Exhibition: ‘Fashioning Self: The Photography of Everyday Expression’ at the Phoenix Art Museum

Exhibition dates: 8th March – 12th November 2023

Curator: Rebecca A. Senf, chief curator at CCP and curator of Fashioning Self

Roger Minick (American, b. 1944)
Young Woman in Black with Pendant, Estrada Courts, Boyle Heights, East Los Angeles, 1978
1978
Gelatin silver print
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona
Gift of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund
© Roger Minick 1978

Freedom of the self

This is a strange group of photographs with which to investigate the “long-intertwined relationship between fashion as a tool for self-expression and photography’s role in chronicling it,” for while the many historical portrait photographs depict a link between fashion and photography of the self (through the need to fit into a regimented cultural norm), many of the vernacular images are not about fashion, are a kind of non-fashion, where the people who “pose” for the photographs are just wearing whatever they are in at the time… thereby undermining the premise of the exhibition, that the performance of self becomes a visual language through the picturing of fashion.

Indeed, despite the assertion that historical genres such as street photography “inform contemporary evolutions, such as selfies and carefully crafted social-media platforms”, most selfies taken today through the ubiquity of the phone camera are not carefully crafted, are the very antithesis of the old purpose of a portrait: that is, to picture how we choose to dress, adorn, and re/present ourselves at a particular moment in time.

In today’s contemporary age self is more about the style and context of the individual (as pictured in a photograph) rather than about the fashion (the latest style; the manner of doing something) of the individual or the collective.

Today, style is casual, informal, ephemeral, temporary… which leads us to pose the questions, are historical photographs evidence of a self-expression of more substance, compared to the rapid self, the throw away self, the narcissistic self of today? Are selfies today just a shallow expression of self or are they intended to be more, can they be more?

Today, there is less a consciousness of fashionability than there is the ability to enact the self without resort to fashion. As Yves Saint Laurent once said, “Fashion fades, style is eternal.”

While visual representations of identity continue to shape our understandings of self and each other “with intimate details that alert viewers to who we are, as filtered through the photographic medium” this is no longer achieved through the definition of self as “fashionable” (as defined on a hierarchical scale of who is fashionable and who isn’t, who is beautiful and who isn’t) – rather, it is through the equivalence of a nonhierarchical expression of self where everything becomes valuable, every selfie and portrait of equal awareness and importance in a collective and individual consciousness of self.

The very non-fashion of contemporary self expression is a non-performance, an anti-ritual if you like (which destroys the ritual of production of consumable fashion), which negates fashion as defining the self, much as photography of the self does not define who we are but is only a very small facet of a multi-layered identity.

All of which makes the premise of this exhibition (that the performance of self becomes a visual language through the picturing of fashion) and the first part of its title – Fashioning Self – highly problematic.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

PS. Many thankx to my friend and artist Elizabeth Gertsakis for her help in providing thoughts and inspiration for this text.

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

Louis Carlos Bernal (American, 1941-1993)
Albert and Lynn Morales, Silver City, New Mexico
1978
Chromogenic print. Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona
Gift of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund
© Lisa Bernal Brethour and Katrina Berna

Louis Carlos Bernal (1941-1993) was born in Douglas, Arizona, and grew up in Phoenix. After completing his M.F.A. at Arizona State University in 1972, he joined the faculty of Pima Community College in Tucson, where he remained for the duration of his career, developing and heading its photography program. In 1979, Bernal, along with four other photographers – Morrie Camhi, Abigail Heyman, Roger Minick, and Neal Slavin – received funding from the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund to photograph Chicano culture in the Southwest for an exhibition and a book project entitled ESPEJO: Reflections of the Mexican American. The commission brought him closer to his ethnic roots and fueled a passionate direction for his work that gained him international recognition for championing regional diversity while symbolizing his exploration of identity as a Mexican American.

Following a tradition of Latin American documentary street photography, Bernal photographed in the barrio – a young girl and her grandfather in a corner barber shop, a girl taking her quinceañera, or locals posing in front of colourful wall murals – images that captured the unique character of Chicano life. He wrote, “My images speak of the religious and family ties I have experienced as a Chicano. I have concerned myself with the mysticism of the Southwest and the strength of the spiritual and cultural values of the barrio.”

Bernal also centered on the family and the home, believing these two elements combined to form the most significant structure within the Mexican-American community. As he wandered streets from Texas to Los Angeles, and met people who were soon drawn to charismatic personality, he was often invited into their homes. He asked permission to photograph them surrounded by their treasured possessions, their family portraits and mementos, and their shrines decorated with saints, candles, and flowers. His subjects appear at ease and confident in front of his camera, a product of Bernal’s deep respect for them. Bernal’s interest in what people chose to surround themselves with led him to photograph the interiors of homes without people. These sensitive portraits of both prized and everyday items in living rooms, bedrooms and gardens were perhaps his most significant innovation.

Bernal’s interest in strong compositional design and technical expertise are evident in both his skilfully printed black-and-white images and his colour work that luminously captures the bright pinks, blues, and greens of interior painted adobe walls, window curtains, and religious icons. He felt a particular urgency to document the streets, people, homes, and artefacts in historic neighbourhoods, as many were undergoing rapid changes or being bulldozed to make way for urban renewal. In recording the Mexican- American experience of Southwest towns and barrios, Bernal created a visual document that preserves the specific iconography and reveals many aspects of this distinct culture.

The Louis Carlos Bernal Collection contains 98 fine prints, both black-and-white and colour, and research materials that include project records, correspondence, clippings, writings and publications.

Anonymous. “Louis Carlos Bernal,” on the Centre for Creative Photography website Nd [Online] Cited 28/09/2023

Kozo Miyoshi (Japanese, b. 1947)
Tucson, Arizona
1992
Gelatin silver print
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona
Gift of the artist, DEP’T CO.,LTD., Tokyo, Nippon Polaroid, Tsudani Oil Co. Ltd.
© Kozo Miyosh

Kozo Miyoshi was born in Chiba, Japan in 1947. He graduated from the Department of Photography at Nihon University College of Art in 1971. He began his photographic career in the 1970s and started shooting an 8 × 10-inch large format camera in 1981. In 2009 he upgraded to an ultra large format 16 × 20-inch camera which he continues to use on his travels. Miyoshi’s photographs have received international acclaim for their unique and sincere approach to his fleeting subjects.

Dennis Feldman (American, b. 1946)
Man with Reflective Glasses
1969-1972
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona
Gift of the artist
© Dennis Feldman

Dennis Feldman (American, b. 1946)
White Girl 1970
1970
Gelatin silver print
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona
Gift of the artist
© Dennis Feldman

From the seedy streets of Los Angeles to empty living rooms and apartments across the United States, the photographs of Dennis Feldman (b. 1946) explore the ways popular entertainment seeps into American consciousness. Pictures from his most acclaimed series, Hollywood Boulevard, 1969-1972, invite subjects from social parade of Los Angeles’s famed sidewalk to animate their self-styled identities. His American Images series, published in 1977, pursues other disclosures, revealing tensions that have come to define the underside of the American dream. In some pictures, people relish the escape and freedom symbolised by cars and movieland, while others seem to search for more elusive horizons. Like Walker Evans, Robert Frank, and Frederick Sommer – pioneering photographers whom he considers mentors – Feldman carefully crafts compositions that do not judge their subjects. Instead, they pry apart the world of appearances to reflect on fantasy and desire as they intertwine with paths of everyday life.

Anonymous. “Dennis Feldman: Photographs,” on the BAMPFA website 2019 [Online] Cited 28/09/2023

Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984)
Untitled [Liberace with his mother]
New York, 1954
Gelatin silver print
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona
Garry Winogrand Archive
Gift of the artist
© The Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Fashioning Self: The Photography of Everyday Expression examines the role of photography in shaping, sharing, and shifting identity.

About the exhibition

Whether for a selfie or formal portrait, we all craft our appearance and identity for a public audience. We consider cultural and social norms, the emotions we wish to express or hide away, where we’re going and with whom, and the purpose of the photograph when choosing how we dress, adorn, and present ourselves. The resulting images serve as a window into a particular moment of our life, with intimate details that alert viewers to who we are, as filtered through the photographic medium.

Organised by Phoenix Art Museum and the Center for Creative Photography (CCP), Fashioning Self: The Photography of Everyday Expression features 54 works of street, documentary, and self-portrait photography from 1912 to 2015 that explore this long-intertwined relationship between fashion as a tool for self-expression and photography’s role in chronicling it. Iconic views by Dennis Feldman, Laura Volkerding, Linda Rich, John Simmons, David Hume Kennerly, Teenie Harris, and more illuminate the dialogue that occurs between photographer and subject – the give-and-take between self-performance and art making.

Alongside these works drawn from CCP’s outstanding collection, Fashioning Self also features a rotating display of social media images reflecting community members and individuals from across the United States. Throughout the duration of the exhibition, the Museum and CCP will invite visitors, Arizona residents, and our collective social media followings to take their own selfies and portraits in the galleries or in their environments and share them via the hashtag #FashioningSelf for display in Norton Gallery. By placing these contemporary, real-time images in conversation with works by renowned photographers of the Americas, the exhibition interrogates what it means to be an artist or maker in a world where cameras are commonplace and everyone curates a feed.

Text from the Phoenix Art Museum website

Max Yavno (American, 1911-1985)
Muscle Beach, Los Angeles
1949
Gelatin silver print
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona
Purchase
© Center for Creative Photography, The University of Arizona Foundation

Max Yavno (American, 1911-1985)
Kuniyoshi Portrait
c. 1941
Gelatin silver
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona
Max Yavno Archive
© Center for Creative Photography, The University of Arizona Foundation

Yasuo Kuniyoshi (国吉康雄, Kuniyoshi Yasuo, September 1, 1889 – May 14, 1953) was an eminent 20th-century Japanese-American painter, photographer and printmaker.

Max Yavno (American, 1911-1985)
Untitled [Opening Night at the San Francisco Opera]
1947
Gelatin silver print
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona
Max Yavno Archive
© Center for Creative Photography, The University of Arizona Foundation

Social documentary photographer Max Yavno (1911-1985) identified the odd charm that constitutes the identity of a place and people. Born in New York, Yavno was a social worker from 1932-1936; this background clearly informed his photographic career. His humanistic sensibility is revealed in his work, which includes street photographs made in New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Yavno is best known for his depictions of these great American cities and the cultural and social detail of their inhabitants, many of which distinctively reflect their era.

In 1936, Yavno began photographing New York street life for the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Theater Project. As his interest in photography burgeoned, Yavno joined the Photo League and served as its President in the late 1930s. Through this organisation he met Aaron Siskind who became his roommate and lifelong friend. During World War II, Yavno served in the United States Army Air Force as a film and photography instructor. Following the war, he relocated to San Francisco and continued teaching. There, Yavno began a freelance career with clients including Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. During this time Yavno achieved success both as a fine art and a commercial photographer.

Yavno was included in “Seventeen American Photographers,” a 1947 exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. This placed him alongside established photographers Berenice Abbott, Ansel Adams, Man Ray, and Edward Weston. Following this pivotal exhibition, Yavno published The San Francisco Book in 1948 and The Los Angeles Book in 1950, both of which chronicled the urban landscape and its population. By 1952, Edward Steichen had purchased Yavno’s prints for The Museum of Modern Art, New York. With recommendations by Edward Weston and Steichen, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1953. From 1954-75, Yavno owned and operated a thriving commercial photography studio in Los Angeles.

In 1975, the sixty four year old photographer closed his studio to allow for more personal pursuits. Yavno continued to photograph California, but also worked in Mexico, Morocco, Israel, and Egypt, securing funds for the later trips from the National Endowment for the Arts. The Photography of Max Yavno was published by University of California press in 1981, to accompany a retrospective at Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery. Yavno continued to make and exhibit photographic works until his death in 1985.

The Max Yavno Archive contains papers, records of commercial assignments, correspondence, information regarding the Photo League, memorabilia, photographic materials and over 800 fine photographs.

Anonymous. “Max Yavno,” on the Centre for Creative Photography website Nd [Online] Cited 28/09/2023

Max Yavno (American, 1911-1985)
Air Force Pilot
1975-1980
Gelatin silver print
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona
Max Yavno Archive
© Center for Creative Photography, The University of Arizona Foundation

Elliott Erwitt (American born France, b. 1928)
Pennsylvania Dutch & Adidas, Santa Cruz, U.S.A.
1975
Gelatin silver print
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona
Gift of Al Cohen
© Elliott Erwitt

Marion Post Wolcott (American, 1910-1990)
Jitterbugging in a night club. Memphis, Tennessee, 1939
1939-11
Gelatin silver print
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona
Gift of John H. Wolcott
© Courtesy of Linda Wolcott Moore for the Estate of Marion Post Wolcott

Marion Post Wolcott (American, 1910-1990)
Spectators at the Paddock Fence, Warrenton, West Virginia
1941
Gelatin silver print
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona
Gift of Robin Moore
© Courtesy of Linda Wolcott Moore for the Estate of Marion Post Wolcott

Marion Post Wolcott (American, 1910-1990)
Board of Directors of the Two Rivers Non-stock Cooperative at a Demonstration of Farmall “M” Tractor, Waterloo, Nebraska
1941
Gelatin silver print
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona
Gift of Robin Lee Moore
© Courtesy of Linda Wolcott Moore for the Estate of Marion Post Wolcott

Marion Post Wolcott was born in Montclair, New Jersey, and educated at the New School for Social Research, New York University, and at the University of Vienna. Upon graduation in 1932, she returned to New York to pursue a career in photography and attended workshops with Ralph Steiner. By 1936, she was a freelance photographer for Life, Fortune, and other magazines. She became a staff photographer for the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin in 1937 and remained there until Paul Strand recommended her to Roy Stryker at the Farm Security Administration, where she worked from 1938 to 1942. Wolcott suspended her photographic career thereafter in order to raise her family, but continued to photograph periodically as she traveled and taught, in Iran, Pakistan, Egypt, and New Mexico. In 1968 she returned to freelance photography in California and concentrated on colour work, which she had been producing in the early 1940s. Wolcott’s photographs have been included in group and solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in 1962, ICP, and elsewhere. Among other honours she has received are the Dorothea Lange Award, and the 1991 Society of Photographic Education’s Lifetime Achievement Award. The several books on her life and career include Paul Henrickson’s Looking for the Light: The Hidden Life of Marion Post Wolcott (1992).

