Exhibition: ‘Arthur Tress: Rambles, Dreams, and Shadows’ at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Exhibition dates: 31st October, 2023 – 18th February, 2024

Warning: This posting contains photographs of male nudity and sexual activity.

Installation view of the exhibition Arthur Tress: Rambles, Dreams, and Shadows at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles showing the work Boy in Flood Dream, Ocean City, Maryland 1971

Arthur Tress: fantastical photographer

Definition of ‘fantastical’
1. strange, weird, or fanciful in appearance, conception, etc.
2. created in the mind; illusory.

I honour the work of Arthur Tress. Strange and wonderful, like something out of a fairytale or a nightmare, Arthur Tress’ ‘imaginary’ stories take the viewer out of themselves and into a different realm of being and believing. His staged, performative “magic realism” photographs – featuring the inclusion of fantastic or mythical elements into seemingly realistic fiction – emerge from the psyche of the artist, from his deepest thoughts, feelings and dreams.

Taking advice from that another gay photographer, American Duane Michals (who works in sequences of images to tell stories), Michals told Tress that “a photograph can be anything”. As Michals insightfully observes,

“I believe in the imagination. What I cannot see is infinitely more important than what I can see…

Everything we experience is in our mind. It is all mind. What you are reading now, hearing now, feeling now…

There is not one photography. There is no photography. The only value judgment is the work itself. Does it move, touch, fill me?”1

It’s all in the mind.

Tress discovered his own way to tell stories, his own signature style, that was completely different from anything being accomplished in New York at the time by (for example) Robert Mapplethorpe, Peter Hujar, Diane Arbus, David Wojnarowicz, or Nan Goldin. Through the transmutation of metal into gold, or dream into photograph, Tress placed himself outside the trendy happenings of the Big Apple. In images such as the early Woman with Coin Operated Binoculars, Coit Tower, San Francisco (1964, below) – redolent of what was to follow – the disturbing Boy with Root Hands, New York (1970, below), Bride and Groom, New York, New York (1970, below) and Boy in Flood Dream, Ocean City, Maryland (1971, below), Tress reaches out an illuminates the dreams, desires and fears of children and adults.

What is disappointing is that neither the media images nor the accompanying text include any images from or text about what I feel is one of Tress’ strongest bodies of work, his photographs of gay fantasies. Can we not include these images for fear of upsetting delicate conservative sensibilities? I don’t know whether there were any included in the exhibition either, having not seen the presentation in person.

Again, created from the artist’s fantasies and imagination these works posses a tremendous élan vital, a celebration of sexuality and life. They also possess intelligence and wit a plenty. Witness, Band-aid Fantasy (1978, below) which is clever and sensitive in its fetishisation of the removal of a Band-aid from a friend; or the look on the face of Superman and the male subject in Superman Fantasy (1977, below) where one cock belongs to both: the penis of the male “standing” in for that of the super man, standing in for the always hidden power of Superman’s cock represented by the (irony: cut-out cardboard) phallic armoured body of the hyper-masculine hero, desired by the male with his lustful look. The photograph makes me laugh. If you are so further inclined, there are six pages of these wonderful gay fantasies on the Stanford Libraries Arthur Tress Photograph Collection web pages. Well worth a visit.

To my mind, Arthur Tress has always been an underrated artist. A courageous and dedicated photographer who forged an extra-ordinary magical path, it is a pleasure to see his work exhibited at the Getty.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

1/ Duane Michals June 20, 1976 September 1, 1976

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

“Tress credits his friend and fellow photographer Duane Michals with opening his eyes to the possibilities of his chosen medium in the 1960s, back when Tress’ photographs hewed more closely to the prevalent “documentary” style of the day. “He said a photograph can be anything,” Tress says, describing Michals’ approach. “It can be a sequence, you can write on the photograph, paint on it, make collages, tell a story. In the ’60s, that was revolutionary.”

As it turned out, Tress was a receptive audience for Michals’ manifesto. By the time the Brooklyn native had secured his breakthrough assignment in 1969 to photograph what he describes as the “endangered folk cultures” of Appalachia, Tress was already pushing against the dispassion of the documentary style.”

Ben Marks. “How One Artist Makes New Art From Old Coloring Books and Found Photos,” on the Collectors Weekly website August 26th, 2021 [Online] Cited 10/11/2023

The first exhibition to chronicle the early career of Arthur Tress, one of the most innovative American photographers of the postwar era. During his first decade as an emergent professional in the New York photography world (1968-1978), his artistic practice evolved from being rooted in the social documentary tradition to a bold new approach drawing inspiration from the inner worlds of fantasies, daydreams, and nightmares.

Arthur Tress (American, b. 1940)
Boy in Flood Dream, Ocean City, Maryland
1971
From the series Dream Collector
Gelatin silver print
J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Arthur Tress Archive LLC

One of Tress’s best known images from his Dream Collectors photobook, the photograph depicts a child emerging out of a discarded roof on a pier in Ocean City, Maryland. The effectiveness of this composition is remarkable given that Tress stumbled on the site and the subject by chance.

Wall label

Installation view of the exhibition Arthur Tress: Rambles, Dreams, and Shadows at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles showing Boy in Flood Dream, Ocean City, Maryland (1971, above)

Installation views of the exhibition Arthur Tress: Rambles, Dreams, and Shadows at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles showing works from his Shadows series in the bottom image

Arthur Tress’s Magic Realism Comes to Getty

Drawn from his imagination, dreams, and queer identity, Arthur Tress’s photography presents a surrealist world with fantastical subjects In the field of staged photography, Arthur Tress (American, born 1940) was a trailblazer, directing his subjects in fictional and often surreal scenes.

The first exhibition to chronicle his early career, Arthur Tress: Rambles, Dreams, and Shadows, on view October 31, 2023 – February 18, 2024 at the Getty Center, examines how his artistic practice evolved from being rooted in the social documentary tradition to a bold new approach drawing inspiration from fantasies, daydreams, and nightmares.

“Tress’s early work from his Dream Collector and other related series constitutes a remarkable artistic achievement and a major contribution to the history of post-war photography and the photo book,” says Timothy Potts, Maria Hummer-Tuttle and Robert Tuttle Director of the J. Paul Getty Museum. “In a series of increasingly radical projects, Tress delved deeply into the worlds of surrealism and the unconscious, establishing himself as one of the most interesting mavericks of his generation.”

Born in Brooklyn, New York, Tress began his career as a documentary photographer in the late 1960’s, focusing his lens on the people of New York and the Appalachian region of the eastern United States. Initially concerned with such societal issues as poverty, pollution, and lack of open space for urban recreation, by the mid-1970s he began channeling his creative energy into more personal artistic projects that reflected his imagination, dreams, and his own queer identity.

This exhibition presents highlights from Tress’s major photographic projects dating from 1968 to 1978: Appalachia: The Disturbed Land; Open Space in the Inner City; The Dream Collector; Shadow; Theater of Mind; and The Ramble.

Tress’s early work is rooted in the social documentary tradition, recalling photographs made by Depression-era artists for the U.S. government. Tress’s Appalachia: The Disturbed Land captures scenes of poverty and environmental degradation in coal mining communities. The work was originally exhibited at the Sierra Club’s gallery in New York where it garnered positive reviews.

Tress’s next major project, Open Space in the Inner City, also reflects his concern for the environment as well as his interest in documenting problems facing young people. Set primarily in New York City and its environs, the photographs show polluted streetscapes and waterways, housing projects, junkyards, factories, and parking lots, and include both candid and posed images of children, families, and commuters. A central theme of the series is the general lack of open space for recreation.

Appearing as his first major photo book in 1972, The Dream Collector visualises children’s fantasies and nightmares. This body of work cemented Tress’s reputation for staging macabre and fantastic subjects at a time when the photography world was largely dedicated to prosaic realism.

Between 1972 and 1975 Tress created a series of photographs centered on his own shadow. The images reproduced in his photobook Shadow trace the mystical dream journey of an individual soul through birth, death, and enlightenment. Tress chose to use a wide-angle lens that alters the perspective and imparts a dreamlike quality. His only light source was the sun, which made early morning or late afternoon the ideal times to shoot, as the raking light lengthened the shadows, making them more dramatic.

In Theater of the Mind Tress explored his personal anxieties as well as the complexities of family relationships. He convinced his subjects to play out dramatic and sometimes disturbing scenes for the camera which were informed by the artist’s own psychic intuitions. Afterwards, when he shared the photographs with them, his sitters often remarked on his having illuminated an important but hitherto hidden aspect of their family dynamic.

One of Tress’s most personal bodies of work is an extraordinary series depicting the Ramble, a wooded section of Central Park in New York City known as a gay cruising ground. The Ramble was a personal photographic project that he did not exhibit or publish, as doing so could have exposed his subjects to embarrassment, harassment, or violence. Tress was still struggling with his sexuality at this time and making these pictures helped allay his anxieties, giving him something else to focus on in the Ramble aside from his own furtive sexual encounters.

“By revisiting an energetic decade of professional and personal work from 1968 to 1978, this exhibition enabled me to see more clearly how these early explorative years marked the beginning of a very personal vision, unique to myself, as an emerging photo artist – a peculiar combination of documentary realism and emotional responsiveness to the hidden mysteries of everyday life,” says Arthur Tress.

“I’m excited to have this amazing opportunity both in our exhibition and its accompanying catalogue to share an extraordinary body of work that is not well known to the general public, and to narrate the remarkable story behind Tress’s early career that has remained untold,” says Jim Ganz, senior curator in the Getty Museum’s Department of Photographs.

Arthur Tress: Rambles, Dreams, and Shadows is curated by Jim Ganz with Paul Martineau, curator in the Department of Photographs. Related programming includes Magic Realism: An Evening with Arthur Tress, where Tress will discuss his bold approach to photography, and the world premiere of Arthur Tress: Water’s Edge, an immersive journey into the life and unique vision of acclaimed photographer Arthur Tress. The exhibition is also accompanied by a catalogue, Arthur Tress: Rambles, Dreams, and Shadows.

Anonymous. “Arthur Tress’s Magic Realism Comes to Getty,” on the Getty website Oct 18, 2023 [Online] Cited 28/10/2023

Arthur Tress: Water’s Edge – Trailer

Trailer for feature length documentary about fantasist/surrealist photographer Arthur Tress. Directed by Stephen B. Lewis

Arthur Tress (American, b. 1940)
Woman with Coin Operated Binoculars, Coit Tower, San Francisco
1964
Gelatin silver print
© Arthur Tress Archive LLC

Not sure whether this photograph is in the exhibition. Used under fair use conditions for the purpose of education, research, review and comment

Arthur Tress (American, b. 1940)
Girl and Moon Dream, New York, New York
1968
Gelatin silver print
J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Arthur Tress Archive LLC

Arthur Tress (American, b. 1940)
Girl with Doll’s Head, Capels, West Virginia
1968
From the series Appalachia: The Disturbed Land
Gelatin silver print
20.4 × 15.7cm (8 1/16 × 6 3/16 in.)
J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Gift of the Ottersons
© Arthur Tress Archive LLC

Arthur Tress Appalachia: The Disturbed Land proof sheet 1968

Arthur Tress (American, b. 1940)
Boy with Hockey Gloves (Hockey Glove Fantasy)
1968
Gelatin silver print
© Arthur Tress Archive LLC

A Kind of Magic

Photographer Arthur Tress’s “shaman vision quest dream journey”

Photographer Arthur Tress revels in the weird and fantastic – a hand sticking out of a bus seat, boys blending in with trees, children and adults playing against backdrops of rubble and trash – dark, spooky, unnerving images.

Tress, who spent time in his early career as a documentary photographer and traveled widely, staged his photographs to set a mood and tell a story.

Tress is one of the foremost practitioners of staged photography. He’s well known for his surreal photobooks, especially The Dream Collector (1972), but his career began earlier, in the 1960s, with commercial projects that encouraged his artistic development and anticipated his later fantastical works.

Arthur Tress: Rambles, Dreams, and Shadows (out now from Getty) looks closely at the artist’s early career, from 1968 to 1978, from his travels abroad through his return to the United States, stopping in Sweden, Russia, Appalachia, New York, San Francisco, and many other places. The images and quotations below are drawn from the exhibition catalog and take you into his world.

Tress traveled to Appalachia several times early in his career, and he became increasingly passionate about accurately representing the character of the destitute yet beautiful region and its people. Photographs curator Mazie Harris writes that the twisted branches and lonely image reflect the region’s “barren future.”

In 1969 Tress photographed “the Ramble,” known as a gay cruising ground in New York’s Central Park. But he never published this work, says photographs curator James Ganz, “because doing so could have exposed the photographer and his subjects to embarrassment or harassment.” Even the act of taking these pictures was dangerous at the time. This body of work is a deeply personal, intimate expression and probing of Tress’s identity as a gay man and also reflects much about the culture of the time and the anxieties, fears, and longings experienced by members of his community.

The image Hobby Horses, Harlem River, Bronx, New York (1970, below) is part of Tress’s series Open Space in the Inner City (1969-1971). It shows his environmentalism, which he cultivated throughout his travels, especially in his exploration of Appalachia. Having settled in New York after living in Sweden, Tress was shocked by the rampant urban blight and crowding in the city and how few open spaces there were for people to play, thrive, and live. His series helped bring attention to this widespread civic issue and was shown by institutions like the Sierra Club and the New York State Council on the Arts.

While Tress was at work on what would become his Dream Collector series, he sought the advice of famed children’s author Maurice Sendak, who is most widely known for the book Where the Wild Things Are. At the end of their visit, Tress offered Sendak the choice of one of Tress’s photographs, and Sendak picked Wild Man of the Forest, Central Park, New York (1969, below) which “evoke[s] the archetypal figure of the medieval wild man of the woods.”

Between 1972 and 1975 Tress created a series and photobook called Shadow. The work Shadow, Cannes, France (negative 1974; print 1975, below), featuring the artist and shadows cast by a sculpture of birds, appeared toward the end of the book in a section titled “Magic Flight.” Curator of photographs Paul Martineau says this picture – juxtaposed with other images of imprisoned shadows – symbolises freedom and “traces a mystical dream journey of an individual soul from the past to the present and into the future, through birth, death, and enlightenment.”

“[This] photograph of my father in a snowstorm is, in fact, a kind of surrogate self-portrait that mirrors my own hollow fearfulness about my own body’s decline and disappearance into a cold emptiness,” Tress wrote in a 2022 letter to curator Paul Martineau. [Last Portrait of My Father, New York, New York, 1978 below]

In 1970 Tress wrote about the magical properties of a photograph, and, surely, he is a visual magician, an artist possessed of a creative vision and intuition that allows him to connect to his subjects in a deep, revelatory way. Tress’s images pull you into his imagined, constructed worlds. His work is mysterious, surprising, surreal, and dreamlike. His images, the product of personal experiences and feelings, are universal in their play on and exploration of human fears, desires, and longings. He once described his series Shadow as a “shaman vision quest dream journey.”

Rachel Barth. “A Kind of Magic,” on the Getty website Nov 07, 2023 [Online] Cited 10/11/2023

Arthur Tress (American, b. 1940)
My Face in Store Window, New York, New York
1969
Gelatin silver print
Collection David Knaus
© Arthur Tress Archive LLC

Arthur Tress (American, b. 1940)
Cemetery, Queens, New York
1969
Gelatin silver print
J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Arthur Tress Archive LLC

Arthur Tress (American, b. 1940)
Boy in Burnt-Out Furniture Store, Newark, New Jersey
1969
Gelatin silver print
© Arthur Tress Archive LLC

In July 1969, while photographing the site of the Newark race riots that had occurred two summers earlier, Tress wrote to his sister that the police took him in for questioning. “They could have arrested me for being in the abandoned buildings – so I was very polite to them.”

Wall label

Arthur Tress (American, b. 1940)
Wild Man of the Forest, Central Park, New York
1969
Gelatin silver print
13 3/4 x 10 3/4 in.
J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Gift of Trixy Castro
© Arthur Tress Archive LLC

While Tress was at work on what would become his Dream Collector series, he sought the advice of famed children’s author Maurice Sendak, who is most widely known for the book Where the Wild Things Are. At the end of their visit, Tress offered Sendak the choice of one of Tress’s photographs, and Sendak picked Wild Man of the Forest, Central Park, New York, which “evoke[s] the archetypal figure of the medieval wild man of the woods.”

Arthur Tress (American, b. 1940)
Woman in Railroad Yard, Brooklyn, New York
1969
From the series Open Space in the Inner City
Gelatin silver print
J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Gift of David A. Cohen and Laurie K. Cohen
© Arthur Tress Archive LLC

Arthur Tress (American, b. 1940)
Boy on Bike Crossing Williamsburg Bridge, New York
1969
From the series Open Space in the Inner City
Gelatin silver print
40.2 × 50cm (15 13/16 × 19 11/16 in.)
J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Gift of Gregory V. Gooding
© Arthur Tress Archive LLC

Arthur Tress (American, b. 1940)
Two Men Cruising, Central Park, New York
1969
From the series The Ramble
Gelatin silver print
Collection David Knaus
© Arthur Tress Archive LLC

Arthur Tress (American, b. 1940)
Dog Walker, Central Park, New York
1969, printed 2007
From the series The Ramble
Gelatin silver print
Collection David Knaus
© Arthur Tress Archive LLC

Arthur Tress (American, b. 1940)
Young Man in Woods, Central Park, New York
1969
Gelatin silver print
9 3/4 x 7 3/4 in.
J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Arthur Tress Archive LLC

Arthur Tress (American, b. 1940)
Boy in Central Park (Rambles), New York City
1969
Gelatin silver print
© Arthur Tress Archive LLC

Arthur Tress (American, b. 1940)
Gay Activists at First Gay Pride Parade, Christopher Street, New York
Negative 1970
Gelatin silver print
J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Arthur Tress Archive LLC

Arthur Tress (American, b. 1940)
Bruce at Dawn, Paper Flower Maker, East Village, New York
1970
Gelatin silver print
J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Arthur Tress Archive LLC

Arthur Tress (American, b. 1940)
Friends Playing Cards, Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, New York
1970
Gelatin silver print
J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Arthur Tress Archive LLC

Arthur Tress (American, b. 1940)
Boy with Root Hands, New York
1970
From the series Dream Collector
Gelatin silver print
J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Arthur Tress Archive LLC

Arthur Tress (American, b. 1940)
Teenage Boys, Bronx High School of Science, Bronx, New York
1970, printed later
From the series Open Space in the Inner City
Gelatin silver print
J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Gift of Jon and Ellen Vein Family
© Arthur Tress Archive LLC

Arthur Tress (American, b. 1940)
Hobby Horses, Harlem River, Bronx, New York
1970
Gelatin silver print
8 7/8 x 7 13/16 in.
J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Gift of J. Patrick and Patricia A. Kennedy
© Arthur Tress Archive LLC

The above image is part of Tress’s series Open Space in the Inner City (1969-1971). It shows his environmentalism, which he cultivated throughout his travels, especially in his exploration of Appalachia. Having settled in New York after living in Sweden, Tress was shocked by the rampant urban blight and crowding in the city and how few open spaces there were for people to play, thrive, and live. His series helped bring attention to this widespread civic issue and was shown by institutions like the Sierra Club and the New York State Council on the Arts.

Arthur Tress (American, b. 1940)
Boy with Basketball, Bronx, New York
1970
From the series The Dream Collector
Gelatin silver print
34 × 26.6cm (13 3/8 × 10 1/2 in.)
J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Arthur Tress Archive LLC

Arthur Tress (American, b. 1940)
Woman in Shopping Center Parking Lot, Lackawanna, New York
1970
From the series Open Space in the Inner City
Gelatin silver print
23.3 × 19.6cm (9 3/16 × 7 11/16 in.)
J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Gift of J. Patrick and Patricia A. Kennedy
© Arthur Tress Archive LLC

Arthur Tress (American, b. 1940)
Minette as Gloria Swanson in Ruins of Fox Theater, Brooklyn, New York
1971
Gelatin silver print
J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Arthur Tress Archive LLC

Arthur Tress (American, b. 1940)
Boy in Tin Cone, Bronx, New York
1972
From the series The Dream Collector
Gelatin silver print
J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Arthur Tress Archive LLC

Arthur Tress (American, b. 1940)
Hand on Train, Staten Island, New York
1972
From the series The Dream Collector
Gelatin silver print
J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Arthur Tress Archive LLC

Arthur Tress (American, b. 1940)
Girl With Dunce Cap, P.S. 3, New York, New York
1972
From the series The Dream Collector
Gelatin silver print
26.4 × 26.4cm (10 3/8 × 10 3/8 in.)
J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Arthur Tress Archive LLC

Installation view of the exhibition Arthur Tress: Rambles, Dreams, and Shadows at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles showing Hockey Player, New York (1972, below)

Arthur Tress (American, b. 1940)
Hockey Player, New York
1972
Gelatin silver print
© Arthur Tress Archive LLC

Arthur Tress (American, b. 1940)
Shadow, Cannes, France
Negative 1974; print 1975
Gelatin silver print,
19.4 × 19.2cm (7 5/8 × 7 9/16 in.)
J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Gift of John V. and Laure M. Knaus
© Arthur Tress Archive LLC

Between 1972 and 1975 Tress created a series and photobook called Shadow. The above work, featuring the artist and shadows cast by a sculpture of birds, appeared toward the end of the book in a section titled “Magic Flight.” Curator of photographs Paul Martineau says this picture – juxtaposed with other images of imprisoned shadows – symbolises freedom and “traces a mystical dream journey of an individual soul from the past to the present and into the future, through birth, death, and enlightenment.”

Arthur Tress (American, b. 1940)
Dream Therapist, Harold Ellis, New York, New York
1975
Gelatin silver print
J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Arthur Tress Archive LLC

Arthur Tress (American, b. 1940)
Girl Running Away from Dinosaur, Santa Cruz, CA
Nd
Gelatin silver print
© Arthur Tress Archive LLC

Arthur Tress (American, b. 1940)
Last Portrait of My Father, New York, New York
1978
Gelatin silver print
15 1/8 x 14 7/8 in.
Collection of David Knaus
© Arthur Tress Archive LLC

Rachel Barth. “A Kind of Magic,” on the Getty website Nov 07, 2023 [Online] Cited 10/11/2023

Installation view of the exhibition Arthur Tress: Rambles, Dreams, and Shadows at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles showing the work Bride and Groom, New York, New York 1970 (below)

Arthur Tress (American, b. 1940)
Bride and Groom, New York, New York
1970
From the series Theater of the Mind
Gelatin silver print
41.7 × 40.2cm (16 7/16 × 15 13/16 in.)
J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Gift of Gregory V. Gooding
© Arthur Tress Archive LLC

Arthur Tress (American, b. 1940)
Hermaphrodite between Venus and Mercury, East Hampton, New York
1973
Gelatin silver print
© Arthur Tress Archive LLC

Used under fair use conditions for the purpose of education, research, review and comment

Arthur Tress (American, b. 1940)
Self-Portrait with Lobster, Bar Harbor, Maine
1974
Gelatin silver print
17.7 x 17.7cm
Collection of the artist

Arthur Tress (American, b. 1940)
Boot Fantasy, New York
1977
Gelatin silver print
26 x 26cm
J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Gift of David Knaus

Arthur Tress (American, b. 1940)
Superman Fantasy
1977
Gelatin silver print
© Arthur Tress Archive LLC

Used under fair use conditions for the purpose of education, research, review and comment

Arthur Tress (American, b. 1940)
Drill Fantasy
1977
Gelatin silver print
© Arthur Tress Archive LLC

Used under fair use conditions for the purpose of education, research, review and comment

Arthur Tress (American, b. 1940)
Two Men, Two Rooms
1977
Gelatin silver print
© Arthur Tress Archive LLC

Used under fair use conditions for the purpose of education, research, review and comment

Arthur Tress (American, b. 1940)
Band-aid Fantasy
1978
Gelatin silver print
© Arthur Tress Archive LLC

Used under fair use conditions for the purpose of education, research, review and comment

Arthur Tress (American, b. 1940)
Lumberjack Fantasy
1980
Gelatin silver print
© Arthur Tress Archive LLC

Used under fair use conditions for the purpose of education, research, review and comment

Arthur Tress (American, b. 1940)
Two Surfers, Ft. Lauderdale
1980
Gelatin silver print
J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Arthur Tress Archive LLC

Arthur Tress (American, b. 1940)
Child’s Dream of Redwood Monster, Santa Cruz, California
1971
From the series The Dream Collector
Gelatin silver print
J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Arthur Tress Archive LLC

Child’s Dream of Redwood Monster, Santa Cruz, CA, 1971 on the cover

Arthur Tress: Rambles, Dreams, and Shadows book

Edited by James A. Ganz, with contributions by Mazie M. Harris and Paul Martineau

This richly illustrated volume is the first critical look at the early career of Arthur Tress, a key proponent of magical realism and staged photography.

Arthur Tress (b. 1940) is a singular figure in the landscape of postwar American photography. His seminal series, The Dream Collector, depicts Tress’s interests in dreams, nightmares, fantasies, and the unconscious and established him as one of the foremost proponents of magical realism at a time when few others were doing staged photography.

This volume presents the first critical look at Tress’s early career, contextualising the highly imaginative, fantastic work he became known for while also examining his other interrelated series: Appalachia: People and Places; Open Space in the Inner City; Shadow; and Theater of the Mind. James A. Ganz, Mazie M. Harris, and Paul Martineau plumb Tress’s work and archives, studying ephemera, personal correspondence, unpublished notes, diaries, contact sheets, and more to uncover how he went from earning his living as a social documentarian in Appalachia to producing surreal work of “imaginative fiction.” This abundantly illustrated volume imparts a fuller understanding of Tress’s career and the New York photographic scene of the 1960s and 1970s.

This volume is published to accompany an exhibition on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center from October 31, 2023, to February 18, 2024.

James A. Ganz is senior curator in the Department of Photographs at the J. Paul Getty Museum.

“Along with several others of his cohort, Arthur Tress spearheaded the resurgence of the directorial mode in the 1970s, as well as his generation’s engagement with previously taboo subject matter. With his unique blend of documentary and surrealist approaches, he has made a major contribution to his medium.”

~ A. D. Coleman, photography critic and historian

264 pages
9 1/2 x 11 inches
17 color and 198 b/w illustrations
ISBN 978-1-60606-861-8
hardcover

Getty Publications
Imprint: J. Paul Getty Museum

Arthur Tress: Rambles, Dreams, and Shadows book cover

Arthur Tress: Rambles, Dreams, and Shadows pp. 30-31

Arthur Tress: Rambles, Dreams, and Shadows pp. 40-41

Arthur Tress: Rambles, Dreams, and Shadows pp. 82-83

The J. Paul Getty Museum
1200 Getty Center Drive
Los Angeles, California 90049

Opening hours:
Daily 10am – 5pm

The J. Paul Getty Museum website

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Exhibition: ‘Daido Moriyama: A Retrospective’ at The Photographers’ Gallery, London

Exhibition dates: 6th October 2023 – 11th February 2024

Curator: Thyago Nogueira, Instituto Moreira Salles, São Paulo, Brazil

Daido Moriyama (Japanese, b. 1938)
Yokosuka
1965
From Japan, a Photo Theater
© Daido Moriyama/Daido Moriyama Photo Foundation

“We are living in a time when, to borrow a phrase and book title of Sigmund Freud’s, civilization and its discontents are becoming painfully evident to us all. Our machine age technology with its private greed, ecologically disastrous policies, crass materialism, human alienation, incessant strife and conflict, and the portent of man’s destroying himself by his own recklessness, is taking its toll in terms of our confidence and optimism about life. …

When we turn to our popular culture – which includes the arts – for diversion and meaning, we are confused, oftentimes, by the welter of contradictory impressions. We are trivialized and mesmerized by the pap that is purveyed on the television and radio, and in newspapers and magazines. We take away from our experience with these forms of entertainment a sense of having spent time but not having been taught anything or having been ennobled. We learn without understanding and visualize without seeing.”

John Anson Warner. “Introduction” to The Life & Art of the North American Indian. London: Hamlyn, 1975, p. 6.

Photography and its discontents

I love Moriyama’s early gritty, surreal, street snap style, high contrast black and white photographs. They possess a certain air, a certain essentialness, established through the artist’s unique aesthetic “famously known by the Japanese phrase ‘are, bure, boke’ (meaning ‘grainy, blurry, out of focus’).” The images are memorable and unforgettable.

I am far lest convinced by Moriyama’s contemporary photographs. His attempts to democratise the image – where he is trying to create something more automatic and where each image becomes of equal importance and meaning – leads to the collective banality of photography. As Diane Smyth observes, “I think he clearly understands that this banality, this horizontality is an essential aspect of photography.”

Instead of a hierarchical system of valuing significant images, Moriyama “rejected the dogmatism of art and the veneration of vintage prints, making the accessible and reproducible aspects of photography its most radical asset.” (Press release)

“Since the 1990s he has used a digital camera to make colour photographs, looking at advertisements in shopping malls and beyond. He is interested in the idea that the image is becoming more present in reality, in certain cases even substituting our reality. His work from the 2000s envelops the architecture of the gallery with vinyls, he makes huge patterns of images that go from floor to ceiling. Of course he’s anticipating our lives completely connected to screens, to these multiple virtual realities of the image which are making and in a way eliminating the real world.”2

As Paul Virlio has observed, images contaminate us like viruses. He suggests that they communicate by contamination, by infection. In our ‘media’ or ‘information’ society we now have a ‘pure seeing’; a seeing without knowing.3 Images “infiltrate our collective consciousness, touching every aspect of our lives. From the advertisements that entice us to purchase particular products, to the news coverage that shapes our understanding of current events, visual imagery surrounds us and leaves an indelible mark on our subconscious. This notion becomes particularly relevant in our increasingly digital age, where images have become the primary vehicle for communication and information dissemination… In an age where images dominate and multiply, the line between reality and its representation blurs.”4

A seeing without knowing… a democracy of the image… the banality of the photograph / photography … the line between reality and its (multiple) representations.

Again, I repeat that I am not convinced by Moriyama’s contemporary photographs. While I understand his investigation into contemporary photographic re/production I am not persuaded by the promiscuity nor by the profundity of his image making. If we look at the installation photographs of Moriyama’s work from Pretty Woman in this exhibition (below) where images go from floor to ceiling I struggle to make sense of this mass of information… and I will struggle to remember any of the images minutes or even seconds after seeing them. None of these photographs leaves an indelible mark on our subconscious. But perhaps that is the point (or just, my point of view).

What makes Moriyama’s early photographs so remarkable is that they are memorable. We remember them because they are iconic, they have a distinctive excellence. The Stray Dog that roaming mongrel staring balefully at us; the surreal Bunuel-like opening of the eye Setagaya-ku, Tokyo, Midnight; the fleeing woman in Yokosuka (1970) so much better in black and white.

Moriyama’s black and white photographs provide “a raw, restless vision of city life and the chaos of everyday existence, strange worlds, and unusual characters.” More than that, they plunge us into a mesmerising, hypnotic world where the viewer is immersed in a fractured dream / scape / space… Strange, haunting and evocative, Moriyama’s black and white photographs project the derangement of the world onto the psyche of the viewer, producing an abnormal condition of the mind that promotes a loss of contact with reality.5 This derangement of the world, this re/arrangement of the world and the mind resonates within our subconscious, like harmonics in music. Something that a thousand thousand thousand irrelevant, inconsiderate (not examined, not remembered) photographs can never do.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

1/ Diane Smyth. “Behind the scenes of Moriyama’s London takeover,” on the British Journal of Photography website 17 October 2023 [Online] Cited 19/12/2023

2/ Paul Virilio. “The Work of Art in the Electronic Age,” in Block No. 14, Autumn, 1988, pp. 4-7 quoted in McGrath, Roberta. “Medical Police,” in Ten.8 No. 14, 1984 quoted in Watney, Simon and Gupta, Sunil. “The Rhetoric of AIDS,” in Boffin, Tessa and Gupta, Sunil (eds.,). Ecstatic Antibodies: Resisting the AIDS Mythology. London: Rivers Osram Press, 1990, p. 143

3/ Herod. “Paul Virilio: ‘Images contaminate us like viruses,” on The Socratic Method website January 2020 [Online] Cited 08/02/2024

4/ Marcus Bunyan commenting on the exhibition Fracture: Daido Moriyama at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) on the Art Blart website July 20, 2012 [Online] Cited 08/02/2024

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

The world is a reality,
not because of the way it is,
but because
of the possibilities it presents.

Frederick Sommer

“Forget everything you’ve learned on the subject of photography for the moment, and just shoot. Take photographs – of anything and everything, whatever catches your eye. Don’t pause to think.”

“There may remain some fragments of memory still lying in the depths of my experience waiting to be awakened, and they are ready to evoke new memories at any time. Of course, I need to interpose a camera into that place.”

“To focus on reality or be concerned with memory, choices that, at first glance, seem opposite are, in fact, identical twins for me.”

Daido Moriyama

The retrospective focuses on different moments of Moriyama’s vast and productive career – beginning with his early works for Japanese magazines, interest in the American occupation, and engagement with photorealism. During this time Moriyama also established his unique aesthetic, famously known by the Japanese phrase are, bure, boke (meaning ‘grainy, blurry, out of focus’).

