me. They have kind of grown on me. This is the reason I try, whenever possible, to revisit them to see how they are going. Normally the places have become worse or are completely gone. I seem to have the right touch for disappearing places…”
~ Andreas Tschersich
Andreas Tschersich (Swiss, b. 1971) Peripher 130 (Berlin) 2004 C-Print / acrylic glass 219 x 170cm
Billy Eduard Albert Meier (Swiss, b. 1937) Ohne Titel 1975 Photograph on paper, 8 parts 18 x 26.5cm Aargauer Kunsthaus Aarau / deposited by the Andreas Züst Collection
Nicolas Faure (Swiss, b. 1949) Silvaplana (GR), Juli 1988 Colour photograph on aluminium 63 x 80cm Aargauer Kunsthaus Aarau
Nicolas Faure (Swiss, b. 1949) Saas-Fee (VS), Juli 1989 Colour photograph on aluminium 63 x 80cm Aargauer Kunsthaus Aarau
Nicolas Faure (Swiss, b. 1949) Le Lac Bleu. Val d’Arolla (VS), August 1997 Colour photograph on aluminium 63 x 80cm Aargauer Kunsthaus Aarau
Born in Geneva in 1949, Nicolas Faure left his native city in 1976 to settle in New York and learn the technique of photography. Self-taught, he acquired his training by working in a lab and shooting documentary photos for publications like Time Life Books and GEO. After taking part in the 1978 group project American Vision, Faure returned to Switzerland in 1982.
Through group and individual portraits, he observed the relationship the Swiss have with clothing and popular forms of leisure (tennis, swimming pools, bicycles, etc.). In the early 1990s his art began to take shape around Swiss landscapes that had been refashioned by human beings and their activities. His body of photographic work now developed in three successive series, Pierres fétiches (fetish stones), Schweizer Autobahnen (Swiss motorways) and Paysage A (landscape A).
Wim Wenders (German, b. 1945) Walled In 2005 Digital C-print 131 x 125cm Courtesy Wenders Images
I’m not a great fan of these “moody,” “simple, composed with clean lines and brilliant colours and mostly unpopulated” photographs. Essentially, I want photography to show me something, some essence of life that I have not seen, and then let the photograph speak to me again and again, to reveal itself over weeks and years. This doesn’t happen with these photographs. They are such derivate photographs (of, for example, the great Stephen Shore) and they certainly don’t take me places that are strange and quiet.
Wenders should learn how to frame a photograph properly. The bottom left hand corner of Sun Bather, Palermo (2007, below) is just an empty negative space that simply falls out the photograph. There is no containment here, no tensioning of the diagonal of the rocks and the line of the sun beds. The photographer has even tried to “burn in” the pavement to hold up this area of image (notice how the contrast has increased!), to no avail. A poorly visualised photograph. The same can be said for the left hand side of Open Air Screen, Palermo (2007, below). The photographer simply shows no understanding of how to construct a photograph, not a film.
One photograph that takes me to a strange and quiet place is the early image Dinosaur and Family, California (1983, below). Now this really works, the light, the family, the dinosaur, the eeriness and stillness. Yes. The other photograph I really like is The Painter’s Palette, Onomichi 2005 (below), a beautifully visualised rendering of colour and form, so painterly in its effect, so unsettling in its pictorial presence.
Usually I don’t say a harsh word in my postings but not in this case. Wim Wenders, you might be a great film director but please, stay away from photography. There are more interesting places for people to go, more deserving of their energy than looking at these overrated images.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thanx to Sammlung Falckenberg and Deichtorhallen Hamburg for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Wim Wenders (German, b. 1945) The Chopper 2005 Digital C-print 124.5 x 125cm Courtesy Wenders Images
Wim Wenders (German, b. 1945) Cowboy Clown, Brisbane 2006 C-print 132 x 148cm Courtesy Wenders Images
Wim Wenders (German, b. 1945) Moscow Back Yard 2006 C-print Courtesy Wenders Images
Wim Wenders (German, b. 1945) Policeman, Heiligendamm 2007 C-print 132 x 148cm Courtesy Wenders Images
The Falckenberg Collection presents in cooperation with Wenders Images Berlin an exhibition of photographs by the internationally renowned filmmaker and artist Wim Wenders (b. 1945). Bringing together almost 60 images, taken from 1983 to 2011, this show entitled “Places, strange and quiet” will feature many photographs not yet exhibited in Germany including several very recent works.