Wolcott’s documentary photographs for the FSA are notable for their variation in subject matter. Because she joined the organisation late in its existence, Stryker often gave her assignments intended to complete projects already begun by others. Wolcott’s photographs show wealthy and middle-class subjects in addition to the poor people and migrant workers who appeared in most FSA photographs. Her body of work provides a view into another side of the 1930s in America, among that small percentage of people who could afford to escape the damaging effects of the Depression.

Lisa Hostetler

Handy et al. Reflections in a Glass Eye: Works from the International Center of Photography Collection, New York: Bulfinch Press in association with the International Center of Photography, 1999, p. 232 “Marion Post Wolcott,” on the International Center of Photography website Nd [Online] Cited 28/09/2023

Francis J. Bruguière (American, 1879-1945)
Self-portrait with Friend
c. 1912
Gelatin silver print
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona
Gift of James Enyeart

This spring, Phoenix Art Museum (PhxArt) presents Fashioning Self: The Photography of Everyday Expression, a new major photography exhibition organised by PhxArt and the Center for Creative Photography (CCP) in Tucson. It will be on view from March 8 through November 12 in the Doris and John Norton Gallery for the Center for Creative Photography at Phoenix Art Museum.

Spanning the 1910s through the present, Fashioning Self explores the long-intertwined relationship between self-expression, fashion, and the photographic medium, with more than 50 works by Dennis Feldman, Laura Volkerding, Louis Carlos Bernal, Tseng Kwong Chi, David Hume Kennerly, Helen Levitt, Teenie Harris and others drawn from the CCP collection. These fine-art photographs are displayed alongside a social-media feed of community photos and selfies to spark reflection on the dynamic between photographer and subject, particularly as new technologies, self-styling, and the photographic medium continue to shape visual culture and personal and collective identities around the globe.

“Since the mid-1800s, photographers have captured our world and the captivating cast of characters who inhabit it, documenting all the varied and nuanced presentations of style and expression,” said the Sybil Harrington Director and CEO of Phoenix Art Museum, Jeremy Mikolajczak. “Fashioning Self: The Photography of Everyday Expression sparks fascinating conversations around historical photography genres, including street photography, and how they inform contemporary evolutions, such as selfies and carefully crafted social-media platforms, while also exploring the give-and-take between self-performance and art making.”

Fashioning Self showcases 54 works of street, documentary and self-portrait photography that present slices of everyday public life in the United States from 1912 through 2015. Featured works include those by Garry Winogrand, Marion Post Wolcott, Kozo Miyoshi, Laura Volkerding, Tseng Kwong Chi, Joan Liftin and Rosalind Solomon.

The exhibition’s fine-art images are complemented by a rotating display of social-media photos reflecting community members and individuals from across the United States. Throughout the duration of the exhibition, the museum and CCP will invite visitors, Arizona residents and the institutions’ collective social-media followings to snap their own selfies and portraits in the galleries or other environments and share them via the hashtag #FashioningSelf for display in Norton Gallery. By placing these contemporary, real-time images in conversation with works by renowned photographers of the Americas, the exhibition interrogates what it means to be an artist or maker when cameras are commonplace and everyone curates a feed.

“I am excited for visitors to contribute their own photos to Fashioning Self and engage with works from CCP’s collection in a fun and unique way,” said Rebecca A. Senf, chief curator at CCP and curator of Fashioning Self. “By participating in the gallery’s regularly updated social-media feed, they will be included in a century-long history of photographers who have fashioned, captured and distributed visual representations of identity, while considering how technology, digital platforms, and the ubiquity of the camera continue to shape our understandings of self and each other.”

Press release from the Phoenix Art Museum

Laura Volkerding (American, 1939-1996)
Mrs. Mary Hatchett, Chicago
1979
Gelatin silver print
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona
Laura Volkerding Archive
© Center for Creative Photography, The University of Arizona Foundation

Educator and photographer Laura Volkerding (1939-1996) began her artistic career making prints and drawings, and discovered her passion for photography in 1972, at age thirty-three. Volkerding studied fine arts at the University of Louisville and the Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology where she received a Master’s degree in graphic design. She taught at University of Chicago from 1970 to 1980, and then served as a senior lecturer in photography at Stanford University until her death in 1996.

Citing photographs by Walker Evans and Art Sinsabaugh, as well as Chicago’s modernist architecture as visual influences, Volkerding’s early photographic work depicts quirky vernacular architecture, campgrounds and suggestive landscapes. In the late 1970s, Laura Volkerding, Nicholas Nixon, Stephen Shore, Frank Gohlke, and Lewis Baltz were among twenty-four photographers chosen to participate in an intensive project entitled Court House that documented historic court house architecture across America. Published in 1979, the monograph Court House: A Photographic Document exhibits a diverse and inclusive examination of America’s architectural heritage. In 1980, Volkerding moved to California and embarked on a project documenting the development of the San Francisco and San Pablo Bay waterfronts creating panoramic images by joining continuous frames of 5 x 7 inch negatives into a more expansive view.

Volkerding experimented with multiple photographic formats before settling, in 1984, on the rich clarity of prints produced with a Deardorff 8 x 10 inch view camera. This same year, Volkerding discovered the subject that would drive her work for over a decade: Les Compagnons du Devoir, a French sculpture apprentice community founded in medieval times. Their history of sculptural practice and reverence for craftsmanship resonated for Volkerding. She was attracted to the figurative and architectural forms that populated their work space. Volkerding photographed classrooms and apprentice projects, foundries and workshops, and cathedral restoration projects. The images suggest the presence of the craftsmen, but are devoid of the actual artisans, thus alluding to the longer craft tradition rather than the contemporary individuals. In addition to making many photographs of Les Compagnons in France, Volkerding photographed other sculpture workshops in Quebec, Tunisia, Spain, Greece, Italy, and the United States. This body of work was exhibited at Stanford in 1986; in 1988 she was awarded her second Guggenheim fellowship. The Center for Creative Photography published a related monograph, Solomon’s Temple: the European Building-Crafts Legacy, shortly before Volkerding’s death.

The Laura Volkerding Endowment and the naming of the Laura Volkerding Reading Room at the Center for Creative Photography serve to perpetuate her important role in photography. The Laura Volkerding Archive contains photographic work prints, negatives, personal papers, and a substantial collection of multi-colour intaglio prints and one-colour lithographs, as well as 968 fine prints.

Anonymous. “Laura Volkerding,” on the Centre for Creative Photography Nd [Online] Cited 28/09/2023

Laura Volkerding (American, 1939-1996)
Easter, Chicago
1979
Gelatin silver print
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona
Laura Volkerding Archive
© Center for Creative Photography, The University of Arizona Foundation

“Our choices about clothing, makeup, hairstyles and accessories are a component of the way we communicate who we are, what we value, and what is important to us,” says Rebecca A. Senf, Chief Curator at the Center for Creative Photography …

“These prints are not just evidence of the photographer’s process; they are also evidence of the self presentation process of the people who appear in the pictures,” says Senf. “When you have your portrait made, there’s a process that goes behind thinking about what you’ll wear, how you’ll do your hair and what kind of sense of yourself are you trying to convey through the picture.”

Featuring works by Helen Levitt, Tseng Wong Chi, Charles “Teenie” Harris and Dennis Feldman, among others, Fashioning Self considers both the formal and informal ways in which people employ visual signifiers to transit their identities to the world. Whether donning ball gowns and fur wraps, cowboy hats and boots, bandana and chest tattoos, or unironic trucker hats, each subject conveys an intuitive sense of ease and authenticity that comes from being true to who they are.

Senf brings this integrity to the curation of the show, offering a broad array of images sparkling with individual expressions of character and poise that can resonate with the widest possible audience. “One of the most exciting things about photography is that it’s functioning as a visual language and people are using it to communicate ideas,” she says.

Miss Rosen. “Symbiotic relationship between art and identity,” on the Huck website Monday 14 August 2023 [Online] Cited 28/09/2023

John Gutmann (American born Germany, 1905-1998)
Helene Mayer, Two Time Olympic Fencing Champion
1935
Gelatin silver print
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona
John Gutmann Archive
© Center for Creative Photography, Arizona Board of Regents

John Gutmann received his bachelor’s degree from the State Academy of Arts and Crafts in Breslau, Germany (now Wroclaw, Poland) and studied with master painter Otto Mueller, one of the founding members of the New Realist movement in Germany. Gutmann moved to Berlin in 1927 where he earned his master’s degree at the State Institute for Higher Education. The arts were flourishing in Berlin, and the city’s vibrant social scene provided inspiration for subject matter and aesthetic. Gutmann’s paintings were done in the vein of well-known German painter Otto Dix, who represented Berlin nightlife as both dizzily exciting and darkly isolating. In 1933, due to the rise of the Nazi regime, Gutmann was no longer able to exhibit his paintings or teach and began to experiment with photography as a means of supporting himself. He bought a Rolleiflex camera, shot three rolls of film, and immediately secured a contract with a German agency, Presse-Foto, to photograph in America and send pictures back for German publications. That same year he arrived in San Francisco and started to document America from the detached eye of an anthropologist. By 1936 he had secured a teaching position at San Francisco State College, where a decade later he founded its creative photography program, one of the first in the country. By the end of the thirties, Gutmann switched agencies to Pix, Inc., a New York-based agency, which promoted his work for publication in magazines such as Time, The Saturday Evening Post, Life, and Look. During World War II, he studied at the Signal Corps Motion Picture School in Queens and made still and motion pictures for the United States Army Signal Corps. He focused much of his work during this time on China, Burma, and India. Gutmann retired from teaching in 1973 and began to print and edit his earlier work for exhibition and publication. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art held a two-man exhibition in 1976 of John Gutmann and Walker Evan’s work focusing on images of the Great Depression and the American culture that emerged from it. Two years later he was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship. In 1984 his first publication titled The Restless Decade was published by Harry N. Abrams, showcasing his work from the 1930s. Beginning in 1989 a major retrospective, Beyond the Document, traveled from San Francisco Museum of Modern Art to the Museum of Modern Art in New York and then to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Gutmann died on June 12, 1998 in San Francisco.

Gutmann brings a strong modernist sensibility to his black-and-white documentary photographs. Using a Rolleiflex camera and shooting from the waist, he combines unusual angles, close cropping, and careful – almost classical – framing to create works that are as poetic as they are impactful. Like Walker Evans, he finds beauty in ordinary and everyday subjects such as advertisements, street scenes, and automobiles–subjects he would return to throughout his career. His straight-style depictions of Depression-era America often include an element of humour, capturing quiet moments of human drama, charged with anxiety, but also hope.

Anonymous. “John Gutmann,” on the International Center of Photography website Nd [Online] Cited 28/09/2023

Joan Liftin (American, 1933-2023)
Drive-in Owners, North Carolina
1987
Chromogenic print
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona
Gift of Helen Levitt
© Joan Liftin

Joan Liftin (American, 1933-2023)
Marseille
2008
Gelatin silver print
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona
Gift of Andrea Stern
© Joan Liftin

Joan Liftin (American, 1933-2023)
70-40, Clairsville, Ohio
1978
Dye coupler print
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona
Gift of artist
© Joan Liftin

Milton Rogovin (American, 1909-2011)
Untitled
1973
Gelatin silver print
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona
Gift of Dr. and Mrs. John Knaus
© The Rogovin Collection

Milton Rogovin (American, 1909-2011)
Untitled
1985
Gelatin silver print
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona
Gift of Dr. and Mrs. John Knaus
© The Rogovin Collection

Milton Rogovin (American, 1909-2011)
Untitled
1992
Gelatin silver print
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona
Gift of Dr. and Mrs. John Knaus
© The Rogovin Collection

Milton Rogovin (American, 1909-2011)
Untitled
1963
Gelatin silver print
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona
Gift of Dr. J. Patrick Kennedy
© The Rogovin Collection

Rollie McKenna (American, 1918-2003)
David Jackson and James Merrill, Stonington, Connecticut
1961
Gelatin silver print
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona
Rosalie Thorne McKenna Archive
© Rosalie Thorne McKenna Foundation

David Noyes Jackson (September 16, 1922 – July 13, 2001) was the life partner of poet James Merrill (1926-1995).

A writer and artist, Jackson is remembered today primarily for his literary collaboration with Merrill. The two men met in May 1953 in New York City, after a performance of Merrill’s play, “The Bait.” They shared homes in Stonington, Connecticut, Key West, Florida, and Athens, Greece. “It was, I often thought, the happiest marriage I knew,” wrote Alison Lurie, who got to know both men in the 1950s and thought enough of the relationship to write a memoir about it more than forty years later, Familiar Spirits (2001).