The second part of the exhibition picks up his work from the self-reflexive period in the 1980s and 1990s. In the decades which followed, he explored the essence of photography and of his own self, developing a visual lyricism with which he reflected on reality, memory and cities through tireless documentation and the reinvention of his own archive.

Fittingly, Daido Moriyama: A Retrospective, brings together more than 200 works and large-scale installations, as well as many of Moriyama’s rare photobooks and magazines, for the first time in the UK. One floor of the gallery has been transformed into a reading room – a dedicated space offering a rare opportunity to spend time with his legendary publications.

Text from The Photographers’ Gallery website

For more than sixty years, Daido Moriyama (森山大道 b. 1938) has used his camera to interrogate and revolutionise the way we look at the world with his dense, grainy images. Even today, Moriyama’s pioneering artistic spirit and visual intensity remain groundbreaking.

The exhibition traces the path of a photographer who transformed the way we see photography and questioned the very nature of photography itself.

Installation views of the exhibition Daido Moriyama: A Retrospective at The Photographers’ Gallery, London October 2023 – February 2024 showing at left in the bottom image, work from Farewell Photography (1972).

His 1972 photobook Farewell Photography highlights photography itself, showing edges of discarded film, flecks of dust, and sprocket holes and questioning its role as a medium.

Installation views of the exhibition Daido Moriyama: A Retrospective at The Photographers’ Gallery, London October 2023 – February 2024 showing work from Provoke (1968-1970)

Installation view of the exhibition Daido Moriyama: A Retrospective at The Photographers’ Gallery, London October 2023 – February 2024 showing work from Japan, a Photo Theater

Installation view of the exhibition Daido Moriyama: A Retrospective at The Photographers’ Gallery, London October 2023 – February 2024

Installation views of the exhibition Daido Moriyama: A Retrospective at The Photographers’ Gallery, London October 2023 – February 2024 showing work from A Hunter

Installation view of the exhibition Daido Moriyama: A Retrospective at The Photographers’ Gallery, London October 2023 – February 2024 showing covers of Record magazine top to bottom No’s 1-53

Daido Moriyama (Japanese, b. 1938)
From Pretty Woman
Tokyo, 2017
© Daido Moriyama/Daido Moriyama Photo Foundation

Installation views of the exhibition Daido Moriyama: A Retrospective at The Photographers’ Gallery, London October 2023 – February 2024 showing work from Pretty Woman

Curator Thyago Nogueira spent three years working with Moriyama on The Photographers’ Gallery retrospective

What Moriyama is really saying is that it’s in the nature of photography to be reproducible and replicable. He’s against and not interested in the veneration of artworks, he wants photography to be disseminated. It’s one of his most radical ideas. So we’re presenting plenty of pages from the magazines and books, printed, on the gallery walls and for visitors to browse, and have made videos flipping through each of his really rare books. There’s also a whole section dedicated to seeing the original books. It is going to be a very dense show. But we also wanted to break the hierarchy between a framed picture, a printed image, a wallpaper, and a vinyl. So there are all these different and very interesting kinds of images. …

In the 1960s and 70s, he was making extraordinary, beautiful images, capturing Japanese society and this ambiguous feeling towards Westernisation and the erosion of traditional Japanese culture. He was also a very interested in the nature of the language of photography, and all the possibilities that that language could offer. He started to struggle with the idea of photography being a window to the world, and started testing the materiality and the flatness of the image. He worked as a conceptual artist. He was saying, ‘There’s nothing beyond an image, this is just an image’, and to accept that was radically original and beautiful.

But he has continued to move and has become, if anything, more in tune with the times. Since the 1990s he has used a digital camera to make colour photographs, looking at advertisements in shopping malls and beyond. He is interested in the idea that the image is becoming more present in reality, in certain cases even substituting our reality. His work from the 2000s envelops the architecture of the gallery with vinyls, he makes huge patterns of images that go from floor to ceiling. Of course he’s anticipating our lives completely connected to screens, to these multiple virtual realities of the image which are making and in a way eliminating the real world.

Since 2006 he has also published a magazine called Record, where he is photographing every day non-stop, looking at his own neighbourhood and daily life. He’s addressing issues of ego, saying ‘I don’t think artists are more special than anyone else’ and trying to produce something more automatic, and thus democratic. I think he clearly understands that this banality, this horizontality is an essential aspect of photography.

Extract from Diane Smyth. “Behind the scenes of Moriyama’s London takeover,” on the British Journal of Photography website 17 October 2023 [Online] Cited 19/12/2023

Daido Moriyama (Japanese, b. 1938)
Male actor playing a woman
Tokyo 1966
From Japan, a Photo Theater
© Daido Moriyama/Daido Moriyama Photo Foundation

His first monograph, Japan: A Photo Theatre (1968) is an edgy trip through a fast-evolving Tokyo

Daido Moriyama (Japanese, b. 1938)
Tokyo
1967
Asahi Graph, Apr 1967
© Daido Moriyama/Daido Moriyama Photo Foundation

Daido Moriyama (Japanese, b. 1938)
For Provoke #2
Tokyo, 1969
© Daido Moriyama/Daido Moriyama Photo Foundation

Daido Moriyama (Japanese, b. 1938)
Tokyo
1969
From Accident, Premeditated or not
© Daido Moriyama/Daido Moriyama Photo Foundation

In 1969 he started a one-year series Accident, published in the magazine Asahi Camera, in which he photographed existing images in the media.

Daido Moriyama (Japanese, b. 1938)
Tokyo
1969
From Accident, Premeditated or not
© Daido Moriyama/Daido Moriyama Photo Foundation

The Photographers’ Gallery presents the first UK retrospective of work by the acclaimed Japanese photographer, Daido Moriyama (b. 1938).

Featuring over 200 works, spanning from 1964 until the present day, Daido Moriyama: A Retrospective traverses different moments of Moriyama’s vast and productive career.

Taking over the whole Gallery, this exhibition celebrates one of the most innovative and influential artists and street photographers of our day. Championing photography as a democratic language, Moriyama inserted himself up close with Japanese society, capturing the clash of Japanese tradition with an accelerated Westernisation in post-war Japan. With his non-conformist approach and desire to challenge the medium, his work is tirelessly unpretentious, raw, blurred, radical and grainy and has defined the style of an entire generation.

Moriyama has spent his sixty-year career asking a fundamental question: what is photography? He rejected the dogmatism of art and the veneration of vintage prints, making the accessible and reproducible aspects of photography its most radical asset. Over and over, he reused his photographs in different contexts, experimenting with enlargements, crops and printing. Most of his work was made for printed pages rather than gallery walls. Fittingly, Daido Moriyama: A Retrospective is the first UK exhibition to showcase many of his rare photobooks and magazines.

These publications, dating from early rare editions and out-of-print Japanese magazines to more recent titles, are on show alongside large-scale works and installations. The magazines and photobooks will give visitors unrivalled access to abundant archival and visual material to view, read and discover.

Presented in two phases of Moriyama’s work, Daido Moriyama: A Retrospective starts with Moriyama’s early work for Japanese magazines, his challenging of photojournalism, his experiments in Provoke magazine and the conceptual radicalisation of his photobook Farewell Photography (1972). During this period, he established his unique aesthetic, famously known as, buke, boke (meaning ‘grainy, blurry, out of focus’).

The second part of the exhibition starts in the 1980s, when Moriyama overcame a creative and personal crisis. In the following decades, he explored the essence of photography and of his own self, developing a visual lyricism with which he reflected on reality, memory and history.

Moriyama renewed street photography inside and outside Japan. His wanderings led him to cover miles in Tokyo, Osaka and Hokkaido, but also New York, Paris, São Paulo and Cologne. His work and travels are showcased in Record magazine, which the photographer continues to publish today.

Daido Moriyama: A Retrospective is the product of a three-year research period, and is one of the most comprehensive exhibitions ever mounted of this artist’s work. It is organised by Instituto Moreira Salles in cooperation with the Daido Moriyama Photo Foundation.

The accompanying catalogue Daido Moriyama: A Retrospective is published by Prestel, £45.

Press release from The Photographers’ Gallery

Daido Moriyama (Japanese, b. 1938)
Kanagawa
1967
From A Hunter
© Daido Moriyama/Daido Moriyama Photo Foundation

Daido Moriyama (Japanese, b. 1938)
Stray Dog, Misawa
1971
From A Hunter
© Daido Moriyama/Daido Moriyama Photo Foundation

7 things to know about Daido Moriyama

Learn more about Moriyama, a name synonymous with avant-garde photography, in this quick guide

Born in 1938 in Osaka, Japan, Moriyama’s photographic journey has been one of constant reinvention, testament to his unrelenting pursuit of the unexpected, chaotic, and the intensely personal.

Here we delve into seven things to know about Moriyama, the subject of the first retrospective of his work in the UK, now on at The Photographers’ Gallery:

1. A lens on post-war Japan

Born in post-war Japan, Daido Moriyama embraced photography as a democratic language, promoted by the mass media industry. His work encapsulates the clash between Japanese tradition and Westernisation, following the US military occupation of Japan after the end of World War II. He saw his camera as a tool for capturing not just images but also the essence of an evolving society, making his photographs a mirror to an era of rapid transformation.

2. Influence of American artists

Moriyama was profoundly influenced by American artists like Andy Warhol and William Klein, as well as novelist and poet Jack Kerouac. Their bold and unconventional styles left a mark on his work. This influence can be seen in his daring approach to photography.

3. Provoke era

Provoke was a Japanese magazine which rejected the glossy commercial imagery and the style of documentary photography. Provoke was part of the photographic movement that arose out of the late 1960s and was motivated by the opposition artists had felt towards the traditional powers of Japan.

Moriyama played a pivotal role in the Provoke era, which saw a radical departure from conventional photography. He, along with other like-minded artists, aimed to free photography from its traditional confines. They believed in creating images that didn’t rely on words for interpretation.

4. Unique aesthetic

Moriyama’s work is known for its distinct style characterised in Japanese by ‘are, bure, boke,’ which translates as ‘grainy, blurry, out of focus’. This unique style challenges the conventional notion of photography and invites us to experience images in a new way.

5. Raw, radical, real approach to photography

Moriyama is a trailblazer in the world of photography, effectively reinventing street photography. He challenged the status quo by rejecting traditional norms and embracing the accessible and reproducible nature of photography as its most radical asset – something he continues to do to this day.

6. Farewell Photography and Record

Photobooks play a critical role in Moriyama’s work – one of his most radical works is Farewell Photography (Shashin yo Sayonara) – a book that pushes the boundaries of photographic reality. Moriyama collected rejected images, discarded photos, and even odd negatives to create a chaotic yet thought-provoking sequence of grainy, cropped, solarised, and scratched images. This work is a rebellion against conventional photography.

Magazines were also Moriyama’s fertile ground for photographic production and debates. His journey through photography can be seen in his ongoing publication, Record magazine. It’s a diary of his life in cities, a place where he explores his obsessions, insecurities, and memories. Flip through its pages, and you’ll experience an intimate glimpse into Moriyama’s life.

7. What is Photography?

Moriyama has spent his career asking a fundamental question: “What is photography?”

He rejected the dogmatism of art and the fetishisation of vintage prints, instead embracing the accessible and reproducible aspects of photography as its most radical asset.

Text from The Photographers’ Gallery website

Daido Moriyama (Japanese, b. 1938)
Harumi, Chūō
Tokyo, 1970
Weekly Playboy, Oct 1970
© Daido Moriyama/Daido Moriyama Photo Foundation

Daido Moriyama (Japanese, b. 1938)
Yokosuka
1970
© Daido Moriyama/Daido Moriyama Photo Foundation

Daido Moriyama (Japanese, b. 1938)
Setagaya-ku, Tokyo, Midnight
1986
From Letter to St-Loup 1990
© Daido Moriyama/Daido Moriyama Photo Foundation

Daido Moriyama (Japanese, b. 1938)
Labyrinth
2012
© Daido Moriyama/Daido Moriyama Photo Foundation

Daido Moriyama (Japanese, b. 1938)
Cover of Record No. 8
Published 2007
Tokyo: Akio Nagasawa Publishing

“It was 34 years ago, back in 1972, that I came out with the self-published photo journal ‘Kiroku.’ At the time, I was busy with all sorts of work for magazines. Partly because of a daily feeling inside that I shouldn’t let myself get carried away by it all, I came up with the idea of a small, self-published personal photo journal. Without any ties to work or any fixed topic, I just wanted to continue publishing a 16-page booklet with an arbitrary selection of favourite photos among the pictures I snapped from day to day. By nature, it was directed first and foremost to myself rather than other people. I wanted a simple, basic title, so I called it ‘Kiroku’ (record). However, the publication of ‘Kiroku’ sadly ended with issue number five. Now, thanks to the willpower and efforts of Akio Nagasawa, ‘Kiroku’ the magazine has resumed publication. Or rather, we should call it a fresh publication. With the hope that it will continue this time, I am selfishly thinking of asking Mr. Nagasawa to publish ‘Kiroku’ at a pace of four issues per year. I happily accept his proposal and look forward now to embarking on a new ‘voyage of recording.'”

~ Daido Moriyama

Daido Moriyama (Japanese, b. 1938)
Cover of Record No. 48
Published September, 2021
Tokyo: Akio Nagasawa Publishing

A few days ago in the evening, I suddenly felt the urge to take a train to Yokosuka. It was already after 8 PM when I arrived in the “Wakamatsu Market” entertainment district behind Yokosuka Chuo Station on the Keihin Line, but due to the ongoing pandemic, the lights of the normally crowded shops were all switched off. The streets at night had turned into a bleak, dimly lit place, with the usual drunken crowd nowhere in sight. I eventually held my camera into the darkness and shot a dozen or so pictures, while walking quite naturally down the main street toward the “Dobuita-dori” district. However, most of the shops here were closed as well, and only a few people passed by. It was a truly sad and lonely sight.

“Little wonder,” I muttered to myself, considering that more than half a century had passed since the time I wandered with the camera in my hand around Yokosuka, right in the middle of the Vietnam War.

It was here in Yokosuka that I decided to devote myself to the street snap style, so the way I captured the Yokosuka cityscape defined the future direction of my photographic work altogether. I was 25 at the time, and was still in my first year as an independent photographer. I remember how determined and ambitious I was when I started shooting, eager to carry my pictures into the Camera Mainichi office and get them published in the magazine. It was a time when I spent my days just clicking away while walking around with the camera in my hand, from Yokosuka out into the suburbs, from the main streets into the back alleys.

I had been familiar with the fact that Yokosuka was a US military base since I was a kid, and it also somehow seemed to suit my own constitution, so I think my dedication helped me overcome the fearfulness that came on the flip side of the fun that was taking photos in Yokosuka.

These are the results of a mere two days of shooting, but somewhere between the changing faces of Yokosuka, and my own response from the position of a somewhat cold and distant observer in the present, I think they are reflecting the passage of time, and the transformations of the times.

~ Afterword by Daido Moriyama

The Photographers’ Gallery
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Opening hours:
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Exhibition: ‘Photography: Real & Imagined’ at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne Part 1

Exhibition dates: 13th October 2023 – 4th February 2024

Warning: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers should be aware that this posting contains images and names of people who may have since passed away.

O. G. Rejlander (British born Sweden, 1813-1875)
No title (The Virgin in prayer)
c. 1858-1860
Albumen silver photograph
20.2 × 15.4cm irreg. (image and sheet)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, 2002
Public domain

This is an ambitious, complex but flawed exhibition of photographic works from the NGV Collection. Further comment in Part 2 of the posting…

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to the NGV for allowing me to publish the media images in the posting. Other photographs in the posting are public domain. All installation images are by Marcus Bunyan.

Photography: Real and Imagined examines two perspectives on photography; photography grounded in the real world, as a record, a document, a reflection of the world around us; and photography as the product of imagination, storytelling and illusion. On occasion, photography operates in both realms of the real and the imagined.

Highlighting major photographic works from the NGV Collection, including recent acquisitions on display for the very first time, Photography: Real and Imagined examines the complex, engaging and sometimes contradictory nature, of all things photographic. The NGV’s largest survey of the photography collection, the exhibition includes more than 300 works by Australian and international photographers and artists working with photo-media from the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Text from the NGV website

Installation view of the entrance to the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne with introduction wall text to the right
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Introduction

Photography was once described by writer and critic Lucy Lippard as having ‘a toe in the chilly waters of verisimilitude’. Photographs, Lippard posits, may be a close – rather than exact – reflection of truth. This proposition raises a raft of questions. Is reality so uncomfortable that we only engage with it partially, or out of necessity? Can a photograph show the truth, and if it does, whose truth is it showing – the photographer’s, the subject’s or the viewer’s? If truth is the end game, what does this mean for creative practice and other types of photography? The suggestion that photography is only partially, and somewhat uncomfortably, engaged with the notion of truth highlights the complexity encountered when trying to nearly encapsulate any selection of photographs.

Through works from the NGV Collection, Photography: Real and Imagined teases out connections between iconic and lesser known photographs, putting them in a dialogue with one another that both explores and transcends the time in which they were made. It dos not set out to be a history of photography, but historical context does inform the content, leading to nuanced discussions of past and present, real and imagined.

Introductory wall text from the exhibition

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at right, Mike and Doug Starn’s Invictus (1992); and at left works by John Kauffmann, Norman Deck and Edward Steichen (see below)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

The sun was the light source that enabled the earliest photographs to be made in the 1830s. More than 150 years later the sun is the subject of this photographic sculpture by Mike and Doug Starn that embraces the possibilities of light and its potential effects on photography, in terms of both producing an image and as a force contributing to its irreparable damage. In the centre of their installation, the circular form of a sun seems to pulse and leach out of the layers of exposed orthographic film, which is stretched and layered across steel beams and held with pipe clamps and tape.

Wall text from the exhibition

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at top left, John Kauffmann’s The Cloud (c. 1905, below); at bottom left, Kauffmann’s The grey veil c. 1919; at top right, Norman Deck’s Sunset, Parramatta River (1909); and a bottom right, Edward Steichen’s Moonrise (1904)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

John Kauffmann (Australian, 1864-1942)
The cloud
c. 1905
Gelatin silver photograph
28.2 × 37.2cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Gift of Mr John Bilney, 1976
Public domain

John Kauffmann (Australian, 1864-1942)
The grey veil
c. 1919
Gelatin silver photograph
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased through The Art Foundation of Victoria with the assistance of the Herald & Weekly Times Limited, Fellow, 1990
Public domain

The Yarra River, the Princes Bridge and the Melbourne city skyline beyond shimmer in this photograph by John Kauffmann. And yet, they are not the image’s subject. Using a highly refined Pictorialist treatment, a reduced tonal range and luminous mid tones, the artist has manipulated light to the extent that the feeling and atmospheric qualities become the focus of the image – it is the impression that is paramount. With the choice of title, too, the photograph moves away from a specific documentation of place or time.

Wall text from the exhibition

Norman Deck (Australian 1882-1980)
Sunset, Parramatta River
1909
Gelatin silver photograph
30.5 × 24.9cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Gift of Joyce Evans, 1993
Public domain

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at centre, David Thomas’ The Movement of Colour (White), Taking a Monochrome for a Walk (London) (2010-2011), with at right works by David Noonan, Hiroshi Sugimoto, László Moholy-Nagy and Susan Fereday (see below)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

David Thomas (British, b. 1951, Australia 1958- )
The Movement of Colour (White), Taking a Monochrome for a Walk (London) (installation view)
2010-2011
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Gift of an anonymous donor through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program 2015
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

“It was made during a residency at the Centre for Drawing Research at Wimbledon School of Art University of the Arts London… and plays on Paul Klee’s definition of drawing as taking a line for a walk on a page… this is taking a monochrome for a walk in the world where the monochrome becomes a key for seeing other colours… an interval in the world. It also suggests the ideas of movement in time and feelings of impermanence.”

~ David Thomas

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at top right, David Noonan’s Untitled (1992); at bottom left, Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Winnetka Drive-In, Paramount (1993); at top right, László Moholy-Nagy’s Fotogram, 1925 (1925); and at bottom right, Susan Fereday’s Untitled (2001)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Light and time are both the means and subject of Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Drive-In Theaters series. To produce the images, the artist directs his camera at the movie screen. Once the film starts, Sugimoto opens the lens shutter of his large-format camera and shuts it the moment the movie ends. The result is a visual condensation of the moving images and projected light of the film for its duration into a vivid, hovering rectangle of virtually pulsating light and, in the case of this drive-in cinema, the surrounding human-made and astronomical light, too.

Wall text from the exhibition

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing David Noonan’s Untitled (1992)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

László Moholy-Nagy (Hungarian 1895-1946, Germany 1920-1934, England 1935-1937, United States 1937-1946)
Fotogram, 1925
1925
Gelatin silver photograph
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Presented by the National Gallery Society of Victoria, 1985
Public domain

From 1922 to 1943 László Moholy-Nagy experimented extensively with the photogram process – he was passionate about the optical effects and inherent properties of these camera-less images freed from a purely representational mode. In this work a pale shape, an organic swathe, streams across a page while curved shapes dance at the base. A halo above emits small geometric patterns. The work is a celebration of abstraction of the image – of the effects of playing with light, objects and photographic paper in a darkroom.

Wall text from the exhibition

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at left, Barbara Kasten’s Composition 8T (2018, below); and at right, Lydia Wegner’s Purple square (2017, below)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Barbara Kasten (American, b. 1936)
Composition 8T
2018
Digital type C print
160.0 x 121.9cm (image and sheet)
ed. 1/1
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased NGV Foundation, 2018
© Barbara Kasten, courtesy Kadel Willborn, Düsseldorf

This photograph from Barbara Kasten’s Collisions/Compositions series continues her practice of creating architectural spaces in the studio using a range of materials, such as plexiglas and mirrors, which she lights and photographs at close range. Influenced by Constructivism and the teachings of the Bauhaus, specifically the work of László Moholy-Nagy, Kasten has experimented with the parameters of abstract photography for around five decades. She has written of her ongoing fascination with light in the creation and conceptual development of her photographs, saying, ‘The interdependency of shadow and light is the essence of photographic exploration and an inescapable part of the photographic process’.

Wall text from the exhibition

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing Lydia Wegner’s Purple square (2017)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at left, Todd McMillan’s Equivalent VIII (2014); and at right, Sue Pedley’s Sound of lotus 1 (2000)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at back left, Thomas Ruff’s Portrait (V. Liebermann D) (1999); and at back second left, Ruff’s Portrait (A. Koschkarow) (2000)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at left, Thomas Ruff’s Portrait (V. Liebermann D) (1999); and at right, Ruff’s Portrait (A. Koschkarow) (2000)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

The earnest gazes of the man and woman in these two monumental photographs by Thomas Ruff are so calm and serene that they bely the intense experience of viewing their enlarged faces. Applying a standardised approach – similar to a generic passport photograph – these portraits have a timeless quality that invites you to attempt to ‘read’ their faces and to search for clues as to the inner state of the person. Ruff, however, lets nothing slip. The faces are known to the artist but remain anonymous to the viewer.

Wall text from the exhibition

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing Robert Rooney’s AM-PM: 2 Dec 1973-28 Feb 1974 (1973-1974) (detail)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Featuring some of the most iconic photographs ever created alongside contemporary approaches to the photographic medium, Photography: Real & Imagined is the largest survey of the NGV’s Photography collection in the institution’s history and features more than 270 photographs by Australian and international practitioners.

Four years in the making, this landmark exhibition features photographs from across the 200-year period since the invention of photography in the 19th century, including work by leading international photographers including Man Ray, Cindy Sherman, Wolfgang Tillmans, Gilbert & George and Nan Goldin, alongside Australian photographers Max Dupain, Olive Cotton, Mervyn Bishop, Polly Borland, Destiny Deacon and Darren Sylvester.

Through twenty-one thematic sections, this large-scale exhibition explores the proposition that a photograph can be grounded in the real world, recording, documenting and reflecting the world around us; or be the product of imagination, storytelling and illusion; and on occasion operate in both realms. The thematic sections explore subject matter such as light, place and environment, consumption, conflict, community, and death.

Exhibition highlights include Mervyn Bishop’s important photograph of former Prime Minister of Australia, Gough Whitlam, pouring sand into the open palm of Gurindji Elder Vincent Lingiari. The 1975 image captures the historic meeting between these two figures where Lingiari received the crown lease of his ancestral lands. Also on display is Joe Rosenthal’s World War II photograph Raising the flag on Iwo Jima, 1945, in which American marines raise their country’s flag over the Japanese Island. Both Bishop and Rosenthal’s photographs were staged, or re-constructed for better pictorial effect, illustrating the fluid space between the real and imagined.

The exhibition also presents fashion and advertising photography, including key examples by Lilian Bassman, Athol Smith, Horst P. Horst and Dora Maar. These images showcase a world of designer fashion and high-end products, which set a standard in advertising that continues today. Ilse Bing’s Surrealist inspired photograph commissioned by Elsa Schiaparelli to launch her new perfume Salut in 1934 is a highlight of the exhibition.

Highlighting an area of focused collecting for the NGV, the exhibition recognises the work of women practicing in the early 20th century, including Barbara Morgan whose acclaimed photo montage City shell, 1938, shows an unexpected view of the then recently completed Empire State Building.

Through to the current day, Photography: Real & Imagined presents contemporary photographers of the 21st century including Zanele Muholi, Richard Mosse and Alex Prager. Highlights include Cindy Sherman’s celebrated self-portrait in the guise of Renaissance aristocrat. Also on display will be the oldest photographic work in the NGV Collection, an early 19th century portrait by Englishman William Henry Fox Talbot, one of the inventors of the medium, as well as examples of daguerreotypes, unique images on silver plated copper sheets that are amongst the earliest forms of photography.

The exhibition is accompanied by a major publication – the most ambitious book published on the NGV Photography Collection, generously supported by the Bowness Family Foundation. The publication comprises essays from NGV Senior Curator of Photography, Susan van Wyk, Susan Bright and David Campany; alongside texts by Curator of Photography, Maggie Finch and external authors from Australia, Europe, North America and Southeast Asia.

Regular introductory talks for students are held on weekdays during term times, and free drop-by guided tours each Thursday and Sunday at 10.30am during the exhibition period.

Tony Ellwood AM, Director, NGV, said: ‘This exhibition celebrates the collections and achievements of the NGV’s photography department, which has presented more than 180 exhibitions in its 55-year history. The exhibition is a testament to the strength of the NGV Collection, with so many key examples of the history of photography represented, from the earliest examples from the 19th century, through to contemporary images being produced right now in the twenty-first century. We are grateful for the support of the many donors and philanthropists, such as the Bowness Family Foundation, who have helped to grow and strengthen the NGV’s photography collection.’

Press release from the NGV

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne at top left, O. G. Rejlander’s The Virgin in prayer (c. 1858-1860, below); at bottom left, Henry Peach Robinson’s Elaine watching the shield of Lancelot (1859); at centre, Ruth Hollick’s Thought (1921); and at right Cindy Sherman’s Untitled (1988) from the History Portraits series 1988-1990
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Describing the complex conundrum presented by Cindy Sherman in this photograph, photographer and curator Patrick Pound once wrote: ‘Fake chested and with a face like a mask, here Cindy Sherman is costumed to the max. She stares out like a disapproving Renaissance figure who has just walked off set from a Peter Greenaway extravaganza. Here we have a photographer looking like a painting that walked out of a film. Sherman’s photographs speak of the fragilities of the visage in an image-saturated world where information and construction slip into foreplay. In Sherman’s photographic world gender and identity is a compilation album. There is a toughness to the excess that is all her own’.

Wall text from the exhibition

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing O. G. Rejlander’s The Virgin in prayer (c. 1858-1860, below)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Henry Peach Robinson (English, 1830-1901)
Elaine watching the shield of Lancelot
1859
Albumen silver photograph
24.3 × 19.3cm (image and sheet)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased from Admission Funds, 1988
Public domain

In the 1850s Henry Peach Robinson was renowned for producing elaborately staged narrative images based on scenes from popular literary sources. He was particularly interested in Arthurian legends and drew upon these stories as inspiration for some of his most admired photographs. Elaine watching the shield of Lancelot is based on Alfred Tennyson’s version of the story of Lancelot and Elaine. Peach Robinson has recreated the scene in which the lovelorn Elaine gazes dreamily at the shield of Lancelot. She is shown as a woman who has shunned reason and propriety and abandoned herself to the intensity of her emotions, making this photograph both a tragic love story and a cautionary narrative.

Wall text from the exhibition

Ruth Hollick (Australian, 1883-1977)
Thought
1921
Gelatin silver photograph
37.4 × 25.3cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Presented through The Art Foundation of Victoria by Mrs Lucy Crosbie Morrison, Member, 1993
Public domain

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing Bernd and Hilla Becher’s Coal tipple, Goodspring, Pennsylvania 1975 from the Artists and Photographs folio 1975
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

In 1959, German-born artists Bernd and Hilla Becher began travelling throughout Europe to create photographic typologies of vanishing industrial architecture (a practice they continued for more than four decades). While predominantly documenting German structures and landscapes, they occasionally worked overseas. This image, four views of a coal tipple, was taken on their first trip to North America in the mid 1970s. The Bechers constructed a system for comparing structures: photographed from a consistent angle, with virtually identical lighting conditions, printed at the same size and often displayed in grids.

Wall text from the exhibition

Edward Ruscha (American, b. 1937)
Twentysix Gasoline Stations (installation view)
1963, published 1967
Artist’s book: photo-offset lithograph and printed text, 48 pages, printed cover, glued binding
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Gift of Robert Rooney through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2009
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

With the first publication of Twentysix Gasoline Stations, and his subsequent artist books, Edward Ruscha’s work was influential in initiating the widespread interest in photographic book publishing that continues today. Ruscha’s use of photographs as a means of recording – a seemingly unemotional, detached cataloguing of the world – and simply as a ‘device to complete the idea’ influenced the interest in serial imaging adopted by many conceptual artists. Ruscha’s use of the book format was also crucial, providing a transportable way of presenting art in varied contexts that existed as a type of ‘map’ to be read and interpreted, with the subject matter becoming less important than the documentation as a whole.

Wall text from the exhibition

John Baldessari (American 1931-2020)
Fable: A Sentence of Thirteen Parts (with Twelve Alternate Verbs) Ending in a Fable (installation views)
1977
Artist’s book: photo-offset lithography on concertina fold-out in cross formation, folded paper cover
9.8 × 14.0 × 1.8cm (closed) 70.0 × 126.5cm approx. (overall, opened)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, Friends of the Gallery Library, 2017
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Conceptual artist John Baldessari, is renowned for his often-playful investigations into ideas of language, image and authenticity, once said: ‘I was always interested in language. I thought, why not? … And then I also had a parallel interest in photography … I could never figure out why photography and art had separate histories. So I decided to explore both’. Taking art off the walls and requiring someone to unfold and activate it is a central idea of this artist’s book. A visual puzzle, it invites an interaction between looking and reading, creating your own fables as you jump from image to word to image again.

Wall text from the exhibition

Eve Sonneman (American, b. 1946)
Real time (installation view)
1968-1974, published 1976
Artist’s book: photo-offset lithograph and printed text, 46 folios, printed paper cover, glued binding
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased NGV Supporters of Photography, 2021
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Eve Sonneman’s photobook Real time includes paired photographs, each separated by a black line border. The diptychs allow for the occurrence of movement and gestures and changes between the artist’s camera clicks. The ordered presentation, however, takes the images away from a straight documentary reading and to a consideration of their ‘objectness’. After first showing the photographs at MoMA, New York, then photography curator, John Szarkowski, set up a mentorship for Sonneman with the photographer Diane Arbus. As Sonneman recalled: ‘[Arbus] loved my pictures and we got along great. For two years she helped me edit’. Sonneman then published the images through the newly established Printed Matter in New York in 1976.

Wall text from the exhibition

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at top left, Carol Jerrems and Virginia Fraser’s book A Book About Australian Women (published 1974); at top centre, Nan Goldin’s book The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (published 1986); and at bottom left, Tracey Emin’s Exploration of the Soul (published 1994)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at bottom left, Harold Cazneaux’s book The Bridge Book (published 1930); and at top right, Lee Friedlander’s book The American Monument (published 1976)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Lee Friedlander (American, b. 1934)
The American Monument (installation view)
Published by The Eakins Press Foundation, New York, 1976
Half-tone plate
Shaw Research Library, National Gallery of Victoria
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Berenice Abbott (American 1898-1991, worked in France 1921-1929)
Changing New York (installation view)
Published by E. P. Dutton & Co, New York, 1939
Half-tone plate and letterpress text
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased NGV Foundation, 2022
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at top left, Man Ray’s book Photographs by Man Ray Paris 1920-1934 (published 1934); at bottom left, Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore’s book Aveux non Avenus (Disavowals or Cancelled Confessions) (published 1930); at top right, Bill Brandt’s book Perspective of Nudes (published 1961); and at bottom right, Germaine Krull’s book Nude studies (Études de nu) (published 1930)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Photographs today are often viewed in galleries in frames, hung on walls. Many photographs, however, were originally created for display in combination with text and graphic design; to be laid out on a page and reproduced in different formats; to be held, worn on the body, published, and shared.