For “Places, strange and quiet” Wenders has assembled a fascinating series of large scale photographs taken in countries around the world from Salvador, Brazil; Palermo, Italy; Onomichi, Japan to Berlin, Germany; Brisbane, Australia, Armenia and the United States. From his iconic images of exteriors and buildings to his panoramic depictions of towns and landscapes, the exhibition will present the full range of Wenders’ work, exploring how he created and honed remarkable images that continue to resonate powerfully.
In his own words, “When you travel a lot, and when you love to just wander around and get lost, you can end up in the strangest spots. I have a huge attraction to places. Already when I look at a map, the names of mountains, villages, rivers, lakes or landscape formations excite me, as long as I don’t know them and have never been there … I seem to have sharpened my sense of place for things that are out of place. Everybody turns right, because that’s where it’s interesting, I turn left where there is nothing! And sure enough, I soon stand in front of my sort of place. I don’t know, it must be some sort of inbuilt radar that often directs me to places that are strangely quiet, or quietly strange.”
Wim Wenders is a multi-faceted artist: a painter, actor, writer and one of the most successful contemporary filmmakers. He first made his name as a leading director of the New German Cinema in the 1970s, and became a cult figure on the international film scene by the mid 1980s. It was in 1983, while scouting for locations for Paris, Texas (1984) that he began to use photography as an art medium in its own right. Wim Wenders was born in Düsseldorf in 1945. After two years of studying medicine and philosophy and a yearlong stay in Paris as a painter he attended the University of Television and Film in Munich from 1967 to 1970.
One of the most important figures to emerge from the “New German Cinema” period in the 1970s, he was a founding member of the German film distribution “Filmverlag der Autoren” in 1971 and he established his own production company “Road Movies” in Berlin in 1975. Alongside directing atmospheric auteur films Wenders works with the medium of photography, and his poignant images of desolate landscapes engage themes including memory, time and movement. A major survey of his photography, “Pictures from the surface of the Earth,” was exhibited in museums and art institutions worldwide. Wim Wenders has published numerous books with essays and photographs.”
Press release from the Deichtorhallen Hamburg website
Wim Wenders (German, b. 1945) Dinosaur and Family, California 1983 C-print 127.7 x 168.3 x 5cm Courtesy Wenders Images
Wim Wenders (German, b. 1945) Black Square 2002 C-print Courtesy Wenders Images
In Black Square (2002, New Mexico), the hues of blue and red contrast with, even highlight more saliently, the decaying wall and tatty old advert, which poignantly includes the words Why Not Now. This photograph shows a deft painterly skill with colour and composition, as does Street Corner in Butte (2003, Montana), with its sharp vertical and horizontal lines and stark contrasts that render the shadows almost black. With the bleak isolation and uncanny feel here, this could be a scene from an Edward Hopper (1924-67) painting; and Wenders’ nod to Hopper is clear in films like The End of Violence (1997), in which one scene recreates the painting Nighthawks (1946).
Wim Wenders (German, b. 1945) Street Corner Butte, Montana 2003 C-print 186 x 224cm Courtesy Wenders Images
These massive pictures work best when they serve Wenders’ painterly eye. So much contemporary colour photography is neutrally descriptive, offering a bland, flat, digital obviousness. Intensely expressive colour gives Wenders’ most involving images a super-reality that becomes an aspect of their strangeness and quietness. On the roof of a skyscraper in São Paolo, waiting for a helicopter taxi, he notices the spectacularly vivid greens of the air-conditioning units – something soft, green, alien and slightly alarming is growing inside, around one of the rims. In a secluded back yard in Moscow, he chances upon a framed painting of a stag done in orange, green and yellow, which is in curious, almost too perfect harmony with the walls and fallen leaves. In a Hopperesque return to an empty street corner in Butte, Montana, he finds broad strokes of yellow, ochre, brown, pale green and blue; at this inflated, painterly scale, every last brick registers as a lustrous dab of pigment.