Over the course of decades conducting séances with a Ouija board, Merrill and Jackson took down supernatural transcriptions and messages from otherworldly entities. Merrill’s and Jackson’s ouija transcriptions were first published in verse form in The Book of Ephraim (printed for the first time in Divine Comedies, 1976, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1977).

Jackson collaborated with James Merrill on much of his most significant poetic output. The Book of Ephraim (1976), Mirabell: Books of Number (1978), and Scripts for the Pageant (1980) were all written with Jackson’s assistance. Together, they constitute the epic trilogy The Changing Light at Sandover, a 560-page apocalyptic poem published in its entirety in 1982.

He and James Merrill are buried side by side at Evergreen Cemetery, Stonington. Jackson’s former wife and Merrill’s friend, Doris Sewell Jackson is buried behind them.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Rollie McKenna (American, 1918-2003)
Georgia O’Keeffe with René d’Harnoncourt, Director of MoMA, at the Georges Seurat Opening, NYC
1958
Gelatin silver print
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona
Rosalie Thorne McKenna Archive
© Rosalie Thorne McKenna Foundation

Rosalie Thorne “Rollie” McKenna (November 15, 1918 – June 14, 2003) was an American photographer. Writers photographed by McKenna include Sylvia Plath, Robert Frost, Dylan Thomas, and Truman Capote. McKenna had a long-term friendship with John Malcolm Brinnin, who helped her come in contact with many of the people she photographed. In addition to portraiture, McKenna also had an interest in architecture, particularly the architecture of Stonington, Connecticut.

John Yang (American, 1933-2009)
Untitled
1948
Gelatin silver print
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona
John Yang Archive
© Naomi Yang

John Yang (1933-2009) was an American architect and photographer. Born in China, he settled in the United States with his family in 1939. His interest in photography began as a child and was later developed when he was a student at The Putney School in Vermont where he was classmates with other future photographers such as Tim Asch. In the summer of 1951, he studied with Minor White at The California School of the Fine Arts. He graduated from Harvard College majoring in Philosophy, and in 1957 he earned a MA in Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania studying under Louis Kahn. Before becoming a photographer full-time, Yang worked as an architect and continued in that practice until 1978.

Yang photographed the architecture and streets of New York as well as the surrounding landscape and gardens. Using traditional equipment and alternative darkroom techniques, he produced exquisite large format contact prints, often toned rich magentas: 11″ x 14″, 8″ x 10″, 5″ x 7″ and 10″ x 78″ panoramas. All work was printed by Yang himself.

Larry Fink (American, 1941-2023)
Ronis Wedding II, Easton Pennslyvania
January 1989
Gelatin silver print
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona
Purchase
© Larry Fink

Larry Fink (American, 1941-2023)
Melzer Family Picnic, Eastport, Long Island, New York
June 2002
Gelatin silver print
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona
Purchase
© Larry Fink

Harold Jones (American, b. 1940)
John and Sandy’s Wedding
1980
Gelatin silver print
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona
Gift of Harold Jones
© Harold Jones

Harold Jones (born 1940) has contributed to photography as an artist, educator, curator and arts administrator. Born in Morristown, New Jersey in 1940, he graduated from the Maryland Institute with a BFA in Painting and Photography, and from the University of New Mexico with an MFA in Art History and Photography. After graduation Jones worked as an assistant curator at the George Eastman House and in 1971 became the first director of LIGHT Gallery in New York City, the first gallery to exclusively represent contemporary photographers, such as Harry Callahan, Aaron Siskind, and Frederick Sommer. In 1975 Jones became the founding director of the Center for Creative Photography and then went on to start the photography program at the University of Arizona where he taught for the next 30 years. Presently he is professor emeritus and volunteer coordinator of the Voices of Photography oral history project at the Center. Jones continues to be a constant student and practitioner of photography.

Harold Jones’s photography is difficult to categorise, and there are no generalisations that satisfactorily describe his varied body of work. His original training in painting and photography led to a practice that Jones referred to as “photodrawings” – gelatin silver prints worked with a variety of hand-coloured surfaces. Over the years, Jones used ink, food colouring, and oil paints as well as a variety of chemical toners to produce effects that range from subtle to direct. The resulting images are unique and cannot be duplicated. Initially he was ambivalent about altering the surfaces of his prints, feeling that it was an impure practice, but ultimately concluded that creating the photograph was the first phase of drawing, and surface treatments and colouring constituted the second phase. Jones’ approach has varied even within his unaltered prints. He has worked with both multiple and long-duration exposures to capture motion. Jones’s subjects are everyday objects arranged in compositions that require viewing and re-viewing. The photographer has described his delight in the process in which a person moves beyond a superficial reading of his work for closer inspection. His images reinforce the idea that a world continues beyond the picture plane; that one is seeing a fragment of a larger whole. Although he often photographs mundane objects, such as a water tower or laundry hanging, his unusual vantage points or unexpected cropping, produce a range of effects from humour to mystery.

The Harold Jones Archive contains over 150 prints, including a number of unique photodrawings, correspondence, biographical materials, teaching and exhibition files, records of the Society for Photographic Education, publications and clippings, and ephemera covering his career. Correspondents include Robert Heinecken, Jim Alinder, Robert Fichter, Beaumont Newhall, Jerry Uelsmann, and many others. An archive highlight is: University: A Photographic Inquiry, 1984-85: a 2-volume maquette from a project titled Universe City, containing 44 gelatin silver prints and 3 colour prints. Jones’s career can also be studied at the Center for Creative Photography through the LIGHT Gallery archive.

Anonymous. “Harold Jones,” on the International Center of Photography website Nd [Online] Cited 28/09/2023

John Simmons (American, b. 1950)
The Cotillion
2015
Inkjet print
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona
Gift of the artist
© John Simmons

Miguel A. Gandert (American, b. 1956)
Juanito with Jesus Tattoo, Albuerquerque, NM
1986
Gelatin silver print
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona
Gift of Alan Manley
© Miguel Gandert

David Hume Kennerly (American, b. 1947)
President Barack Obama And First Lady Michelle Obama Attend The Inaugural Balls
2009
Chromogenic print
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona
David Hume Kennerly Archive
© Center for Creative Photography, Arizona Board of Regents

David Hume Kennerly (born March 9, 1947) is an American photographer. He won the 1972 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography for his portfolio of photographs of the Vietnam War, Cambodia, East Pakistani refugees near Calcutta, and the Ali-Frazier fight in Madison Square Garden. He has photographed every American president since Lyndon B Johnson. He is the first presidential scholar at the University of Arizona.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Rosalind Solomon (American, b. 1930)
On the Ranch, Wyoming, USA
1977
Gelatin silver print
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona
Rosalind Solomon Archive
© Rosalind Solomon, all rights reserved

The photographer Rosalind Fox Solomon turned her camera on Washington, D.C., between 1977 and 1979. With access to spaces ranging from artist studios to the White House, Solomon made probing portraits, such as this one of First Lady Rosalynn Carter aboard Air Force 2. During her years as first lady, Carter (born in Plains, Georgia, in 1927) expanded the role of the presidential spouse, regularly attending cabinet meetings and representing her husband, Jimmy Carter, in an official capacity at home and abroad.

Carter continues to devote her life to public service. For more than four decades, she has championed the needs of people with mental illness while also advocating on behalf of numerous other causes, including the Equal Rights Amendment, early childhood immunisation, the Cambodian refugee crisis, and homelessness. In 1982, she and her husband co-founded the Carter Center to promote peace and human rights worldwide. They jointly received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1999.

Text from the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery website

Rosalind Solomon (American, b. 1930)
First Lady Rosalyn Carter, Airforce 2 en route Orlando, USA
1978
Gelatin silver print
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona
Rosalind Solomon Archive
© Rosalind Solomon, all rights reserved

Phoenix Art Museum
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1625 N. Central Avenue
Phoenix, AZ 85004

Opening hours:
Monday and Tuesday Museum closed
Wednesday: 10am – 7pm
Thursday – Sunday: 10am – 5pm

Phoenix Art Museum website

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Exhibition: ‘Joyce Evans’ at the National Library of Australia, Canberra

Exhibition dates: 4th April – 5th November 2023

Curators: Dr Grace Blakeley-Carroll and Shelly McGuire

Joyce Evans (Australian, 1929-2019)
Students Protesting during a May Day March on Flinders Street, Melbourne
1951
Photograph
Joyce Evans Archive
National Library of Australia

At far-left, John Clendenin, philosopher and president of University of Melbourne SRC. Banner-bearer Jill Warwick, later a TV Producer, vice-president UniMelb SRC. The Forum Theatre on Flinders Street in the background.

That bohemian force of nature who was Australian artist, curator, teacher, writer, philanthropist, poet, gallery owner and collector Joyce Evans OAM (1929-2019) would have been the first to admit that she was not the most naturally gifted photographer the world has ever known. But Joyce worked assiduously at her craft for over 70 years and became a very fine image maker, picturing her beloved Australia through landscape, documentary and portrait photographs for many a decade.

Her early and historically important photographs of the late 1940s and early 1950s (of which three are in this posting) represent the post Second World War flowering of an Australian civil right movement. Further images from this period can be seen in the book We Had Such High Hopes: Student Activism and the Peace Movement 1949-1952, A Photographic Memoir by Joyce Evans published by Australian Scholarly Publishing in 2019; and you can read my foreword to the book and see more images from it in the Art Blart posting “Nothing emerges from nothing” (2019).

Joyce had an innate knack of putting people at their ease when having their photograph taken. Never without a camera close at hand, she would approach complete strangers anywhere and ask them whether she could take their portrait… and she was never refused. She had the most gracious way about her, as though she was speaking in communion with her subject: whether that be the contemplation of the Australian landscape, Indigenous Australians, or up close and personal portraits of the ordinary or famous. As author Professor Sasha Grishin observes in his book Joyce Evans (National Library of Australia, 2022) she “was an artist who possessed a definite photographic personality… [who] pursued an agenda that shone a light on racism, social inequality and environmental degradation.”

Joyce worked hard at her craft and it rewarded her soul in so many unconditional ways. Her energy for life and photography was full of unbridled enthusiasm. It is therefore a blessing that this passion has now found a permanent home: her complete photographic archive, the Joyce Evans Archive, is now housed at the National Library of Australia in Canberra, an institution for which she did much work over the years. And it is wonderful that they have staged this small exhibition of 27 of her photographs. My only quibble would be the lack of photographs of Indigenous Australians in the exhibition. Other than the portrait of Aboriginal activist Faith Bandler (1951, below) there are no other photographs of her immense engagement with Aboriginal communities and peoples in this exhibition – which is a great shame. Joyce was very proud of her photography of and relationship with remote Aboriginal communities and their people and it would have been nice to see that energy reflected in the photographs in this exhibition.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Joyce Evans was a cherished friend of Marcus Bunyan.

Many thankx to the National Library 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 career of Joyce Evans OAM (1929-2019) spans more than six decades of landscape, documentary, and portrait photography. Her work is preserved through the Library’s Joyce Evans Archive, one of our largest collections of images by a contemporary Australian photographer, and contains images which capture essential aspects of Australian life.

“We believed we had an obligation, neither social nor political, to make a difference. We were brought up as children to believe that we had an obligation to make that difference.

If we can find out what we are… that is the artist. This goes to the core element of your being, and the core element of your enquiry remains the same.

If the core part of your life is the search for the truth then that becomes a core part of your identity for the rest of your life. It becomes embedded in your soul.”

Joyce Evans

Joyce Evans (Australian, 1929-2019)
Richard Woolcott AC at NUAUS Conference, Largs Bay, S.A.
1951, printed by David Chisolm and Joyce Evans, 2013
Photograph
Joyce Evans Archive
National Library of Australia

Richard Arthur Woolcott AC (11 June 1927 – 2 February 2023) was an Australian public servant, diplomat, author, and commentator.

The [photographic] form that Joyce found so early in her life was the music and poetry of humanist photographs, images that are subjective, lyrical, and reveal a state-of-mind. Here is passion and belief in the life of human beings, and the exquisiteness, beauty (and death) of the lived moment. You could label them “social documentary photography” if you were so inclined, but labels don’t capture the frisson of the creative process nor the joyous outcome of Joyce’s portraits. It’s as though Joyce, in a mixture of consciousness and unconsciousness, is making love to the world through her images: neither rational nor cerebral they evoke sensations and feelings, of being here and there, in that past space and time, now, all these years later. These were epic days of change and transformation – of nations, of continents, of cultures and of people. There was death and destruction but there was also such happiness, hope and joy.

Further, what her photographs also depict is the rise of an informed Australian social consciousness after the Second World War. Her important historical and personal photographs shine a light on forgotten people, times, places and actions, such as the broad based youth movements opposition to the atomic bomb, associations and friendships which eventually form the basis for the progressive social and political protest movements of the 1960s. The voices raised later in support of feminism, gay liberation, free love and Vietnam anti-war protests did not appear fully formed, for there was a history of activism… a slow build, a groundswell of public opinion that was the basis for such emerging actions. Nothing ever emerges from nothing.

Marcus Bunyan. “Nothing emerges from nothing,” foreword from the book We Had Such High Hopes: Student Activism and the Peace Movement 1949-1952, A Photographic Memoir by Joyce Evans. Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2019

Read the full text and see more early photographic images by Joyce Evans

Joyce Evans (Australian, 1929-2019)
Faith Bandler
1951, printed 2012
Photograph
Joyce Evans Archive
National Library of Australia

Faith Bandler AC MBE (27 September 1918 – 13 February 2015; née Ida Lessing Faith Mussing) was an Australian civil rights activist of South Sea Islander and Scottish-Indian heritage. A campaigner for the rights of Indigenous Australians and South Sea Islanders, she was best known for her leadership in the campaign for the 1967 referendum on Aboriginal Australians.