With recognition of these expanded histories of photography, and the contemporary resurgence in publishing, this exhibition includes artist books, magazines and photobooks that use the photographic image in print, publishing and design. These two cases include examples that show the influence of Surrealism, the New Objectivity and Constructivist graphic design in dynamic modern publications.

Artist and author Martin Parr has described the photobook as the ‘supreme platform’ for photographers to share the work with a broad audience. The 1920s to the 1970s were arguably the most important period for the publication of photobooks. These two cases include examples that show the influence of modernist, humanist and documentary photography traditions in innovative publications from this time. These include exhibition catalogues, examples of first edition books, publications published in larger un-editioned print runs and coveted collectable limited-edition books and portfolios.

Wall text from the exhibition

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing Man Ray’s book Photographs by Man Ray Paris 1920-1934 (published 1934) with at right, Man Ray’s Anatomies (1930, below)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Man Ray (Emmanuel Radnitzky) (American, 1890-1976)
Anatomies
1930
Gelatin silver photograph

Please note: this photograph is not in the exhibition

Claude Cahun (French, 1894-1954) Marcel Moore (French, 1892-1972)
Aveux non Avenus (Disavowals or Cancelled Confessions) (installation view)
Published by Éditions du Carrefour, Paris, 1930
Illustrated book: photogravure, letterpress text, 237 pages, 10 leaves of plates, paper cover, stitched binding
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Shaw Research Library, acquired through the Friends of the Gallery Library endowment, 2017
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Aveux non Avenus, by the celebrated poet, writer, sculptor and photographer Claude Cahun, was published in 1930 by Éditions du Carrefour, Paris, in an edition of five hundred. The book comprises a series of texts in French: poems, literary aphorisms, recollections of dream sequences and philosophical thoughts, ideas and meanderings. Pierre Mac Orlan, a French novelist who wrote the preface to the book, described Mademoiselle Claude Cahun’s text as ‘de poèmes-essais et d’essais-poèmes’, or ‘poem-essays and essay-poems’, and said that overall ‘the book is virtually entirely dedicated to the word adventure’

The alliterative title presents a conundrum for English translation – ‘aveux’ meaning ‘avowals’ or ‘confessions’, and ‘non avenus’ meaning ‘voided’ – and is variously translated as Disavowals, Denials, and Unavowed confessions, among other things. Curator Jennifer Mundy has written that the title suggests ‘an affirmative expression immediately followed by some form of negation or retraction’.

Ambiguities around the title aside, there is a strong visual aspect to the book too. The texts are each demarcated with a complex and fantastical photogravure created by Cahun’s partner, Marcel Moore. These photogravure (where an image from the negative of a photograph is etched into a metal plate, similar to printmaking) are collages made up of photographic images of, and by, Cahun. Throughout the book, graphic devices of stars, eyes and lips are also used to separate sections of text. Aveux non Avenus, which has been described as an anti-realist or surrealist-autobiography of the multi-disciplinary Cahun, exists as a potential critique of the autobiography format altogether, is wonderfully irreducible.

Maggie Finch and Isobel Crombie. “Claude Cahun,” in the 2019 July/August edition of NGV Magazine on the NGV website 9th April 2020 [Online] Cited 28/01/2024

Claude Cahun (French, 1894-1954) and Marcel Moore (French, 1892-1972)
Untitled
1930
In Aveux non avenus 1930
published by Éditions du Carrefour, Paris
illustrated book: heliographs
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Shaw Research Library, acquired through the Friends of the Gallery Library endowment, 2017

Germaine Krull (German, 1897-1985)
Nude Studies (Études de Nu) (installation view)
Published by Librarie des arts décoratifs, Paris, 1930
24 photogravures, letterpress on paper, white cloth-backed orange paper-covered board portfolio with ribbons
National Gallery of Victoria
Purchased, NGV Foundation, 2022
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Bill Brandt (English born Germany, 1904-1983)
Perspective of Nudes (installation view)
Published Bodley Head, London, 1961
Half-tone plate
Shaw Research Library, National Gallery of Victoria
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Karl Blossfeldt (German, 1865-1932)
Art Forms in Nature: Examples from the Plant World Photographed Direct from Nature (installation view)
Published by A. Zwemmer, London, 1929
Half-tone plate
Shaw Research Library, National Gallery of Victoria
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Karel Teige typographer (Czechoslovakia 1900-1951)
Karel Paspa photographer (Czechoslovakia 1862-1936)
ABECEDA (Alphabet) (installation view)
Published by J. Otto, Prague, 1926
Photomontage
National Gallery of Victoria
Shaw Research Library, acquired through the Friends of the Gallery Library endowment, 2017
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Aleksandr Rodchenko (Russian, 1891-1958) and Varvara Stepanova (Russian, 1894-1958)
USSR in Construction, no. 12 (Parachute issue) (URSS en Construction) (installation view)
1935
Illustrated journal: colour rotogravure, 22 pages with fold-out inserts, lithographic cover
National Gallery of Victoria
Purchased, NGV Supporters of Prints and Drawings, 2019
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at top left, Eliza Hutchinson’s No. 9 (2010); at bottom left, Ewa Narkiewicz’s Copper flax #4 (1999); at centre top, Harry Nankin’s The first wave: fragment 2 (1996); at centre bottom, Peter Peryer’s Seeing (1989); and at right, Aaron Siskind’s New York (1950)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

In much the same way that tactile writing systems such as braille are impenetrable to those with vision, a photograph printed in two dimensions can be incomprehensible for people with vision impairment. Each system presents a conversion – of letters, texts and illustration – into raised dots on a page; of visible wavelengths of light into an image on a light-sensitive surface. Each relies on an irreversible alteration of the surface. Seeing, the title of this Peter Peryer photograph, infers an action – seeing something. Yet the conversion into a photographic image draws attention to the impenetrability of both acts.

Wall text from the exhibition

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at left, Gregory Crewdson’s Untitled (1999) from the Twilight series (1998-2002); at centre, Malerie Marder’s Untitled (2001); and at right, Anne Zahalka’s Sunday, 2:09pm (1995)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Gregory Crewdson (American, b. 1962)
Untitled (installation view)
1999
From the Twilight series 1998-2002
Type C photograph
121.9 × 152.4cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Kaiser Bequest, 2000
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Anne Zahalka (Australian, b. 1957)
Sunday, 2:09pm
1995, printed 2019
From the Open House series 1995
Colour cibachrome transparency, light box
121.7 × 161.4cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, Victorian Foundation for Living Australian Artists, 2019
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at left, Polly Borland’s Untitled (2018); and at right, Anne Zahalka’s Sunday, 2:09pm (1995)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at rear from left to right, Gregory Crewdson’s Untitled (1999) from the Twilight series (1998-2002); at second left, Malerie Marder’s Untitled (2001); and centre, Anne Zahalka’s Sunday, 2:09pm (1995); and at right, Alex Prager’s Crowd #11 (Cedar and Broad Street) (2013, below)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing Alex Prager’s Crowd #11 (Cedar and Broad Street) (2013, below)
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Alex Prager (American, b. 1979)
Crowd #11 (Cedar and Broad Street)
2013
Inkjet print
149.7 × 142.0cm (image and sheet)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Bowness Family Fund for Contemporary Photography, 2014

Alex Prager’s staged photographs openly reference the aesthetics of mid-twentieth century American cinema, fashion photography and the photographs of Cindy Sherman. Her images resemble film stills and are packed with emotion and human melodrama. Working with actors, directing their placement and interaction to create a hyperreal dramatisation of crowd behaviour, Prager’s narrative tableaux pair the banal and fantastic, the everyday and the theatrical, real life and cinematic representation. In this image we have a bird’s eye view of a mass of people crossing the road. We can see the patterns of movement, contact and avoidance and a suggestion of the narrative possibilities of the interacting crowd.

Wall text from the exhibition

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at second right, Pat Brassington’s Rosa (2014); and at right, Yvonne Todd’s Werta (2005)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Zoë Croggon (Australian, b. 1989)
Fonteyn (installation view)
2012
Digital type C print
102.8 × 99.9cm
Purchased with funds arranged by Loti Smorgon for Contemporary Australian Photography, 2013
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing Loretta Lux’s The Drummer (2004, below)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Loretta Lux (German, b. 1969)
The drummer
2004
Cibachrome photograph
45.0 x 37.7cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, NGV Foundation, 2006
© Loretta Lux. VG Bild-Kunst/Copyright Agency, 2023

Loretta Lux is known for her eerie, hyperreal photographs of children. The luminous pallor of the boy’s skin and the subtle tonal range throughout the photograph is achieved through Lux’s delicate use of digital manipulation to reduce the palette in her image. Lux’s history as a painter informs photographs such as this, which seem to owe as much of a debt to Old Master paintings as modern technology. Her skilful combination of photographic reality and painterly effect gives the image a profoundly disconcerting quality that is reminiscent of the fantastical (and disturbing) character of Oskar, the little drummer boy, in the Günter Grass novel The Tin Drum (1959).

Wall text from the exhibition

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at bottom left, Raoul Ubac’s Penthésilée (c. 1938, below); at top centre, André Kertész’s Satiric Dancer, Paris (1926, below); and at right, Max Dupain’s Impassioned clay (1936, below)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Raoul Ubac (Belgian, 1909-1985)
Penthésilée
c. 1938
Gelatin silver photograph
31.0 × 41.5cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased NGV Foundation, 2013

From the mid 1930s onwards Surrealist photographer Raoul Ubac experimented with collage, photomontage and solarisation. These processes disrupted the surface of his photographs, enabling him to create new and fantastic realities and introducing an element of chance into his image making. Penthésilée is from his most important series of photographs. The image is based on the story of Penthesilea, queen of the Amazons, who was killed by Achilles while fighting alongside the Trojans. To represent this mythic battle Ubac created this complex photomontage by cutting up, collaging, rephotographing and solarising photographs of nude female figures. The resulting image has an uncanny sense of movement suggesting the height of battle.

Wall text from the exhibition

André Kertész (Hungarian 1894-1985, France 1925-1936, United States 1936-1985)
Satiric Dancer, Paris
1926, printed c. 1972
Gelatin silver photograph
Purchased, 1973

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing Max Dupain’s Impassioned clay (1936, below)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Max Dupain (Australian 1911-1992)
Impassioned clay
1936
Gelatin silver photograph
50.4 × 36.7cm irreg.
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
William Kimpton Bequest, 2016
Public domain

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at left, Pat Brassington’s Rosa (2014); and at right, Yvonne Todd’s Werta (2005)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Yvonne Todd selects her subjects, most often young women, from ‘call outs’ seeking certain types, people encountered on the street, or modelling agencies where she invariably chooses those with little or no industry experience. In her studio Todd uses costumes, heavy make-up and wigs to style her models. Costuming is an important aspect of Todd’s practice; her interest lies in in what she describes as, ‘the way they carry character and narrative connotations’. Todd’s finished photographs are heavily reworked using Photoshop so that they appear obviously artificial. This overt use of artifice shifts her images from simply being nostalgic recreations to being strangely familiar and undeniably creepy.

Wall text from the exhibition

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at back left, Robyn Stacey’s Nothing to see here (2019) and at back centre, Polly Borland’s Untitled (2018)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Robyn Stacey (Australian, b. 1952)
Nothing to see here
2019
From the Nothing to See Here series 2019
Lenticular image
155.5 × 119cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, Victorian Foundation for Living Australian Artists, 2020

This large-scale lenticular photograph shows the face of a woman projected onto a curtain. The curtain suggests a hidden cinema screen; however, Robyn Stacey’s curtains cannot be pulled back. From one viewpoint a beautiful face with eyes softly closed as if in sleep appears, but as you move past the image you can only see the curtain. The curtain becomes what the artist described as ‘a membrane between reality and allegory’ and acts as the screen as the portrait appears and disappears.

Wall text from the exhibition

Installation views of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing Polly Borland’s lenticular photograph Untitled (2018) from the MORPH series
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Polly Borland (Australia, b. 1959)
Untitled
2018
From MORPH series 2018
Inkjet print on rice paper on lenticular cardboard
216.0 × 172.7 × 13.0cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, Victorian Foundation for Living Australian Artists, 2019
© Polly Borland

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at left, Narelle Autio’s two photographs Untitled from The Seventh Wave series (1999-2000); and at centre right, Selina Ou’s Convenience (2001)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing Narelle Autio’s two photographs Untitled from The Seventh Wave series (1999-2000)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Narelle Autio (Australian, b. 1969)
Untitled (installation view)
2000
From The Seventh Wave series 1999-2000
Gelatin silver photograph
90.0 × 134.1cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased with funds arranged by Loti Smorgon for Contemporary Australian Photography, 2001
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at back centre, Selina Ou’s Convenience (2001); and at right, Rosemary Laing’s welcome to Australia (2004)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at back left, Ben Shahn’s Young cotton picker, Pulaski County, Arkansas. Schools for coloured children do not open until January 1st so as not to interfere with cotton picking 1935; and back right, Lewis Hine’s Finishing garments, 10 Hanover Ave., Boston, Massachusetts 1912; and at right in the cabinet, Kusakabe Kimbei’s album (Landscape and portraits) (1880s-1910s)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Ben Shahn (Lithuanian 1898-1969, United States c. 1925-1969)
Young cotton picker, Pulaski County, Arkansas. Schools for coloured children do not open until January 1st so as not to interfere with cotton picking (installation view)
1935, printed c. 1975
Gelatin silver photograph
21.7 × 32.8cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, 1975
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Lewis Hine (American, 1874-1940)
Finishing garments, 10 Hanover Ave., Boston, Massachusetts
1912
Gelatin silver photograph
11.4 × 16.4cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, 1980
Public domain

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing Kusakabe Kimbei’s album (Landscape and portraits) (1880s-1910s)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at left, John Thomson’s The crawlers (1876-1877, below); at top right, Heather George’s Stockyards, stockmen in distance. Wave Hill Station, Northern Territory (1952); and at bottom right, Fred Kruger’s Group of Aborigines in hop gardens, Coranderrk (1876, below)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing John Thomson’s The crawlers (1876-1877, below)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

John Thomson (Scottish 1837-1921)
The crawlers
1876-1877
From the Street Life in London series 1877
Woodbury type
11.5 × 8.7cm (image and sheet)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Felton Bequest, 1977
Public Domain

Heather George (Australian 1907-1983)
Stockyards, stockmen in distance. Wave Hill Station, Northern Territory (installation view)
1952, printed 1978
From the Northern Territory series 1952
Gelatin silver photograph
Purchased, 1980
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

In 1952 the Australian magazine Walkabout included a series of images made by photojournalist Heather George at Wave Hill Station in the Northern Territory. The vast pastoral lease on the lands of the dispossessed Gurindji people would later become famous as a turning point in the recognition of land rights for Australia’s First Nations peoples, but when George visited, it was a place of entrenched, officially sanctioned discrimination. In George’s photograph, the Gurindji stockmen appear overshadowed by the stockyards in the foreground, perhaps reflecting the attitude of pastoralists who, having been granted leases, took advantage of people living on Country, exploiting them as an unpaid workforce.

Wall text from the exhibition

Fred Kruger (German 1831-1888, Australia 1860-1888)
Group of Aborigines in hop gardens, Coranderrk
1876
Albumen silver photograph
13.3 × 20.2cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Gift of Mrs Beryl M. Curl, 1979
Public domain

In 1876 Fred Kruger was commissioned to produce two series of photographs at Coranderrk, a settlement and working farm established to rehouse dispossessed people of the Kulin Nation. One of the many subjects he photographed was the productive farmland and the activities of the community working the land. Kruger’s photograph shows a multigenerational group of people in the lush Arcadian setting of the hop garden, but what it obscures is the reality of exploitation and poverty that afflicted First Nations people in this place. Kruger’s photographs met a brief to promote the so-called ‘civilising’ work of colonial authorities but in doing so represented a largely imagined reality and created an effective form of propaganda.

Wall text from the exhibition

Selina Ou (Australian, b. 1977)
Convenience (installation view)
2001
From the Serving You Better series 2001
Type C photograph
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased with funds arranged by Loti Smorgon for Contemporary Australian Photography, 2005
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at top left, Kusakabe Kimbei’s Vegetable peddler (1880s, below); at bottom left, David Wadelton’s Richmond hairdresser (1979, below); at top centre, Rennie Ellis’ Between strips, Kings Cross (1970-1971, below); at bottom centre, Brassai’s Washing up in a brothel, Rue Quincampoix (La Toilette, rue Quincampoix (Bidet)) (1932, below); and at right, Wolfgang Sievers’ Shiftchange at Kelly and Lewis engineering works, Springvale, Melbourne (1949, below)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Kusakabe Kimbei (Japanese, 1841-1934)
Vegetable peddler
1880s
Albumen silver photograph, colour dyes
20.6 × 26.3cm (image and sheet)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Gerstl Bequest, 2000
Public domain

Japanese photographer Kusakabe Kimbei established his studio in 1881, making photographs for the domestic and tourist markets. Most of the photographs in this elaborate album are conventional, staged domestic scenes; picturesque views of popular tourist attractions; and street scenes. This image, however, stands alone in the album as an unusual view of contemporary life. Despite the women weavers wearing traditional dress and working hand-operated looms, the factory in which they are working is lit by electric lights and they are supervised by men wearing European-style dress. Unlike its companion works in Kimbei’s album, this photograph speaks to the industrialisation that was part of the Meiji-era modernisation in Japan.

Wall text from the exhibition

Kusakabe Kimbei (Japanese, 1841-1934)

Kusakabe Kimbei (日下部金兵衛; 1841-1934) was a Japanese photographer. He usually went by his given name, Kimbei, because his clientele, mostly non-Japanese-speaking foreign residents and visitors, found it easier to pronounce than his family name

Kusakabe Kimbei worked with Felice Beato and Baron Raimund von Stillfried as a photographic colourist and assistant. In 1881, Kimbei opened his own workshop in Yokohama, in the Benten-dōri quarter. From 1889, the studio operated in the Honmachi quarter. By 1893, his was one of the leading Japanese studios supplying art to Western customers. Many of the photographs in the studio’s catalogue featured depictions of Japanese women, which were popular with tourists of the time. Kimbei preferred to portray female subjects in a traditional bijinga style, and hired geisha to pose for the photographs. Many of his albums are mounted in accordion fashion.

Around 1885, Kimbei acquired the negatives of Felice Beato and of Stillfried, as well as those of Uchida Kuichi. Kusakabe also acquired some of Ueno Hikoma’s negatives of Nagasaki. Kimbei retired as a photographer in 1914.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing David Wadelton’s Richmond hairdresser (1979, below)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

David Wadelton (Australian, b. 1955)
Richmond hairdresser
1979
Gelatin silver photograph
13.4 × 20.2cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Gift of David Wadelton through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2015
© David Wadelton

Rennie Ellis (Australian, 1940-2003)
Between strips, Kings Cross
1970-1971; 2000 {printed}
from the Kings Cross series 1971
gelatin silver photograph
37.1 x 24.1 cm (image) 40.3 x 30.4 cm (sheet)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, 2005
© Rennie Ellis Photographic Archive

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing Brassaï’s Washing up in a brothel, Rue Quincampoix (La Toilette, rue Quincampoix (Bidet)) (1932, below)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Brassaï (Hungarian-French, 1899-1984)
Washing up in a brothel, Rue Quincampoix
(La Toilette, rue Quincampoix (Bidet))
1932; printed c. 1979
from The secret of Paris in the 30s series 1931–1935
Gelatin silver photograph
20.5 × 29.2cm (image and sheet)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, 1980
Public Domain

In the 1930s Brassaï became well-known for his photographs of the nightlife of Paris, but it was the sex workers, along with other characters of the city’s underbelly, who excited his imagination. Reflecting on this time, he wrote, ‘Rightly or wrongly, I felt at that time that this underground world represented Paris at its least cosmopolitan, at its most alive, its most authentic, that in these colourful faces of its underworld there had been preserved, from age to age, almost without alteration, the folklore of its remote past’. This photograph presents a matter-of-fact view – there is nothing exotic or erotic about the woman washing herself as her client ties his shoes and prepares to leave.

Wall text from the exhibition

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing Wolfgang Sievers’ Shiftchange at Kelly and Lewis engineering works, Springvale, Melbourne (1949, below)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Wolfgang Sievers (Australian born Germany, 1913-2007)
Shiftchange at Kelly and Lewis engineering works, Springvale, Melbourne
1949; printed 1986
Gelatin silver photograph
49.4 × 40.5cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, 1986
© National Library of Australia

Wolfgang Sievers arrived in Australia in 1938, bringing photographic equipment, rigorous training in modernist photography, a firmly held belief in the union of art and industry, left-leaning political views, and the self-declared desire to ‘assist this country through my knowledge as thanks for the freedom I can enjoy here’. The human face of industrial Australia is captured in Sievers’s celebrated photograph of the change of shift at a Melbourne engineering works, showing a sea of men and women surging into work. The upturned, smiling faces of the masses speaking to Sievers’s firmly held belief in the dignity of work.

Wall text from the exhibition

Rosemary Laing (Australian, b. 1959)
welcome to Australia (installation view)
2004
Type C photograph
110.8 × 224.4cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased with funds from the Victorian Foundation for Living Australian Artists, 2005
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

This photograph by Rosemary Laing makes an obviously ironic statement, as curator Kyla MacFarlane notes: ‘The title and compositional beauty of this photograph … purposefully jar against its subject matter – the remote Woomera Immigration Detention and Processing Centre in South Australia. Photographing the site while the sun sits low in the sky, Laing observes the Centre’s mechanisms of containment and surveillance – a violent presence on the red dirt and gravel road, and sun-tinged, cloudless sky of its remote location’. The photograph’s formal emptiness reflects the lack of freedom imposed on those seeking asylum and the loss of their civil liberties once detained.

Wall text from the exhibition

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at left, Rosemary Laing’s welcome to Australia (2004, above); and at right, four photographs from Michael Cook’s Civilised series (2012)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing Dorothea Lange’s Towards Los Angeles, California (1936, below)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Dorothea Lange (United States 1895-1965)
Towards Los Angeles, California
1936; c. 1975 {printed}
Gelatin silver photograph
39.6 x 39.1cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, 1975

In this photograph Dorothea Lange has ironically juxtaposed the aspiration of clean, comfortable train travel with the exhausting reality of the unemployed traversing America in search of work in the 1930s. Renowned for making photographs that combine empathy and clear-eyed observation, Lange also believed that photographs and text should be presented together to amplify the messages carried in both mediums. She understood that captions ‘fortified’ her photographs and that they should ‘not only (carry) factual information, but also add clues to attitudes, relationships and meanings’. Although it doesn’t have a caption, the opportunistic combination of image and text in this image highlights the gulf between the haves and have nots.

Wall text from the exhibition

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at top left, Alfred Stiegliz’s The steerage (1907, below); at bottom left, David Moore’s Migrants arriving in Sydney (1966, below); at centre, Charles Nettleton’s Hobsons Bay railway pier (1870s, below); at top right, Maggie Diaz’s The Canberra, Port Melbourne (1961-1967); and at bottom right, Paul Haviland’s Passing steamer (1910)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Alfred Stieglitz (American 1864-1946, Germany 1881-1990)
The steerage
1907, printed 1911
Photogravure
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, 1979
Public domain

Alfred Stieglitz was a pioneering photographer, publisher and gallery director. The steerage, arguably his most important photograph, is regarded as his first great modernist work. The composition, with its compressed space, apparent lack of horizon and striking diagonal lines, is suggestive of avant-garde painting of the time. Showing the densely packed lower decks of the of the transatlantic steamer Kaiser Wilhelm II, Stieglitz’s oblique reference to the return movement of unsuccessful immigrants to America offers an insight into the social outcomes and complexities of mass global migration in the early twentieth century.

Wall text from the exhibition

David Moore (Australia, 1927-2003)
Migrants arriving in Sydney
1966
Gelatin silver photograph
26.7 × 40.4cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, 1991
© Estate of David Moore

David Moore was Australia’s pre-eminent photojournalist of the 1960s. His work was regularly seen in leading local and international magazines. Moore’s Migrants arriving in Sydney, was commissioned and published by National Geographic in 1966. This now iconic image shows the climactic moment when a ship carrying migrants to Australia docks at Sydney harbour. The tightly framed photograph reveals a range of emotions on the faces of a group of people about to disembark and begin a new life. “We must do more than record the sensational, the bizarre, and the tragic. The lens of the camera must probe, with absolute sincerity, deep into the lives of ordinary men and women and show how we work and play.” David Moore, 1953

Text from the National Gallery of Victoria website

THIS IS NOT CORRECT NGV!

In 2015, Judy Annear [Head of Photography at the Art Gallery of New South Wales] said of this famous photograph: “It’s great to consider that it’s not actually what it seems.” Years after the photo was published, it emerged that four of the passengers in it were not migrants but Sydneysiders returning home from holiday.

Charles Nettleton (English 1825-1902, Australia 1854-1902)
Hobsons Bay railway pier
1870s
Albumen silver photograph
12.8 × 19.2cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, 1992
Public domain

Maggie Diaz (American, 1925-2016, Australia 1961-2016)
The Canberra, Port Melbourne
1961-1967, printed 2014
Pigment print
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, Victorian Foundation for Living Australian Artists, 2015

As a young woman, Maggie Diaz had been fascinated by the work of French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson. Her photographs are a ‘slice of life’ offering similar insights into the everyday experiences of people wherever she encountered them. The ship she photographed at Melbourne’s Station Pier in the 1960s was The Canberra, the largest of the passenger ships sailing between Britain and Australia at that time. Often bringing British migrants on assisted passages, the ship also held personal significance for Diaz: as a migrant from the United States, she travelled one-way from the US to Australia on The Canberra’s maiden voyage in 1961.

Wall text from the exhibition

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing four photographs from Michael Cook’s Civilised series (2012)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Michael Cook (Australian / Bidjara, b. 1968)
Civilised #11
2012
From the Civilised series 2012
Inkjet print
100.0 x 87.5cm
ed. 3/8
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased NGV Foundation, 2013
© Michael Cook and Michael Reid Sydney + Berlin

Bidjara artist Michael Cook poses a question in his Civilised series: ‘What makes a person civilised?’ In these photographs he represents the ways Europeans – English, French, Portuguese and Spanish colonists – responded to First Nations people when they arrived on these shores. The artist asserts that his Civilised series ‘suggests how different history might have been if those Europeans had realised that the Aborigines were indeed civilised’.

Wall text from the exhibition

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at right, Narelle Autio’s two photographs Untitled from The Seventh Wave series (1999-2000)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at third left bottom, Henri Cartier-Bresson’s Sunday on the banks of the Marne (1938, below); at fourth left top, Gabriel de Rumine’s Caryatid porch of Erechtheum, Acropolis, Athens (1859, below); at fourth left bottom, Lee Friedlander’s Mount Rushmore (1969, below); at centre top, John Williams’ Clovelly Beach, Sydney (1969, below); at top right, Eugène Atget’s The roller coaster, Invalides funfair (Montagnes russes, fête des Invalides) (1898, below); and at bottom right, Roger Scott’s Ghost train, Sydney Royal Easter Show (1972? 1975? below)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing David Goldblatt’s The playing fields of Tladi, Soweto, Johannesburg, August 1972
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Harold Cazneaux (Australian born New Zealand, 1878-1953)
Fairy Lane steps
1910
Bromoil print
24.8 × 18.5cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, 1979
© The Cazneaux family

Harold Cazneaux was one of the most important and influential Australian photographers of the early twentieth century. He had a great love of the natural world but early in his career also found a rich subject in the inner-city streets of Sydney. Cazneaux made photographs that appear lively and spontaneous, although given the limitations of the equipment at the time they are almost certain to have been staged to a degree. His charming studies of children at play in city streets transformed the bleak, impoverished urban environments of inner-city Sydney into a wonderful playground.

Wall text from the exhibition

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing Helen Levitt’s New York (Boys fighting on a pediment) c. 1940
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009)
New York (Boys fighting on a pediment)
c. 1940
Gelatin silver print
31.8 × 21.1cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2022
Public domain

Francis Bedford (attributed to) (English, 1815-1894)
Fairy Glen, Betws-y-Coed
(Ffos Noddyn, Betws-y-Coed)
c. 1860
from the No title (Stephen Thompson album) (1859 – c. 1868)
Albumen silver photograph
13.7 × 17.8cm (image and sheet)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased from Admission Funds, 1988
Public domain

Henri Cartier-Bresson (French, 1908-2004)
Sunday on the banks of the Marne, Juvisy, France
1938; (1990s) {printed}
Gelatin silver photograph
29.1 x 43.9 cm (image)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased NGV Foundation, 2015
2015.566
© Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum Photos

In 1938 Henri Cartier-Bresson photographed a group of people picnicking on the banks of the river Marne. It is a celebratory image showing a quintessential aspect of everyday life in France: long Sunday lunches. But it also reveals something of the revolutionary politics of the period and their profound influence on Cartier-Bresson in the 1930s. In 1938 the left-wing Popular Front swept into power in France and the newly elected government mandated two weeks paid leave for all workers. At the time, Cartier-Bresson worked for the Paris-based communist press and was commissioned by Regards magazine to photograph an extended series that looked at the social impact of this initiative.

Wall text from the exhibition

Gabriel de Rumine (European, 1841-1871)
No title (Caryatid porch of Erechtheum, Acropolis, Athens)
1859
Albumen silver photograph
25.7 × 35.8cm irreg. (image and sheet)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Presented by the National Gallery Women’s Association, 1995
Public domain

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing Lee Friedlander’s Mount Rushmore (1969, below)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Lee Friedlander (born United States 1934)
Mount Rushmore
1969; printed c. 1977
Gelatin silver print
18.3 × 27.5cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, 1977
© Lee Friedlander, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco and Luhring Augustine, New York

Installation views of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing John Williams’ Clovelly Beach, Sydney (1969, below)
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

John Williams (Australian, 1933-2016)
Clovelly Beach, Sydney
1969; printed 1988
Gelatin silver photograph
25.6 × 25.4cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, 1989
© John Williams

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)
The roller coaster, Invalides funfair (Montagnes russes, fête des Invalides)
1898
From the Festivals and Fairs series in the Art in Old Paris series 1898-1927
Albumen silver photograph
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Gift of Patrick Pound through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2020
Public domain

Roger Scott (Australian, b. 1944)
Ghost train, Sydney Royal Easter Show
1972? 1975?
Gelatin silver print
30.4 × 45.6cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Gift of Mr James Mollison, 1994
© Roger Scott

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

Opening hours:
Daily 10am – 5pm

National Gallery of Victoria website

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Exhibition: ‘Etched by Light: Photogravures from the Collection, 1840-1940’ at the National Gallery of Art, Washington

Exhibition dates: 15th October, 2023 – 4th February, 2024

Curators: The exhibition is curated by Sarah Greenough, senior curator and head of the department of photographs, with Andrea Coffman, collection manager in the department of photographs, both at the National Gallery of Art.

Charles Nègre (French, 1820-1880)
Cathédrale de Chartres – Portique du Midi XIIe Siècle
c. 1854, printed c. 1857
Photogravure
Image: 53 x 73cm (20 7/8 x 28 3/4 in.)
Sheet: 59.3 x 80cm (23 3/8 x 31 1/2 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, The Sarah and William L Walton Fund

The under appreciated photogravure process, which prints photographs in ink on paper, produces images of luscious lucidity.

In the “photomechanical process, which came to be called photogravure, a photographic image is etched into a printmaking plate, ink is rubbed into the etched surface, a damp sheet of paper is laid on top of the plate, and both are put through a printing press to transfer the ink to paper.” (Press release)

The prints are tonally rich and have a smooth, continuous tonal range and, depending on the choice of paper and inks, can be produced in a variety of colours and textures. While the process is time-consuming and labour-intensive nothing – except perhaps a platinum print developed in Amidol or alike whose negative has been developed in Pyro developer – comes close to the beauty and tonality of the gravure. “This intricate, painstaking and time-consuming method produces images with rich tones and a sense of light, depth, and realism.”

“The process offers the most sophisticated photomechanical means to reproduce large editions while still retaining the warm blacks and subtle shades of gray. It thrived into the 1930s, but World War II brought an end to its popularity due to costs and availability. As the spirit of hands-on experimentation returned to photography in the 1960s, Jon Goodman (b. 1953) is credited with its revival, and is lauded for creating sumptuous portfolios of the works of famed photographers Paul Strand (1890-1976) and Edward Steichen (1879-1973).”1

Some of the most beautiful photographs ever made are printed in the photogravure process. Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946), that pioneering artist, publisher and teacher, used them extensively in his influential quarterly photographic journal Camera Work (1903-1917).