Rick Poynor. “Wim Wenders’ Strange and Quiet Places,” on the Design Observer website 21st April 2011 [Online] Cited 03/08/2024. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Wim Wenders (German, b. 1945) The Quay Wall, Onomichi 2005 C-print 186 x 225.8cm Courtesy Wenders Images
Wim Wenders (German, b. 1945) The Painter’s Palette, Onomichi 2005 C-print 132.6 x 133cm Courtesy Wenders Images
Wim Wenders (German, b. 1945) On Mount Etna, Sicily 2007 C-print 186 x 213cm Courtesy Wenders Images
Wim Wenders (German, b. 1945) Sun Bather, Palermo 2007 C-print 132 x 148cm Courtesy Wenders Images
Wim Wenders (German, b. 1945) Open Air Screen, Palermo 2007 C-Print 186 x 213cm Courtesy Wenders Images
![Franck-François-Genès Chauvassaignes (French, 1831 - after 1900) 'Untitled [Female Nude in Studio]' 1856-1859 from the exhibition 'Naked Before the Camera' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, March - September, 2012](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/chauvassaignes_seated-nude-web.jpg "Franck-François-Genès Chauvassaignes (French, 1831 - after 1900) 'Untitled [Female Nude in Studio]' 1856-1859 from the exhibition 'Naked Before the Camera' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, March - September, 2012")
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![Eugène Durieu (French, 1800-1874) 'Untitled [Seated Female Nude]' 1853-1854](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/durieu_nude_ph8976-web.jpg "Eugène Durieu (French, 1800-1874) 'Untitled [Seated Female Nude]' 1853-1854")
![Charles Alphonse Marlé (French, 1821 - after 1867) 'Untitled [Standing Male Nude]' c. 1855](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/marle_standing-male-nude-web.jpg "Charles Alphonse Marlé (French, 1821 - after 1867) 'Untitled [Standing Male Nude]' c. 1855")
![Nadar (French, Paris 1820 - 1910 Paris) '[Standing Female Nude]' 1860-1861](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/nadar-standing-female-nude.jpg "Nadar (French, Paris 1820 - 1910 Paris) '[Standing Female Nude]' 1860-1861")
![Unknown photographer (French) '[Nude with Mirror]' c. 1850](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/nude-with-mirror.jpg "Unknown photographer (French) '[Nude with Mirror]' c. 1850")
![Julien Vallou de Villeneuve (French, 1795-1866) '[Reclining Female Nude]' c. 1853](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/julien-vallou-de-villeneuve-reclining-female-nude.jpg "Julien Vallou de Villeneuve (French, 1795-1866) '[Reclining Female Nude]' c. 1853")
![Unknown photographer (French) '[Standing Female Nude]' c. 1856](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/standing-female-nude.jpg "Unknown photographer (French) '[Standing Female Nude]' c. 1856")
![Unknown photographer (French) '[Standing Male Nude]' c. 1856](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/standing-male-nude.jpg "Unknown photographer (French) '[Standing Male Nude]' c. 1856")
![Unknown photographer (French) '[Female Nude with Mask]' c. 1870](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/female-nude-with-mask.jpg "Unknown photographer (French) '[Female Nude with Mask]' c. 1870")
![Albert Londe (French, 1858-1917) Paul Marie Louis Pierre Richer (French, 1849-1933) '[Male Musculature Study]' c. 1890](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/male-study.jpg "Albert Londe (French, 1858-1917) Paul Marie Louis Pierre Richer (French, 1849-1933) '[Male Musculature Study]' c. 1890")
![Guglielmo Plüshow (Italian born Germany, 1852–1930) '[Young Male Nude Seated on Leopard Skin]' 1890s-1900s](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/plushow-young-male-nude-seated-on-leopard-skin.jpg "Guglielmo Plüshow (Italian born Germany, 1852–1930) '[Young Male Nude Seated on Leopard Skin]' 1890s-1900s")
![Lady Ottoline Violet Anne Cavendish-Bentinck Morrell (British, 1873-1938) '[Cavorting by the Pool at Garsington]' c. 1916](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/cavendish-bentinck-morrell-cavorting-by-the-pool-at-garsington.jpg "Lady Ottoline Violet Anne Cavendish-Bentinck Morrell (British, 1873-1938) '[Cavorting by the Pool at Garsington]' c. 1916")
![Lady Ottoline Violet Anne Cavendish-Bentinck Morrell (British, 1873-1938) '[Cavorting by the Pool at Garsington]' c. 1916](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/cavendish-bentinck-morrell-cavorting-by-the-pool-at-garsington-a.jpg "Lady Ottoline Violet Anne Cavendish-Bentinck Morrell (British, 1873-1938) '[Cavorting by the Pool at Garsington]' c. 1916")
![Edward Weston (American, Highland Park, Illinois 1886 - 1958 Carmel, California) '[Nude]' 1925](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/weston-nude.jpg "Edward Weston (American, Highland Park, Illinois 1886 - 1958 Carmel, California) '[Nude]' 1925")
![George Platt Lynes (American, East Orange, New Jersey 1907–1955 New York) '[Male Nude]' 1930s](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/lynes-male-nude-1.jpg)
![Mark Morrisroe (American, 1959-1989) 'Untitled [Two Men in Silhouette]' c. 1987](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/16_morrisroe_untitled-web.jpg "Mark Morrisroe (American, 1959-1989) 'Untitled [Two Men in Silhouette]' c. 1987")
![Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American, 1899-1968) 'Untitled [Anthony Esposito, booked on suspicion of killing a policeman, New York]' January 16, 1941 from the exhibition 'Weegee: Murder Is My Business' at the International Center of Photography, New York, January - September, 2012](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/3-weegee_anthony-esposito-web.jpg "Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American, 1899-1968) 'Untitled [Anthony Esposito, booked on suspicion of killing a policeman, New York]' January 16, 1941 from the exhibition 'Weegee: Murder Is My Business' at the International Center of Photography, New York, January - September, 2012")
![Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American, 1899-1968) 'Untitled [Installation view of "Weegee: Murder Is My Business" at the Photo League, New York]' 1941](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/17-weegee_19982_1993-web.jpg "Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American, 1899-1968) 'Untitled [Installation view of \"Weegee: Murder Is My Business\" at the Photo League, New York]' 1941")
![Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American, 1899-1968) 'Untitled [Installation view of "Weegee: Murder Is My Business" at the Photo League, New York]' 1941](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/6-weegee_19969_1993-web.jpg "Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American, 1899-1968) 'Untitled [Installation view of \"Weegee: Murder Is My Business\" at the Photo League, New York]' 1941")
![Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American, 1899-1968) 'Untitled [Installation view of "Weegee: Murder Is My Business" at the Photo League, New York]' 1941](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/15-weegee_19961_1993-web.jpg "Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American, 1899-1968) 'Untitled [Installation view of \"Weegee: Murder Is My Business\" at the Photo League, New York]' 1941")
![Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American, 1899-1968) 'Untitled [Installation view of "Weegee: Murder Is My Business" at the Photo League, New York]' 1941](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/16-weegee_19972_1993-web.jpg "Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American, 1899-1968) 'Untitled [Installation view of \"Weegee: Murder Is My Business\" at the Photo League, New York]' 1941")
![Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American, 1899-1968) 'Untitled ["Ruth Snyder Murder" wax display, Eden Musée, Coney Island, New York]' c. 1941](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/5-weegee_7221_1993-web.jpg "Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American, 1899-1968) 'Untitled [\"Ruth Snyder Murder\" wax display, Eden Musée, Coney Island, New York]' c. 1941")
![Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American, 1899-1968) 'Untitled [Hats in a pool room, Mulberry Street, New York]' c. 1943](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/14-weegee_15595_1993-web.jpg "Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American, 1899-1968) 'Untitled [Hats in a pool room, Mulberry Street, New York]' c. 1943")
![Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American, 1899-1968) 'Untitled [Body of Dominick Didato, Elizabeth Street, New York]' August 7, 1936](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/8-weegee_2070_1993-web.jpg "Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American, 1899-1968) 'Untitled [Body of Dominick Didato, Elizabeth Street, New York]' August 7, 1936")
![Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American, 1899-1968) 'Untitled [Police officer and lodge member looking at blanket-covered body of woman trampled to death in excursion-ship stampede, New York]' August 18, 1941](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/11-weegee_1016_1993-web.jpg "Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American, 1899-1968) 'Untitled [Police officer and lodge member looking at blanket-covered body of woman trampled to death in excursion-ship stampede, New York]' August 18, 1941")
![Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American, 1899-1968) 'Untitled [Police officer and assistant removing body of Reception Hospital ambulance driver Morris Linker from East River, New York]' August 24, 1943](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/9-weegee_133_1982-web.jpg "Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American, 1899-1968) 'Untitled [Police officer and assistant removing body of Reception Hospital ambulance driver Morris Linker from East River, New York]' August 24, 1943")
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![Nadar [Gaspard Félix Tournachon] (French, 1820-1910) 'George Sand (Amandine-Aurore-Lucile Dupin), Writer' c. 1865](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/realideal5-web.jpg "Nadar [Gaspard Félix Tournachon] (French, 1820-1910) 'George Sand (Amandine-Aurore-Lucile Dupin), Writer' c. 1865")
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