‘I don’t know what sort of photographer I am, but I try to be an honest one.’ ~ Joyce Evans.

This collection-in-focus display contains highlights from the Library’s Joyce Evans Archive, and can be seen in our Treasures Gallery from Tuesday 4 April 2023. Entry to the Gallery is free and no bookings are required.

You can read more about Evans’ life in the NLA Publishing title, Joyce Evans by Sasha Grishin.

Text from the National Library of Australia website.

Joyce Evans (Australian, 1929-2019)
Cotswold Farm, Menzies Creek, Victoria
1982
Colour photograph
Joyce Evans Archive
National Library of Australia

Joyce Evans (Australian, 1929-2019)
Moon over Coober Pedy, South Australia
1988, printed by David Chisolm and Joyce Evans, 2013
Colour photograph
35.2 x 35cm
Joyce Evans Archive
National Library of Australia

Joyce Evans (Australian, 1929-2019)
Windmill on Weerewa/Lake George, New South Wales
c. 1983-2012
Colour photograph
35.6 x 37.2cm
Joyce Evans Archive
National Library of Australia

Joyce Evans (Australian, 1929-2019)
Desert Car on Gunbarrel Highway, Northern Territory
1991
Colour photograph
21 x 50.6cm
Joyce Evans Archive
National Library of Australia

Joyce Evans (Australian, 1929-2019)
Mud Football, Derby, Western Australia
2000, printed 2012
Inkjet on Hahnemuhle photo rag paper
34.3 x 41cm
Joyce Evans Archive
National Library of Australia

Joyce Evans (Australian, 1929-2019)
The Big Galah and Tourist Gift Shop, Kimba, South Australia
c. 2006-2012
Colour photograph
33.6 x 50.7cm
Joyce Evans Archive
National Library of Australia

Joyce Evans (Australian, 1929-2019)
Gertrude, Boola Boolka Station, New South Wales
2006
Colour photograph
33.9 x 50.7cm
Joyce Evans Archive
National Library of Australia

Joyce Evans (Australian, 1929-2019)
Evidence of Severe Drought at Menindee Dam, Menindee, New South Wales
2006
Colour photograph
Joyce Evans Archive
National Library of Australia

Joyce Evans (Australian, 1929-2019)
Uluru, Northern Territory
1987
Colour photograph
Joyce Evans Archive
National Library of Australia

Joyce Evans was an unusual phenomenon in the Australian photography scene. Her conversion to photography did not occur until she was already in her 40s, while her engagement in professional photography had to wait until she was 50. She never developed a signature style, nor had she become a template photographer, but she possessed a definite photographic personality. …

As a documentary photographer, Evans considered herself a hunter and gatherer waiting to find the image. She remarked, “as an artist, you channel the energy of the place – the image comes to you as a gift.”

Her oeuvre is remarkable for its diversity and includes landscapes, roadkill, portraiture, social documentation, brothels and erotica – all brought together through a unifying sensibility, the Evans photographic moment. She was also an artist with a social conscience and pursued an agenda that shone a light on racism, social inequality and environmental degradation.

Many of Evans’s photographs demand slow viewing and open up gradually. Uluru, Northern Territory, 1987 (above), shows the rock as if carved by nature. In one sense, it is a very simple photograph in which two colours meet – the brilliant red ochre of the rock and the fathomless blue of the sky. It is also an immensely complex photograph with the mysterious slit – like the womb of the earth – in the centre of the composition and galvanising the viewer’s attention.

Gradually, as you focus into the image, there are signs of human presence at the top of the rock: two climbers on the chain pathway, contrasted with organic shapes created through centuries of erosion – a contrast between the temporal and the eternal. Despite the sense of stillness and silence, there is also considerable movement as the light plays over the textured surfaces.

The photograph is rare in that it defines a space but also distils the spiritual essence of the place and asserts an atmosphere of mystery and contemplative presence.

In 2016, when I was working on a monograph on Evans’s work, she noted: “As a photographer – I have a voice – it is an Australian voice, as I do not know intimately any other culture. It comes at a time when you say: ‘This is my country’. One of the sub-texts, when I pick up a camera, is that I always try to identify the stereotypical that is always defined by that which is on the edge.”

Sasha Grishin. “Joyce Evans, an unheralded icon of photography, the focus of the National Library of Australia,” on the Riotact website 8 October 2023 [Online] Cited 16/10/2023

Joyce Evans (Australian, 1929-2019)
Barbara Blackman
1989
Photograph
30 x 40.7cm
Joyce Evans Archive
National Library of Australia

Barbara Blackman AO (née Patterson; born 22 December 1928) is an Australian writer, poet, librettist, broadcaster, model and patron of the arts. In 2004, she donated $1 million to a number of Australian music organisations, including Pro Musica, the Australian Chamber Orchestra, the Australian National University’s School of Music and the Stopera Chamber Opera Company. In 2006, she was awarded the Australian Contemporary Music Award for Patronage. Barbara Blackman was married for 27 years to renowned Australian artist Charles Blackman.

Joyce Evans (Australian, 1929-2019)
Philanthropist Dame Elisabeth Murdoch, Langwarrin, Victoria
1995
Photograph
24.9 x 37.0cm
Joyce Evans Archive
National Library of Australia

Dame Elisabeth Joy Murdoch, Lady Murdoch AC DBE (née Greene; 8 February 1909 – 5 December 2012), also known as Elisabeth, Lady Murdoch, was an Australian philanthropist and matriarch of the Murdoch family. She was the wife of Australian newspaper publisher Sir Keith Murdoch and the mother of international media proprietor Rupert Murdoch. She was appointed a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in 1963 for her charity work in Australia and overseas.

Joyce Evans (Australian, 1929-2019)
Bernard Smith, Victoria
2004, printed 2013
Colour photograph
47.5 x 37.5cm
Joyce Evans Archive
National Library of Australia

Bernard William Smith (3 October 1916 – 2 September 2011) was an Australian art historian, art critic and academic, considered the founding father of Australian art history, and one of the country’s most important thinkers. His book Place, Taste and Tradition: a Study of Australian Art Since 1788 (1945) is a key text in Australian art history, and influence on Robert Hughes. Smith was associated with the Communist Party of Australia, and after leaving the party remained a prominent left-wing intellectual and Marxist thinker.

Joyce Evans (Australian, 1929-2019)
Stephen Dupont
2009, printed by David Chisolm and Joyce Evans, 2013
Photograph
35.6 x 35.6cm
Joyce Evans Archive
National Library of Australia

Stephen Dupont (b. 1967) is an Australian photographer and director working on films, commercials, magazine and newspaper assignments and long term personal projects.

Joyce Evans (Australian, 1929-2019)
William Yang
1996
Photograph
Joyce Evans Archive
National Library of Australia

“William Yang [Aust., b.1943] belongs to a generation of artists who used photography to document alternative lifestyles and celebrate social diversity during the latter decades of the 20th century…Yang is the type of social documentary photographer who carries a camera around his neck, ready to capture things with a certain immediacy, as they happen around him.” ~ Museum of Contemporary Art

Joyce Evans was an unusual phenomenon in the Australian photography scene. Her conversion to photography did not occur until she was already in her forties, while her engagement in professional photography had to wait until she was fifty. She never developed a signature style, nor did she become a template photographer, but she possessed a sensibility that has become characteristic of her work, so that you can quickly recognise a Joyce Evans photograph. She was an artist who possessed a definite photographic personality.

Evans combined documentary photography, social photography, landscape photography and studio practice. She also had a social conscience. Although avoiding didactic images or illustrative propaganda, in her documentary work and in her choice of subjects, she had pursued an agenda that shone a light on racism, social inequality and environmental degradation.

This stylish and generously-illustrated monograph shows how Evans’ photography was about capturing not only the surface appearances, but ultimately the essences, of her subjects. It illustrates the Evans’ belief that in silence and stillness you come to feel the spirit of the subject, and that capturing this spirit was the photographer’s goal.

About the author

Professor Sasha Grishin AM, FAHA established the academic discipline of Art History at the ANU and was the Sir William Dobell Professor of Art History and Head of Art History and Curatorship at the ANU until December 2013. He works internationally as an art historian, art critic and curator. In 2005 he was awarded the Order of Australia (AM) for services to Australian art and art history. He has published over 25 books and over 2,000 articles and catalogue essays dealing with various aspects of art.

Text from the National Library of Australia website.

Purchase the book

Cover of the book Joyce Evans by Sasha Grishin

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Exhibition: ‘Peter Hujar: Performance and Portraiture’ at the Art Institute of Chicago

Exhibition dates: 13th May – 9th October 2023

Curators: Grace Deveney, David C. and Sarajean Ruttenberg Associate Curator, Photography and Media

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Nude Self-Portrait Series #5
1967
Pigmented ink print
© The Peter Hujar Archive / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY

What can I say … more from that ecstatic photographer Peter Hujar. One of my top ten photographers of all time.

I can’t get enough of his uncomplicated, fleeting photographs of people who have the bravery to be themselves. Photographs that haunt my memory.

A big thank you to Nick Henderson for allowing me to use the photographs that he took of the exhibition in the posting.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to the Art Institute of Chicago for allowing me to publish some of the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image. All installation images courtesy of and with thankx to Nick Henderson.

Installation view of the exhibition Peter Hujar: Performance and Portraiture at the Art Institute of Chicago showing Hujar’s Nude Self-Portrait Series #5 (1967, above)
Photo: Nick Henderson

While photography has long been associated with documentation and memory, Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987) sought to produce images that construct a new reality through subtle exchanges between himself and his subjects. He created direct yet enigmatic portraits of people and animals, pictures of performers, and sexually charged male nudes. These were influenced by various dimensions of his experience, including a childhood spent on his grandparents’ farm, a lifelong interest in dance and theatre, and his identity as a gay man.

In the early 1970s Hujar lived in a loft in downtown Manhattan, amid numerous performers, choreographers, and playwrights who were exploring new approaches to representation. Operating in modes ranging from experimental dance to drag, they challenged the distinction between art and everyday life. Hujar created portraits of many members of these creative communities, and his work embodies the same sense of experimentation that his subjects pursued in their live and performance.

Hujar sought not to document a person or moment but instead to create a reality that exists only within the photograph. This exhibition connects these new realities with the worlds their subjects were making through performance. In keeping with the spirit of collaboration and exchange that typified the downtown New York scene, this exhibition also includes artwork by some of those in his circle.

Wall text from the exhibition

Installation view of the exhibition Peter Hujar: Performance and Portraiture at the Art Institute of Chicago showing Hujar’s Nude Self-Portrait Series #5 (1967, above)
Photo: Nick Henderson

Installation view of the exhibition Peter Hujar: Performance and Portraiture at the Art Institute of Chicago showing at left, Gary in Contortion (2) (1979, below), and at second right Gary Indiana Veiled (1981, below)
Photo: Nick Henderson

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Gary in Contortion (2)
1979
Gelatin silver print
Courtesy of the Peter Hujar Archive and Pace Gallery
© The Peter Hujar Archive / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Gary Indiana Veiled
1981
Gelatin silver print
Courtesy of the Peter Hujar Archive and Pace Gallery
© The Peter Hujar Archive / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY

Installation view of the exhibition Peter Hujar: Performance and Portraiture at the Art Institute of Chicago showing at fifth from left, Hujar’s John Flowers Backstage at the Palm Casino Revue (1974, below); and at right, Hujar’s Larry Ree Backstage (1974, below) with ‘Experimental and Camp Performance’ exhibition text to the extreme right
Photo: Nick Henderson

Wall text from the exhibition
Photo: Nick Henderson

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
John Flowers Backstage at the Palm Casino Revue
1974
Courtesy of the Peter Hujar Archive and Pace Gallery
© The Peter Hujar Archive / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Larry Ree Backstage (installation view)
1974
Collection of Randall Kroszner and David Nelson
© The Peter Hujar Archive / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY
Photo: Nick Henderson

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Larry Ree Backstage
1974
Collection of Randall Kroszner and David Nelson
© The Peter Hujar Archive / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Palermo Catacombs #6 (Girl with Gloves)
1963
Gelatin silver print
Image: 37.4 × 37.5cm (14 3/4 × 14 13/16 in.)
Paper: 50.5 × 40.5cm (19 15/16 × 16 in.)
Ruttenberg Curatorial Endowment and Photography and Media Purchase funds
© The Peter Hujar Archive / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY

Wall text from the exhibition
Photo: Nick Henderson

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Palermo Catacombs #10 (Girl with Flowers)
1963
Gelatin silver print
Image: 38.4 × 38.3cm (15 1/8 × 15 1/8 in.)
Paper: 50.8 × 40.4cm (20 × 15 15/16 in.)
Promised gift of Randall Kroszner and David Nelson
© The Peter Hujar Archive / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY

He created direct yet enigmatic portraits of people and animals, pictures of performers, and sexually charged male nudes in close dialogue with the performance and movement study scene emerging in New York’s East Village in the 1970s. His subject matter was influenced by various dimensions of his experience, including a childhood spent on his grandparents’ farm, a lifelong interest in dance and theatre, and his identity as a gay man.

In the early 1970s, Hujar was living in a loft in lower Manhattan as, nearby, Robert Wilson founded the Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds, a performance group dedicated to exploring new approaches to theatre and choreography. Byrd Hoffman is just one of the groups Hujar would go on to photograph extensively, along with the Ridiculous Theatrical Company, an absurdist project founded by Charles Ludlam, and The Cockettes, a psychedelic theatre troupe based in San Francisco. Hujar photographed performances by these companies but often paid more attention to capturing the actors and dancers backstage, in moments of transition – as they put on their costumes and make-up, preparing to embody the characters they would play.