One of my favourite photographs of all time, Paul Strand’s Wall Street (1915) is known only in two vintage platinum palladium prints, but is more commonly seen in reproduction as a photogravure print, notably in Stieglitz’s Camera Work Number 48 October 1916 (see below). “Wall Street became one of his most famous images because of his willingness to reproduce it in various photographic media and at different periods throughout his career.” (Philadelphia Museum of Art website)

Thus the reproducibility of the photogravure process led to the wider distribution of beautiful photographs. Crucially these hand printed photomechanical prints still retain an aura – of reality, presence and the hand of the artist, spirit if you like – unlike many reproductions in later photography books.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

1/ Robin O’Dell. “The Photogravure Process,” on the Florida Museum of Photographic Arts website Nov 15, 2020 [Online] Cited 26/01/2024

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

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
New York [Wall Street]
Negative 1915; print 1916
Photogravure
From Camera Work. Number 48. Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) publisher
Image: 13 × 16.2 cm (5 1/8 × 6 3/8 in.)
Sheet: 27.8 × 19.7 cm (10 15/16 × 7 3/4 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Public domain

Please note: As far as I know, this photograph is not in the exhibition.

Discover an intriguing chapter in the history of photography, as innovative practitioners searched for and perfected a method to produce identical photographic prints in ink. The process, which came to be called photogravure, yielded some of the most beautiful photographs ever made – featuring delicate highlights, lush blacks, a remarkably rich tonal range, and a velvety matte surface. Etched by Light: Photogravures from the Collection, 1840-1940 tells the story of the first 100 years of this process. Artists and scientists working across Europe from the 1840s through the 1870s were dismayed to discover that identical silver-based photographic prints were not only difficult to make but also faded quickly. Building on one another’s discoveries, innovators such as William Henry Fox Talbot, Hippolyte Fizeau, and Charles Nègre perfected a way to etch a photographic image into a copperplate and print it in ink. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, photographers such as James Craig Annan and Peter Henry Emerson utilised this process to demonstrate the artistic nature of photography while somewhat later photographers such as Alfred Stieglitz, Man Ray, and Laure Albin-Guillot used the technique to create large, bold pictures that they disseminated widely. Including 46 photogravures and 5 bound volumes illustrated with photogravures, many never before exhibited, Etched by Light shows how these works, through their proliferation, have helped shape our collective visual experience.

Bisson Frères. Louis-Auguste Bisson (French, 1814-1876) and Auguste-Rosalie Bisson (French, 1826-1900)
Notre-Dame
1850s
Heliogravure on chine colle
Sheet: 35.7 x 27.3cm (14 1/16 x 10 3/4 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
Public domain

Joseph Cundall (British, 1818-1895) and Robert Howlett (British, 1831-1858)
Crimean Braves – Men of the Trenches and Battlefields in the Crimea
1856
Photogalvanograph proof on chine collé
Plate: 31 x 25cm (12 3/16 x 9 13/16 in.)
Sheet: 55.8 x 38cm (21 15/16 x 14 15/16 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
Public domain

Peter Henry Emerson (British, 1856-1936)
A Winter’s Morning
1887
Photogravure
Image: 17.7 x 28.7cm (6 15/16 x 11 5/16 in.)
Sheet: 21.5 x 32.4cm (8 7/16 x 12 3/4 in.)
Mount: 40 x 50.8cm (15 3/4 x 20 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Carolyn Brody Fund and Robert B. Menschel and the Vital Projects

Peter Henry Emerson (British born Cuba, 1856-1936)
The Poacher – A Hare in View
1888
Photogravure
Image: 28.5 x 23.7cm (11 1/4 x 9 5/16 in.)
Sheet: 30.5 x 25.7cm (12 x 10 1/8 in.)
National Gallery of Art
Gift of Mary and Dan Solomon and Patrons’ Permanent Fund
Public domain

Peter Henry Emerson (British born Cuba, 1856-1936)
The Poacher – A Hare in View (detail)
1888
Photogravure
Image: 28.5 x 23.7cm (11 1/4 x 9 5/16 in.)
Sheet: 30.5 x 25.7cm (12 x 10 1/8 in.)
National Gallery of Art
Gift of Mary and Dan Solomon and Patrons’ Permanent Fund
Public domain

James Craig Annan (British, 1864-1946)
A Black Canal
1894
Photogravure
Image: 9.1 x 12.6cm (3 9/16 x 4 15/16 in.)
Sheet: 9.6 x 12.8cm (3 3/4 x 5 1/16 in.)
National Gallery of Art
Pepita Milmore Memorial Fund and Robert B. Menschel and the Vital Projects Fund

Peter Henry Emerson (British born Cuba, 1856-1936)
Marsh Leaves
Published 1895
1 vol: ill: 16 photogravures on wove paper
Page size: 28.4 x 18.4cm (11 3/16 x 7 1/4 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Harvey S. Shipley Miller and J. Randall Plummer, in Honor of the 50th Anniversary of the National Gallery of Art

Clarence H. White (American, 1871-1925)
Spring
1899
Photogravure overmatted and mounted on gray wove paper
Image (sight): 12.9 x 13cm (5 1/16 x 5 1/8 in.)
Mat: 28.5 x 19.5cm (11 1/4 x 7 11/16 in.)
Mount: 38 x 27.8cm (14 15/16 x 10 15/16 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Anonymous Gift
Public domain

Mathilde Weil (American, 1872-1942)
Beatrice
1899
Photogravure in sepia on chine collé mounted on cream wove paper
Image: 16.7 x 9cm (6 9/16 x 3 9/16 in.)
Sheet: 18.8 x 10.4cm (7 3/8 x 4 1/8 in.)
Mount: 37.8 x 27.8cm (14 7/8 x 10 15/16 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Anonymous Gift

Clarence H. White (American, 1871-1925)
Edge of the Woods, Evening
1900
Photogravure
Image: 14.5 x 10.1cm (5 11/16 x 4 in.)
Sheet: 28.5 x 19.8cm (11 1/4 x 7 13/16 in.)
National Gallery of Art
Robert B. Menschel and the Vital Projects Fund
Public domain

Clarence H. White (American, 1871-1925)
Morning
c. 1905
Photogravure
Image: 20.2 x 15.5cm (7 15/16 x 6 1/8 in.)
Mount: 20.7 x 16.2cm (8 1/8 x 6 3/8 in.)
National Gallery of Art Washington, Robert B. Menschel and the Vital Projects Fund
Public domain

Etched by Light: Photogravures from the Collection, 1840-1940 tells the fascinating story of the search to find and perfect a way to print photographs in ink. The process, which came to be called photogravure, resulted in some of the most beautiful photographs ever made – featuring delicate highlights, lush blacks, a remarkably rich tonal range, and a velvety matte surface. Presenting 40 photogravures and 4 bound volumes illustrated with them (many recently acquired and exhibited here for the first time), Etched by Light shows how this process enabled photographs to circulate widely and help shape our collective visual experience. The exhibition is on view from October 15, 2023, through February 4, 2024, in the West Building of the National Gallery of Art.

“Discover an intriguing chapter in the history of photography, as innovative practitioners developed a method to produce photographic prints in ink,” said Sarah Greenough, senior curator and head of the department of photographs at the National Gallery of Art. “Including photogravures from the National Gallery’s collection, this exhibition shows the pivotal role photogravures played in the history of photography by enabling the creation and widespread dissemination of tonally rich and lasting prints.”

About the Exhibition

From its very beginnings, photography revolutionised the way pictures were made and knowledge about the visual world was disseminated. But in the early 1840s, artists and scientists working across Europe discovered that it had drawbacks. The daguerreotype process, developed by Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, created astonishingly vivid images, but each one was unique and could only be copied by making another photograph. William Henry Fox Talbot’s negative / positive process held more promise, but his silver-chloride prints faded when exposed to light. Early practitioners also learned that it was hard to make numerous identical prints that could be tipped into books or journals, owing to variabilities in the paper and chemicals that were used to make prints. Such obstacles, at least initially, frustrated their hopes of fully realising the potential of this new medium.

Divided into three sections, Etched by Light traces the search – unfolding across 100 years – for a process to print photographs in ink, which were more stable than traditional silver-based photographic prints. It moves from the experiments in the 1840s and 1850s by French and British photographers such as Armand-Hippolyte-Louis Fizeau, Charles Nègre, and Talbot, who discovered the chemical and technical components necessary to print photographs in ink, to the successful solution invented by Talbot in the 1850s and perfected by Karl Klíč in 1879. In their photomechanical process, which came to be called photogravure, a photographic image is etched into a printmaking plate, ink is rubbed into the etched surface, a damp sheet of paper is laid on top of the plate, and both are put through a printing press to transfer the ink to paper. Favoured from the mid-1880s through the 1930s, revived in the 1980s and 1990s, and still popular today, photogravures have a smooth, continuous tonal range, although an extremely fine grain is evident under magnification.

The exhibition also shows how photographers working in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including Peter Henry Emerson and Alfred Stieglitz, exploited the photogravure process for its artistic potential. They highlighted the individuality of their pictures through their choice of paper and inks, and even manipulated the photographic image itself. They also utilised the reproducibility of the process, inserting their photogravures into limited edition books, portfolios, and journals that they circulated in an effort to prove the artistic merit of photography.

The exhibition concludes with the work of modernist photographers, such as Alvin Langdon Coburn, Laure Albin Guillot, Man Ray, and Margaret Bourke-White, who used the process to enlarge small negatives, creating big, bold, and sometimes colourful photogravures. Circulating their photogravures widely in books and portfolios, as well as commercial advertisements, these artists demonstrated that photography could tackle new subjects, revitalising our view of life, art, and science, and in the process revealing critical new insights about the world around us.

The exhibition is organised by the National Gallery of Art, Washington

Press release from the National Gallery of Art

Alvin Langdon Coburn (British born United States, 1882-1966)
Trafalgar Square
1909
Photogravure
Image: 21.2 x 16.2cm (8 3/8 x 6 3/8 in.)
Sheet: 21.7 x 16.7cm (8 9/16 x 6 9/16 in.)
National Gallery of Art
Robert B. Menschel and the Vital Projects Fund

Alvin Langdon Coburn (British born United States, 1882-1966)
Brooklyn Bridge
c. 1910
Photogravure
Image: 19.9 x 14.7cm (7 13/16 x 5 13/16 in.)
Sheet: 21.2 x 15.3cm (8 3/8 x 6 in.)
National Gallery of Art
Robert B. Menschel and the Vital Projects Fund

Alvin Langdon Coburn (British born United States, 1882-1966)
The Battery
c. 1909
Photogravure
Image: 16 x 15.56cm (6 5/16 x 6 1/8 in.)
Sheet: 17.3 x 16.4cm (6 13/16 x 6 7/16 in.)
National Gallery of Art
Robert B. Menschel and the Vital Projects Fund

Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946)
The Street – Design for a Poster / The Street – Fifth Avenue
1896? / 1901-1902?, printed 1903
Photogravure
National Gallery of Art
Public domain

Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946)
The Steerage
1907, printed in or before 1913
Photogravure on cream moderately thick smooth wove Japanese paper
Image: 33.2 x 26.4cm (13 1/16 x 10 3/8 in.)
Sheet: 46.3 x 31.9cm (18 1/4 x 12 9/16 in.)
National Gallery of Art
Alfred Stieglitz Collection

Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946)
Old and New New York
1910, printed in or before 1913
Photogravure on beige thin slightly textured laid Japanese paper
Image: 33.3 x 25.7cm (13 1/8 x 10 1/8 in.)
Sheet: 40.3 x 28.3cm (15 7/8 x 11 1/8 in.)
National Gallery of Art
Alfred Stieglitz Collection

Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946)
After Working Hours – The Ferry Boat
1910, printed in or before 1913
Photogravure
Image: 33.6 x 25.9cm (13 1/4 x 10 3/16 in.)
Sheet: 40.4 x 28.1cm (15 7/8 x 11 1/16 in.)
National Gallery of Art
Alfred Stieglitz Collection

Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946)
The City of Ambition
1910, printed in or before 1913
Photogravure on beige thin slightly textured laid Japanese paper
Sheet (trimmed to image): 34 x 26cm (13 3/8 x 10 1/4 in.)
Mount: 43.3 x 32 cm (17 1/16 x 12 5/8 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred Stieglitz Collection

Anne Brigman (American, 1859-1960)
The Cleft of the Rock
1912
Photogravure
Image: 21 x 16cm (8 1/4 x 6 5/16 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Mark Katzman and Hilary Skirboll

Alvin Langdon Coburn (British born United States, 1882-1966)
The Tunnel Builders
1913
Photogravure
Image: 21 x 17cm (8 1/4 x 6 11/16 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Funds from John S. Parsley and Nancy Nolan Parsley

Man Ray (American, 1890-1976)
Électricité
1931
Photogravure
Image: 26 x 20.5cm (10 1/4 x 8 1/16 in.)
Mount: 37.5 x 27.5cm (14 3/4 x 10 13/16 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Robert B. Menschel

Man Ray (American, 1890-1976)
Le Monde
1931
Photogravure
Image: 26 x 20.5cm (10 1/4 x 8 1/16 in.)
Mount: 37.5 x 27.5cm (14 3/4 x 10 13/16 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Robert B. Menschel

Man Ray (American, 1890-1976)
La Ville (The City)
1931
Photogravure
Image: 26 x 20.5cm (10 1/4 x 8 1/16 in.)
Mount: 37.5 x 27.5cm (14 3/4 x 10 13/16 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Robert B. Menschel

Man Ray (American, 1890-1976)
Le Souffle (Breeze)
1931
Photogravure
Image: 26 x 20.2cm (10 1/4 x 7 15/16 in.)
Mount: 37.5 x 27.5cm (14 3/4 x 10 13/16 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Robert B. Menschel

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Virgin, Sand Felipe, Oaxaca
1933, printed 1940
Photogravure
Image: 26.4 x 20.7cm (10 3/8 x 8 1/8 in.)
Sheet: 40.4 x 31.7cm (15 7/8 x 12 1/2 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Men of Santa Anna, Michoacan
1933, printed 1940
Photogravure
Image: 16.1 x 12.7cm (6 5/16 x 5 in.)
Sheet: 40.4 x 31.7cm (15 7/8 x 12 1/2 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Boy, Uruapan
1933, printed 1940
Photogravure
Image: 25.7 x 20.5cm (10 1/8 x 8 1/16 in.)
Sheet: 40.4 x 31.7cm (15 7/8 x 12 1/2 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Cristo, Tiacochoaya, Oaxaca
1933, printed 1940
Photogravure
Image: 26 x 20.4cm (10 1/4 x 8 1/16 in.)
Sheet: 40.4 x 31.7cm (15 7/8 x 12 1/2 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Cristo with Thorns, Huexotla
1933, printed 1940
Photogravure
Image: 26 x 20.5cm (10 1/4 x 8 1/16 in.)
Sheet: 40.4 x 31.7cm (15 7/8 x 12 1/2 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Church, Coapiaxtla
1933, printed 1940
Photogravure
Image: 16.2 x 12.7cm (6 3/8 x 5 in.)
Sheet: 40.4 x 31.7cm (15 7/8 x 12 1/2 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund

Doris Ulmann (American, 1882-1934)
Plate 35
1933
Photogravure
Image: 21 x 16cm (8 1/4 x 6 5/16 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Mary and Dan Solomon

Doris Ulmann (American, 1882-1934)
Plate 47
1933
Photogravure
Image: 16 x 21cm (6 5/16 x 8 1/4 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Pepita Milmore Memorial Fund

National Gallery of Art
National Mall between 3rd and 7th Streets
Constitution Avenue NW, Washington

Opening hours:
Daily 10am – 5pm

National Gallery of Art website

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Exhibition: ‘Raja Deen Dayal: King of Indian Photographers’ at Cleveland Museum of Art

Exhibition dates: 23rd April 2023 – 4th February 2024

Raja Deen Dayal (Indian, 1844-1905)
Album of 37 photographs
c. 1887-1888
37 albumen prints
Cleveland Museum of Art
Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund

There are some beautiful photographs in this mid-week posting by the most eminent Indian photographer of the 19th century, Raja Deen Dayal (Indian, 1844-1905).

Dayal had access to the upper echelons of British and Indian society where he photographed in the Western tradition of formal portraiture and more personal views of the British occupiers and Indian nobility, namely the Maharaja of the semi-independent “princely states” of central India.

“Dayal posed and composed Indian royalty exactly as he did his photographs of British leadership, with the most important person in the center, often surrounded by advisers and subordinates. Head-on to the camera, stately but not overly formal, viceroys and rajahs alike became accessibly human but at imposing removes.”1

Will Heinrich in an article for the New York Times observes that what really stands out, what is really shocking are “the rows of Indian servants lined up like stiff accessories behind rickshaws, buggies and English garden parties” and the fact that “they were photographed that way by an Indian photographer complicates any easy read of what they mean.” And that none of the Indian servants is identified.

This should not be shocking at all… for the Indian world, as the British world, was all about status and power. You can see British servants lined up outside and behind the owners of stately homes in the United Kingdom. And they won’t be named. That’s because their social status made them invisible in name if not in physical appearance. They were servants.

And it should come as no surprise that Dayal photographs Indians in the way that he does because he aspired to enter the highest levels of British and Indian society – through his talent yes but also using that talent to advance his social climbing and social standing. By imitating Westernised portraiture of the ruling class both British and Indian, he sought to cement his stature as one of the country’s top photographers, picturing both the country and people through “an archive of depictions of meaningful sites, important occasions, and significant people that was essential to running a profitable studio.”

He took photographs of superb pictorial refinement and luxurious tonality. Through his talent and business acumen he became a man of importance, he had access to the upper echelons of society and his name is still known today … unlike all the anonymous men (and one woman) who are lost to the mists of time.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

1/ Will Heinrich. “The Photographer Who Immortalized British Viceroys and Maharajahs,” on The New York Times website August 31st, 2023 [Online] Cited 04/09/2023

Many thankx to the Cleveland 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.

A map of central and northern India showing some of the cities where Dayal took photographs in this posting.

Raja Deen Dayal (Indian, 1844-1905)
Detachment of Bhopal Battalion at Indore
1886
Albumen print
Image: 19.1 x 26.5cm (7 1/2 x 10 7/16 in.)
Paper: 19.1 x 26.5cm (7 1/2 x 10 7/16 in.)
Cleveland Museum of Art
Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund

In state and military portraits, people seated in chairs and in the middle are generally of the highest rank. Amid these Indian soldiers sits a lone British officer. The Bhopal Battalion had seen combat just six years earlier during the Second Anglo-Afghan War, helping to keep Afghanistan a British-friendly buffer against Russia’s desire to expand into India. This detachment includes a number of Sikhs, identifiable by their neatly trimmed beards and turbans that cover their ears. Members of that religious group were avidly recruited by the British Indian Army due to their reputed ferocity and courage in battle.

Raja Deen Dayal (Indian, 1844-1905)
Detachment of Bhopal Battalion at Indore (detail)
1886
Albumen print
Image: 19.1 x 26.5cm (7 1/2 x 10 7/16 in.)
Paper: 19.1 x 26.5cm (7 1/2 x 10 7/16 in.)
Cleveland Museum of Art
Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund

Raja Deen Dayal (Indian, 1844-1905)
The Duke and Duchess of Connaught, with Col. Adam, Captain H.V. Benett, Col. Becher, Gen. Knowles, Captain Herbert, Col. Cavaye, Mrs. Cavaye, and Gen. R. Gellispie, Mhow
1887
Albumen print
Image: 19.1 x 26.6cm (7 1/2 x 10 1/2 in.)
Paper: 19.1 x 26.6cm (7 1/2 x 10 1/2 in.)
Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund

This gathering of British military officers was occasioned by the visit of Queen Victoria’s seventh child, Prince Arthur, Duke of Connaught and Strathearn (1850-1942) (seated, second from left). His wife, Princess Louise Margaret of Prussia, is the woman on the right. As commander in chief of the Bombay Presidency from 1886 to 1890, the prince performed military inspections and embarked on diplomatic missions throughout India. Dignitaries’ visits were routinely commemorated with a professional photograph. The photographer often took the image for free, counting on the purchase of prints by those wanting to feature the dignitary in their parlours on walls and tables or in albums.

In 2016, the museum acquired 37 photographs made by Raja Deen Dayal (1844-1905), hailed as the first great Indian photographer. This exhibition marks the Cleveland debut of these rare images, all of which come from a single album and were shot in 1886 and 1887, an important juncture in the artist’s life. On display alongside Dayal’s photographs are historical Indian paintings, textiles, clothing, and jewellery from the museum’s collection. These objects provide viewers with insight into the cultural context and help translate the objects in the photographs from monochrome into colour.

Dayal was a surveyor working for the British government when he took up photography as a hobby in 1874. In 1885, he attempted to make it his career and by 1887 had cemented his stature as one of the country’s top photographers, British or Indian. This rare early album pictures both the maharajas of princely India and the British colonial elite.

Dayal produced formal portraits but also more personal views of the Indian nobility. In a moving portrait of a 10-year-old maharaja, Dayal reveals the boy beneath the crown. Weighed down by necklaces and jewels, he occupies a chair that is too tall for him; his stockinged feet curl under so they touch the ground.

Dayal’s talent also won him access to the highest levels of British society. He photographed government meetings and leisurely afternoons of badminton and picnics, costume parties, and even a private moment of communion between an Englishman and his bulldog. Dayal portrayed how the British brought England with them to India and in some images, the Indian servants who supported that lifestyle. The photographer cultivated his relationship with the military by documenting troop manoeuvres, several views of which are included.

Visually striking, seductively charming, and highly informative, these photographs and objects offer new insights into the early career of India’s most important 19th-century photographer and into British and Indian life at the height of the colonial “Raj.”

Text from the Cleveland Museum of Art website

Unknown artist (Central India, Madhya Pradesh)
A Ruler Seated on a Terrace Worshipping at a Shrine of Radha and Krishna
c. 1800
Gum tempera and gold on paper
25.1 x 20cm (9 7/8 x 7 7/8 in.)
Purchase and partial gift from the Catherine and Ralph Benkaim Collection; Severance and Greta Millikin Purchase Fund

A noble clad in a black woollen shawl and a red turban, both with delicate floral embroidery, kneels before a small shrine with icons of Krishna fluting alongside his lover Radha. An attendant dressed in white holds a fly whisk that denotes the kneeling figure’s royal status. The black sky with light horizon suggests that the sun has recently set. In spite of the individualised facial features, this noble remains unidentified. Both figures have rosaries of rudraksha beads usually worn by followers of Shiva, instead of Krishna.

Unknown maker (Indian)
Ornament
1800s
Gold with green enamel ground, white sapphires, rubies, and pearls
Diameter: 5.2 cm (2 1/16 in.)
Gift of Mr. and Mrs. J. H. Wade

Circular ornaments were worn as pendants, sewn onto textiles, or pinned into hair. The decorative motif made of colourful gems depicting flowering plants was introduced during the reign of the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan (1628-1658) and remained popular through the 1800s.

Unknown maker (Indian)
Medallion
1800s
Silver gilt with rubies and emeralds
Diameter: 5.4 cm (2 1/8 in.)
Gift of Mr. and Mrs. J. H. Wade

Circular ornaments were worn as pendants, sewn onto textiles, or pinned into hair. The decorative motif made of colorful gems depicting flowering plants was introduced during the reign of the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan (1628-1658) and remained popular through the 1800s.

Unknown maker (Indian)
Pendant
1700s
Northwestern India, Rajasthan, Rajput Kingdom of Jaipur
Gold, emerald, diamonds, enamel, and pearl
Overall: 7.4 x 4.8 cm (2 15/16 x 1 7/8 in.)
Bequest of Anne Jessop Smith

The large green emerald on one side of this pendant was probably imported to India from Columbia. Delicately incised with a lotus blossom, a symbol of the sun, it is surrounded by inset diamonds in organic, petal-like shapes. Emeralds, especially prized for their green colour, were associated with the planet Mercury in Hindu astrology and with the power to ward off evil in Islam. On the reverse, a peacock and two peahens surrounded by flowers are rendered using blue, green, and red glass.

Attributed to Balchand (Indian, active 1595 – c. 1650)
Portrait of Murad Bakhsh (1624-1661)
c. 1635; borders c. 1700s
Mughal India, court of Shah Jahan (reigned 1628-1658)
Gum tempera and gold on paper
Overall: 28.4 x 25.7cm (11 3/16 x 10 1/8 in.)
Painting: 4.3 x 3.5cm (1 11/16 x 1 3/8 in.)
Gift in honour of Madeline Neves Clapp; Gift of Mrs. Henry White Cannon by exchange; Bequest of Louise T. Cooper; Leonard C. Hanna Jr. Fund; From the Catherine and Ralph Benkaim Collection

The miniature portrait of a Mughal prince is now mounted on an album page. Originally, it was in a gemstone setting as a “portrait jewel” to be worn by family and supporters at court. India’s ruling elite had been wearing portrait jewels since Sir Thomas Rowe (about 1581-1655) presented British portrait miniatures and cameos to the Mughal emperor as part of a diplomatic gift in 1616, when he successfully negotiated for British access to India’s ports.

Raja Deen Dayal (Indian, 1844-1905)
His Highness Maharaja Scindia of Gwalior
1887
Albumen print
Image: 25.5 x 18.4cm (10 1/16 x 7 1/4 in.)
Paper: 25.5 x 18.4cm (10 1/16 x 7 1/4 in.)
Cleveland Museum of Art
Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund

Ten-year-old Madho Rao Scindia, the Maharaja of Gwalior (1876-1925; reigned 1886-1925), inherited the throne one year before this photograph was taken. Acceptance of both Indian and British cultural influences can be seen in the contrast of his garb, which is Indian from turban to shoe, with the Western-style furniture, clock, and books. Reflected in the glass balls on the table, which may be an inkwell or perfume jar, are the other people in the room during the shot. The person on the left in the top ball may be the photographer, Lala Deen Dayal.

Raja Deen Dayal (Indian, 1844-1905)
His Highness Maharaja Scindia of Gwalior (detail)
1887
Albumen print
Image: 25.5 x 18.4cm (10 1/16 x 7 1/4 in.)
Paper: 25.5 x 18.4cm (10 1/16 x 7 1/4 in.)
Cleveland Museum of Art
Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund

In 1887, a photographer named Lala Deen Dayal took a picture of Frederick Temple-Blackwood, First Marquess of Dufferin and Ava [below]. The men were in Shimla, in the foothills of the Himalayas, because the British colonial government in India moved there every summer to escape the heat of Kolkata. Dufferin was the British viceroy, and Dayal, who had worked as a surveyor for the colonial government before leaving to pursue his passion as a freelancer, was his official photographer.

Dayal posed Dufferin, a short, balding, goateed, intelligent-looking man, at the center of the photo, behind a round table covered in a patterned cloth. To either side of him sit three other men, all seven constituting the Supreme Council of Government of India. Beneath them is an enormous, intricately patterned carpet; behind them, a nondescript curtain and rough wooden walls. They look like what they were: fresh conquerors who hadn’t yet built themselves palaces.

They also look pretty discomfited by the camera in what were still its early days. Two look at the viceroy, who leans aside to deliver some incidental remark; one gazes at the floor; two stare stiffly into nowhere; and only one councillor, like a faint glimmer of self-awareness within the raj, peers suspiciously into the lens.

The photograph became one of a deep file of stock images available in Dayal’s shop. One souvenir album, assembled by an unidentified purchaser and later broken apart, was partially acquired by the Cleveland Museum of Art in 2016. In “Raja Deen Dayal: King of Indian Photographers,” the museum combines this cache of 37 photographs with roughly contemporary miniature paintings and objets to create a small but incisive look at cross-cultural projections of power – Dayal was official photographer to the British military commander in chief, too, as well as to the Nizam of Hyderabad, who gave him the title Raja.

An acute wall label next to “His Eminence Commander in Chief and Party, Simla” [below] draws attention to the tiger skin on the floor, flung carelessly under British feet; beside the photo, on the gallery wall, to illustrate the Indian association of this animal with royalty, hangs a 19th century painting from Rajasthan showing a “Tiger Hunt of Ram Singh II.”

It’s just one of the show’s many examples of the casual degradations of imperial rule, which also include an English-style silver teapot with a goddess for a handle, and a painting of an Indian servant walking British dogs – a mordant wall label notes that Indian art traditionally pictured “dogs and jackals” only in cremation grounds. But it’s the rows of Indian servants lined up like stiff accessories behind rickshaws, buggies and English garden parties that really stand out. They’re shocking, but the fact that they were photographed that way by an Indian photographer complicates any easy read of what they mean.

Also in 1887, give or take a year or two, Dayal made a portrait of “His Highness the Maharaja of Rewa,” one of the semi-independent “princely states” of central India. Draped in gold and jewels, with a stylized footprint of Vishnu painted on his forehead, slumping comfortably sideways in an ornate chair with his stocking feet curled underneath, the boy king is pretty much the opposite of the severely styled Dufferin. But Dayal posed and composed Indian royalty exactly as he did his photographs of British leadership, with the most important person in the center, often surrounded by advisers and subordinates. Head-on to the camera, stately but not overly formal, viceroys and rajahs alike became accessibly human but at imposing removes. In retrospect, Dayal’s pictures aren’t just portraits of royal and imperial power – they’re portraits of the nascent power of photography.

Will Heinrich. “The Photographer Who Immortalized British Viceroys and Maharajahs,” on The New York Times website August 31st, 2023 [Online] Cited 04/09/2023

Unknown maker (Indian)
Cap
1800s
Velvet embroidered with gilt-silver–wrapped silk thread (zari); silk: lining; rubies, pearls, and spinels
Overall: 6.3 x 15.2 x 15.2 cm (2 1/2 x 6 x 6 in.)
Gift of Mr. and Mrs. J. H. Wade 1916.1477

Historically in India, head coverings were worn in outdoor and formal contexts and can signal age, allegiance, and status among Indian men and boys. A low round cap such as this was worn primarily by the well-educated aristocratic boys in the king’s circle. The painstaking process of creating the ornament involved wrapping gilt-silver wire of various dimensions around a silk thread core to create a textured appearance for the flowers and vines.

Raja Deen Dayal (Indian, 1844-1905)
Maharaja of Rewa and Classmates
1886
Albumen print
Image: 19.8 x 27.1cm (7 13/16 x 10 11/16 in.)
Paper: 19.8 x 27.1cm (7 13/16 x 10 11/16 in.)
Cleveland Museum of Art
Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund

Deen Dayal uses the arrangement of people and the architecture to point to the most important person in the photograph. Here, the Maharaja of Rewa is placed front and center. In this image, the young maharaja is shown with Indian teachers, but the instructional tools are Western: bound books and a raised relief globe (with Asia visible).

Raja Deen Dayal (Indian, 1844-1905)
Maharaja of Rewa and Sardars
1886
Albumen print
Image: 19.7 x 26.9cm (7 3/4 x 10 9/16 in.)
Paper: 19.7 x 26.9cm (7 3/4 x 10 9/16 in.)
Cleveland Museum of Art
Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund

Deen Dayal uses the arrangement of people and the architecture to point to the most important person in the photograph. Here, the Maharaja of Rewa is placed front and centre. “Sardars,” inscribed on the picture’s mount, refers to the military officials surrounding him. After 1858, British influence dictated that Indian rulers be educated in European history and ideas as well as their local culture and history.

Raja Deen Dayal (Indian, 1844-1905)
Maharaja of Rewa in Prayer
1886
Albumen print
Image: 20 x 27.2cm (7 7/8 x 10 11/16 in.)
Paper: 20 x 27.2cm (7 7/8 x 10 11/16 in.)
Cleveland Museum of Art
Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund

Performing religious devotions was part of a maharaja’s duty to protect his kingdom. Praying before an altar, the maharaja fingers prayer beads and sits opposite a mirror, an auspicious object in Hindu worship. The lines painted on the men’s foreheads indicate that they are devotees of the Hindu god Vishnu. This group portrait demonstrates three ways rulers serve the state: by being a military commander, a worldly scholar, and, in this image, an observant Hindu.

Raja Deen Dayal (Indian, 1844-1905)
His Highness the Maharaja of Rewa
1886
Albumen print
Image: 20 x 27.2cm (7 7/8 x 10 11/16 in.)
Paper: 20 x 27.2cm (7 7/8 x 10 11/16 in.)
Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund

Deen Dayal’s status as an Indian person may have helped him gain access to Indian rulers at the start of his career. The year before he received the patronage of British officials, Deen Dayal photographed ten-year-old Venkat Raman Singh (1876-1918; reigned 1880-1918), the Maharaja of Rewa. The studio portrait reveals the boy beneath the crown. He straddles a Western-style chair that is too tall for him, curling under his stockinged feet so they touch the floor. One of his many necklaces holds a painted or photographic portrait similar to the portrait jewel pendant in the nearby case.

Raja Deen Dayal (Indian, 1844-1905)
His Highness the Maharaja of Rewa
1886
Albumen print
Image: 26.7 x 20.3cm (10 1/2 x 8 in.)
Paper: 26.7 x 20.3cm (10 1/2 x 8 in.)
Cleveland Museum of Art
Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund

Unknown maker (Indian)
Turban Ornament (Sarpech)
1800s
Gilt silver with diamonds, rubies, emeralds, topaz, blue sapphires, yellow sapphire
Overall: 10.2 x 8.4cm (4 x 3 5/16 in.)
Gift of Mr. and Mrs. J. H. Wade

This type of ornament would have been affixed to the front of a turban as an emblem of high noble status. The raised central element mimics the shape of an eagle feather or plume.