This exhibition connects both the experimentation Hujar and his subjects pursued and the new realities they each created – whether through photographs or performance. The presentation includes over 60 works by Hujar, and in keeping with the spirit of collaboration and exchange that typified the downtown New York scene, also includes artwork by some of the artists and performers in his circle, including works by Greer Lankton, Sheryl Sutton, and David Wojnarowicz.

Text from the Art Institute of Chicago website

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Nude Self-Portrait Series #1 (installation view)
1967
Pigmented ink print
© The Peter Hujar Archive / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY
Photo: Nick Henderson

Wall text from the exhibition
Photo: Nick Henderson

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Nude Self-Portrait Series #3
1967
Pigmented ink print
© The Peter Hujar Archive / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Iggy Pop Lying Down
1969
Gelatin silver print
Courtesy of the Peter Hujar Archive and Pace Gallery
© The Peter Hujar Archive / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Orgasmic Man (installation view)
1969
Gelatin silver print
© The Peter Hujar Archive / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY
Photo: Nick Henderson

Wall text from the exhibition
Photo: Nick Henderson

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Orgasmic Man
1969
Gelatin silver print
© The Peter Hujar Archive / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Orgasmic Man (I)
1969
Gelatin silver print
© The Peter Hujar Archive / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Orgasmic Man (I) (installation view)
1969
Gelatin silver print
© The Peter Hujar Archive / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY
Photo: Nick Henderson

Wall text from the exhibition
Photo: Nick Henderson

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Candy Darling on Her Deathbed (installation view)
1973
© The Peter Hujar Archive / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY
Photo: Nick Henderson

Wall text from the exhibition
Photo: Nick Henderson

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Candy Darling on Her Deathbed
1973
Courtesy of the Peter Hujar Archive and Pace Gallery
© The Peter Hujar Archive / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Sheryl Sutton
1977
The Art Institute of Chicago, Ruttenberg Curatorial Endowment Fund
© The Peter Hujar Archive / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Arthur Rimbaud in New York (installation view)
1978-1979
Gelatin silver print
© The Peter Hujar Archive / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY
Photo: Nick Henderson

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Arthur Rimbaud in New York
1978-1979
Gelatin silver print
© The Peter Hujar Archive / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
David Brintzenhofe Applying Makeup (installation view)
1982
Gelatin silver print
© The Peter Hujar Archive / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY
Photo: Nick Henderson

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
David Brintzenhofe Applying Makeup
1982
Gelatin silver print
© The Peter Hujar Archive / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Canal Street Piers: Luis Frangella Painting (installation view)
1983
Gelatin silver print
© The Peter Hujar Archive / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY
Photo: Nick Henderson

Wall text from the exhibition
Photo: Nick Henderson

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Greer Lankton’s Legs (installation view)
1983
Gelatin silver print
The Art Institute of Chicago, purchased with funds provided by Pamela Phillips Weston
© The Peter Hujar Archive / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY
Photo: Nick Henderson

Wall text from the exhibition
Photo: Nick Henderson

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Greer Lankton’s Legs
1983
Gelatin silver print
The Art Institute of Chicago, purchased with funds provided by Pamela Phillips Weston
© The Peter Hujar Archive / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY

Hujar’s representation of artist Greer Lankton’s legs evokes tropes of feminine glamor and imagery such as fashion photographs and pin-ups, while also recalling the fragmentation of the body Lankton effected in her sculptures.

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Dean Savard Reclining
1984
Courtesy of the Peter Hujar Archive and Pace Gallery
© The Peter Hujar Archive / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
Merce Cunningham and John Cage (installation view)
1986
Gelatin silver print
© The Peter Hujar Archive / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY
Photo: Nick Henderson

Wall text from the exhibition
Photo: Nick Henderson

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
David Wojnarowicz Reclining (II) (installation view)
1981
Pigmented ink print
Collection of Randall Kroszner and David Nelson
© The Peter Hujar Archive / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY
Photo: Nick Henderson

Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987)
David Wojnarowicz Reclining (II)
1981
Pigmented ink print
Collection of Randall Kroszner and David Nelson
© The Peter Hujar Archive / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY

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Exhibition: ‘Golden Valley Faces: The photographs of Richard Jenkins’ at the Café Gallery, Hay Castle, Hay-on-Wye

Exhibition dates: until September 2023

Curator: Hilary Engel

Richard Jenkins (British, 1890-1964)
Untitled [Husband and wife]
Nd
Digital scan from a glass plate negative

Salt of the Earth

Little is known of the life of photographer Richard Jenkins but that matters little for the images the artist left behind captured on glass-plate negatives give clear insight into the nature of the man. His images are sensitive, full of feeling for the people he is photographing, direct and enigmatic at the same time.

An association can be made between Jenkins’ work and that of German photographer August Sander (1876-1964) as can be seen in the examples I have assembled in this posting. Both artists came from farming stock. Both artists took up photography to escape their proletarian roots. Both artists used an old-fashioned large-format camera with glass negatives. Shooting from a single (face-to-face) perspective both artists work possesses a frontality which places the subject front and centre in the pictorial plane with the background thrown out of focus by the use of low depth of field. Both artists planned compositions pictured their subjects within familiar surroundings and “considered the relationship between location and sitter to be the most essential ingredient for communicating both the status and essence of his or her personality.”1

But while Sander’s portraits tell of an uncertain cultural landscape during the Weimar Republic and the rise of the Nazis during the interwar years through a set of typologies – ‘The Farmer’, ‘The Skilled Tradesman’, ‘The Woman’, ‘Classes and Professions’, ‘The Artists’, ‘The City’ and ‘The Last People’ – based on the tenants of the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) movement “which advocated a return to realism and social commentary in art with a respectful and unadorned neutrality, and always within their familiar surroundings”2 rejecting all forms of expressionism and romanticism, Jenkins’ portraits picture the stable cultural landscape of Britain’s farming working class, a class of people that had existed since feudal times in the Britain: in sure and certain hope that hard work will be their salvation.

I grew up belonging to this working class. We were very poor. My mother had to boil a large kettle on the stove and then bathe us boys in a cowper on the floor of the kitchen for we had no hot running water when I was a child, and we only existed on what my father could shoot on the farm… pheasant, pigeon, rabbit, hare, partridge. But what we lacked for in creature comforts we made up in spirit. The energy of the land and its people. The connection to nature, the trees and birds, the crops and earth. In some ways it was a magical childhood amongst the forest, cowslips, fields, granaries – in others, not good at all. This spirit is what you can feel in Jenkins’ photographs. The essentialness of being of the people he photographed. As curator Hilary Engel insightfully observes, “He took photographs of them working, and the beautiful, useful things they made. Although Richard was not interested in farm work himself, he admired the skills that it entailed… You can sense their strength, their resilience – the spirit that has enabled them to survive the hard work and challenges of life in this remote farming community. Richard simply presents them, honestly, as they are: and you sense that they trust him.”

Jenkins’ photographs are not mere facades. They reveal in intimate detail, through every hard earned line on a human face, the triumphs and travails of that person’s existence. Observe if you will Jenkins’ photograph Untitled [Family group] (Nd, below) and note the intimacy of the scene with the two children balanced on the knee of their parents, the daughter held by the mother and the son clasped firmly by one of the stocky, dirty, hardened hands of the father who stares straight at the camera with a slight smile and a twinkle in his eye. Notice his patterned waistcoat peeking out from beneath his thick woollen jacket, thick workman’s trousers surmounting his WWI era puttees and likely army boots with studs. Did he serve during the First World War and survive? Observe also Jenkins’ photograph Untitled [Family group probably at a wedding] (Nd, below) where the family group are all in their Sunday best. What fascinates here is the sitters attitude towards the camera: the aloofness and stiff upper lip of the old gentleman (for that is what he would have been called) at top left, the quizzical look of the man at top right, the contemptuous defiance of the girl at lower left, the inscrutability on the man’s face at bottom right and, dominating them all, the openness and straight forward stare towards the camera of the woman at centre, she clutching a bouquet of flowers, wearing a prominent cross and surmounted by an enormous hat bedecked with blooms. High collars, bowlers hats, stiff upper lips, flowers and finery. It would have been a grand day…

“Sander once said ‘The portrait is your mirror. It’s you’. He believed that, through photography, he could reveal the characteristic traits of people. He used these images to tell each person’s story…”3 Jenkins’ photographs also tell each person’s story but my feeling is that he does it with a more humanist approach than those qualities Sander brought to photographic portraiture. There is a warm and empathy in photographs such as Untitled [Group of men with Romford & Evershed Ltd Pershorf 1885 steam engine] (Nd, below), Untitled [Man and dog] (Nd, below) and Untitled [Three women, sheep and dog] (Nd, below replete with sheep and dog) which Sander’s more Germanic portraits (with their rejection of all forms of expressionism and romanticism) shy away from. If as Sander believed, the portrait is your mirror, it’s you… it’s also a reflection of the soul of the photographer evinced through the portraits of his subjects.

Richard Jenkins must have been one hell of a human being to capture such revealing, intimate, celestial portraits of the people he loved.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

1/ Anonymous. “August Sander,” on The Art Story website Nd [Online] Cited 18/09/2023

2/ Ibid.,

3/ Anonymous. “Five things to know: August Sander,” on the Tate website Nd [Online] Cited 21/09/2023

Many thankx to Hay Castle for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image. © Copyright in Richard Jenkins’ photographs: the Jenkins family 2023. © Copyright in the text: Hilary Engel 2023.

Richard Jenkins was born in 1890 on a farm ten miles from Hay and he became a brilliant pioneering photographer. He longed to escape the drudgery of farming – to go away and study. Instead he had to console himself by learning to wield a cumbersome camera, taking and developing spontaneous and moving portraits of his friends and neighbours going about their everyday lives. He had a gift for capturing his subjects’ personalities, paying tribute to their fortitude and skills. Miraculously, nearly a thousand of his glass-plate images survived decades of neglect and since the publication of Golden Valley Faces in 2020, his work has begun to be recognised as a remarkable record of life in rural Herefordshire at the start of the twentieth century.

August Sander (German, 1876-1964)
Bauernpaar – Zucht und Harmonie [Peasant couple – breeding and harmony]
1912
Gelatin silver print

Richard Jenkins (British, 1890-1964)
Untitled [Family group]
Nd
Digital scan from a glass plate negative

August Sander (German, 1876-1964)
Working-class Mother
1927
Gelatin silver print

Richard Jenkins (British, 1890-1964)
Untitled
Nd
Digital scan from a glass plate negative

Richard Jenkins was born in 1890 in south west Herefordshire, close to the Black Mountains of Wales. He grew up to be a bright, curious young man: he longed to go to college to study engineering, to be part of the technological revolution that was going on in the outside world. But because he was the only son of a farmer it was not allowed: he had to stay on the farm. Even in this remote valley, new machinery was beginning to take over tasks that had always been done by hand, or with horses – like the mobile steam engine which travelled from farm to farm. Travel was being transformed, with the opening of railways. And country people were beginning to discover a new freedom with bicycles – or even motorbikes.

Communication was revolutionised during Richard’s childhood, with the invention of wireless and telephones. Electricity was reaching across the country. Any one of these burgeoning industries offered enticing prospects for a would-be engineer in the first decade of the twentieth century. But for Richard, it was not to be. As he grew up, Richard found a way to escape the prison of farming. He acquired a camera, and somehow mastered the art of composing telling images, as well as the science of developing and printing. It was his way of celebrating the world that he saw around him. He photographed every stage in the lives of his Golden Valley neighbours: their weddings, their babies, their graves.

He portrayed their children growing up, at school concerts and at chapel anniversaries. He took photographs of them working, and the beautiful, useful things they made. Although Richard was not interested in farm work himself, he admired the skills that it entailed. Richard’s subjects were not used to being photographed. Some of them look uncomfortable, apprehensive. But Richard was evidently charming, and had a knack for getting people to relax. They have various props to put them at their ease – dogs, cats, even sheep or horses. Or a favourite bicycle or motorbike. Richard saw that these additions helped to express his subjects’ personalities. Many of them stare resolutely into the camera. You can sense their strength, their resilience – the spirit that has enabled them to survive the hard work and challenges of life in this remote farming community. Richard simply presents them, honestly, as they are: and you sense that they trust him.

Richard’s portraits differ markedly from the conventional style of the time. A professional photographer might place his subjects in a studio against an elegant setting, and get them to take up a certain pose, gazing into the distance. Or they would be portrayed with objects representative of their status – splendid horses, or impressive houses. Instead, Richard’s subjects appear in their natural, often very modest, habitat. Richard adored his beautiful sister, Eva, and photographed her repeatedly. Her form lights up many of the pictures. She poses, elegantly composed, amongst the bracken at Quarrelly Farm.

Richard Jenkins died in 1964, having lived at Quarrelly Farm all his life. For decades his glass plate negatives were stored in shoeboxes and cupboards in the farmhouse – never catalogued or published. But in 2010 the Jenkins family generously decided to place the collection in the care of the Herefordshire Archive and Records Centre, where it has since been digitised. Since the publication of Golden Valley Faces in 2020, Richard Jenkins has begun to be recognised as a remarkable photographer. Many of his subjects remain unknown: but their faces speak with all the freshness and vigour they had a hundred years ago. His images of the life around him form a unique portrait of rural Herefordshire at the start of the twentieth century.