Unknown artist (Indian)
Royal Elephant Ramkali with a Mahout
c. 1761
Northwestern India, Rajasthan, Rajput kingdom of Mewar, Udaipur, Court of Ari Singh (reigned 1761-73)
Gum tempera, ink, and gold on paper
Painting: 20.6 x 21.4cm (8 1/8 x 8 7/16 in.)
Overall: 24.1 x 25cm (9 1/2 x 9 13/16 in.)
Gift of Dr. Norman Zaworski

The mahout (elephant driver), directs the confident female elephant at a brisk trot, with bells swinging in response to her movements. This painting belongs to a series depicting the elephants in the royal stables at Udaipur, each one named in the upper margin. Elephants have been a potent emblem for royalty in India for more than three thousand years.

Raja Deen Dayal (Indian, 1844-1905)
Ramkishore Singh of Rewa
1886
Albumen print
Image: 20.3 x 27.3cm (8 x 10 3/4 in.)
Paper: 20.3 x 27.3cm (8 x 10 3/4 in.)
Cleveland Museum of Art
Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund

Ramkishore Singh, likely a high-ranking official or merchant, is depicted twice in the album, each time aboard a luxurious type of transport. In one photograph [above], he rides atop an elephant, a creature associated with India, power, and fortitude, preceded by an attendant on horseback. In the other [below], he rides in a European-style carriage pulled by two horses, flanked by attendants on camels (native to parts of India) and horses. Like the images of Britons in their carriages and rickshaws, these depictions suggest the sitter’s wealth through his possession of servants, animals, and vehicles.

Raja Deen Dayal (Indian, 1844-1905)
Ramkishore Singh of Rewa
1886
Albumen print
Image: 18.6 x 27cm (7 5/16 x 10 5/8 in.)
Paper: 18.6 x 27cm (7 5/16 x 10 5/8 in.)
Cleveland Museum of Art
Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund

Raja Deen Dayal (Indian, 1844-1905)
Colonel F. G. Oldham, Simla
1887
Albumen print
Image: 13 x 20.3cm (5 1/8 x 8 in.)
Paper: 13 x 20.3cm (5 1/8 x 8 in.)
Cleveland Museum of Art
Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund

In Deen Dayal’s shots of large groups, the sitters are artfully arranged in close proximity, some even touching. But in his family portraits, at least in this album, the individuals are separated. Francis Oldham (1839-1923), an engineer at the India Public Works Department, poses with his wife Nora, their son Brian, an unidentified woman, and rickshaw drivers.

Raja Deen Dayal (Indian, 1844-1905)
Colonel H.R. Thuillier and His Wife Emmeline Williams Thuillier, Simla
1887
Albumen print
Image: 18.1 x 26.1cm (7 1/8 x 10 1/4 in.)
Paper: 18.1 x 26.1cm (7 1/8 x 10 1/4 in.)
Cleveland Museum of Art
Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund

In Deen Dayal’s shots of large groups, the sitters are artfully arranged in close proximity, some even touching. But in his family portraits, at least in this album, the individuals are separated. The above image features Colonel H. R. Thuillier (1838-1922) holding his horse’s bridal, his wife Emmeline, their two terriers, and rickshaw drivers. Thuillier became the surveyor general of India the year this photograph was taken by Deen Dayal, who had just given up surveying for photography.

Raja Deen Dayal (Indian, 1844-1905)
Colonel H.R. Thuillier and His Wife Emmeline Williams Thuillier, Simla (detail)
1887
Albumen print
Image: 18.1 x 26.1cm (7 1/8 x 10 1/4 in.)
Paper: 18.1 x 26.1cm (7 1/8 x 10 1/4 in.)
Cleveland Museum of Art
Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund

Raja Deen Dayal (Indian, 1844-1905)
His Honor The Lieutenant Governor of the Punjab and Party, Simla
1887
Albumen print
Image: 19.5 x 27.4cm (7 11/16 x 10 13/16 in.)
Paper: 19.5 x 27.4cm (7 11/16 x 10 13/16 in.)
Cleveland Museum of Art
Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund

This photograph may commemorate a family reunion of the Lyalls. In 1887 James Lyall (1838-1916) (possibly on the left) was appointed lieutenant governor of the Punjab region, the same year that his elder brother Alfred Lyall (1835-1911) (second from left) retired as lieutenant governor of North-Western Provinces. After recovering from a serious illness, Alfred visited James in Simla. The women are likely Alfred’s daughter Mary Evelina Lyall (1868-1948) (left) and “Mrs. Lyall,” possibly Mary’s aunt, James Lyall’s wife. A master at staging group portraits, Deen Dayal used symmetry, proximity, height, and other formal devices to indicate the sitters’ interrelationships and relative ranks.

Raja Deen Dayal (Indian, 1844-1905)
Lord Dufferin and the Supreme Council of Government of India, Simla
1887
Albumen print
Image: 19.4 x 27.3cm (7 5/8 x 10 3/4 in.)
Paper: 19.4 x 27.3cm (7 5/8 x 10 3/4 in.)
Cleveland Museum of Art
Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund

Each summer, the British government left the heat of Calcutta for Simla in the foothills of the Himalayas, where this photograph was taken. In 1885 Deen Dayal began spending his summers there to be near the officials, who were both subjects and clients. The viceroy, or British ruler, of India, Frederick Temple-Blackwood, 1st Marquess of Dufferin and Ava (1826-1902), sits at the centre of this staged meeting of the Supreme Council. Deen Dayal made images of Lord Dufferin and his wife, herself an amateur photographer, that led to his appointment as photographer to the viceroy, which resulted in access to other members of the British elite.

Raja Deen Dayal (Indian, 1844-1905)
His Eminence Commander in Chief and Party, Simla
1887
Albumen print
Image: 19.5 x 27.2cm (7 11/16 x 10 11/16 in.)
Paper: 19.5 x 27.2cm (7 11/16 x 10 11/16 in.)
Cleveland Museum of Art
Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund

In 1887 Deen Dayal was appointed photographer to the commander in chief of the British Indian Army, Field Marshal Frederick Roberts (1832-1914) (seated, third from left). This casually dressed group of Roberts’s family and friends had just enjoyed a week of formal events, including a “fancy dress” ball celebrating the 50th anniversary of Queen Victoria’s accession to the throne. That party inaugurated a ballroom built onto Roberts’s home. The following day, Roberts was made Knight Commander of the Order of the Indian Empire. The tiger skin attests to British success at big game hunting. Its use as a rug reveals a very different attitude toward this favoured pastime among the British than the Indians, for whom it symbolised royal power.

Unknown artist (Indian)
Tiger Hunt of Ram Singh II
c. 1830-1840
Northwestern India, Rajasthan, Rajput kingdom of Kota, court of Ram Singh II (reigned 1826–66)
Gum tempera, ink, and gold on paper
Painting: 25.3 x 49.1cm (9 15/16 x 19 5/16 in.)
Seventy-fifth anniversary gift of Dr. Norman Zaworski

Set against the dramatic backdrop of the cliffs that define the landscape of the small princely kingdom of Kota, a majestic tiger has just been shot by the king. Noisemakers with a firebrand drive the tiger out of the forest, and men at the right keep bears at bay. The women and musicians in two small boats look on in admiration.

Raja Deen Dayal (Indian, 1844-1905)
His Eminence Commander in Chief and Party, Simla (detail)
1887
Albumen print
Image: 19.5 x 27.2cm (7 11/16 x 10 11/16 in.)
Paper: 19.5 x 27.2cm (7 11/16 x 10 11/16 in.)
Cleveland Museum of Art
Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund

In 2016, the museum acquired 37 photographs by Raja Deen Dayal (1844-1905), hailed as the first great Indian photographer. These images, which show the British ruling elite in India and two boy maharajas and their nobles, had all once been part of a single photo album. Popular from the 1850s until the spread of digital photography in the 1990s, photo albums are precious mementos of a time or place. They served as status symbols and objects that defined one’s identity for future generations.

The album in question had been ordered from the photographer’s studio around 1888, probably by a male British official serving in or visiting India in late 1887 or 1888. This exhibition marks the United States debut of these rare, early photographs by Deen Dayal. On display alongside them are historical Indian paintings and luxurious textiles, clothing, and jewelry from the museum’s collection that help bring the photographs to life.

The client would have chosen which images he wanted in the volume, and he seems to have greatly favored portraits. Captions elegantly handwritten in English on the mounts identify the subjects. Most of the prints came from Deen Dayal’s stock images – an archive of depictions of meaningful sites, important occasions, and significant people that was essential to running a profitable studio. Nonetheless, it is likely that the purchaser of the album met many of the British individuals he selected – perhaps had tea or dinner at their homes – and spent time at a number of the locales depicted. If the visitor was on official business, he may even have been received at the courts of these maharajas. After all, this album was a souvenir of his time in India, something to jog his own memory in the future and to pass down the story of his glorious adventure in India to later generations.

How personal were this man’s connections with the sitters? A young woman identified as Miss Lyall appears in three different photographs and a Mrs. Lyall (most likely a sister-in-law but possibly a mother) in two of them. Was the album commissioned by someone courting Miss Lyall, perhaps even her future husband? We may never know, even though we can track the biographies of many of the British sitters and of the two 10-year-old maharajas, both of whom remained on the throne for almost 40 years.

What do these images, taken 135 years ago by an Indian whose business relied heavily on a British clientele, suggest about the British colonists and the Indian people over whom they ruled? Deen Dayal portrayed how the British brought England with them to India and, in a number of pictures, the Indian servants who supported that colonial lifestyle. These servants are never identified or even referred to in the captions. We see them posing alongside the British horses and dogs they walk, feed, and groom; hovering in the background at a picnic ready to offer more food; and standing at attention behind British carriages.

Visually striking, seductively charming, and providing much food for thought, Deen Dayal’s photographs and the related Indian art objects offer new insights into the early career of India’s most important historic photographer and into British and Indian life in late 19th-century India.

Anonymous. “The Photos of Raja Deen Dayal: The first great Indian photographer,” in Cleveland Art, 2023 issue 2 Nd [Online] Cited 04/09/2023

Raja Deen Dayal (Indian, 1844-1905)
Miss Lyall, Simla
1887
Albumen print
Image: 12.4 x 20.3cm (4 7/8 x 8 in.)
Paper: 12.4 x 20.3 cm (4 7/8 x 8 in.)
Cleveland Museum of Art
Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund

Raja Deen Dayal (Indian, 1844-1905)
Miss Lyall, Simla (detail)
1887
Albumen print
Image: 12.4 x 20.3cm (4 7/8 x 8 in.)
Paper: 12.4 x 20.3 cm (4 7/8 x 8 in.)
Cleveland Museum of Art
Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund

Raja Deen Dayal (Indian, 1844-1905)
Mrs. and Miss Lyall, Simla
1887
Albumen print
Image: 19.9 x 27cm (7 13/16 x 10 5/8 in.)
Paper: 19.9 x 27cm (7 13/16 x 10 5/8 in.)
Cleveland Museum of Art
Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund

A number of Deen Dayal’s Simla portraits include rickshaws, which were items of great novelty, being found in India only in Simla at the time. The two-wheeled, human-powered passenger cart first appeared in Japan around 1870 and was introduced to Simla around 1880 by a Scottish missionary. The town’s steep hills required four drivers, two to pull and two to push. Horse-drawn buggies were another common means of transport. Miss Lyall and Mrs. Lyall also appear in the photograph, suggesting that they had a significant personal relationship with the purchaser of the album.

Raja Deen Dayal (Indian, 1844-1905)
Mrs. and Miss Lyall, Simla (detail)
1887
Albumen print
Image: 19.9 x 27cm (7 13/16 x 10 5/8 in.)
Paper: 19.9 x 27cm (7 13/16 x 10 5/8 in.)
Cleveland Museum of Art
Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund

Raja Deen Dayal (Indian, 1844-1905)
Sir Auckland Colvin and Family, Simla
1887
Albumen print
Image: 20 x 26.9cm (7 7/8 x 10 9/16 in.)
Paper: 20 x 26.9cm (7 7/8 x 10 9/16 in.)
Cleveland Museum of Art
Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund

Deen Dayal’s large glass plate negatives and view camera required daylight to capture people without a blur, so his large group portraits are usually set before the sitters’ homes in their gardens. The equipment also dictated that scenes be carefully posed, not candid, shots. Sir Auckland Colvin (1838-1908) and his daughters were photographed in 1887, the year he became lieutenant governor of North-Western Provinces, a position his father had once held. The sitters are arranged so they orbit two framed photographs displayed on a table, presumably depictions of Colvin’s deceased wife and son. Thanks to photography, the entire Colvin family was reunited.

Raja Deen Dayal (Indian, 1844-1905)
Picnic party, Mashobra
1887
Albumen print
Image: 19.3 x 26.1cm (7 5/8 x 10 1/4 in.)
Paper: 19.3 x 26.1cm (7 5/8 x 10 1/4 in.)
Cleveland Museum of Art
Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund

This scene is from one of many lavish entertainments hosted by caterer, restaurateur, and hotelier Federico Peliti (Italian, 1844-1914) at his forested country estate outside Simla. In the photograph, Peliti is on horseback and his wife Judith on the swing. Swings have a long history as items of leisurely pleasure in Europe and India. Badminton, which originated in England in 1873, was popular in India. Deen Dayal may have been invited to document this gathering because he and Peliti, an amateur photographer, both belonged to the Photographic Society of Bombay.

Raja Deen Dayal (Indian, 1844-1905)
Picnic party, Mashobra (detail)
1887
Albumen print
Image: 19.3 x 26.1cm (7 5/8 x 10 1/4 in.)
Paper: 19.3 x 26.1cm (7 5/8 x 10 1/4 in.)
Cleveland Museum of Art
Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund

Raja Deen Dayal (Indian, 1844-1905)
Reverend Loche at Neemuch
1887
Albumen print
Image: 19.4 x 26.5cm (7 5/8 x 10 7/16 in.)
Paper: 19.4 x 26.5cm (7 5/8 x 10 7/16 in.)
Cleveland Museum of Art
Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund

This building is a “dak bungalow,” one of the British government guesthouses that were central to the lives of British travellers in India. This network of houses offered places to eat, stay, rent fresh horses, and conduct business while traveling between residences. The bungalows’ wide latticed verandahs admitted breezes, kept out pests, and provided some privacy. The average British Indian military household had at least six servants; eleven Indian servants are shown here, including the only Indian woman pictured in this exhibition. Many images in this album show servants, but they are never mentioned in the captions.

Raja Deen Dayal (Indian, 1844-1905)
Heavy Field Battery, Jhansi
1886
Albumen print
Image: 18.3 x 27cm (7 3/16 x 10 5/8 in.)
Paper: 18.3 x 27cm (7 3/16 x 10 5/8 in.)
Cleveland Museum of Art
Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund

Exercises involving elephant batteries, which were exotic to European eyes, attracted spectators; photographs of them were excellent souvenirs of these military forces employed by the British Indian Army. Elephants had been employed in warfare in India since at least the 500s BC, but with the advent of heavy artillery, their function switched from attack to support. They transported big guns and supplies and worked in logging and construction. It took many cattle to pull a load that could be handled by two elephants.

Raja Deen Dayal (Indian, 1844-1905)
Jhansi Fort and Elephant Battery
1886
Albumen print
Image: 19.4 x 27.2 cm (7 5/8 x 10 11/16 in.)
Paper: 19.4 x 27.2 cm (7 5/8 x 10 11/16 in.)
Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund

Raja Deen Dayal (Indian, 1844-1905)
Mr. Brown’s Horses, Jhansi
1887
Albumen print
Image: 18.9 x 27.6cm (7 7/16 x 10 7/8 in.)
Paper: 18.9 x 27.6cm (7 7/16 x 10 7/8 in.)
Cleveland Museum of Art
Purchase from the J. H. Wade

Imported into India in great numbers by the British, horses were used for both transportation and sports such as riding, polo, and racing. Caring for the animals fell largely to Indian servants. Captions on the photographs’ mounts specify the owners of these animals (note that Major Sparks also has a monkey and pet deer). However, none of the Indian servants is identified. Nor would they have received a copy of the photograph because of their low social status, which was far below that of Deen Dayal.

Teapot (Indian)
c. 1860-1890
Silver
Overall: 14 x 21 x 13.5 cm (5 1/2 x 8 1/4 x 5 5/16 in.)
Gift of Dr. Ranajit K. Datta

Made either for export or to appeal to the British community living in colonial splendor in India, this pot is a rare testament to the influence of the British Empire on consumer design during the period. Shri Lakshmi, the Hindu goddess of wealth, crowns the vessel as an apt divinity to preside over the horse races depicted on the belly of the teapot.

Raja Deen Dayal (Indian, 1844-1905)
Treacher and Co.’s Shop in the Fort, Bombay
1886
Albumen print
Image: 19.6 x 26.3cm (7 11/16 x 10 3/8 in.)
Paper: 19.6 x 26.3cm (7 11/16 x 10 3/8 in.)
Cleveland Museum of Art
Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund

The English in India approximated life back home instead of adopting local ways. This image, probably one of Deen Dayal’s stock photographs, proved to those back in England that the comforts of home were readily available in India. Treacher’s, a multi-story emporium in Bombay, offered a plethora of products ranging from drugs, wine, and electro-medical instruments to silver tea sets and rocking horses. Many goods were imported, but some local craftsmen had mastered traditional European forms for objects including furniture and silver.

Raja Deen Dayal (Indian, 1844-1905)
Treacher and Co.’s Shop in the Fort, Bombay (detail)
1886
Albumen print
Image: 19.6 x 26.3cm (7 11/16 x 10 3/8 in.)
Paper: 19.6 x 26.3cm (7 11/16 x 10 3/8 in.)
Cleveland Museum of Art
Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund

Cleveland Museum of Art
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Exhibition: ‘Nan Goldin’ at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Exhibition dates: 8th July 2023 – 28th January 2024

Curator: Anne O’Hehir, Curator, Photography

Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953)
Cookie at Tin Pan Alley, New York City
1983
From the series The ballad of sexual dependency, 1973-1986
Cibachrome print
National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra
Purchased 2021 in celebration of the National Gallery of Australia’s 40th anniversary, 2022
© Nan Goldin

Putting a spell on you

In a February 2017 posting on Art Blart on Goldin’s The ballad of sexual dependency I commented:

“There is little love and tenderness here, little magic or generosity of spirit. Goldin’s attitude to the world at the time seems to be one of hostility and resentment. It’s all very well portraying the underbelly of society – the depravity, violence and degradation – but if your point of departure is one of anger and animosity, this is always going to be reflected in your art. I remember going out with my friends partying in the 1980s, the drugs, the sex, the pushing it to the edge, but you know what – we cared about each other. Nothing could be further from the truth in Goldin’s hedonistic (not heuristic) approach to her aura. …”

Over six years later it was time to reevaluate my feelings towards the work by looking again. Had my feelings changed in the intervening years? Or was I just being an obtuse human at the time who couldn’t see what everyone else could see, the genius of the work?

I have reflected long and hard on my feelings in relation to these photographs. Perhaps I was too close to the subject matter, that the series cut too close to the bone: many years of partying in London taking drugs, so many friends and lovers lost to HIV/AIDS. But that is not the case.

The problem for me with this work is its rather sad detachment from life and a pervading sadness attached to each of these photographs. While Goldin announces that “For me it is not a detachment to take a picture” I feel the opposite is true: Goldin seems uber detached when taking these photographs. The artist goes “diving for pearls” hoping to create some magical, random psychological subtexts where the subconscious is made visible, but she doesn’t ever know whether it’s her or the camera’s subconscious that is revealed or who (the camera or the artist) is doing the work. So much for knowing thyself, being responsible to the world, to others, and to oneself, intellectually, morally, and practically.

While the diaristic photographs of this “seminal” body of work feature intimate moments of love and loss, moments of bohemian sex, transgression, beauty, spontaneity, and suffering captured in photographs of “unflinching candour, rich hues, and a keen sense of empathy and lyricism” where is the real Goldin in all of this observational performance (Goldin says her photographs ‘come out of relationships, not observation’.) I’ll just leave that one there…

What I would really like to see is the full 700 slide sequence, live, with the music that was supposed to go with these slides. I want to feel the context of these photographs and their intimacies in the flesh with the freshness and passion of what was happening at the time in New York:

Images and words and music

the real memory
the real experience

HIV/AIDS
death
life
bitterness
love
anger
immediacy

Mark Morrisroe
David Wojnarowicz
Peter Hujar
Cookie Mueller
Keith Haring
Kiki Smith

addiction
music with the ballad of sexual dependency = I put a spell on you
witness… to life, to the hurt
conformity and denial
rebellion

Each period reframes issues surrounding gender, sex, drug use and death … and what it means to be free. These images would feel totally different in 1980s New York but today, they feel cold, desperate and sad and I can’t identify with them or their photographic pathology, their study of suffering.

Have my feelings changed towards this work six years on. Yes they have. I more fully appreciate their photographic snapshot composition, their colour, their diaristic bravado. But I still don’t like their energy…. nor their masochistic indulgence.

Perhaps I just want to feel the real memory, the real experience (the energy and atmosphere of being in New York at the time) not viewed through the prism of this distanced, distancing monologue.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

The photographs in Nan Goldin’s The ballad of sexual dependency depict the everyday lives, often in intimate detail, of people in Goldin’s immediate community during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Please be advised that works of art in this exhibition depict explicit nudity, sexual acts, drug use, and the impacts of violence against women. Viewer discretion is advised. This exhibition is not suitable for children under the age of 15.

‘For me it is not a detachment to take a picture. It’s a way of touching somebody – it’s a caress, I think that you can actually give people access to their own soul.’

Nan Goldin

‘The people who have been photographed extensively by me feel that my camera is as much a part of their life as any other aspect of their life with me. It then becomes perfectly natural to be photographed. It ceases to be an external experience and becomes a part of the relationship, which is heightened by the camera, not distanced. The camera connects me to the experience and clarifies what is going on between me and the subject.’

Nan Goldin, wall text from the exhibition

“Since David Armstrong and I were young he always referred to photography as “diving for pearls.” If you took a million pictures you were lucky to come out with one or two gems. … I never learned control over my machines. I made every mistake in the book. But the technical mistakes allowed for magic. … Random psychological subtexts that I never would have thought to intentionally create. The subconscious made visible – though whether mine or the camera’s I don’t know …”

Nan Goldin. “Diving for Pearls,” quoted in Hilton Als. “Nan Goldin’s Life in Progress,” on The New Yorker website, July 4, 2016 [Online] Cited 18/11/2021

‘Nan Goldin’s nostalgic snapshots depict intimate moments of bohemian sex, transgression, beauty, spontaneity, and suffering. Her frames are marked by unflinching candour, rich hues, and a keen sense of empathy and lyricism. Goldin’s most famous work, ‘The Ballad of Sexual Dependency’ (1985), is a slideshow that presents nearly 700 images from her life in New York [and around the world] during the 1970s and ’80s; throughout the reel, the artist lies in bed with her lover, drag queens kiss in bars, and the AIDS epidemic ravages the photographer’s community.’

Anonymous text from the Artsy website

All The Beauty And The Bloodshed Official Trailer

Directed by Academy Award-winning filmmaker Laura Poitras, All the Beauty And The Bloodshed is an epic, emotional and interconnected story about internationally renowned artist and activist Nan Goldin told through her slideshows, intimate interviews, ground-breaking photography, and rare footage of her personal fight to hold the Sackler family accountable for the overdose crisis.

Installation views, Nan Goldin: the ballad of sexual dependency, National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri / Canberra, 2023
Photos: Karlee Holland

The ballad of sexual dependency is a defining artwork of the 1980s. Nan Goldin’s extended photographic study of her chosen family – her ‘tribe’ – began life as a slide show screened in the clubs and bars of New York where Goldin and her friends worked and played. The slide show was then distilled to a series of 126 photographs, which has recently become part of the National Gallery’s collection.

Goldin takes photographs to connect, to keep the people she loves in her memory. She is committed to the idea that photography can faithfully record a time and place, and do so in a way that has real social purpose. Using a documentary, snapshot style, she lays bare her life in the manner of a family album. We see her alongside her friends and lovers as they live their lives – hanging out, falling in and out of love, having children. But this is a community that would be decimated by HIV / AIDS and drug-related deaths. The ballad has become as much a testament to how much Goldin and her community have lost, as it is a record of the look and feel of a past time.

Goldin refers to The ballad as her ‘public diary’, stating that her photographs ‘come out of relationships, not observation’. The work’s overriding themes, she has stated, are those of love and empathy and the tension between autonomy and interdependence in relationships—relationships in which all genders struggle to find a common language.

Text from the NGA website

Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953)
Mark tattooing Mark, Boston
1978
From the series The ballad of sexual dependency, 1973-1986
Cibachrome print
National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra
Purchased 2021 in celebration of the National Gallery of Australia’s 40th anniversary, 2022
© Nan Goldin

Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953)
Couple in Bed, Chicago
1977
From the series The ballad of sexual dependency, 1973-1986
Cibachrome print
National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra
Purchased 2021 in celebration of the National Gallery of Australia’s 40th anniversary, 2022
© Nan Goldin

Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953)
Buzz and Nan at the Afterhours, New York City
1980
From the series The ballad of sexual dependency, 1973-1986
Cibachrome print
National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra
Purchased 2021 in celebration of the National Gallery of Australia’s 40th anniversary, 2022
© Nan Goldin

Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953)
Flaming car, Salisbury Beach, N.H.
1979
From the series The ballad of sexual dependency, 1973-1986
Cibachrome print
National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra
Purchased 2021 in celebration of the National Gallery of Australia’s 40th anniversary, 2022
© Nan Goldin

Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953)
Brian’s face, West Berlin
1984
From the series The ballad of sexual dependency, 1973-1986
Cibachrome print
National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra
Purchased 2021 in celebration of the National Gallery of Australia’s 40th anniversary, 2022
© Nan Goldin

Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953)
Nan and Brian in bed, New York City
1983
From the series The ballad of sexual dependency, 1973-1986
Cibachrome print
National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra
Purchased 2021 in celebration of the National Gallery of Australia’s 40th anniversary, 2022
© Nan Goldin

Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953)
Suzanne in the green bathroom, Pergamon Museum, East Berlin
1984
From the series The ballad of sexual dependency, 1973-1986
Cibachrome print
National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra
Purchased 2021 in celebration of the National Gallery of Australia’s 40th anniversary, 2022
© Nan Goldin

Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953)
Millie with the cheeseburger radio at home, New York City
1980
From the series The ballad of sexual dependency, 1973-1986
Cibachrome print
National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra
Purchased 2021 in celebration of the National Gallery of Australia’s 40th anniversary, 2022
© Nan Goldin

Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953)
Edwidge behind the bar at Evelyne’s, New York City
1985
From the series The ballad of sexual dependency, 1973-1986
National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra
Purchased 2021 in celebration of the National Gallery of Australia’s 40th anniversary, 2022
© Nan Goldin

Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953)
Greer on the bed, New York City
1983
From the series The ballad of sexual dependency, 1973-1986
Cibachrome print
National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra
Purchased 2021 in celebration of the National Gallery of Australia’s 40th anniversary, 2022
© Nan Goldin

Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953)
Dieter on the train, Sweden
1984
From the series The ballad of sexual dependency, 1973-1986
Cibachrome print
National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra
Purchased 2021 in celebration of the National Gallery of Australia’s 40th anniversary, 2022
© Nan Goldin

Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953)
Brian with the Flintstones, New York City
1981
From the series The ballad of sexual dependency, 1973-1986
Cibachrome print
National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra
Purchased 2021 in celebration of the National Gallery of Australia’s 40th anniversary, 2022
© Nan Goldin

Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953)
Cookie and Vittorio’s wedding, New York City
1986
From the series The ballad of sexual dependency, 1973-1986
Cibachrome print
National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra
Purchased 2021 in celebration of the National Gallery of Australia’s 40th anniversary, 2022
© Nan Goldin

Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953)
Twisting at my birthday party, New York City
1980
From the series The ballad of sexual dependency, 1973-1986
Cibachrome print
National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra
Purchased 2021 in celebration of the National Gallery of Australia’s 40th anniversary, 2022
© Nan Goldin

Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953)
Bruce on top of French Chris, Fire Island, N.Y.
1979
From the series The ballad of sexual dependency, 1973-1986
Cibachrome print
National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra
Purchased 2021 in celebration of the National Gallery of Australia’s 40th anniversary, 2022
© Nan Goldin

Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953)
French Chris on the convertible, New York City
1979
From the series The ballad of sexual dependency, 1973-1986
Cibachrome print
National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra
Purchased 2021 in celebration of the National Gallery of Australia’s 40th anniversary, 2022
© Nan Goldin

Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953)
Philippe H. and Suzanne Kissing at Euthanasia, New York City
1981
From the series The ballad of sexual dependency, 1973-1986
Cibachrome print
National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra
Purchased 2021 in celebration of the National Gallery of Australia’s 40th anniversary, 2022
© Nan Goldin

Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953)
Rise and Monty Kissing, New York City
1980
From the series The ballad of sexual dependency, 1973-1986
Cibachrome print
National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra
Purchased 2021 in celebration of the National Gallery of Australia’s 40th anniversary, 2022
© Nan Goldin

Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953)
Heart-Shaped Bruise, New York City
1980
From the series The ballad of sexual dependency, 1973-1986
Cibachrome print
National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra
Purchased 2021 in celebration of the National Gallery of Australia’s 40th anniversary, 2022
© Nan Goldin

Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953)
Nan and Dickie in the York Motel, New Jersey
1980
From the series The ballad of sexual dependency, 1973-1986
Cibachrome print
National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra
Purchased 2021 in celebration of the National Gallery of Australia’s 40th anniversary, 2022
© Nan Goldin

Nan Goldin is one of the world’s most influential photographers and her iconic series of 126 photographs The ballad of sexual dependency is a defining artwork of the 1980s. The National Gallery recently acquired the last, complete edition of this cornerstone work, which will be shown at the Gallery from 8 July.

Decades in the making, Goldin’s extended photographic study of her chosen family – her ‘tribe’ – is a deeply moving portrayal of life in the 1970s and 1980s, as the artist and her loved ones navigate a time of unrelenting energy and extremes.

National Gallery Curator of Photography Anne O’Hehir said Goldin’s rich and evocative series explores themes of sexual identity, community, and love and loss against the backdrop of New York City and has shaped a generation who’ve fallen in love with the unvarnished intimacy of her storytelling.

‘Goldin takes photographs to connect, to keep the people she loves in her memory. She is committed to the idea that photography can faithfully record a time and place and do so in a way that has real social purpose,’ O’Hehir said.

‘Using a documentary, snapshot style, she lays bare her life in the manner of a family album. We see her alongside her friends and lovers as they live their lives – hanging out, falling in and out of love, having children. But this is a community that would soon be decimated by HIV / AIDS and drug-related deaths.

‘The ballad of sexual dependency has become as much a testament to how much Goldin and her community have lost, as it is a record of the look and feel of a past time.’

O’Hehir said this engaged and at times moving series urges you to empathise with stories and experiences that are rarely depicted. ‘Goldin is committed to making public that which is usually hidden and private, and to the truthful recording of her life,’ O’Hehir said.

Goldin refers to The ballad of sexual dependency as her ‘public diary’, stating that her photographs ‘come out of relationships, not observation’. The work’s overriding themes, she has stated, are those of love and empathy and the tension between autonomy and interdependence in relationships – relationships in which all genders struggle to find a common language.

The ballad of sexual dependency began its life as a slideshow presented by Goldin at parties and in clubs and bars in New York City’s downtown art scene. The slide show was then distilled to a series of 126 photographs, which are now part of the national collection.

The opening of The ballad of sexual dependency at the National Gallery coincides with the release of Goldin’s acclaimed documentary All The Beauty And The Bloodshed on DocPlay. Directed by Academy Award®-winning filmmaker Laura Poitras, All The Beauty And The Bloodshed is an epic, emotional and interconnected story about Goldin’s life, work and activism, focussing on her recent fight to hold the Sackler family accountable for the opioid crisis. The biographical film will also be screened at the National Gallery on Saturday 22 July.

Nan Goldin’s The ballad of sexual dependency is free and will be on display at the National Gallery in Kamberri / Canberra from 8 July 2023 – 28 Jan 2024. This exhibition is part of the National Gallery of Australia’s 40th Anniversary celebrations and continues the Know My Name gender equity initiative. Nan Goldin’s exhibition The ballad of sexual dependency is supported by DocPlay, the streaming home of the world’s best documentaries.