Text by Hilary Engel on the Golden Valley Faces website Nd [Online] Cited 02/08/2023

Richard Jenkins (British, 1890-1964)
Untitled [Child and bull]
Nd
Digital scan from a glass plate negative

Richard Jenkins (British, 1890-1964)
Untitled [Family group probably at a wedding]
Nd
Digital scan from a glass plate negative

Richard Jenkins (British, 1890-1964)
Untitled [Family group probably at a wedding] (detail)
Nd
Digital scan from a glass plate negative

Richard Jenkins (British, 1890-1964)
Untitled [Woman lying among the ferns]
Nd
Digital scan from a glass plate negative

Richard Jenkins (British, 1890-1964)
Untitled [Woman lying among the ferns] (detail)
Nd
Digital scan from a glass plate negative

Richard Jenkins (British, 1890-1964)
Untitled [Loading the hay]
Nd
Digital scan from a glass plate negative

Richard Jenkins (British, 1890-1964)
Untitled [Group of men with Romford & Evershed Ltd Pershorf 1885 steam engine]
Nd
Digital scan from a glass plate negative

Richard Jenkins (British, 1890-1964)
Untitled [Three men and a press]
Nd
Digital scan from a glass plate negative

Richard Jenkins (British, 1890-1964)
Untitled [Man with buttonhole posy]
Nd
Digital scan from a glass plate negative

August Sander (German, 1876-1964)
[Farmer, Westerwald (Bauer, Westerwald)]
1910
Gelatin silver print

Richard Jenkins (British, 1890-1964)
Untitled [Couple]
Nd
Digital scan from a glass plate negative

August Sander (German, 1876-1964)
Mother and Daughter
1912
Gelatin silver print

Richard Jenkins (British, 1890-1964)
Untitled [Nurse, group of children and candles]
Nd
Digital scan from a glass plate negative

Richard Jenkins (British, 1890-1964)
Untitled [Man and dog]
Nd
Digital scan from a glass plate negative

Richard Jenkins (British, 1890-1964)
Untitled [Three women, sheep and dog]
Nd
Digital scan from a glass plate negative

Richard Jenkins (British, 1890-1964)
Untitled [Two heavy horses, two men and a plough]
Nd
Digital scan from a glass plate negative

Richard Jenkins (British, 1890-1964)
Untitled [Two men with pipes, bicycles and dog]
Nd
Digital scan from a glass plate negative

The first published selection of Richard Jenkins’ work, telling the story of his life and his photography

Author: Hilary Engel
112 pages, 240 x 200 mm
140 black and white photographs
ISBN 978-1-5272-6998-9
Available in bookshops, or order online
Retail price £12
Postage and packing within the UK: £5

Profits from sales of the book will go to the Laurie Engel Fund for Teenage Cancer Trust

Hay Castle
Oxford Road
Hay-on-Wye
HR3 5DG
Phone: 01497 820079

Opening hours:
Daily 10am – 5pm

Hay Castle website

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Exhibition: ‘Berenice Abbott’s New York Album, 1929’ at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Exhibition dates: 2nd March – 4th September 2023

Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975)
[Berenice Abbott]
1929-1930
Gelatin silver print
16.9 x 11.8cm (6 5/8 x 4 5/8 in.)
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 1997
© Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Abbott appraises the camera with cool assurance in this portrait, made just after her return from Paris to New York. Her gamine-short hair and bare face affect a chic nonchalance that intrigued Evans. Describing her to a friend after their first meeting, he wrote: “You would like Berenice Abbott, with her hair brushed forward and her woozy eyes.” Her work likewise impressed the young photographer, then finding his footing in the field. Evans’s picture betrays admiration for his new acquaintance, whose burgeoning career offered a model for his own.

American visionary

What a wonderful photographer Berenice Abbott developed into and what a debt of gratitude we owe her for saving the archive of French photographer Eugène Atget whose photographs initially influenced her urban(e) style.

“Abbott felt the changing city [New York] needed an equivalent to the French photographer Eugène Atget (1857-1927), who had documented Paris during a critical period of transition in the late 19th and early 20th centuries with what Abbott called “the shock of realism unadorned.””

It is interesting to analyse Abbott’s New York photographs in relation to Atget. In photographs such as the grouping on Album Page 9: Fulton Street Fish Market and Lower East Side, Manhattan (1929, below) there is an almost symbiotic relationship between Atget’s photographs of street Petits Métiers (trades and professions) and those of Abbott. “The subjects were not sensational, but nevertheless shocking in their very familiarity,” she said of seeing Atget’s photographs in Man Ray’s studio in 1926. Similarly, we can recognise in Abbott’s grouping in Album Page: City Hall Park and Brooklyn Bridge Vicinity, Manhattan (1929, below) and Pingpank Barbershop, 413 Bleecker Street, Manhattan (1938, below) an affinity with Atget’s photographs of architectural details of door handles and the front of shops.

A step away from Atget’s aesthetic are Abbott’s photographs such as Brooklyn Bridge, With Pier 21, Pennsylvania R.R. (1937, below), West Street (1936, below) and Henry Street from Market, Looking West, Manhattan (1935, below) where the foreground of each photograph mimics Atget’s photographs of Old Paris whilst the soaring background of skyscrapers and bridges is all modernist New York, the near / far of the picture plane becoming old / new. Abbott chronicled “the changing aspect of the world’s great metropolis. … Its hurrying tempo, its congested streets, the past jostling the present.”

Still further away from Atget’s aesthetic are Abbott’s photographs grouped in Album Page 1: Financial District, Broadway and Wall Street Vicinity, Manhattan (1929, below) where the artist uses with the chiaroscuro (the treatment of light and shade) within the canyons of skyscraper New York – and modernist almost constructivist photographs such as Canyon, Broadway and Exchange Place (1936, below) and Manhattan Bridge, Looking Up (1936, below) where the artist plays with pictorial perspective by pointing her camera skywards.

Finally, there are Abbott’s photographs that bear no relation to those of Atget, where Abbott as an artist has stepped out of the older artist’s shadow and developed her own artistic signature. Those wonderfully abstract and enigmatic photographs at lower left and right in Album Page 5: Pier 17, South Street Seaport, Manhattan push the boundaries of 1930s photographic language. In other glorious photographs such as The El at Columbus and Broadway (1929, below) and The El, 2nd and 3rd Avenue Lines, Bowery and Division Street, Manhattan (1936, below) Abbott captured the random disorder of urban activity with a focused intensity of vision that produces magical images… and by that I mean, images that transport you into other spaces, other states of being. Her dadaist poet Tristan Tzara put it this way: “We leave with those leaving arrive with those arriving / leave with those arriving arrive when the others leave.”

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

In January 1929, after eight years in Europe, the American photographer Berenice Abbott (1898-1991) boarded an ocean liner to New York City for what was meant to be a short visit. Upon arrival, she found the city transformed and ripe with photographic potential. “When I saw New York again, and stood in the dirty slush, I felt that here was the thing I had been wanting to do all my life,” she recalled. With a handheld camera, Abbott traversed the city, photographing its skyscrapers, bridges, elevated trains, and neighbourhood street life. She pasted these “tiny photographic notes” into a standard black-page album, arranging them by subject and locale.

Consisting of 266 small black-and-white prints arranged on thirty-two pages, Abbott’s New York album marks a key turning point in her career – from her portrait work in Paris to the urban documentation that culminated in her federally funded project, Changing New York (1935-1939). Berenice Abbott’s New York Album, 1929 presents a selection of unbound pages from this unique album, shedding new light on the creative process of one of the great photographic artists of the twentieth century. For context, the exhibition also features views of Paris by Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927), whose extensive photographic archive Abbott purchased and publicised; views of New York City by her contemporaries Walker Evans, Paul Grotz, and Margaret Bourke-White; and photographs from Changing New York. The exhibition is made possible by The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, Inc.

Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website

MAP

This map charts some of the locations across Manhattan that Berenice Abbott photographed in her New York Album (1929). As the album bears almost no notations, identifying the exact sites depicted in the photographs had to be done through visual recognition of streets, buildings, and other urban landmarks.

Some of the iconic places Abbott photographed, such as the main branch of the New York Public Library and Trinity Church on Wall Street, haven’t changed much since 1929. Others, such as the city’s four elevated train lines and Harlem’s famed Lafayette Theater, have vanished completely. Several sites have gone through multiple transformations within the past century. The National Winter Garden Theater on Houston Street and Second Avenue opened in 1912 as a cinema and vaudeville theatre. By the time Abbott photographed it in 1929, it had been converted to a burlesque house; today, it’s a Whole Foods. The map is an invitation to explore Abbott’s photographs beyond the confines of the Museum’s galleries, and, like the artist herself, to cherish New York as a vibrant metropolis that is, and always has been, defined by change.

For their invaluable help with the historical research, The Met is grateful to the Jones Family Research Collective: former Manhattan Borough Historian Celedonia “Cal” Jones; his daughter, Diane Jones Randall; and his son, Kenneth Jones. Explore Abbott’s 1929 images of New York here with images of each album page.

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Eugène Atget
1927
Gelatin silver print
4 3/8 × 3 5/16 in. (11.1 × 8.4cm)
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Gift of Maria Morris Hambourg, in honour of John Szarkowski, 2020
© Berenice Abbott / Commerce Graphics Ltd. Inc.

Born in Ohio, Berenice Abbott moved to Paris and in 1923 became Man Ray’s darkroom assistant. In 1927 she made this photograph of Atget, the renowned documentarian of the streets of Paris and an unwitting hero of the surrealists; when she returned to his apartment to deliver a print of her portrait, Abbott learned of the elderly artist’s death. The unfortunate circumstance put in motion a process that led to Abbott’s purchase of Atget’s archive of five thousand photographs and one thousand negatives, the first (1930) monograph on Atget (edited by Abbott), and the collection’s eventual acquisition by MoMA in 1968.

In the spring of 1927, Abbott invited Atget to sit for a portrait in her Paris studio. She made only three exposures that day: a standing pose, a frontal view, and this profile view. Unfortunately, Atget never saw the photographs. When Abbott arrived at his apartment a few months later to deliver the proofs, she found that the elderly photographer had died suddenly. This portrait was used as the frontispiece in the first book devoted to his work, Atget, Photographe de Paris (1930), displayed in the case nearby.

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
James Joyce
1926
Gelatin silver print
23.3 x 17.4cm (9 3/16 x 6 7/8in.)
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Gilman Collection, Purchase, Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee Gift, 2005
© Berenice Abbott / Commerce Graphics Ltd. Inc.

Berenice Abbott opened a photographic portrait studio in Paris in 1926 after having worked for three years as an assistant to Man Ray, whom she had met in New York. Although her Paris portraits are indebted stylistically to Man Ray’s, she brought to them a sympathetic eye that was very much her own. Her portraits of women are notable for their empathic understanding of her subjects, but she reached a depth of expression in her photographs of James Joyce (1882-1941). Abbott photographed Joyce on two occasions, the first in 1926 at his home, the second in 1928 at her studio, as was her more customary practice. In spite of Abbott’s annotation on the back of the print, this portrait belongs to the earlier session, when Joyce was photographed both with and without the patch over his eye, worn because of his sadly degenerating sight. For this particular exposure Joyce removed the patch and held it, with his glasses, in his right hand; his forehead still bears the diagonal impression of the ribbon. This intimate portrait, with its softly diffused lighting, suggests the complex, introverted character of Joyce’s imagination. It is with good reason that Abbott’s are considered the definitive portraits of the author of “Ulysses” and “Finnegan’s Wake.”

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Djuna Barnes
1925
Gelatin silver print
22.6 x 17.1cm (8 7/8 x 6 3/4 in.)
Purchase, Joyce and Robert Menschel Gift, 1987

Abbott lived with the American writer Djuna Barnes when she moved from Ohio to Greenwich Village in 1918, and the two women remained friends, and occasional romantic rivals, throughout their lives. In this portrait, made in Man Ray’s Paris studio, Barnes is elegantly attired and addresses the camera with a smouldering gaze above a slight smile. A decade later, Barnes would publish Nightwood (1936), a classic of lesbian fiction inspired by her tormented affair with the American artist Thelma Wood (1901-1970), who also had a brief relationship with Abbott.

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Buddy Gilmore, Paris
1926-1927
Gelatin silver print
23.1 x 17.2cm (9 1/8 x 6 3/4 in.)
Purchase
Gift of the Polaroid Corporation and matching funds from the National Endowment for the Arts, 1981

Gilmore was an American jazz drummer known for his acrobatic dexterity and energetic solos. After seeing him perform at Zelli’s, a nightclub in Paris, Abbott invited him to her studio to pose for this action portrait with his drum set. “I was simply crazy about his playing,” she recalled.

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Fifth Avenue, Nos. 4, 6, 8
1936
Gelatin silver print
19.2 x 24.4cm (7 9/16 x 9 5/8 in.)
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Ford Motor Company Collection, Gift of Ford Motor Company and John C. Waddell, 1987
© Berenice Abbott / Commerce Graphics Ltd. Inc.

In 1929, after eight years in Paris, Abbott returned to America, bringing with her an immense collection of photographs by Eugène Atget and the ideas of European modernist photographers. Her first pictures of New York show the modernist influence in the sharply angled viewpoints and tendency toward abstraction. By the mid-1930s, however, Atget emerged as the stronger influence, as Abbott’s style became more straightforward and documentary.

In 1935 Abbott embarked on a series documenting New York funded by the Federal Art Project, and during the next four years she made hundreds of images of the city’s monuments and architecture. Ninety-seven of these, including “Fifth Avenue, Nos. 4, 6, 8,” were published in “Changing New York” (1939). The caption for this picture informs us that “No. 8 was once the home of the art collection which formed a part of the original Metropolitan Museum of Art.” It was built in 1856 for John Taylor Johnston, president of the Central Railroad of New Jersey. A leading collector of American art, Johnston was a founder of The Met and was elected its first president in 1870.

The New York Album

Abbott sailed for New York in January 1929, hoping to find an American publisher for a proposed book of Atget’s photographs and to promote her own portrait work. She brought with her a new handheld Curt Bentzin camera, thinking she might make some views of the city to sell to publishers in Europe. Inspired by the towering skyscrapers that had reshaped the American metropolis in the 1920s, Abbott pointed her camera up, down, and at skewed angles, creating dynamic compositions with sharp contrasts of light and shadow. She wandered all over Manhattan, photographing storefronts in Harlem, construction sites in midtown, and street vendors and tenement buildings in Chinatown and on the Lower East Side. She paid special attention to the city’s transportation infrastructure: bridges, elevated train lines, railroad terminals, ships docked on the waterfront.

Without access to a darkroom, Abbott had her negatives processed and printed at local drug stores and commercial labs. She pasted the little prints onto the pages of a standard photo album, creating a kind of sketchbook of subjects and themes. When The Met acquired it between 1978 and 1984, the album had already been disbound. Abbott reconstructed the sequence of the first eleven pages displayed here for a publication in 2013; the order of the remaining pages is unknown.

Changing New York

Abbott’s New York album laid the groundwork for her ambitious documentary project Changing New York (1935-1939). Comprising more than 300 negatives and a wealth of research, the project was funded by the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration, a government program dedicated to supporting unemployed artists during the Great Depression. Aided by a team of researchers, field assistants, and darkroom technicians, Abbott chronicled “the changing aspect of the world’s great metropolis. … Its hurrying tempo, its congested streets, the past jostling the present.” She returned to many of the locations she visited in 1929, but the new photographs, made with a large-format view camera like the one Atget used, are more straightforward and less influenced by the jazzy, sharp-angled style of European modernism. The project culminated in a book, published in 1939, featuring ninety-seven photographs with captions by Abbott’s companion, the art critic Elizabeth McCausland. The photographs were widely exhibited and complete sets of the final images were distributed to high schools, libraries, and other public institutions throughout the New York area.

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
[Album Page 1: Financial District, Broadway and Wall Street Vicinity, Manhattan]
1929
Gelatin silver prints
Images: approx. 2 1/4 × 3 1/4 in. (5.7 × 8.2cm), and the reverse
Album Page: 10 × 13 in. (25.4 × 33cm), irregular
Metropolitan Museum of Art
© Berenice Abbott / Commerce Graphics Ltd. Inc.
Gift of Emanuel Gerard, 1984

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
[Album Page 1: Financial District, Broadway and Wall Street Vicinity, Manhattan] (detail)
1929
Gelatin silver prints
Images: approx. 2 1/4 × 3 1/4 in. (5.7 × 8.2cm), and the reverse
Album Page: 10 × 13 in. (25.4 × 33cm), irregular
Metropolitan Museum of Art
© Berenice Abbott / Commerce Graphics Ltd. Inc.
Gift of Emanuel Gerard, 1984

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
[Album Page 1: Financial District, Broadway and Wall Street Vicinity, Manhattan] (details)
1929
Gelatin silver prints
Images: approx. 2 1/4 × 3 1/4 in. (5.7 × 8.2cm), and the reverse
Album Page: 10 × 13 in. (25.4 × 33cm), irregular
Metropolitan Museum of Art
© Berenice Abbott / Commerce Graphics Ltd. Inc.
Gift of Emanuel Gerard, 1984

If you were an American artist or writer in the 1920s, Paris was where you wanted to be. Springfield, Ohio-born photographer Berenice Abbott (1898-1991) arrived there in 1921 by way of New York, and by early 1929 she had managed to establish herself in the French capital’s flourishing interwar avant-garde scene – first working as an assistant to Man Ray and later taking her own celebrated portraits of luminaries such as James Joyce and Djuna Barnes. She even changed the spelling of her name from “Bernice” to the more Gallic “Berenice.”

Yet somehow this magnet for culturally minded expatriates lost its hold on Abbott the moment she set foot in Lower Manhattan – on a messy January day, no less – at the beginning of what was supposed to be a short trip back to the United States. She had lived in New York once, just eight years before, but in her absence the city had been scaled up: new skyscrapers were rising, the population was exploding, and every block, it seemed, was abuzz with commerce and construction. (The market crash of October 1929 was still many months away). Suddenly, Paris was passe. “When I saw New York again, and stood in the dirty slush,” she later recalled, “I felt that here was the thing I had been wanting to do all my life.”

“Berenice Abbott’s New York Album, 1929,” a small but inspiring show at the Metropolitan Museum, channels the exhilaration Abbott felt upon arriving in the city. The exhibition’s focus is a disbound scrapbook with seven to nine photographs per page, all taken over the course of that year, as Abbott paced the streets (and piers, bridges and train platforms) with a hand-held camera and a compulsion to capture New York’s unruly, cutthroat modernity.

With its 32 pages of small contact prints processed at drugstores and commercial labs (or as Abbott called them, “tiny photographic notes”), the album can be seen as a rough draft of her well-known Works Progress Administration project of the 1930s, “Changing New York.” (Several examples from this later series are in the Met show, including a disconcertingly ethereal view of Seventh Avenue taken from the top of a 46-story building in the garment district.) But Abbott’s “New York Album” is a fascinating artwork in its own right, an adrenalized and ambitious alignment of artist and subject.

Abbott felt the changing city needed an equivalent to the French photographer Eugène Atget (1857-1927), who had documented Paris during a critical period of transition in the late 19th and early 20th centuries with what Abbott called “the shock of realism unadorned.” She had come to New York as part of an impassioned effort to promote Atget’s oeuvre, one that included purchasing the photographer’s archive after his death and making her own prints from his glass-plate negatives; in the “New York Album” she goes further, becoming, in effect, his heir.

The Met’s exhibition incorporates several Atget photographs from the museum’s collection, including one that Abbott was known to admire; it shows an early automobile garage in the Fifth Arrondissement, with a Renault parked in a cobblestoned courtyard. A similar appreciation for the collision of the newfangled with the outmoded can be seen throughout Abbott’s “New York Album,” in shots of skyscrapers looming over rows of tenements and, in one more subtle and almost surreal case, an overhead view of an equine statue photographed from the Ninth Avenue El.

Although the album is not strictly organized by location, it has a distinct cartography. Abbott gravitated to certain neighborhoods that, for her, showed the face of the new city emerging. Many of them were in lower Manhattan; multiple pages are devoted to the Lower East Side, where she was drawn to storefronts and their simultaneously poetic and transactional signage, and the Financial District, where she often pointed her camera skyward to exaggerate the intimidating height of new corporate towers.

Unlike peers such as Walker Evans, she did not take much of an interest in the human subject – or, at least, in individuals. To her, the city was a human construction and humanity was implicit in every part of it. “You’re photographing people when you’re photographing a city,” she explained in a documentary film about her life. “You don’t have to have a person in it.”

As Abbott’s biographer has noted, she was influenced by the French literary movement of Unanimism, which emphasized collective consciousness and expression. You can sense this especially in her shots of the city’s elevated train system, which revel in the formal modernism of all that interlaced steel and cast iron without losing sight of its function of moving millions of people.

As an extension of the exhibition, the Met has created a helpful digital map that identifies some of the subjects in Abbott’s album and updates them with present-day photographs (a collaboration between the Met curator of photography who organized the exhibition, Mia Fineman, and the Jones Family Research Collective, led by the Manhattan borough historian emeritus, Celedonia Jones, until his death last April). It reveals, for example, that the site of a burlesque theater on Houston Street photographed by Abbott is now a Whole Foods.

Visitors to the exhibition can spend a lot of time testing their own knowledge of the city’s geography, but the pleasures of the show have more to do with the drive and dynamism behind the pictures. “Berenice Abbott’s New York Album, 1929” takes us back to an invigorating moment in the history of the metropolis, captured on the fly by an emergent modern artist.

During her upbringing in Ohio, Abbott had planned to be a journalist – she attended Ohio State University’s School of Journalism before turning to art – and it’s clear from her photography that she never lost that instinct for wanting to be where the story was. In those early months of 1929 she recognized that New York was the big story; looking at her “New York Album” gives us hope that it could be again.

Karen Rosenberg. “Berenice Abbott Captured Manhattan in the Throes of Heady Change,” on the New York Times website August 16, 2023 [Online] Cited 21/08/2023

Unanimism

Unanimism (French: Unanimisme) is a movement in French literature begun by Jules Romains in the early 1900s, with his first book, La vie unanime, published in 1904. It can be dated to a sudden conception Romains had in October 1903 of a ‘communal spirit’ or joint ‘psychic life’ in groups of people. It is based on ideas of collective consciousness and collective emotion, and on crowd behaviour, where members of a group do or think something simultaneously. Unanimism is about an artistic merger with these group phenomena, which transcend the consciousness of the individual. Harry Bergholz writes that “grossly generalising, one might describe its aim as the art of the psychology of human groups”. Because of this collective emphasis, common themes of unanimist writing include politics and friendship.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
[Album Page: Madison Square Park, Third Avenue and Ninth Avenue Elevated Train Lines, Manhattan]
1929
Gelatin silver prints
Images: 5.3 x 7.8cm (2 1/16 x 3 1/16 in.)
Sheet: 6.4 x 8.7cm (2 1/2 x 3 7/16 in.)
Album Page: 25.4 x 30.3cm (10 x 11 15/16in.)
Metropolitan Museum of Art
© Berenice Abbott / Commerce Graphics Ltd. Inc.
Gift of Emanuel Gerard, 1978

In 1921 Ohio-native Abbott left New York to study in Paris. Returning to the city in 1929, she found it transformed and ripe with photographic potential. Following the model of the French photographer Eugène Atget, whose street views of Paris she admired, Abbott ventured around New York photographing seemingly incidental, but often profound, scenes that captured the city’s changing character. This page of small-scale photographs is one example of many of similar album pages in the Metropolitan’s collection. Assembled by Abbott, the album from which they derive comprised a kind of photographer’s sketchbook for subjects and themes.

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
[Album Page: City Hall Park and Brooklyn Bridge Vicinity, Manhattan]
1929
Gelatin silver print
Album Page: 25.4 x 33.2 cm (10 x 13 1/16 in.), irregular
Metropolitan Museum of Art
© Berenice Abbott / Commerce Graphics Ltd. Inc.
Gift of Emanuel Gerard, 1981

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
[Album Page 5: Pier 17, South Street Seaport, Manhattan]
1929
Gelatin silver prints
Images: approx. 5.6 x 8.2cm (2 1/4 x 3 1/4 in.), and the reverse
Album Page: 25.3 x 30.5cm (9 15/16 x 12 in.), irregular
Metropolitan Museum of Art
© Berenice Abbott / Commerce Graphics Ltd. Inc.
Gift of Emanuel Gerard, 1982

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
[Album Page 9: Fulton Street Fish Market and Lower East Side, Manhattan]
1929
Gelatin silver print
Images: approx. 5.6 x 8.2cm (2 1/4 x 3 1/4 in.), and the reverse
Album Page: 25.3 x 30.5 cm (9 15/16 x 12 in.), irregular
Metropolitan Museum of Art
© Berenice Abbott / Commerce Graphics Ltd. Inc.
Gift of Emanuel Gerard, 1981

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
[Sumner Healy Antique Shop, 942 3rd Avenue near 57th Street, Manhattan]
1930s, printed 1936
Gelatin silver print
8 1/8 × 9 15/16 in. (20.6 × 25.2cm)
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Gift of Phyllis D. Massar, 1971
© Berenice Abbott / Commerce Graphics Ltd. Inc.

In 1935 Abbott embarked on a series of photographs documenting New York City. Funded by the Federal Art Project, during the next four years she made hundreds of images of the city’s monuments and architecture, including this one of Sumner Healey’s shop. Attracted to the “extraordinary montage of antiques” – anchored by a ten-foot-tall figurehead of Mars from an eighteenth-century battleship – Abbott also captured the owner’s cat, seemingly trapped on either side by the decorative dogs flanking the store’s entrance. Healey died soon after Abbott made this photograph, and the shop closed two years later.

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Pingpank Barbershop, 413 Bleecker Street, Manhattan
1938
Gelatin silver print
24.5 × 19.7cm (9 5/8 × 7 3/4 in.)
Twentieth Century Photography Fund, 2013

With its subtle interplay of reflection and interior, this slightly oblique view of a barbershop window reveals the influence of Atget’s photographs of Parisian storefronts. When Abbott made this image, August Pingpank was eighty-seven and was said to be the oldest barber in New York City. He lamented to Federal Art Project researchers that he would soon have to retire due to the invention of the safety razor: “It’s different now with men shaving themselves every morning at home.”

Berenice Abbott’s New York Album, 1929 presents selections from a unique unbound album of photographs of New York City created by American photographer Berenice Abbott (1898-1991), shedding light on the creative process of one of the great artists of the 20th century. Consisting of 266 small black-and-white prints arranged on 32 pages, the album is a kind of photographic sketchbook that offers a rare glimpse of an artist’s mind at work. In addition to some 25 framed album pages, the exhibition features photographs from The Met collection of Paris streets by Eugène Atget, whose archive Abbott purchased and promoted; views of New York by her contemporaries Walker Evans and Margaret Bourke-White; and selections from Abbott’s grand documentary project, Changing New York (1935-1939).