Curator: Anne O’Hehir, Curator, Photography

Press release from the National Gallery of Australia

Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953)
The Hug, New York City
1980
From the series The ballad of sexual dependency, 1973-1986
Cibachrome print
National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra
Purchased 2021 in celebration of the National Gallery of Australia’s 40th anniversary, 2022
© Nan Goldin

Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953)
Mark Dirt, New York City
1981
From the series The ballad of sexual dependency, 1973-1986
Cibachrome print
National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra
Purchased 2021 in celebration of the National Gallery of Australia’s 40th anniversary, 2022
© Nan Goldin

Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953)
Thomas shaving, Boston
1977
From the series The ballad of sexual dependency, 1973-1986
Cibachrome print
National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra
Purchased 2021 in celebration of the National Gallery of Australia’s 40th anniversary, 2022
© Nan Goldin

Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953)
Scarpota at the Knox bar, West Berlin
1984
From the series The ballad of sexual dependency, 1973-1986
Cibachrome print
National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra
Purchased 2021 in celebration of the National Gallery of Australia’s 40th anniversary, 2022
© Nan Goldin

Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953)
Brian on the Bowery roof, New York City
1982
From the series The ballad of sexual dependency, 1973-1986
Cibachrome print
National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra
Purchased 2021 in celebration of the National Gallery of Australia’s 40th anniversary, 2022
© Nan Goldin

Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953)
C.Z. and Max on the beach, Truro, Mass.
1976
From the series The ballad of sexual dependency, 1973-1986
Cibachrome print
National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra
Purchased 2021 in celebration of the National Gallery of Australia’s 40th anniversary, 2022
© Nan Goldin

Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953)
Vivienne in the green dress, New York City
1980
From the series The ballad of sexual dependency, 1973-1986
Cibachrome print
National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra
Purchased 2021 in celebration of the National Gallery of Australia’s 40th anniversary, 2022
© Nan Goldin

Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953)
Bruce with his portrait, New York City
1981
From the series The ballad of sexual dependency, 1973-1986
Cibachrome print
National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra
Purchased 2021 in celebration of the National Gallery of Australia’s 40th anniversary, 2022
© Nan Goldin

“Ballads of Sexual Dependency” Nan Goldin poster

The Ballad of Sexual Dependency Slide Show by Nan Goldin poster

National Gallery of Australia
Parkes Place, Canberra
Australian Capital Territory 2600
Phone: (02) 6240 6411

Opening hours:
Open daily 10.00am – 5.00pm
(closed Christmas day)

National Gallery of Australia website

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Exhibition: ‘Hoda Afshar: A Curve is a Broken Line’ at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

Exhibition dates: 2nd September 2023 – 21st January 2024

Hoda Afshar (Iran, Australia, b. 1983)
Portrait #3
2014
From the series In the exodus, I love you more 2014 – ongoing
Pigment photographic print
47 x 59cm
© Hoda Afshar, image courtesy the artist

“Mixed-up times are overflowing with both pain and joy – with vastly unjust patterns of pain and joy, with unnecessary killing of ongoingness but also with necessary resurgence. The task is to make kin in lines of inventive connection as a practice of learning to live and die well with each other in a thick present. Our task is to make trouble, to stir up potent response to devastating events, as well as to settle troubled waters and rebuild quiet places.”

Donna Haraway, 2016

“… according to one’s structure and position, each of us sees certain facets, certain parts of facets (…).”

Alberto Giacometti

It’s great to see Melbourne artist Hoda Afshar have a mid-career survey exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. With her strong bodies of work over recent years she surely deserves such an accolade.

Unfortunately I can’t make any comment on the exhibition Hoda Afshar: A Curve is a Broken Line itself – its flow from body of work to body of work, from space to space; the colours used behind the photographs; the sequencing of the work; and how the different sizes of the photographs bring the viewer forward and push them back – because I have not seen the exhibition. But, as always with the work of Afshar, it would seem her compassionate, lyrical, conceptual images are displayed with a clear seeing and focus on the stories that the artist wishes to tell.

Many words have been written by others (below) about significant aspects of Afshar’s work: the layers of displacement, difference and marginality; othering and image-making; war, statelessness, diaspora, oppression, corruption, torment, identity, place … which relate to the “relativity of reality” (the view that people are active participants in the construction of their own reality) imbued in her work. Indeed, “concepts of identity develop across the social spectrum – from within the self, within the culture, and within the political arena.”1 You can read these texts at your leisure. But from what I can see in the media images the exhibition exemplifies, as writer Celina Lei notes, “how her practice has matured while still carrying forth that visual pull – aesthetically, intellectually and emotionally.”

From what I can observe and feel the images are strongly composed, rigorously conceived and carry emotional weight when combined in sequences. Single images are ambiguous but when combined into a flow of images the narrative comes alive. People are framed against contextless backgrounds, they turn away from the camera, they shield their eyes and their identity or have their faces obscured by tree branches – so much of Afshar’s work is about absence, loss, longing, persecution, the impermanence of identity and the conflicting perceptions of a constructed, lived reality.

What I take issue with is John McDonald’s comparison of Afshar’s work with that of William Eggleston: works in her ongoing series In the exodus, I love you more (2014-) which capture diverse images of Iran “have the same mixture of ordinariness and oddity one finds in the work of a photographer such as William Eggleston.”2 Nothing could be farther from a form of reality. Eggleston’s images are never ordinary, are frequently surreal and bizarre, shot from a low or high angle (often with lurid colour ways) and possess a cutting social commentary on American culture … whereas Afshar’s photographs are poetic, sublime, lyrical emanations of ‘reality’ and if they do picture some oddity they lack the intense “bite” of an Eggleston image – something I would like to see Afshar reintroduce into her image making.

Many of her images are reflective, meditative, and approach the subject matter in an oblique manner which illuminates “how photography can activate new ways of thinking” … all well and good, but I long for a little more guts and directness to some of her individual images (physically, literally not intellectually). Her early series Under Western Eyes for example, contains biting, quirky creativity but for obvious reasons has not been included in this exhibition because it doesn’t fit the style of the smooth, polished, buffed, ambiguous and other worldly later work.

I also take issue with Tom Williams’ observation. “Even in her early, nominally “documentary” series, you can sense an embracing of the ambiguity of the still image, and an interest in composing a reality more vivid (and perhaps genuine) than dispassionate reportage might be capable of.”3 I disagree with the second part of this statement.

Having recently spent hours assembling a huge posting of photographs on the war in Ukraine – images which picture the ordinariness and atrocity of war – nothing, literally nothing, can be more vivid and genuine than the images of that war captured by brave Ukrainian photographers (see examples below). The same can be said of the genocide happening in Gaza and the photographs emerging from that massacre.

But as John McDonald intelligently observes, “The tragic events that have unfolded in Israel and Gaza over the past month should be enough to remind us that art is powerless in the face of real political upheaval. The most an artist can do to effect social and political change is to create a few striking images that circulate beyond the thought-absorbing walls of the art museum. Even then, any change to people’s attitudes is bound to be incremental and highly personal.”4

Most images then, have little power to change public and personal opinion… all they can do is proffer alternate visions and interpretations of the world and hope that some glimmer of recognition of injustice, difference and otherness will permeate the mind of the viewer. And while Afshar’s photographs do not effect social and political change what they do is bring to consciousness in the viewer “other” aspects of the realities of the world. Through the visibility of her images she exposes the phallocracy of the masculine, singular definition of truth. As David Smail suggests when speaking on the nature of ‘truth’,

“Though the truth is not just a matter of personal perspective, neither is it fixed and certain, objectively ‘out there’ and independent of human knowing. ‘The truth’ changes according to, among other things, developments and alterations in our values and understandings… the ‘non-finality’ of truth is not to be confused with a simple relativity of ‘truths’.”5

Afshar’s photographs address the simple relativity of many ‘truths’, the tension between “forms” … of truth and reality. Truths and reality, what is seen and not seen. So much of being alive is breaking…

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Footnotes

1/ Ari Hakkarainen. “‘The Urgency of Resistance’: Rehearsals of Death in the Photography of David Wojnarowicz” 2018

2/ John McDonald. “Politically charged or aesthetically ambitious? This show is the best of both worlds,” on The Sydney Morning Herald website November 3, 2023 [Online] Cited 05/02/2024

3/ Tom Williams. “How photography can reveal, overlook and manipulate truth: the fearless work of Australian Iranian artist Hoda Afshar,” on The Conversation website September 8, 2023 [Online] Cited 05/02/2024

4/ McDonald, op cit.,

5/ David Smail. Illusion & Reality: The Meaning of Anxiety. London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1984, p. 152.

Many thankx to the Art Gallery of New South Wales for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Mstyslav Chernov (Ukrainian, b. 1985) / AP
Doctors unsuccessfully try to resuscitate a girl hit by Russian shelling in Mariupol, Ukraine. February 27, 2022
2022

Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education, research, criticism and review

Alexey FurmanAlexey Furman (Ukrainian, b. 1991) / Getty Images
A young girl cries as a man bids his daughter goodbye at the railway station in Lviv, Ukraine, on March 22, 2022. Lviv has served as a stopover and shelter for the millions of Ukrainians fleeing the Russian invasion, either to the safety of nearby countries or the relative security of western Ukraine’
2022

Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education, research, criticism and review

Sergi Mykhalchuk (Ukrainian, b. 1972)
Evacuation of civilians from Irpіn, Ukraine. March 4-5, 2022
2022

Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education, research, criticism and review

Mstyslav Chernov (Ukrainian, b. 1985) / AP
Mariana Vishegirskaya stands outside a maternity hospital that was damaged by shelling in Mariupol, Ukraine, March 9, 2022. Vishegirskaya survived the shelling and later gave birth to a girl in another hospital in Mariupol
2022

Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education, research, criticism and review

“I see art-making as a process of “unselfing” – you can be outside of your body, less focused on what’s inside, and see yourself in relation to the broader world.”⁠

Hoda Afshar

“In co-opting the documentary genre, Afshar harnesses its truth-telling power while simultaneously telling another story – one that is often unspoken or at odds with what we are told by those in power.”

Susan Acret. “Hoda Afshar’s Fragments of Reality,” on the Ocula website Sydney, 3 February 2023 [Online] Cited 11/12/2023

Through her poetically constructed images, Hoda Afshar illuminates a world overshadowed by history and atrocity. Yet we never see despair: we see defiance, comradeship, reinvention and a search for how photography can activate new ways of thinking. …

What unites her materially diverse work is a concern with visibility: who is denied it, what is made visible by media, and how photography can reveal, overlook and manipulate truth.

Much of her work addresses critical humanitarian issues of our time: war, statelessness, diaspora, oppression, corruption. She challenges stereotypes. We don’t see passive victims or closed narratives: we are introduced to new perspectives that might lead us to reappraise the world we inhabit.

Anonymous. “How photography can reveal, overlook and manipulate truth,” on the University of Wollongong website September 8, 2023 [Online] Cited 11/01/2023

The title of the exhibition was inspired by lines in a poem by Kaveh Akbar:

a curve is a straight line broken at all its points so much
of being alive is breaking.

Through her photographs and moving image works, Iranian-born, Melbourne-based Hoda Afshar examines the politics of image-making. Deeply researched yet emotionally sensitive, her work can be seen as a form of activism as much as an artistic inquiry.

Afshar uses the camera to give visibility to those who have been denied it, resolutely insisting on the humanity of her subjects. She makes us contend with violence and brutality, not through blunt imagery but through evocation. Her work is anchored in empathy yet also radical in the way it wrestles with injustice.

This exhibition will feature photography and film from the past decade to present a comprehensive overview of Afshar’s recent practice, including a newly commissioned series. Amassed together in dialogue for the first time in a major public institution, these works offer a poignant reminder of the power of images and their coercive potential.

An accompanying publication offers critical insight into Afshar’s work as well as creative and experimental responses from a range of writers.

Text from the Art Gallery of New South Wales website

“The tragic events that have unfolded in Israel and Gaza over the past month should be enough to remind us that art is powerless in the face of real political upheaval. The most an artist can do to effect social and political change is to create a few striking images that circulate beyond the thought-absorbing walls of the art museum. Even then, any change to people’s attitudes is bound to be incremental and highly personal. …

Like Valamanesh, Afshar has never been able to let go of her brutalised, much-maligned country. In her ongoing series, In the exodus, I love you more (2014-), which takes its title from a line by Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, she returns time and again to Iran, capturing diverse images that have the same mixture of ordinariness and oddity one finds in the work of a photographer such as William Eggleston. Landscapes, street scenes, portraits, horses, peacocks, a building draped in heavy curtains, a hose in a courtyard … nothing is disqualified from an idiosyncratic overview that digs under the skin of her birthplace. The same applies, but with added eeriness, to the series Speak to the wind (2015-22), set on the island of Hormuz, off the southern coast of Iran.”

John McDonald. “Politically charged or aesthetically ambitious? This show is the best of both worlds,” on The Sydney Morning Herald website November 3, 2023 [Online] Cited 05/02/2024

“Through her poetically constructed images, Hoda Afshar illuminates a world overshadowed by history and atrocity. Yet we never see despair: we see defiance, comradeship, reinvention and a search for how photography can activate new ways of thinking. …

Even in her early, nominally “documentary” series, you can sense an embracing of the ambiguity of the still image, and an interest in composing a reality more vivid (and perhaps genuine) than dispassionate reportage might be capable of. …

What unites her materially diverse work is a concern with visibility: who is denied it, what is made visible by media, and how photography can reveal, overlook and manipulate truth.

Much of her work addresses critical humanitarian issues of our time: war, statelessness, diaspora, oppression, corruption. She challenges stereotypes. We don’t see passive victims or closed narratives: we are introduced to new perspectives that might lead us to reappraise the world we inhabit. …

Hoda Afshar’s work addresses conflict, injustice, mobility and the often fragile state of being alive. It reminds us that dominant powers can be challenged by exposing truth and envisioning something new.”

Tom Williams. “How photography can reveal, overlook and manipulate truth: the fearless work of Australian Iranian artist Hoda Afshar,” on The Conversation website September 8, 2023 [Online] Cited 05/02/2024

“Social and political commentary is a given in much of her work, but her lens remains sympathetic, never othering. This is highlighted in sections throughout Hoda Afshar: A Curve is a Broken Line. Her portraits of stateless asylum seekers on Manus Island, Papua New Guinea, taken in 2018, display power and dignity in visibility, despite lived experiences of harshness and torment.”

Celina Lei. “Exhibition review: Hoda Afshar – A Curve is a Broken Line, AGNSW,” on the Artshub website 13 Sep 2023 [Online] Cited 05/02/2024

Installation views of the exhibition Hoda Afshar: A Curve is a Broken Line at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2023 showing work from the series In the exodus, I love you more 2014- ongoing
Photo: © Art Gallery of New South Wales, Christopher Snee

Hoda Afshar (Iran, Australia, b. 1983)
Untitled
2014
From the series In the exodus, I love you more 2014- ongoing
Pigment photographic print
© Hoda Afshar, image courtesy the artist

Hoda Afshar (Iran, Australia, b. 1983)
Grace
2014
From the series In the exodus, I love you more 2014- ongoing
Pigment photographic print
47 x 59cm
© Hoda Afshar, image courtesy the artist

In the exodus, I love you more (2014-) is a portrait of her home country formed by experiences of familiarity and distance. The artist is both at home and searching, like an outsider. Images suggest at times an intimate proximity, and at others a separation akin to the one made by raising a camera to your eye.

Afshar examines her experience of migration and, she tells me, seeks to “dismantle the idea of there being one way of seeing Iran.”

The final image in this series shows the erasure of a woman’s face in a painted Persian miniature.

Hoda Afshar (Iran, Australia, b. 1983)
Crease
2014
From the series In the exodus, I love you more 2014 – ongoing
Pigment photographic print
23 x 29cm
© Hoda Afshar, image courtesy the artist

Hoda Afshar (Iran, Australia, b. 1983)
Draw
2016
From the series In the exodus, I love you more 2014 – ongoing
Pigment photographic print
81 x 102cm
© Hoda Afshar, image courtesy the artist

Hoda Afshar (Iran, Australia, b. 1983)
Twofold
2014, printed 2023
From the series In the exodus, I love you more 2014 – ongoing
Digital print on vinyl, installation dimensions variable
© Hoda Afshar, image courtesy the artist

In September, the Art Gallery of New South Wales will present Hoda Afshar: A Curve is a Broken Line, the first major solo exhibition of one of Australia’s most innovative and unflinching photo-media artists, Iranian-born, Melbourne-based Hoda Afshar.

Featuring photographs and moving image works from the past decade, including a newly commissioned series, the comprehensive exhibition provides an overview of the artist’s recent practice and examines the politics of art making. Amassed together in dialogue for the first time by a major public institution, these works offer a poignant reminder of the power of images and their coercive potential.

Art Gallery of NSW director Michael Brand said it is a great pleasure to present Afshar’s first major solo exhibition at the Art Gallery of NSW.

‘Hoda Afshar is one of the most exciting artists working in Australia today. While her work explores themes of violence and pain, it also speaks to the transformative potential of image-making which is of profound importance to art institutions, as agents of advocacy and emotional encounter,’ said Brand.

‘Her work gives visibility to marginalised voices and serves as a powerful reminder of art’s capacity to embolden, inspire, and move. Her own voice as an artist is a defiantly international one.’

Since she first began working with photography in the early 2000s, Afshar has resolutely insisted on the humanity of her subjects. She is sensitive to the camera’s status as an imperialist tool that has long been used to define how history is told and how power is consolidated. Throughout her practice, she has involved her subjects in the act of photographing them in order to equalise the power dynamic that exists between photographer and photographed and return agency to those she depicts.

Exhibition curator, Art Gallery of NSW senior curator of contemporary Australian art Isobel Parker Philip said: ‘Hoda Afshar’s work is both deeply researched and poetically resonant and can be seen as a form of activism as much as an artistic inquiry.

‘Hoda’s approach is unique in that she makes us contend with brutality, not through blunt imagery but through evocation. Her work is anchored in compassion yet also radical in the way it wrestles with injustice.

‘Hoda’s photographs and videos are emotionally embroiled in the world they depict. It is this fact that makes a survey of her work both compelling and timely.’

Hoda Afshar: A Curve is a Broken Line includes the reveal of a new body of work commissioned for the exhibition, titled In turn 2023, which is a series of large-scale photographs depicting Iranian women who, like Afshar, live in Australia and have watched, from afar, the women-led Iranian uprising that began in September 2022. Presented one year on from when the uprising started, the portrait series is something of an elegy, speaking to their shared grief and their shared hope.

Among the most recognisable works featured in the exhibition, is Behrouz Boochani – Manus Island 2018, which was acquired by the Art Gallery in 2020 from Afshar’s pivotal series Remain 2018, which comprises a video and suite of photographs. Made on Manus Island, Papua New Guinea with a group of stateless asylum seekers, the video and photographs of Remain serve as testimony to the lived impact of Australia’s border protection policy.

The exhibition is accompanied by a publication, Hoda Afshar: A Curve is a Broken Line (RRP$65) featuring new writing by curator Isobel Parker Philip and writers including Hala Alyan, Elyas Alavi, Behrouz Boochani, Andrew Brooks and Astrid Lorange (working as the duo Snack Syndicate), Taous Dahmani, Shahram Khosravi and Sarah Sentilles.

Press release from the Art Gallery of New South Wales

Hoda Afshar (Iran, Australia, b. 1983)
Untitled #4
From the series Behold 2016
Pigment photographic print
95 x 120cm
© Hoda Afshar, image courtesy the artist

Hoda Afshar (Iran, Australia, b. 1983)
Untitled #6
rom the series Behold 2016
Pigment photographic print
95 x 120cm
© Hoda Afshar, image courtesy the artist

Behold (2016)

The series Behold was made while the artist was travelling in the Middle East and befriended a group of young gay men who invited her to photograph them in a local male-only bathhouse.

The title Behold is alluding to the role of the viewer, the camera, in partially constructing the meaning of these images. For instance, the visible expressions of male intimacy tend to be viewed through a very narrow sexualized frame in the West, but in Iran, like elsewhere in the East, it is quite normal to see men engaged in physical contact, embracing each other and kissing cheeks, physically massaging each other in bathhouses, without it being sexualized. It is like public displays of breastfeeding and images of naked infants or adolescents – and also male intimacy – it is always interesting for me the reactions that these things engender in the West – the weird sort of prohibitions, and paranoias that surround the displaying of certain bodies or their interactions.⁠
⁠
Picking up on something that John Berger said for example – if we were to replace the men in these images with women then of course the reaction would be very different. So returning to the idea of viewing: this work for me (now, upon reflection) is also about challenging the viewer – or different viewers – about these things. because despite the points just mentioned, the dominant reading of the work will still likely be about the censorship of bodies and identities in a particularly religious environment. But again what I am suggesting is that this has something, though not everything, to do with our own framing.

Hoda Afshar Instagram page

In Behold (2016), once more we see acts of resolute defiance by people performing for the camera. Afshar was invited by a group of gay men to observe re-enacted gestures of protection and intimacy outlawed in most of the Middle East.

Unable to freely express their love in society, they disclose and affirm it for Afshar and her lens.

Behold was made unexpectedly, and without design. I was travelling in a city that I sometimes return to, and I got to know a group of gay men. There, where they live, these men (and many others like them) are mostly left to be. But only on the condition that they lead one part of their lives in secret. Rarely, that is, do their bodies ever meet in open honesty outside, in public. Only here, in this bathhouse, where their desire to be seen and embraced by others – just to be and to be held – is played out the partial openness of these four closed walls.

The bathhouse no longer exists. But while it still did, these men invited me to document it and a little glimpse of their lives in it. We arrived, but I was not allowed to enter. So we rented the place, and for a few hours I took pictures while these men played themselves performing their lives for my peering camera, in order that their desire to be seen might be realised, in part at least, here in the world of the images – in the act of beholding, where the bare thereness of life is transformed from mere appearing or appearance, into something more meaningful … into recognition.

Hoda Afshar. “11 Works by Hoda Afshar,” on the Cordite website 1 August 2018 [Online] Cited 09/11/2023

Hoda Afshar (Iran, Australia, b. 1983)
Untitled #7
From the series Behold 2016
Pigment photographic print
95 x 120cm
© Hoda Afshar, image courtesy the artist

Installation view of the exhibition Hoda Afshar: A Curve is a Broken Line at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2023 showing Ibrahim Mahjid – Manus Island from the series Remain 2018
Photo: © Art Gallery of New South Wales, Christopher Snee

Hoda Afshar (Iran, Australia, b. 1983)
Remain (video still)
2018
From the series Remain 2018
Dual channel digital video, colour, sound
Two-channel digital video, colour, sound, duration 23:33 min, aspect ratio 16:9, installation dimensions variable
Art Gallery of New South Wales
Purchased with funds provided by the Contemporary Collection Benefactors 2020
© Hoda Afshar

Hoda Afshar | Remain (excerpt)

Remain (2018)

Remain addresses Australia’s contentious border protection policy and the human rights of asylum seekers. The work was made in collaboration with several of the men who remained on Manus Island, Papua New Guinea, six or more years after they left their homelands to seek asylum in Australia, but instead were sent to languish in the remote offshore detention centre. The work involves these men retelling their individual and shared stories through staged images, words, and poetry, and bearing witness to life in the Manus camps: from the death of friends and dreams of freedom, to the strange air of beauty, boredom, and violence that surrounds them on the island.

Afshar believes ‘typical images of refugees only reinforce in the eyes of the viewer their inferior image and position’. Afshar, in collaboration with the people in her
portraits, attempted to create ‘an artwork – using the language of poetry, performance, and song – that defies such logic, and forces the viewer to confront their
own incomprehension, as well as the very inexplicableness of the situation that these men face.’ Collaboration, trust and empathy is an important aspect of Afshar’s art practice. She says:

One portrait shows a stateless Kurdish refugee called Emad struggling under a downpour of sand. When I asked him what natural element he wanted to use in his image, he chose soil. He said: ‘It reminds me of land; the land that I was torn from; the land that has been torn from me. From us. Soil is the most precious idea in Kurdish culture. But we are stateless. I’ve been stateless my whole life.’

Afshar’s criticism of documentary photography isn’t aimed at photographers themselves, or their intentions: ‘It’s important for all of us to look at the visual languages that we inherited, that are predominantly imperial visual languages, and ask questions about why we’re framing things in a certain way.’

Anonymous. “Counihan Gallery learning resource – Means Without End Hoda Afshar,” on the Merri-bek City Council website [Online] Cited 08/11/2023

Hoda Afshar – Introduction to Remain

Hoda Afshar’s 2018 body of work Remain is an unflinchingly political commentary on Australia’s border protection policy and serves as testimony to its assault of human rights. Encompassing a film and a suite of photographic portraits, Remain speaks the stories of a group of stateless men who remained on Manus Island, Papua New Guinea, after the immigration detention centre closed in October 2017. In the film, their experiences are recounted as episodic fragments shot through with violence in voice overs that are by turns lyrical and brutal. Some recite poetry, some sing, some remember the riots and the suicides. As their stories unfold, the camera pans over a picturesque landscape – lush foliage and crystal-clear water. A ‘green hell’ as one man describes it. It is the abrupt collision of these two registers, the haunting narrative and the idyllic imagery, that carries the emotional force of the work. It is beautiful and horrifying at the same time.

The accompanying photographic portraits of the same protagonists are insistent and powerful. They stand before us, in the foreground of the image, against a dark backdrop. In these photographs, there is nothing to distract us from the figures themselves. Nothing to detract from the simple fact of their presence. They each assert their right to be seen. The bluntness of this gesture is itself a political act. For that is what detention does; it makes individuals invisible. In these portraits, Afshar acknowledges the plight of these men metaphorically. They are beset by the elements, by fire, water and earth. But at no point is their humanity questioned.

Text from the Art Gallery of New South Wales website

Hoda Afshar (Iran, Australia, b. 1983)
Behrouz Boochani – Manus Island
2018
From the series Remain
Inkjet archival print
130 x 104cm
Art Gallery of New South Wales
Purchased with funds provided by the Contemporary Collection Benefactors 2020
© Hoda Afshar

Behrouz Boochani (Persian, b. 1983)

Behrouz Boochani (Persian: بهروز بوچانی; born 23 July 1983) is a Kurdish-Iranian journalist, human rights defender, writer and film producer living in New Zealand. He was held in the Australian-run Manus Island detention centre in Papua New Guinea from 2013 until its closure in 2017. He remained on the island before being moved to Port Moresby along with the other detainees around September 2019. On 14 November 2019 he arrived in Christchurch on a one-month visa, to speak at a special event organised by WORD Christchurch on 29 November, as well as other speaking events. In December 2019, his one month visa to New Zealand expired and he remained on an expired visa until being granted refugee status in July 2020, at which time he became a Senior Adjunct Research Fellow at the University of Canterbury.

Boochani is the co-director, along with Iranian film maker Arash Kamali Sarvestani, of the documentary Chauka, Please Tell Us the Time, has published numerous articles in leading media internationally about the plight of refugees held by the Australian government on Manus Island, and has won several awards.

His memoir, No Friend But the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison, won the Victorian Prize for Literature and the Victorian Premier’s Prize for Nonfiction in January 2019. The book was tapped out on a mobile phone in a series of single messages over time and translated from Persian into English by Omid Tofighian.

After the November 2022 publication of his second collection of writings, Freedom, Only Freedom: The Prison Writings of Behrouz Boochani, Boochani visited Australia for the first time to promote the book in December 2022.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Hoda Afshar (Iran, Australia, b. 1983)
Emad Moradi – Manus Island
2018
From the series Remain
Inkjet archival print
130 x 83cm
Art Gallery of New South Wales
Purchased with funds provided by the Contemporary Collection Benefactors 2020
© Hoda Afshar

Text from the Art Gallery of New South Wales website

Hoda Afshar (Iran, Australia, b. 1983)
Ari Sirwan – Manus Island
2018
From the series Remain
Inkjet archival print
130 x 83cm
Art Gallery of New South Wales
Purchased with funds provided by the Contemporary Collection Benefactors 2020
© Hoda Afshar

Installation view of the exhibition Hoda Afshar: A Curve is a Broken Line at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2023 showing work from the series Speak the wind 2015-2022 (see below)
Photo: © Art Gallery of New South Wales, Christopher Snee

Hoda Afshar (Iran, Australia, b. 1983)
Untitled
From the series Speak the wind 2015-2022
Pigment photographic print
100 x 80cm
© Hoda Afshar, image courtesy the artist

Hoda Afshar (Iran, Australia, b. 1983)
Untitled #88
From the series Speak the wind 2015-2022
Pigment photographic print
80 x 100cm
© Hoda Afshar, image courtesy the artist

Hoda Afshar (Iran, Australia, b. 1983)
Untitled
From the series Speak the wind 2015-2022
Pigment photographic print
80 x 100cm
© Hoda Afshar, image courtesy the artist

Hoda Afshar (Iran, Australia, b. 1983)
Untitled #18
From the series Speak the wind 2015-2022
Pigment photographic print
80 x 100cm
© Hoda Afshar, image courtesy the artist

Speak the wind 2015-2022

On the islands in the Strait of Hormuz, a belief exists that a wind, known as zār, can possess a person, and can be exorcised from them through an intense ceremony of dance and music.

On the islands of the Strait of Hormuz, near the southern coast of Iran, there is a belief that the winds – generally believed to be harmful – can possess a person, causing them to experience illness or disease. As part of a ritual placating the winds’ harmful effects, the islands’ inhabitants practice a ceremony involving incense, music and movement, in which a hereditary cult leader speaks with the wind through the afflicted patient in order to negotiate its exit.⁠

When artist Hoda Afshar first visited the islands in 2015, she found herself drawn not only to these distinctive customs practiced by its inhabitants but also to its otherworldly landscapes – the strange valleys and statue-like mountains, themselves sculpted by the wind over many millennia. While the exact origins remain unclear, the existence of similar beliefs in many African countries suggests that the cult may have been brought to the south of Iran from southeast Africa through the Arab slave trade. This seldom spoken history became a starting point into an intriguing project for Afshar, who sought to document the story of these winds and the traces they have left on these islands and inhabitants.⁠

Mack Books on Intagram

Hoda Afshar (Iran, Australia, b. 1983)
Untitled #11
From the series Speak the wind 2015-2022
Pigment photographic print
80 x 100cm
© Hoda Afshar, image courtesy the artist

Hoda Afshar (Iran, Australia, b. 1983)
Untitled
From the series Speak the wind 2015-2022
Pigment photographic print
80 x 100cm
© Hoda Afshar, image courtesy the artist

Hoda Afshar (Iran, Australia, b. 1983)
Untitled #2
From the series Speak the wind 2015-2022
Pigment photographic print
100 x 80cm
© Hoda Afshar, image courtesy the artist

Installation view of the exhibition Hoda Afshar: A Curve is a Broken Line at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2023 showing work from the series Agonistes 2020 with, from left to right, A General Practitioner / A Writer Who Was Born Into A Closed Christadelphian Community / A Solicitor and Barrister, and Former Attorney General / A Disability Care Worker Employed at Autism Spectrum Australia
Photo: © Art Gallery of New South Wales, Christopher Snee

With 110 cameras functioning instantaneously in a photo studio, Afshar created 3D images of her subjects and used a 3D printer to convert them into statues.

Hoda Afshar (Iran, Australia, b. 1983)
Portrait #3
From the series Agonistes 2020
Pigment photographic print, text
69 x 55cm
© Hoda Afshar, image courtesy the artist

An officer and lawyer in the Australian Special Forces

While serving in Afghanistan, he raised concerns that the Australian government were covering up the corruption of Australia’s defence force for political gain, and sacrificing the lives of Australian soldiers. After his concerns were consistently ignored, he copied over a hundred secret documents and distributed them to several journalists and to the ABC. He faces trial on five charges relating to National Security. If found guilty, he will face lifetime imprisonment.

Hoda Afshar Instagram page

Hoda Afshar (Iran, Australia, b. 1983)
A writer who was born into a closed Christadelphian community
From the series Agonistes 2020
Pigment photographic print, text
69 x 55cm
© Hoda Afshar, image courtesy the artist

Portrait of Janet Galbraith, a survivor of family sexual abuse

Hoda Afshar (Iran, Australia, b. 1983)
An occupational health and safety manager working for security firm G4S at Manus Island Immigration Detention Centre
From the series Agonistes 2020
Pigment photographic print, text
69 x 55cm
© Hoda Afshar, image courtesy the artist

Portrait of Rod St George, who exposed atrocious conditions at the Manus Island detention centre

Agonistes (2020)

Hoda Afshar explores the experiences of people who have spoken out. The artist worked with people known as whistle-blowers, who have brought to light various transgressions perpetrated in Australian institutions today. Although whistleblowing in Australia is considered a hallmark of our democracy, whistle blowers take great personal risks when drawing attention to institutional wrongdoing.

Agonistes is based on the experiences of several men and women – former employees in the areas of immigration, youth detention, disability care, and other government agencies – who chose to speak out, and who now live with the consequences. They describe the personal and professional ruin, the breakdown of friendships and family relationships, and the physical and mental anguish that followed their decision to call out alleged abuses, and the reasons that led them to do so, despite knowing their possible fate. They explain that if they could go back, they would do it all again.

While their individual stories differ, the shared struggle of these men and women and their portraits expose the same agonizing truth: that the choice between responsibility and obligation – between morality and the law – is, in a very real sense, the essence of tragedy. Afshar produced a 3D scan of each of the whistle blowers. This was then 3D printed to create a bust. Afshar created studio photographs of the busts, which resulted in a suite of images that abstracts the identity of each subject. The eyes – a feature we usually use to identify people in photographs – become curiously blank.

Anonymous. “Counihan Gallery learning resource – Means Without End Hoda Afshar,” on the Merri-bek City Council website [Online] Cited 08/11/2023

“It took me 14 years to find that level of courage, or knowledge or connection to the place [Australia] to make a work like the Agonistes, to turn the lens inward, to feel like I’m authorised to talk about it as a citizen,” says Afshar.

To identify the whistleblowers to approach for the project, Afshar worked with Claire Loughnan, a lecturer in criminology at the University of Melbourne.

She flew each person to Melbourne and photographed them using a system of 110 cameras – which allowed her to essentially create a 360-degree portrait. She used this composite image to generate a 3D-printed sculpture of each whistleblower. …

Afshar was fascinated to discover that the one thing that the 110 cameras could not capture was the details of her subjects’ eyes – resulting in a glazed-over effect.

This accidental byproduct of the process had a certain poetic resonance for the photographer: it reminded her of the eyes on ancient Greek busts.

She points out that democracy and tragedy emerged in ancient Greece at the same time.

“Often in the tragic narratives, the main character is the one that is caught between two conflicting choices: responsibility and obligation, or morality and the law … [or] the public and the state.”

“The reality of Athens at the time was a system that was rooted in patriarchy, slavery, xenophobia, refugee crisis – which are still the struggles of our time. And the function of tragedy then was to give voice to the excluded voices.”

In the Agonistes video work, we hear the excluded voices of the whistleblowers while Afshar zooms in on her subjects’ eyes, mouths, hands.

Hannah Reich. “Hoda Afshar documents Australian government whistleblowers in new photography and film project,” on the ABC News website Sat 6 Mar 2021 [Online] Cited 08/11/2023

Hoda Afshar (Iran, Australia, b. 1983)
Agonistes (video still)
From the series Agonistes 2020
Single-channel digital video, colour, sound, duration 20 min, aspect ratio 16:9, installation dimensions variable
© Hoda Afshar, image courtesy the artist

Installation views of the exhibition Hoda Afshar: A Curve is a Broken Line at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2023 showing work from the series In turn 2023
Photo: © Art Gallery of New South Wales, Christopher Snee

Hoda Afshar (Iran, Australia, b. 1983)
Untitled #2
From the series In turn 2023
Pigment photographic print
169 x 128cm
© Hoda Afshar, image courtesy the artist

Hoda Afshar (Iran, Australia, b. 1983)
Untitled #4
From the series In turn 2023
Pigment photographic print
169 x 128cm
© Hoda Afshar, image courtesy the artist

In the adjoining room, the new series In turn (2023) is a suite of large, framed photographs of Iranian women based in Australia. Many images show them as they tenderly braid one another’s hair. These women are unidentifiable, apart from artist and activist Mahla Karimian, who appears airborne with a pair of flying doves.

This work was catalysed by the women-led protest movement sparked by the death of Mahsa Jina Amini, an Iranian Kurdish woman arrested in September 2022 for not following Iran’s strict female dress codes. The uprising filled the streets with women chanting “Women, Life, Freedom!” and “Say her name!” in fearless defiance of authorities, who responded with murderous retaliation.

Afshar was observing her homeland from afar. She says she wanted to “share voices the media was ignoring”. She was inspired by social media images of women plaiting each other’s hair in public: a rebellious act that echoes a practice of female Kurdish fighters preparing for battle.

But the images aren’t violent. They’re quietly peaceful, showing solidarity in grief, hope and determination. In making this “visual letter” to her Iranian sisters, Afshar has risked long-term exile from her country of birth.

Hoda Afshar (Iran, Australia, b. 1983)
Untitled #10
From the series In turn 2023
Pigment photographic print
169 x 128cm
© Hoda Afshar, image courtesy the artist

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Art Gallery Road, The Domain
Sydney NSW 2000, Australia

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Exhibition: ‘Noir & Blanc: une esthétique de la photographie’ at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF), François-Mitterrand, Paris

Exhibition dates: 17th October 2023 – 21st January 2024

Benjamin Brecknell Turner (English, 1815-1894)
North Side of Quadrangle, Arundel Castle
1852-1854
Negative photograph on paper
29.7 x 39.6cm
BnF, department of Prints and Photography, RES PHOTO EI-6-BOITE FOL B (n° 3)
Gift of André and Marie-Thérèse Jammes, 1960

What a lovely exhibition to start the year 2024 on Art Blart.

My favourite photographs in the posting: three beautiful fashion photographs by Frères Séeberger; a stunning late Atget Parc de Sceaux, Duchess Alley (between 1925 and 1927, below) in which you can feel the crispness in the air of the early winter morning; and the glorious seascapes of Gustave Le Gray, probably the best (and most atmospheric) photographer of the sea in all time.

In this posting we observe how black and white photographs are never just black and white but full of different hues and colours. These colour variations tell us a lot about the perception of the image.

As the exhibition text notes: “The strength of the blacks and whites, the variations of hues influence our perception of the image: the more contrasted it is, the more readable it is for our eye saturated with absolute blacks and whites; the more nuanced it is, the more sensitive the distance of time becomes.”

As we enter a new year, another year further away from the origin of the light captured in these photographs, the sensitivity of early photographers and their ability to displace time continues to entrance the viewer.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Noir & Blanc: Une esthétique de la photographie

Black and white is inseparable from the history of photography: its developments, from the end of the 19th century to today, have revealed its plastic force. While the use of colour intensified from the 1970s, black and white reinvented itself as a means of assertive aesthetic expression emphasising graphics and material. Black and white photography remains less expensive and simpler, but its persistence to this day can be explained above all by the fact that it has come to embody the very essence of photography. It appears to carry a universal, timeless, even memorial dimension, where colour would be the sole translation of the contemporary world.

The National Library of France holds one of the richest photographic collections in the world with some six million prints, these are particularly representative of this abundant history of black and white photography.

Benjamin Brecknell Turner (English, 1815-1894)
Arbre le long d’une clotûre (Tree along a fence)
1852-1854
Negative photograph on paper
23.5 x 27.3cm
BnF, department of Prints and Photography, RES PHOTO EI-6-BOITE FOL B (n° 3)
Gift of André and Marie-Thérèse Jammes, 1960

Photography on paper, with its speed and precision, revolutionised image production in the mid-19th century. The prerequisite is the production of a negative then of the same size as the print. The first negatives are on paper. Reversing the values of blacks and whites, they offer an unknown vision of the world. These oppositions, inverted or not, are the basis of the aesthetics of photography.

One of the earliest British amateur photographers, Benjamin Brecknell Turner (1815-1894) was experimenting with photography barely ten years after the invention of the medium. He exhibited widely during his lifetime and is best known for his beautiful photographs of 19th-century England, picturesque ruins and rural scenes.

A founder member of the Photographic Society of London, Turner contributed to the rapid technical and aesthetic development of photography in the 1850s. Our collection includes a unique album compiled by Turner, ‘Photographic Views from Nature’, containing some of the earliest photographs made in and around the counties of Worcestershire, Surrey, Sussex, Kent and Yorkshire, alongside the radical modern architecture of the Crystal Palace in London’s Hyde Park.

Text from the V&A website

The origins of black and white

Before the invention of colour photography by the Lumière brothers in 1903, one might believe that all photography was black and white. The reality is more complex: the early days were more those of a varied range of values where pure blacks and whites were the exception and so-called sepia tones were the most common. The negative / positive process patented by the Englishman Fox Talbot in 1841 makes it possible to multiply the prints on paper and therefore to vary the shades.

Certain subjects play on oppositions: the mountain views of the Bisson brothers, the Great Wave by Gustave Le Gray, the portraits of the prolific amateur Blancard.

Désiré Charnay (French, 1828-1915)
Chichen Itza: Bas-relief des Tigres, Palais du Cirque (Chichen Itza: Bas-relief of the Tigers, Circus Palace)
1859-1861
Print on gold-toned albumen paper from a collodion glass negative
BnF, Department of Prints and Photography, RES PHOTO VZ-940-FT4

In 1861, Charnay gave Napoleon III a copy of the album American Ruins composed for the Emperor of expensive proofs on albumen paper toned with gold, in an exceptional format, the miraculous result of his Mexican epic. The shift to gold accentuates the vigour of the contrasts and brings a cold tone to the blacks.

Désiré Charnay (French, 1828-1915)
Uxmal: détail de la façade dite de la couleuvre (Uxmal: detail of the so-called snake facade)
1859-1861
From the album American Ruins
Print on gold-toned albumen paper from a collodion glass negative
59 x 78.2cm
BnF, Department of Prints and Photography, RES PHOTO VZ-940-FT4

The forty-nine views of the ruins of Yucatan, Chiapas, Tabasco and the province of Oaxaca constitute the first set of photographs entered into the collections of the Geographical Society, in 1861. During the general assembly of November 29 , Charnay presents his collection of photographs exhibited in the meeting room. The same day, at the Academy of Inscriptions and Belles Lettres, Jomard returns to the quality of Charnay’s photographs, which allow us to conclude that American art – the Egyptologist’s supreme tribute – “deserves a place alongside Assyrian art, and even alongside the art of the Egyptians.”

Bisson frères. Louis-Auguste (French, 1814-1876) and Auguste-Rosalie (French, 1826-1900)
La crevasse (départ) sur le chemin du grand plateau, ascension du Mont-Blanc (The crevasse (departure) on the way to the grand plateau, ascent of Mont-Blanc)
1862
Print on albumen paper from a wet collodion glass negative
BnF, Department of Prints and Photography, EO-14 (3)-FOL

In 1861, the Bisson brothers managed to hoist their photographic equipment to the summit of Mont Blanc. Mountaineering feat, photographic feat: in these extreme conditions, the plate must be sensitised just before use and developed as soon as possible. The violence of the contrasts, when the brightness of the snow juxtaposes the black of the rocks, redoubles this technical challenge. This conquest of the limit is crowned by the harmony of the print, carried by a site with spectacular aesthetic qualities.

This exhibition brings together black and white masterpieces from the photographic collections of the National Library of France. Nadar, Man Ray, Ansel Adams, Willy Ronis, Helmut Newton, Diane Arbus, Mario Giacomelli, Robert Frank, William Klein, Daido Moriyama, Valérie Belin…: the big names in French and international photography are brought together in a journey which presents approximately 300 prints and embraces 150 years of history of black and white photography, from its origins in the 19th century to contemporary creation.

The exhibition in brief

The exhibition addresses the question of black and white from an aesthetic, formal and sensitive angle, emphasising the modes of image creation: plastic and graphic effects of contrasts, play of shadows and lights, rendering of materials in all the palette of values from black to white. The emphasis was placed on photographers who concentrated and systematised their artistic creation in black and white, experimented with its possibilities and limits or made it the very subject of their photography such as Man Ray, Ansel Adams, Ralph Gibson, Mario Giacomelli or Valérie Belin. Particular attention was paid to the quality of the prints, the variety of techniques and photographic papers, but also to the printing of black and white, books and magazines having long been the main relay to the public for photographic creation .

The exhibition thus shows the richness and extent of the BnF’s photographic collections. Among the richest in the world with some six million prints, these are particularly representative of this abundant history of black and white photography.

Exhibition co-organised with the Réunion des Musées Nationaux – Grand Palais

Commissariat

Sylvie Aubenas, director of the Prints and Photography department, BnF
Héloïse Conésa, head of the photography department, responsible for contemporary photography at the Department of Prints and Photography, BnF
Flora Triebel, curator in charge of 19th century photography at the Department of Prints and Photography, BnF
Dominique Versavel, curator in charge of modern photography at the Department of Prints and Photography, BnF

Text from the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF)

Hippolyte Blancard (French, 1843-1924)
Mademoiselle L. Vulliemin, à mi-corps, la tête couverte d’un chapeau (Miss L. Vulliemin, half-length, head covered with a hat)
1889
Platinum print from a gelatin-silver bromide glass negative
BnF, Department of Prints and Photography, EO-508-PET FOL
Gift of print dealer Maurice Rousseau, 1944

Amateur photographer, wealthy pharmacist enriched by the sale of digestive pills, Blancard creates a prolific and picturesque work in a superb contrast of black and white thanks to the use of platinum. This expensive process, patented in 1873, ensures stable prints with marked contrasts which do not stifle the rendering of halftones.

Émile Zola (French, 1840-1902)
Denise et Jacques, les enfants d’Émile Zola (Denise and Jacques, the children of Émile Zola)
1898 or 1899
Gelatin aristotype, gelatin aristotype on matte velvety paper with toning, cyanotype, silver print, gelatin aristotype toned with gold, collodion aristotype with toning
BnF, Department of Prints and Photography, NZ-214-8
Purchase at public sale, 2017

From 1894, the novelist devoted himself with passion to photography, in an intimate vein. Here he tests the effects of his shooting by varying the papers, the processes, the tones based on the same negative on a glass plate. We see that black and white is a monochromy among others (brown, orange, blue). Very few of these test prints created in the privacy of the photographer’s laboratory have reached us; the collection of these six prints is exceptional.

Frères Séeberger. Jules, Louis and Henri Séeberger (French, 1872-1932; 1874-1946; 1876-1956)
Untitled
1909-1912
Silver print on baryta paper
BnF, Department of Prints and Photography, OA-38 (1)-BOITE FOL
Acquisition-donation from the family, 1976

For almost half a century, the Séeberger brothers, specialising in fashion reporting, captured elegant women in their natural settings, racecourses, palaces, upscale beaches. The print on baryta paper, used here, marks a technical breakthrough. A layer of pure white barium sulfate is now interposed between the print support and the binder layer, where the image is formed. Manufactured industrially from the 1890s, chemically developed baryta papers and their characteristic cold tone would dominate silver production until the 1970s.

In Black and White

Entirely designed from the Library’s rich collections, Black & White: An aesthetic of photography presents more than 300 works from the 19th century to the present day which bear witness to the use black and white from more than 200 photographers from around the world.

Considering black and white photographic creation from the 19th century to the most contemporary works, the exhibition presented at the François-Mitterrand affirms an ambition commensurate with the historical and geographical scope of the BnF’s collections and their immense variety technical and stylistic. The Department of Prints and photography has been a high place of conservation and emulation for monochrome photographic expression, under the impetus in particular of Jean-Claude Lemagny. Recently deceased, this very first curator of photography contemporary, in office from 1968 to 1996, was a fervent defender of black and white aesthetics.

In the 19th century, the powerlessness of photography to reproduce colours do not reduce it only to black and white and the tonal variations (blue, sepia, etc.) are in fact multiple. The exhibition opens with a spectacular monochrome of prints by Émile Zola, alongside luxurious prints by Gustave Le Gray, by Désiré Charnay and the Bisson brothers. It is at the turn of the 20th century that black and white became the tonality of photography par excellence, with the generalisation of the gelatin-silver bromide process.

An artistic and aesthetic approach

The rest of the journey deliberately interweaves creations of the 20th and 21st centuries, without chronological consideration. According to a primarily artistic and aesthetic approach to black and white, works of authors, decades, styles, schools and various origins interact, in order to highlight visual constants and graphics observable in use by black and white by photographers from 37 countries. That the photographers either suffered lack of colour or – from the 1950s-1970s – preferred to it, black and white is appreciated by artists for its numerous graphic, material and symbolic, which allow them to obtain certain effects features.

Write in black and white

These are these different ways of writing in black and white that the exhibition shows, starting with the contrasts: prints by Imogen Cunningham and André Kertész at the sculptural portraits of black women by Valérie Belin, in passing through the photograms of Man Ray, the books of William Klein or the fashion photographs of Helmut Newton, the contrast is deliberately sought by certain artists. By accentuating blacks and whites, or even making them disappear to any intermediate shade of grey, they bring out the essential lines of their subjects, retrace the design of the world,
gain visual and graphic expressiveness.

The play of shadows and light, at the origins of the photographic act, forms another part of the exhibition highlights. Bringing together the works of photographers as varied as Brassaï, Alexandre Rodtchenko, Henri CartierBresson, Willy Ronis, Flor Garduño, Daido Moriyama, Arthur Tress or Ann Mandelbaum, this part emphasises the dazzling effects or shadows cast, explored by these artists in their portrait practice, of the street snapshot, of the nocturnal shooting or in their laboratory experiments.

The exhibition continues with a chart of tests deployed in ribbon, from the blackest to the whitest. These prints signed Jun Shiraoka, Emmanuel Sougez, Edward Weston, Barbara Crane or Israel Ariño recall the ability of black and white to render effects of matter by its infinite variations of grey or, conversely, suggest the overflow or disappearance of all matter.

A sensory experience

The journey ends with a paradox with the works of photographers who, like Patrick Tosani, Marina Gadonneix or Laurent Cammal, disturbing the visitor’s perception by using colour processes to represent a black and white subject – an ultimate game with codes inherited from their art. Designed to show the historical depth and the richness of the BnF collections, this exhibition is intended to be educational and sensitive: emphasising certain technical aspects linked to printing practices, while insisting also on the irreducible material part of this art. By the high quality of prints presented, the exhibition offers to the public a sensory experience that will make them perceive the nuances hidden behind this apparently monolithic notion black and white.

Flora Triebel and Dominique Versavel. “En Noir et Blanc,” in Une saison en photographie, Chroniques No. 98, BnF, September – December 2023

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)
Parc de Sceaux, Duchess Alley
Between 1925 and 1927
Print on matte albumen paper from gelatin-bromide glass negative
BnF, Department of Prints and Photography, EO-109 (16)-BOITE FOL B

Eugène Atget claimed a humble, artisanal practice of photography. He used the same old camera and printing paper for decades. Only the disappearance of his usual supplies forced him to change. There is therefore no aesthetic research, yet these colour variations tell us a lot about the perception of the image.

The photographer artist can choose the colours of his prints by playing on the chemistry of the fixing baths or on the nature of the papers.

Gold toning, known since the 1850s, produces deep blacks but is very expensive. Baryta or platinum papers appeared at the end of the century and made it possible to further accentuate contrasts.

Gustave Le Gray (French, 1820-1884)
Plage de Sainte-Adresse avec les bains Dumont (Sainte-Adresse beach with Dumont baths)
1856
Print on albumen paper from a collodion glass negative
31.3 x 41.3cm
Former Alfred Armand collection
BnF, Department of Prints and Photography, RESERVE FOL-EO-13 (3)

The strength of the blacks and whites, the variations of hues influence our perception of the image: the more contrasted it is, the more readable it is for our eye saturated with absolute blacks and whites; the more nuanced it is, the more sensitive the distance of time becomes.

Provenance

This article was designed as part of the exhibition “Black & White – An aesthetic of photography” presented at the BnF from October 17, 2023 to January 21, 2024.

The marines of Le Gray

Gustave Le Gray (1820-1884) is a central figure in 19th century photography. A contemporary of photographers like Nadar, Charles Nègre and Henri Le Secq, he began his career by training as a painter. With great mastery of photographic technique, he developed two major inventions, the collodion glass negative in 1850 and the dry wax paper negative in 1851.

Le Gray’s seascapes mark not only a milestone in the history of photography, but also its true intrusion into a pictorial genre characteristic of the English school. Fixing the movement of the waves while the snapshot is still stammering, combining two negatives, one for the sky and one for the sea, Le Gray plays like a virtuoso with a complex technique in the service of a lyrical vision, which prefigures marine studies by Courbet in the 1860s-1870s. The success was immense in France and England: these “enchanted paintings” were acquired by crowned heads, aristocrats, artists and art collectors.

Gustave Le Gray (French, 1820-1884)
Vapeur (Steam)
1856-1857
Print on albumen paper from a collodion glass negative
31.3 x 37.2cm
BnF, Department of Prints and Photography, ESERVE FOL-EO-13 (3)

Gustave Le Gray (French, 1820-1884)
Groupe de navires – Sète – Méditerranée – No. 10 (Group of ships – Sète – Mediterranean – No. 10)
1857
Print on albumen paper from a collodion glass negative
29.9 x 41.2cm
Former Alfred Armand collection
BnF, Department of Prints and Photography, RESERVE FOL-EO-13 (3)

Gustave Le Gray (French, 1820-1884)
La Vague brisée. Mer Méditerranée No. 15 (The Broken Wave. Mediterranean Sea No. 15)
1857
Photograph, albumen paper, collodion glass negative
41.7 x 32.5cm
BnF, Department of Prints and Photography, RESERVE FOL-EO-13 (3)

Gustave Le Gray (French, 1820-1884)
La Grande vague – Sète – N° 17 (The Great Wave)
1857
Photograph, albumen paper, collodion glass negative
35.7 x 41.9 cm
BnF, Department of Prints and Photography, RESERVE FOL-EO-13 (3)

Gustave Le Gray (French, 1820-1884)
Flotte franco-anglaise en rade de Cherbourg (Franco-English fleet in Cherbourg harbour)
August 4-8, 1858
Print on albumen paper from a collodion glass negative
31 x 39.8cm
Former Alfred Armand collection
BnF, Department of Prints and Photography, RESERVE FOL-EO-13 (3)

Félix Nadar (French, 1820-1910)
La Princesse Marie Cantacuzène (The Princesse Marie Cantacuzène)
around 1855-1860
Varnished salted paper print from a collodion glass negative
20.8 × 15.3cm
BnF, Department of Prints and Photography, EO-15 (2)-PET FOL

Nadar created two portraits of this classically beautiful young woman. It indicates on the back of one of the proofs that it is the Romanian princess, Marie Cantacuzène.

The portrait by Félix Nadar

Until the beginning of the 1880s, Félix Nadar’s portraits were distinguished by their neutral backgrounds.

The merit of Mr. Nadar’s portraits does not consist only in the skill of the pose, which is entirely artistic, there is a learned and reasoned arrangement of the light, which attenuates or increases the daylight depending on the character of the head. and the operator’s instinct. We also find in the printing of the proofs a delicate search for harmony and slightly faded tones which soften the edges of the contours with their darkness.

Félix Nadar (French, 1820-1910)
Bakounine
About 1862
Silver print from the original negative on collodion glass
27.1 × 20.6cm
BnF, Department of Prints and Photography, EO-15 (4)-FOL

The revolutionary, philosopher and theoretician of socialism Mikhail Bakunin is one of the immense personalities that Nadar photographed during his career and offered to clients in his constantly enriched portrait gallery. We see here a print from 1862, contemporary with the shooting, but there is also a print made twenty years later and finally a print around 1900, brought up to date after heavy retouching. Thus until the end of the activity of the Nadar workshop, the oldest portraits of celebrities were always offered to customers.

Félix Nadar (French, 1820-1910)
Jean Journet (1799-1861)
1857
Salted paper print from collodion glass negative
27.4 x 21.8cm
BnF, Department of Prints and Photography, EO-15 (9)-PET FOL

Jean Journet, nicknamed the Apostle, was a picturesque and eccentric Parisian figure, often ridiculed by his contemporaries. Former carbonaro, pharmacist in Limoux, he discovered the philosophy of Fourier and decided to spread his doctrine by abandoning his family and taking his pilgrim’s staff. His humanitarian evangelism, advocating fraternity and association, led him to write numerous pamphlets which he distributed in an untimely manner: by throwing them from “paradise” into theatres or by laying siege to famous writers and editorial offices. Interned several times in Bicêtre, Journet found upon his death a defender in Nadar who published an article in Le Figaro on October 27, 1861, concluding: “Ah my dear fools! that I love you much better than all these wise men.”

Nadar draws inspiration from Spanish painting from the Golden Age to render “this dazzling head of Saint Peter”.

Félix Nadar (French, 1820-1910)
Charles Asselineau (1820-1874)
Between 1854 and 1870
Print on albumen paper from a collodion glass negative
23.8 x 18.1cm
BnF, Department of Prints and Photography, EO-15 (1)-PET FOL

Charles Asselineau is one of Nadar’s oldest friends. They became friends at the Collège Bourbon and were both close friends of Baudelaire. A fine scholar and supernumerary librarian at Mazarine, Charles Asselineau, author of, among other things, Paradis des gens de lettres and L’Enfer du Bibliophile, was close to the publisher Poulet-Malassis, nicknamed by Baudelaire “Coco-mal-perché”. He collaborated with Nadar on two short stories published in April and August 1846: “The Healed Dead” and “The Found Paradise”, reprinted in When I Was a Student. He belonged to the small circle of editors who documented the Pantheon-Nadar to which biographies of each character were originally to be annexed.

He was Nadar’s best man at his wedding… warned, however, two weeks after the ceremony. The groom explained this in a letter: “It’s quite funny that my first witness learned of my marriage 15 days after the consummation and through an announcement letter. This, my good friend, will be explained to you by me on our first trip. I will limit myself to telling you for the present that I went to your house the day before, a Sunday and that on Monday morning at noon time fixed for the ceremony I did not know at 11 o’clock if I was getting married.” (NAF 25007, fol. 8).

Alexandre Rodtchenko (Russian, 1891-1956)
Jeune fille au Leica (Young girl with Leica)
1934
BnF, prints and photography

Piergiorgio Branzi (Italian, 1928-2022)
Bar sur la plage, Adriatique (Beach bar, Adriatic)
1957
BnF, prints and photography

Willy Ronis (French, 1910-2009)
Venise (Venice)
1959
BnF, prints and photography

Ray K. Metzker (American, 1931-2014)
Kayak, Frankfurt
1961, printed around 1970
Silver gelatin print
20 x 25.1cm
BnF, Department of Prints and Photography, EP-91 (1)-FOL
Purchase from the author, 1970
Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York
© Estate of Ray K. Metzker

A student of Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind at the Institute of Design in Chicago, Metzker sublimates the formal particularities of this school through exceptional mastery black and white: he excels at stylising reality by constructing his images in direct opposition to dark and light flat areas.

Mario Giacomelli (Italian, 1925-2000)
Je n’ai pas de main qui me caresse le visage (I have no Hands caress my face)
1961-1963
BnF, prints and photography

Daido Moriyama (Japanese, b. 1938)
Portrait d’acteur (Actor portrait)
1968
From the series Japanese theatre
BnF, prints and photography

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
1er janvier 1972 à la Martinique (January 1, 1972 in Martinique)
1972
BnF, prints and photography

Bernard Plossu (French, b. 1945)
Paris
1973
BnF, prints and photography

Mary Ellen Mark (American, 1940-2015)
Immigrants, Istanbul, Turkey
c. 1977
BnF, prints and photography

Koichi Kurita (Japanese, b. 1962)
Melting Snow on a Rock, Nagano, Japan
1988
BnF, prints and photography

Flor Garduño (Mexican, b. 1957)
Canasta de Luz (Corbeille de lumière)(Basket of Light)
1989
BnF, prints and photography

Laurence Leblanc (French, b. 1967)
Chéa, Cambodge (Chéa, Cambodia)
2000
From the series Rithy Chéa Kim Sour and the others
BnF, prints and photography

Bibliothèque François-Mitterrand
Quai François Mauriac, 75706 Paris Cedex 13
Phone: +33(0)1 53 79 59 59

Opening hours:
Monday: 2pm – 8pm
Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday: 9am – 8pm
Sunday: 1pm – 7pm

Bibliothèque François-Mitterrand website

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Exhibition: ‘Ruth Orkin: Bike Trip, USA, 1939’ at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris

Exhibition dates: 19th September, 2023 – 14th January, 2024

Curator: Clément Chéroux, director, Fondation HCB

Wishing all readers of Art Blart a Happy New Year … but first, a glorious posting to finish the year 2023!

What a joy it is to see a young seventeen-year-old artist spreading their wings and taking such accomplished photographs. “Her photographs of street scenes, of buildings cut by subtle lighting effects, her poetic and touching images” are remarkable for their pictorial construction – framing, understanding and use of light and shadow, perspective – and how they tell the story in a single, beautiful image.

Of particular interest is

1/ How Orkin uses the bicycle and its shadow to frame subject matter, showing an implicit understanding of modernist photography. Images such as Thru the wheels of Commerce, Frisco dockyards on the photo album page San Francisco 1939 (below) are almost Duchampian in their conceptualisation. The artist’s use of near / far, high / low and the reverse of that perspective is exceptional.

2/ How Orkin constructs the pages of the photo album, neatly gridded in either horizontal or vertical photographs (never mixed). Through collective images and text this girded visualisation formalises the journey in her mind, illuminating what a transformative experience it must have been – a rite of passage between youth and adulthood (I have no details on when or why the photo album was constructed). What adventures she must have had, shooting-the-streets at 6am in the morning before going to an Italian grocery store for breakfast!

Further, in the photo album page San Francisco 1939 No’s 33-39 (below) we can observe in the young artist an understanding of how to sequence photographs in their ebb and flow: the bicycle framing the vanishing point in 33 leads to its inversion in Orkin’s shadow in 34; this shadow is echoed in the positive in the sculpture of Voleenteer Firemen (complete with misspelling) in 35 which then leads into the thrusting Italian Church of 36 … but here it is the hanging vegetation which is of import, for the vertical drapery is then inverted in the perspective of the ground shadow in 37 Weeping willows; the opening of the light in that image is echoed in the vista between the bicycle frame in 38 Bay from Cort Tower, this negative space then itself inverted in the self-portrait in 39.

3/ How the addition of text can provide a different interpretation to the images for the viewer. The media images were shorn of the text from the photo album pages (being cropped without text) – lack of con/text which to my eyes denudes them of Orkin’s interpretation and feelings about her images.

For example, the photograph captioned in the press images These people are standing in the middle of Washington St & reading the blackboard wall bulletins, on a newspaper office, Boston, 1939 (below) – reminiscent of Atget’s photograph Pendant l’éclipse (During the eclipse) 1912 (below) – is actually inscribed, These people are standing in the middle of Washington St & reading the blackboard wall bulletins, on a newspaper office. Sept 1.

Some may wonder why the deletion of “Sept 1” is so important… until you realise that Sept 1, 1939 was the day that Hitler’s Nazi Germany invaded Poland leading to the official start of World War 2 (although war had been raging in Manchuria between China and Japan since 1931). Without that word and number all we have in that photograph is a varied group of people looking up at news bulletins. But with their addition, and Orkin knew this only too well, the photograph assimilates the significance of world events into its very being … and then reflects back to the viewer an understanding of how those events will subsequently affect every person in that photograph. If that word and number is not there (as in the press images title) we would have never known the import of the moment that Orkin captured.

Finally, I would acknowledge the precocious talent of Ruth Orkin and her perspicacious (from Latin perspicax, perspicac– ‘seeing clearly’) nature. On this road trip she was young and full of joys of taking photographs, perceptive and aware of the world around her. For me the photographs are more than sketches that map out the beginnings of her photographic style – they are her style, fully formed and eloquent in their subtle, formal beauty. What an accomplishment for any artist no matter their age.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

L’exposition Ruth Orkin – Bike Trip, USA, 1939

Curator: Clément Chéroux

In 1939, at the age of 17, Ruth Orkin crossed the United States alone with her bike, her camera and only $25 in her pocket. This “bike trip” across the United States took her from Los Angeles to New York, where she planned to visit the World’s Fair. Her journey and her audacity, exceptional for the time, aroused the curiosity of the local press, which devoted numerous reports to her while she was there. It was during this epic bicycle trip that Ruth Orkin sketched out the beginnings of her photographic style. Her photographs of street scenes, of buildings cut by subtle lighting effects, her poetic and touching images, in which she doesn’t hesitate to stage her metal steed, will be shown for the first time in France at an exhibition at the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation. In 1951, having become a professional photographer (after working as a courier for MGM studios), Ruth Orkin produced her most famous image, American Girl in Italy, showing a woman travelling alone, under the gaze of the men who surround her and occupy public space, as a nod to her personal experience.

Text from the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson website

Ruth Orkin (American, 1921-1985)
Bay from Coit Tower, Treasure Island at left
San Francisco, 1938
© 2023 Ruth Orkin Photo Archive

Ruth Orkin (American, 1921-1985)
San Francisco 1939
1939
From the series Ruth Orkin: Bike Trip, USA, 1939
© 2023 Ruth Orkin Photo Archive

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)
Pendant l’éclipse (During the eclipse)
1912
Albumen print

Although the moon is not visible in this photograph by Eugène Atget, its presence and appeal are implied. The crowd gathered in Paris’s Place de la Bastille on April 17, 1912, was observing a solar eclipse through viewing apparatuses. Atget, rather than recording the astronomical event itself, turned his attention to its spectators. Though Atget made more than 8,500 pictures of Paris and its environs in a career that spanned over thirty years – most documenting the built environment – this photograph is an unusual example that focuses on a crowd of people.

Text from the MoMA website

Ruth Orkin (American, 1921-1985)
These people are standing in the middle of Washington St & reading the blackboard wall bulletins, on a newspaper office
Boston, 1939
© 2023 Ruth Orkin Photo Archive

Ruth Orkin (American, 1921-1985)
These people are standing in the middle of Washington St & reading the blackboard wall bulletins, on a newspaper office. Sept 1.
Boston, 1939
From the series Ruth Orkin: Bike Trip, USA, 1939
© 2023 Ruth Orkin Photo Archive

Ruth Orkin (American, 1921-1985)
Chicago 1939
1939
From the series Ruth Orkin: Bike Trip, USA, 1939
© 2023 Ruth Orkin Photo Archive

Ruth Orkin (American, 1921-1985)
U.S. Continent and Chicago 1939
1939
From the series Ruth Orkin: Bike Trip, USA, 1939
© 2023 Ruth Orkin Photo Archive

Exhibition

For the first time in France, the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson presents a solo exhibition on American photographer Ruth Orkin (1921-1985), internationally known for her photograph American Girl in Italy (1951), an iconic image of a women travelling alone. While still a teenager, Orkin undertook a pioneering journey across the United States from West to East.

In 1939, at 17 and still living with her parents in Los Angeles, Ruth Orkin decided to cross the United States solo, from the Pacific to the Atlantic. She travelled less by bicycle than with a bicycle, crossing long distances by car, train, and bus, using her bicycle to explore big cities: Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington, New York, Boston and San Francisco.

Over a four-month period, she took 350 photographs: urban scenes, numerous self-portraits and striking compositions framed by her bicycle. In each city she visited, local newspapers covered her story, interviewing and photographing her. With the unexpected publicity, she was invited everywhere, given tickets to shows, and even received a new two-wheeler.

Orkin’s stated aim upon departure was to visit the New York World’s Fair, but the transcontinental adventure proved far more decisive. It was a defining moment in her personal and artistic development, confirming the old adage: it’s not the destination, it’s the journey.

The exhibition brings together around forty photographs and archival documents, including Ruth Orkin’s manuscript on this adventure.

Biography

Born in Boston in 1921, Ruth Orkin grew up in Hollywood. At the age of 10, she received her first camera and began photographing her friends and teachers at school. In 1938, at 17 years old, she took a monumental bicycle trip across the United States from Los Angeles to New York City to see the 1939 World’s Fair, and she photographed along the way.

In 1943, the photographer moved to New York where worked for all the major magazines, including LIFE, which sent her to Israel in 1951. She then went to Italy, where she met Jinx Allen, an art student and fellow American, who became the subject of American Girl in Italy. The photograph was part of a series titled When You Travel Alone, about what they encountered as women traveling alone in Europe after the war.

On her return to New York, Orkin married the photographer and filmmaker Morris Engel. Together they produced two feature films, including Little Fugitive, which was nominated at the Oscar in 1953. From their New York apartment overlooking Central Park, Orkin photographed numerous events (marathons, parades, concerts) and the beauty of the changing seasons. Ruth Orkin passed away in 1985.

Text from the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson website

Ruth Orkin (American, 1921-1985)
Conn & the Sound. Nearly lost my camera taking these because of wind
New England, 1939
© 2023 Ruth Orkin Photo Archive

Ruth Orkin (American, 1921-1985)
Conn & the Sound. Nearly lost my camera taking these because of wind
New England, 1939
From the series Ruth Orkin: Bike Trip, USA, 1939
© 2023 Ruth Orkin Photo Archive

Long Island Sound is a marine sound and tidal estuary of the Atlantic Ocean. It lies predominantly between the U.S. state of Connecticut to the north and Long Island in New York to the south. From west to east, the sound stretches 110 mi (180 km) from the East River in New York City, along the North Shore of Long Island, to Block Island Sound. A mix of freshwater from tributaries, and saltwater from the Atlantic Ocean, Long Island Sound is 21 mi (34 km) at its widest point and varies in depth from 65 to 230 feet (20 to 70 m).

Text from the Wikipedia website

Ruth Orkin (American, 1921-1985)
Washington 1939
1939
From the series Ruth Orkin: Bike Trip, USA, 1939
© 2023 Ruth Orkin Photo Archive

Ruth Orkin (American, 1921-1985)
Washington Monument as seen from the Lincoln Memorial & reflected in the Mall
Washington D.C., 1939
© 2023 Ruth Orkin Photo Archive

Ruth Orkin (American, 1921-1985)
Washington Monument as seen from the Lincoln Memorial & reflected in the Mall
Washington D.C., 1939
From the series Ruth Orkin: Bike Trip, USA, 1939
© 2023 Ruth Orkin Photo Archive

Ruth Orkin (American, 1921-1985)
“Through the Wheels of Justice” The Supreme Court across from Capitol Hill
Washington D.C., 1939
© 2023 Ruth Orkin Photo Archive

Ruth Orkin (American, 1921-1985)
“Through the Wheels of Justice” The Supreme Court across from Capitol Hill
Washington D.C., 1939
From the series Ruth Orkin: Bike Trip, USA, 1939
© 2023 Ruth Orkin Photo Archive

Ruth Orkin (American, 1921-1985)
“EI” running over a slum street. Municipal building in background
New York, 1939
© 2023 Ruth Orkin Photo Archive

Ruth Orkin (American, 1921-1985)
“EI” running over a slum street. Municipal building in background
New York, 1939
From the series Ruth Orkin: Bike Trip, USA, 1939
© 2023 Ruth Orkin Photo Archive

Ruth Orkin (American, 1921-1985)
Sunset over lower Manhattan
New York, 1939
From the series Ruth Orkin: Bike Trip, USA, 1939
© 2023 Ruth Orkin Photo Archive

Ruth Orkin (American, 1921-1985)
17-Year-Old Girl Pedals Bicycle From Los Angeles to Boston, newspaper clipping from Boston
August 1939
© 2023 Ruth Orkin Photo Archive

Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson
79 rue des Archives
75003 Paris

Opening hours:
Tuesday – Sunday 11am – 7pm
Closed on Mondays

Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson website

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Exhibition: ‘Hiroshi Sugimoto: Time Machine’ at the Hayward Gallery, London

Exhibition dates: 11th October 2023 -⁠ 7th January 2024

Curators: Hiroshi Sugimoto: Time Machine is curated by Hayward Gallery Director Ralph Rugoff with Assistant Curators Thomas Sutton and Gilly Fox, and Curatorial Assistant Suzanna Petot.

Please note: The (retired) WordPress theme that I have been using since Art Blart started in 2009, and which was the look of the site, decided to stop loading the posts on desktop and iPad. No support and it will not be fixed. So please bear with me as I customise and adjust the site to the new theme… a lot of work! ~ Marcus

Rachael Smith
Hiroshi Sugimoto in the Hayward Gallery with his ‘Seascapes’ series
2023

The world is a reality,
not because of the way it is,
but because
of the possibilities it presents

Frederick Sommer

Almost real

I have an ambivalent relationship with the work of Hiroshi Sugimoto.

On the one hand I truly admire the beauty and presence of Sugimoto’s photographs; how his images “contradict the medium’s conventional tasks – to record reality as precisely as possible”; and how his work, through an investigation of “fundamental questions of space and time, past and present, art and science, imagination and reality” push at the boundaries of what a photograph is and can be through an exploration of the very nature of photography.

Through this erudite, conceptual, scientific and creative investigation, Sugimoto’s staged images proffer a reorientation of the referent – of the world, in the world – unsettling the certainty of the truth of the photograph as a visual record of the world.

In my favourite series – such as the movie in a moment Theaters (1976 – ), the stuffed animal Dioramas (1974 – ), some of the wax works dead pan Portraits (1999 -) (particularly Oscar Wilde, Queen Victoria and Princess Diana), and the Seascapes (1980 -) – I feel released from the bounds of reality as we perceive it. The artist takes me out of myself and into a new plane of existence. He has reanimated the in/animate through an alchemical process, a mystery of mysteries, to create new life – a transubstantiation of the elements earth, air, water, fire.

On the other hand I am less impressed with bodies of work that simply do not work for me… that leave me feeling cold, lifeless. Series such as Revolution (1990/2012), Lightning Fields (2009), Photogenic Drawings (2009), Architecture (1997 – below) and the recent Opticks (2018 – below), while not derivative, owe a great debt to other artists that have already strode that golden path… and have done it better.

As I have observed in another review of Sugimoto’s work: “I’m not saying Sugimoto is derivative but because of these other works, they don’t have much room to move. Indeed, they hardly move at all. They are so frozen in attitude that all the daring transcendence of light, the light! of space time travel, the transition from one state to another, has been lost. The Flame of Recognition (Edward Weston) – has gone.”

Taking his work as a whole, we observe in Sugimoto’s work a slightly malevolent aura – follow my argument here – not in the sense of the work “showing a wish to do evil to others” but through the photographs unsettling ability to confound the reality of others. The artist’s work is very male/volent, very masculine and in the Latin etymology of the word “volent” (present participle of velle to will, wish) very much (reality) constructed at the will and wish of the artist.

While Sugimoto’s volition (from Latin volo ‘I wish’) creates beautiful and subversive images of true presence and power, it is the artist’s ability to will into existence images that engage with mystical forces beyond the apparent and the factual but which live as completely real and part of the total world of man and nature … that is his most impressive attribute as an artist. Through his photographs he brings to consciousness things only a small portion of which most of us experience directly.1

Dr Marcus Bunyan

1/ Adapted from Ansel Adams’ essay for The Flame of Recognition 1964 in “Edward Weston’s The Flame of Recognition” on the Aperture website August 12, 2015 [Online] Cited 22/12/2023

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

“All my life I have made a habit of never believing my eyes.”

Hiroshi Sugimoto

“Sugimoto’s unique accomplishments in his genre contradict the medium’s conventional tasks – to record reality as precisely as possible. In Sugimoto’s work, one is confronted with the formal reduction of conceptual images, in which he addresses fundamental questions of space and time, past and present, art and science, imagination and reality. “I was concerned,” noted the artist in 2002, “with revealing an ancient stage of human memory through the medium of photography. Whether it is individual memory or the cultural memory of mankind itself, my work is about returning to the past and remembering where we came from and how we came about.” His pictures, which leave a lasting impression through their beauty and their auratic effect, interweave Japanese traditions with Western ideas. This East-West dialogue remains characteristic of his work today, which is captivating in its exceptional craftsmanship and strong aesthetic presence, and can exercise an almost magical effect on viewers.”

Anonymous. “Hiroshi Sugimoto. Revolution,” on the Museum Brandhorst website February 8, 2013

Hiroshi Sugimoto | curator tour with Ralph Rugoff | Hayward Gallery

Hiroshi Sugimoto: ‘My camera works as a time machine’ | Hayward Gallery

‘A camera can be able to stop the world, in that we stop the world and then investigate what is there, carefully.’

~ Hiroshi Sugimoto

Ahead of the opening of Hiroshi Sugimoto: Time Machine at the Hayward Gallery – the largest survey to date of the Sugimoto’s works – we travelled to meet the photographer at the Enoura Observatory in Japan. Situated against the outer rim of the country’s Hakone Mountains, the observatory was designed by Sugimoto as a forum for disseminating art and culture.

In this short video interview Sugimoto considers the impact of the invention of the camera – with this new ability to pause the world around us – and explains how his own photography, such as his Seascapes series, draws on this idea of the camera’s ability to distort linear time.

Dioramas (1974 – )

Installation view of Hiroshi Sugimoto, Dioramas (1974 – ) Silver gelatin prints
Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery

‘My life as an artist began the moment I saw that I had succeeded in bringing the bear back to life on film,’ said Sugimoto about his 1976 work Polar Bear. The image is of an Arctic diorama in the American Museum of Natural History in New York, but through clever use of framing and exposure, Sugimoto was able to make the scene appear real. As well as revisiting the museum, and others across the US, to expand his Dioramas series, Sugimoto later took a similar approach to the waxworks of Madame Tussauds in his Portraits. By removing the figures from their staged displays, and photographing them against a black backdrop with sympathetic lighting, the artist gave the impression that these famous faces had themselves modelled for his portraiture.

Installation view of Hiroshi Sugimoto, Polar Bear, 1976. Silver gelatin print
Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery

Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japanese, b. 1948)
Polar Bear
1976
From the Dioramas series
Gelatin silver print
© Hiroshi Sugimoto, courtesy of the artist

“Polar Bear” (1976) shows the majestic white animal roaring over a fresh kill: the bloodied body of a seal whose inert form is bulky and dark against an Arctic white background that stretches into the distance. Look closely and behind the bear – with its luscious coat of fur, its big paws so heavy in the snow you can almost hear it crunch – the line between two and three dimensions is just visible: a jagged crevasse in the ice floe beneath the two animals merges almost seamlessly with a painted backdrop of receding icy peaks.

The eye judders between these realities. The dead bear, momentarily brought to life by the vividness of the photograph, dies again, and is preserved again, a copy of a copy, frozen between past and present. Similar fates await a pair of ostriches defending their new hatchlings against a family of wart hogs (“Ostrich-Wart Hog,” 1980) and a placidly floating mother manatee and her calf (“Manatee,” 1994).

Emily LaBarge. “What Is Photography? (No Need to Answer That),” on the New York Times website Nov. 21, 2023 [Online] Cited 23/11/2023

Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japanese, b. 1948)
Manatee
1994
From the Dioramas series
Gelatin silver print
© Hiroshi Sugimoto, courtesy of the artist

Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japanese, b. 1948)
Earliest Human Relatives
1994
From the Dioramas series
Gelatin silver print
© Hiroshi Sugimoto, courtesy of Marian Goodman Gallery

Theaters (1976 – ) and Abandoned Theaters (2015 – )

Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japanese, b. 1948)
UA Playhouse, New York
1978
Gelatin silver print
© Hiroshi Sugimoto, courtesy of the artist

Installation view of Hiroshi Sugimoto, Theaters series (1976 – ) Gelatin silver prints
Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery

Installation view of Hiroshi Sugimoto, Goshen Indiana, 1980. Gelatin silver print
Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery

Installation view of Hiroshi Sugimoto, Cabot Street Cinema, Beverly, Massachusetts 1978. Gelatin silver print

Installation view of Hiroshi Sugimoto, Abandoned Theaters series (2015 – ). Gelatin silver prints
Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery

Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japanese, b. 1948)
Kenosha Theater, Kenosha
2015
Gelatin silver print
© Hiroshi Sugimoto, courtesy of the artist

Installation view of Hiroshi Sugimoto, Union City Drive-in, Union City, 1993. Gelatin silver print
Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery

Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japanese, b. 1948)
Union City Drive-in, Union City
1993
Gelatin silver print
© Hiroshi Sugimoto, courtesy of the artist

The largest survey to date of Hiroshi Sugimoto, an artist renowned for creating some of the most alluringly enigmatic photographs of our time. Over the past 50 years, Sugimoto has created pictures which are meticulously crafted, deeply thought-provoking and quietly subversive.

Featuring key works from all of the artist’s major photographic series, this survey highlights Sugimoto’s philosophical yet playful inquiry into our understanding of time and memory, and photography’s ability to both document and invent.

The exhibition also includes lesser-known works that reveal the artist’s interest in the history of photography, as well as in mathematics and optical sciences.

Often employing a large-format wooden camera and mixing his own darkroom chemicals, Sugimoto has repeatedly re-explored ideas and practices from 19th century photography while capturing subjects including dioramas, wax figures and architecture. His work has stretched and rearranged concepts of time, space and light that are integral to the medium.

Born and raised in Tokyo, Japan, Hiroshi Sugimoto divides his time between Tokyo and New York City. Over the past five decades, his photographs have received international acclaim and have been presented in major institutions across the globe.

While best known as a photographer, Sugimoto has more recently added architecture and sculpture to his multidisciplinary practice, as well as being artistic director on performing arts productions.

Text from the Hayward Gallery website

Seascapes (1980 -)

Installation view of Hiroshi Sugimoto, Seascapes series. Gelatin silver prints
Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery

Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japanese, b. 1948)
Bay of Sagami, Atami
1997
From the Seascapes series
Gelatin silver print
© Hiroshi Sugimoto, courtesy of the artist

Architecture (1997 – )

Installation view of Hiroshi Sugimoto, Chrysler Building 1997. Gelatin silver print
Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery

Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japanese, b. 1948)
Chrysler Building
1997
Gelatin silver print
© Hiroshi Sugimoto, courtesy of the artist

Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japanese, b. 1948)
World Trade Center
1997
Gelatin silver print
© Hiroshi Sugimoto, courtesy of the artist

Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japanese, b. 1948)
Eiffel Tower
1998
Gelatin silver print
© Hiroshi Sugimoto, courtesy of the artist

Over the past 50 years, Hiroshi Sugimoto has created some of the most alluringly enigmatic photographs of our time: pictures that are precisely crafted and deeply thought-provoking, familiar yet tantalisingly ambiguous. Featuring key works from all of the artist’s major photographic series, this survey highlights the artist’s philosophical yet playful inquiry into our understanding of time and memory, and the ambiguous character of photography as a medium suited to both documentation and invention.

The exhibition also includes lesser-known works that illuminate the artist’s interest in the history of photography as well as in mathematics and optical sciences. Often employing a large-format wooden camera, mixing his own darkroom chemicals and developing his black-and-white prints by hand, Sugimoto has repeatedly re-explored ideas and practices from 19th century photography, including subjects such as dioramas, wax figures and architecture. In the process, his work has stretched and rearranged concepts of time, space and light that are integral to the medium.

Hiroshi Sugimoto says: “The camera is a time machine capable of representing the sense of time… The camera can capture more than a single moment, it can capture history, geological time, the concept of eternity, the essence of time itself… The more I think about that sense of time, the more I think this is probably one of the key factors of how humans became humans.”

Ralph Rugoff, Director of the Hayward Gallery, says: “Hiroshi Sugimoto is a brilliant visual poet of paradox, a polymath postmodern who embraces meticulous old school craftsmanship to produce exquisite, uncanny pictures that reference science and maths as well as abstract art and Renaissance portraits. Juggling different conceptions of time, and evoking visions ranging from primordial prehistory to the end of civilisation, his photographs ingeniously recalibrate our basic assumptions about the medium, and alter our sense of history, time and existence itself. Amidst all his peers, his work stands apart for its depth and striking originality of thought.”

Time Machine commences with a selection of Sugimoto’s black-and-white photographs of natural history dioramas, a series he began in the mid-1970s. The Dioramas photos draw attention less to the natural world than to its theatrical representation in museums, whilst at the same time conjuring what the artist has called the ‘fragility of existence’.

The subject of time is also explored in two subsequent bodies of work featured in the exhibition: shot in movie palaces as well as drive-ins, Sugimoto’s Theaters (1976 – ) capture entire films with a single long exposure, thus compressing all the dramatic action that appeared on screen into a single image of radiant whiteness. His renowned Seascapes (1980 -), which depict evenly divided expanses of sea and sky unmarked by any trace of human existence, are equally beguiling in their temporal reference, evoking the immediacy of abstract painting even as they speak to Sugimoto’s interest in focusing on vistas that, as he remarks, “are before human beings and after human beings.”

For Architecture (1997 – ), a series of deliberately out-of-focus studies of iconic modernist buildings – ranging from the Eiffel Tower to the Twin Towers – Sugimoto displays the expansive ambiguity that informs his art, at the same time conveying a sense of the visual germ of an idea in an architect’s imagination, as well as fashioning ghostly images of what he has described as “architecture after the end of the world.” For his subsequent Portraits (1999) series, meanwhile, the artist focused his camera on wax models of famous historical figures from Madame Tussauds; rendered more life-like in black-and-white, figures ranging from Queen Elizabeth II to Oscar Wilde and Salvador Dali take on a disarmingly lively appearance, underscoring the camera’s potential for altering our perception. As the artist has noted, “However fake the subject, once photographed, it’s as good as real.”

A final section of Hiroshi Sugimoto: Time Machine focuses on photographs that evoke different notions of timelessness, including his Sea of Buddha (1995) series, which portrays an installation in a 12th century Kyoto temple featuring 1001 gilded wooden statues of Buddha; and Lightning Fields (2006 – ), spectacular camera-less photographs created by exposing sensitised paper to electrical impulses produced by a Van der Graaf generator.

The exhibition comes to a stunning conclusion with a gallery dedicated to Sugimoto’s Opticks (2018 – ), intensely coloured photographs of prism-refracted light. Taking inspiration from Newton’s research into the properties of light whilst calling to mind colour field painting and artists like Mark Rothko, Opticks presents deeply immersive fields of subtly varying hues.

Alongside his photographs, two of Sugimoto’s elegantly contoured and polished aluminium sculptural models are presented, alluding to both mathematical equations and the abstract forms favoured by modernists such as Constantin Brâncuși.

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully-illustrated, 216pp catalogue with newly commissioned essays and an illustrated chronology, co-published with Hatje Cantz. Texts by Ralph Rugoff (on Dioramas), James Attlee (on Theaters), Mami Kataoka (on Seascapes), Lara Strongman (on Portraits), Geoffrey Batchen (on Lightning Fields), Edmund de Waal (on Sea of Buddha), Margaret Wertheim (on Conceptual Forms), Allie Biswas (on Opticks) and David Chipperfield (in conversation, on Architecture).

The show is set to tour internationally in 2024, at the UCCA Center for Contemporary Art (23 March – 23 June 2024) and The Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (2 August – 27 October 2024).

Press release from the Hayward Gallery

Sea of Buddha (1995)

Installation views of Hiroshi Sugimoto, Sea of Buddha series. Gelatin silver prints
Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery

Installation view of Hiroshi Sugimoto, Sea of Buddha 049 (Triptych) 1995. Gelatin silver print
Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery

Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japanese, b. 1948)
Sea of Buddha 049 (Triptych)
1995
Gelatin silver print
© Hiroshi Sugimoto, courtesy of the artist

Chamber of Horrors (1994 – ) and Portraits (1999 -)

Installation view of Hiroshi Sugimoto, Chamber of Horrors series. Gelatin silver prints
Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery

Installation view of Hiroshi Sugimoto, The Garrote 1994. Gelatin silver print
Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery

Installation view of Hiroshi Sugimoto, The Electric Chair 1994. Gelatin silver print
Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery

Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japanese, b. 1948)
The Electric Chair
1994
From the series The Chamber of Horrors
Gelatin silver print
© Hiroshi Sugimoto, courtesy of the artist

Installation view of Hiroshi Sugimoto, The Plague, 1994. Gelatin silver print
Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery

Installation view of Hiroshi Sugimoto, Portraits series. Gelatin silver prints
Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery

Installation view of Hiroshi Sugimoto, Anne Boleyn 1999. Gelatin silver print
Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery

Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japanese, b. 1948)
Anne Boleyn
1999
Gelatin silver print
© Hiroshi Sugimoto, courtesy of the artist

Installation view of Hiroshi Sugimoto, Queen Victoria 1999. Gelatin silver print
Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery

Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japanese, b. 1948)
Queen Victoria
1999
Gelatin silver print
© Hiroshi Sugimoto, courtesy of the artist

Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japanese, b. 1948)
Salvador Dali
1999
Gelatin silver print
© Hiroshi Sugimoto, courtesy of the artist

Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japanese, b. 1948)
Oscar Wilde
1999
Gelatin silver print
© Hiroshi Sugimoto, courtesy of the artist

Installation views of Hiroshi Sugimoto, Diana, Princess of Wales 1999. Gelatin silver print
Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery

Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japanese, b. 1948)
Diana, Princess of Wales
1999
Gelatin silver print
© Hiroshi Sugimoto, courtesy of the artist

Lightning Fields (2006 – )

Installation view of Hiroshi Sugimoto, Lightning Fields 163 2009. Gelatin silver print
Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery

Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japanese, b. 1948)
Lightning Fields 225
2009
Gelatin silver print
© Hiroshi Sugimoto, courtesy of the artist

Hiroshi Sugimoto: formative years and significant works

For five decades the work of photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto has received international acclaim, whilst being presented in major galleries and institutions the world over.

Sugimoto’s photographs are meticulously crafted, often stretching and rearranging the concept of time, and our understanding of the world around us, and he has often re-explored ideas and practices from photography’s earliest exponents. Over the past 50 years, he has often revisited and expanded upon his own ideas, and series, which we take a closer look at, along with the artist’s formative years, here.

Hiroshi Sugimito: early years

Hiroshi Sugimoto was born in Tokyo in 1948 to a family of merchants. Among the young Sugimoto’s interests were trains, electronics, carpentry and photography, with his early fascination with the latter further enhanced by one of his elementary school science teachers, who showed Sugimoto and his classmates how to use photosensitive paper to make photograms. ‘He used spoons and forks and other items and he exposed the paper under the light for five or six minutes.’ explained Sugimoto, looking back. ‘When he removed it, the shapes of the spoons and forks remained on the paper. It was an amazing experience for me that left a lasting impression’.

At the age of 12 Sugimoto was given his first camera, a Mamiya 6 medium-format, by his father, which he would use to take photographs of trains and gather reference material for model-making. When he moved on to high school, Sugimoto joined the photography club and also began developing an interest in the cinema, which he would visit regularly. It wasn’t long before his love of film and photography combined, as he recalls, ‘Audrey Hepburn was beautiful and I fell in love with her on the screen. I wanted her portrait so I brought my Minolta SR7 camera into a movie theatre, and I studied how to stop the image on the screen. I found that one-fifteenth and one-thirteenth of a second stops the image’.

In 1970, after graduating in Economics from Tokyo’s Rikkyo University, Sugimoto backpacked across Russia and Europe. Influenced by communist ideology, and the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels as a student, he had wanted to experience Russian society, but disillusioned by what he found, he duly continued on to Europe. ‘I kept moving westwards. I stayed in Moscow for a few weeks and took another train to Poland, and then to Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and other Eastern European countries. After several weeks I arrived in Vienna for my first taste of Western civilization’.

Hiroshi Sugimoto in America

Later in 1970 Sugimoto would get another taste of Western civilisation as he travelled to the US, and California. Here he studied at Los Angeles’ ArtCentre College of Design, specialising in photography. Speaking of his studies here, Sugimoto has said ‘ArtCenter College was more like a training school for technicians: car design and advertising. For photography you trained to be a commercial photographer, which is what I wanted. I wasn’t interested in academic study at all’.

After completing his study in Los Angeles Sugimoto moved to New York in 1974 in order to pursue a full-time career in photography. Here, Sugimoto soon became part of the city’s hippy counter-culture. ‘I got serious about using photography as a tool in my art after I moved to New York’, says Sugimoto. ‘I saw many good shows, mainly minimalist shows: Sol LeWitt, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd. When I moved to the East Coast I found so many interesting people that I decided to stay. I’d just finished my photographic studies and was hungry to work. Since photography was considered a second-class citizen in the art world then why not use photography? It was more interesting for me to start with something a step down and bring it up’.

Dioramas

In 1974, Sugimoto made his first visit to the American Museum of Natural History in New York, it was a visit that would inspire his first major breakthrough in photography. ‘I made a curious discovery while at the exhibition of animal dioramas,’ the artist explains. ‘The stuffed animals positioned before painted backdrops looked utterly fake, yet by taking a quick peek with one eye closed, all perspective vanished, and suddenly they looked very real. I had found a way to see the world as a camera does. However fake the subject, once photographed, it’s as good as real’.

Inspired by these taxidermy dioramas, he went on to commence his Dioramas series, which among its initial works included Polar Bear (1976) and Hyena – Jackal – Vulture (1976). Sugimoto would return to this idea two decades on, adding more works to Dioramas in the 1990s including 1994’s Earliest Human Relatives. In 1978 Polar Bear was acquired by The Museum of Modern Art, representing Sugimoto’s first photographic sale. The work was also exhibited in the museum’s Recent Acquisitions show, that same year.

Theaters

It was whilst working on his Dioramas series, that Sugimoto also found the inspiration for his next series, Theaters, as he would later detail. ‘I am a habitual self-interlocutor. One evening while taking photographs at the American Museum of Natural History, I had a near-hallucinatory vision. My internal question-and-answer session leading up to this vision went something like this: ‘Suppose you shoot a whole movie in a single frame?’ The answer: ‘You get a shining screen.’ Immediately I began experimenting in order to realise this vision’.

He began this series in 1976, by photographing St. Marks Cinema in Manhattan’s East Village, and the first group of works would also see Sugimoto capture other movie theatres and cinemas in the Northeast and Midwest of the US. It was an approach that the photographer has returned to again and again over the course of his career, firstly in 1993 when he broadened the Theaters series to include depictions of Drive-Ins across the US. The photographer later travelled to Europe, primarily Italy, to replicate the approach with Opera Houses in 2014, and then in 2015 began photographing Abandoned Theaters.

Seascapes

The seeds for Sugimoto’s Seascapes series were sown in 1980. ‘One New York night, during another of my internal question-and-answer sessions I pictured two great mountains’, the photographer has explained. ‘One, today’s Mount Fuji, and the other, Mount Hakone in the days before its summit collapsed, creating the Ashinoko crater lake. When hiking up from the foothills of Hakone, one would see a second freestanding peak as tall as Mount Fuji. Two rivals in height – what a magnificent sight that must have been! Unfortunately, the topography has changed. Although the land is forever changing its form, the sea, I thought, is immutable. Thus began my travels back through time to the ancient seas of the world’.

Sugimoto began the series that same year with a photograph of the Caribbean Sea, taken from a bluff in Jamaica while on a family holiday to the island. Seascapes would subsequently lead Sugimoto across the globe, photographing bodies of water from the Ligurian Sea viewed from Italy to the North Pacific Ocean viewed from Japan.

Chamber of Horrors and Portraits

In 1994 Sugimoto made his first visit to Madame Tussaud’s in London, where he photographed his Chamber of Horrors series on location. ‘I saw the blade that guillotined Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, and the electric chair that executed the Lindbergh baby’s kidnapper, among other exhibits. They all looked very real to me’, Sugimoto said. ‘To corroborate these various murderous instruments invented by civilised men, I took the requisite eye-witness photographs: thus did people in times past face death head on’.

Sugimoto would return to the wax museum five years later to photograph his Portraits series, for which he was given special permission to remove selected figures from the display to photograph individually, among them Diana, Princess of Wales (1999), Fidel Castro (1999) and Anne of Cleeves (1999). However, he found that the exhibits he had previously captured for Chamber of Horrors had now been removed from the museum. ‘When I asked why,’ he said ‘I was told they’d been removed in a gesture to political correctness. Must we moderns be so sheltered from death?’

Opticks

In 2018 Sugimoto began printing his Opticks series, which was inspired by an 1704 work of the same name by Isaac Newton, in which Newton, through his experiments with prisms presented proof that natural light was not purely white. Drawing on Newton’s approach, Sugimoto used a batch of Polaroid film he had been gifted – one of the last batches of film Polaroid ever produced – along with a glass prism and a mirror to create condensed vivid compositions of pure colour. Sugimoto then enlarged these works into chromogenic prints. Opticks was presented for the first time in 2020 at the Kyoto City KYOCERA Museum of Art in Japan, and received its first UK presentation here at the Hayward Gallery.

Anonymous. “Hiroshi Sugimoto: formative years and significant works,” on the Hayward Gallery website Fri Nov 17, 2023 [Online] Cited 19/11/2023

Opticks (2018 – )

Installation views of Hiroshi Sugimoto, Opticks series. Chromogenic prints
Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery

Opticks isn’t the only series in which Sugimoto has experimented with historic techniques. In his 2006 series Lightning Fields, informed by the work of 19th century photography pioneer Henry Fox Talbot, Sugimoto captured the lightning-like shapes of electrical currents as they passed across a negatively-charged metal plate.

In his commitment to historic approaches the artist had initially attempted to supply the current to the plates using a hand-operated 18th century Wimshurst Electrostatic Machine, before switching to a more consistent Van de Graaff Generator.

In 2009, Sugimoto was gifted a batch of colour Polaroid film to see how a photographer who worked primarily in black and white might use it. This proved to be one of the last batches of the film ever produced (Polaroid went out of business in that same year) and would eventually find use in Sugimoto’s 2018 series, Opticks.

The images in Opticks – Sugimoto’s newest series, which has yet to be featured in any surveys of the artist’s work – are inspired by Isaac Newton’s seminal 1704 work of the same name, in which he presented proof that natural light was not purely white. Taking his cue from Newton’s experiments with prisms, Sugimoto used the Polaroid, along with glass and a mirror, to create condensed yet vivid compositions of colour in its purest form, before later enlarging these works into chromogenic prints.

Installation views of Hiroshi Sugimoto, Opticks series. Chromogenic print
Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery

Installation view of Hiroshi Sugimoto, Opticks series. Chromogenic print
Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery

Rachael Smith
Hiroshi Sugimoto in the Hayward Gallery with his ‘Opticks’ series
2023

Installation view of Hiroshi Sugimoto, Conceptual Forms 0003 and Mathematical Model 002. Gelatin silver print, aluminium and steel
Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery

Installation view of Hiroshi Sugimoto, Conceptual Forms 0003 2004. Gelatin silver print
Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery

Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japanese, b. 1948)
Conceptual Forms 0003 Dini’s surface – a surface of constant negative curvature obtained by twisting a pseudosphere
2004
Gelatin silver print
© Hiroshi Sugimoto, courtesy of the artist

Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japanese, b. 1948)
Mathematical Model 002 Dini’s Surface
2005
Aluminium and steel
© Hiroshi Sugimoto, courtesy of the artist

Installation view of Hiroshi Sugimoto, Conceptual Forms and Mathematical Model 006. Gelatin silver print, aluminium and steel
Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery

Installation view of Hiroshi Sugimoto, Conceptual Form Surface 0001 Helicoid: Minimal Surface 2004. Gelatin silver print
Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery

Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japanese, b. 1948)
Conceptual Form Surface 0001 Helicoid: Minimal Surface
2004
Gelatin silver print
© Hiroshi Sugimoto, courtesy of the artist