“Berenice Abbott’s groundbreaking work in photography continues to inspire and captivate audiences today, nearly a century after she first began documenting the world around her,” said Max Hollein, Marina Kellen French Director of The Met. “Abbott’s insightful and powerful images provide a window into the New York of the past, while also reminding us of the city’s enduring vitality and resilience.”

Born in Ohio, Abbott moved to New York City in 1918 and to Paris in 1921. She learned photography as a darkroom assistant in Man Ray’s studio and soon established herself as a prominent portraitist of the Parisian avant-garde. Through Man Ray, Abbott met the ageing French photographer Eugène Atget, whose documentation of Paris and its environs struck her as a model of modern photographic art. Following Atget’s sudden death in 1927, she purchased his archive of some 8,000 prints and 1,500 glass negatives and set about promoting his work through exhibitions and publications.

In January 1929, after eight years in Europe, Abbott boarded an ocean liner to New York City for what was intended to be a short visit. Upon arrival, she found the city transformed and ripe with photographic potential. “When I saw New York again, and stood in the dirty slush, I felt that here was the thing I had been wanting to do all my life,” she recalled. Inspired by Atget, Abbott traversed the city with a handheld camera, photographing its skyscrapers, storefronts, bridges, elevated trains, and neighbourhood street life. She pasted these “notes” into a standard black-page album, arranging them by subject and locale. As the immediate precursor to her 1930s WPA project, Changing New York, Abbott’s New York album marks a key moment of transition in her career: from Europe to America and from studio portraiture to urban documentation. The exhibition will be accompanied by an online feature that identifies, for the first time, the locations of many of the photographs in the album.

Berenice Abbott’s New York Album, 1929 is organised by Mia Fineman, Curator in the Department of Photographs, with assistance from Virginia McBride, Research Assistant in the Department of Photographs, both at The Met.

Press release from the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
The El at Columbus and Broadway
1929
15.0 x 20.3cm (5 15/16 x 8 in.)
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Ford Motor Company Collection, Gift of Ford Motor Company and John C. Waddell, 1987
© Berenice Abbott / Commerce Graphics Ltd. Inc.

Following her eight years of expatriate life in Paris, Abbott saw New York with European eyes. In this view, made shortly after her return, she captured the random disorder of urban activity as handily as her friend the dadaist poet Tristan Tzara, who put it this way: “We leave with those leaving arrive with those arriving / leave with those arriving arrive when the others leave.”

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
[The El, 2nd and 3rd Avenue Lines, Bowery and Division Street, Manhattan]
1936
Gelatin silver print
Image: 9 11/16 × 7 5/8 in. (24.6 × 19.3cm)
Sheet: 9 7/8 × 7 15/16 in. (25.1 × 20.1cm)
Metropolitan Museum of Art
© Berenice Abbott / Commerce Graphics Ltd. Inc.
Gift of Phyllis D. Massar, 1971

Manhattan’s elevated (El) train lines fascinated Abbott when she first photographed the city in 1929. Seven years later, she used her large-format camera to capture this shadowed vista beneath the El in Chinatown. “I was right in the middle of the street on a little island,” she recalled. “This was one of the occasions when it was downright dangerous to document New York, with traffic whizzing by on both sides, but it was very important to get in exactly the right position to make the photograph work.”

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
[Manhattan Bridge]
1936
Gelatin silver print
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Gift of Phyllis D. Massar, 1971
© Berenice Abbott / Commerce Graphics Ltd. Inc.

The Brooklyn Bridge was New York’s first and most famous, but Abbott favoured the all-steel Manhattan Bridge, completed in 1909. She made this photograph on the southern pedestrian walkway; the vibrations of the suspension bridge required a fast shutter speed to avoid blur. “I seem to veer toward waterfronts,” she later said. “As Melville wrote in Moby Dick, the heart of a port city is around its waterfront, and by nature I seem to head right there. Perhaps I should have been a sailor – boats and bridges have always fascinated me.”

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
[Seventh Avenue Looking South from Thirty-fifth Street, New York]
1935
Gelatin silver print
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Gift of Phyllis D. Massar, 1971
© Berenice Abbott / Commerce Graphics Ltd. Inc.

Abbott made this overhead view of skyscrapers in the garment district from atop the forty-six-story Nelson Tower on Seventh Avenue. The roof of the original Pennsylvania Station, demolished in 1962, can be seen in the lower right corner.

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Canyon, Broadway and Exchange Place
1936
Gelatin silver print
23.8 x 19.3cm (9 3/8 x 7 5/8 in.)
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Gift of Joyce and Robert Menschel, 1991
© Berenice Abbott / Commerce Graphics Ltd. Inc.

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Manhattan Bridge, Looking Up
1936
Gelatin silver print
24.5 x 19.4cm (9 5/8 x 7 5/8 in.)
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Gift of Phyllis D. Massar, 1971
© Berenice Abbott / Commerce Graphics Ltd. Inc.

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Brooklyn Bridge, With Pier 21, Pennsylvania R.R.
1937
Gelatin silver print
19.4 x 24.4cm (7 5/8 x 9 5/8 in.)
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Gift of Joyce and Robert Menschel, 1991
© Berenice Abbott / Commerce Graphics Ltd. Inc.

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
West Street
1936
Gelatin silver print
19.1 x 24cm (7 1/2 x 9 7/16 in. )
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Gift of Jane and Mark Ciabattari, 2000
© Berenice Abbott / Commerce Graphics Ltd. Inc.

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Henry Street from Market, Looking West, Manhattan
1935
Gelatin silver print
19.2 x 24.2cm (7 9/16 x 9 1/2 in.)
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Gift of Joyce F. Menschel, 2012
© Berenice Abbott / Commerce Graphics Ltd. Inc.

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Automat, 977 Eighth Avenue, Manhattan
1936
Gelatin silver print
Image: 19.4 x 24.6cm (7 5/8 x 9 11/16 in.)
Sheet: 22 x 25.3cm (8 11/16 x 9 15/16 in.)
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Gift of Joyce F. Menschel, 2011
© Berenice Abbott / Commerce Graphics Ltd. Inc.

During the Depression, Horn & Hardart’s chain of “waiterless restaurants” served as many as eight hundred thousand freshly prepared meals a day to customers in New York and Philadelphia. With its clean lines, polished chrome details, and mechanical efficiency, the Automat struck Abbott as “an extremely American artefact.” New York’s first Automat opened in Times Square in 1912, but Abbott chose to document the branch at Columbus Circle, popular as a nighttime gathering spot for musicians and cabaret patrons.

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)
Printer: Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Street Musicians
1898-1999, printed 1956
Title page from the portfolio 20 Photographs by Eugène Atget (1856-1927), 1956
Published by Berenice Abbott, New York Gelatin silver print from glass negatives David Hunter McAlpin Fund, 1956

In 1956 Abbott produced a portfolio of twenty new prints from Atget’s glass-plate negatives and offered it by subscription to museums, libraries, and private collectors. This photograph of an organ grinder and exuberant female singer belongs to a series of photographs devoted to the rapidly vanishing street trades, or petits métiers, of Paris.

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)
[Atget’s Work Room with Contact Printing Frames]
c. 1910
Albumen silver print from glass negative
20.9 x 17.3cm (8 1/4 x 6 13/16 in.)
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 1990

This straightforward study by Atget of his own work room offers a rare glimpse of the inner sanctum of an auteur éditeur, as he described his profession. On the table are the wooden frames the photographer used to contact print his glass negatives; at right are several bins of negatives stacked vertically; below the table are his chemical trays; on the shelves above are stacks of paper albums – a shelf label reads escaliers et grilles (staircases and grills). Atget used these homemade albums to organise his vast picture collection from which he sold views of old Paris to clients.

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)
15, rue Maître-Albert
1912
Gelatin silver print from glass negative
23.2 x 17.6 cm (9 1/8 x 6 15/16 in.)
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Rogers Fund, 1991
Creative Commons CC0 1.0

Eloquent testimony to Atget’s keen regard for the expressions of common folk, this photograph was part of a self-assigned survey of storefronts and commercial signs. Atget ennobled the little grocery with its modest façade and rudimentary display (covered for lunch hour against the midday heat) and framed it simply, thus withdrawing it from the predictable realm of the picturesque.

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)
Courtyard, 7 Rue de Valence, 5th arr.
1922
Gelatin silver print from glass negative
Image: 17.2 x 22.7cm (6 3/4 x 8 15/16 in.)
Mount: 36.7 x 28.7cm (14 7/16 x 11 5/16 in.)
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Gilman Collection, Purchase, Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee Gift, 2005

Atget found his vocation in photography in 1897, at the age of forty, after having been a merchant seaman, an itinerant actor, and a painter. He became obsessed with making what he termed “documents” of Paris and its environs, and with compiling a visual compendium of the architecture, landscape, and artefacts that distinguish French culture and its history. By the end of his life, Atget had amassed an archive of over 8,000 negatives that he had organised into such categories as Parisian Interiors, Petits Métiers (trades and professions), and Vehicles in Paris.

The subject of this photograph is an early automobile garage occupying a timeworn courtyard near the intersection of rue Mouffetard and rue Monge in the fifth arrondissement. Although Atget’s interest was primarily in the texture of old Paris – not the city’s new promenades and modern monuments – he did make a few studies of automobiles, signs of modern times, beginning in 1922. Beside a pair of motorcycles rests an early-model Renault touring car, probably dating from 1908. It, too, may be a relic: its four-cylinder engine lies beside it.

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)
Printer: Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Fête du Trône
1925, printed c. 1929
Matte gelatin silver print from glass negative
23.4 x 17cm (9 3/16 x 6 11/16 in.)
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 1999

Abbott made new contact prints from Atget’s glass-plate negatives, experimenting with various photographic papers and processes to try to approximate the clarity and detail of Atget’s own prints. Sometime early in 1930, Walker Evans visited Abbott’s studio in New York’s Hotel des Artistes, where she stored her vast Atget archive. Deeply affected by the French photographer’s work, Evans left that day with four of Abbott’s Atget prints: this one, Boutique, Marché aux Halles (displayed to the right), and two others. Although Atget’s work was never exhibited during his lifetime, his soulful documentation of Paris had a profound impact on both Abbott and Evans, and contributed to the emergence of a documentary style in twentieth-century American art photography.

Learning from Atget

When Abbott met Eugène Atget in 1926, he had been photographing Paris for thirty years. Working with a large wooden-view camera, Atget made what he modestly called “documents” of the city, compiling a vast visual archive of Parisian streets, courtyards, gardens, shop windows, architectural details, apartment interiors, and tradespeople. Atget’s studio was on the same street in Montparnasse as that of Man Ray, who purchased several dozen of his photographs, publishing four of them in the journal La Révolution surréaliste. Abbott was instantly captivated by Atget’s photographs when she encountered them in Man Ray’s studio. “Their impact was immediate and tremendous,” she recalled. “There was a sudden flash of recognition – the shock of realism unadorned. The subjects were not sensational, but nevertheless shocking in their very familiarity.” In 1927 Abbott persuaded Atget to sit for a portrait in her own studio on the rue du Bac. Months later, following his sudden death at age seventy, she purchased his archive of some 8,000 prints and 1,500 glass negatives and set about promoting his work through exhibitions, publications, and sales of the prints, a selection of which are on display here. When she moved to New York in 1929, Abbott brought the archive with her, and eventually sold it to the Museum of Modern Art in 1968.

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)
Printer: Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Boutique, Marché aux Halles, Paris
1925, printed c. 1929
Matte gelatin silver print from glass negative
23.1 x 17cm (9 1/8 x 6 11/16 in. )
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 1999
Creative Commons CC0 1.0

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)
Rue Laplace and Rue Valette, Paris
1926
Gelatin silver print from glass negative
Image: 22 x 17.6cm (8 11/16 x 6 15/16 in.)
Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, by exchange, 1970
Creative Commons CC0 1.0

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)
Avenue des Gobelins
1927
Gelatin silver print from glass negative
36.8 x 28.6cm (14 1/2 x 11 1/4 in.)
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Purchase, Rogers Fund, and Joyce and Robert Menschel and Harriette and Noel Levine Gifts, 1994

In this headless mannequin, clothed in a simple white uniform, Atget recognised a modern version of the commedia dell’arte clown Gilles, depicted by the eighteenth-century painter Jean Antoine Watteau, for example. It was for the type of transforming vision seen in this picture, which is among the very last in Atget’s lifelong exploration of Paris, that the artist’s work was so enthusiastically embraced by the Surrealists.

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Exhibition: ‘Images of Italy: Places of Longing in Early Photography’ at the Städel Museum, Frankfurt

Exhibition dates: 23rd February – 3rd September 2023

Curator: Dr Kristina Lemke (Head of Photography, Städel Museum)

Giorgio Sommer (Italian born Germany, 1834-1914)
Pompeii: The Oil Merchant’s Shop
After 1873
Albumen print mounted on cardboard
20.5 x 25.3cm
Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main
Acquired in the 19th century

Perhaps I was born in the wrong age for the more I view the wonders of 19th century photography the more disappointed I am at the vacuousness of a large proportion of contemporary photography.

In these photographs there seems to be a secret language of the photograph … where a certain piece of paper has a certain aesthetics of the image inherently buried in its structure which is then revealed. This is the place I long to be.

Thinking of the exhibition listings and texts for a recent major photographic biennale, the vacuousness of the concepts/themes and the resulting photographs was astounding. This, given the utter tsunami of the photo-digital and primacy of the visual in every day life, and every other aspect of our existence, is not a good situation. As my friend and artist Elizabeth Gertsakis observed, “‘Vacuousness’ is like a mirror without a capacity for reflection.” Or too much (self) reflection.

‘Self’ alone lacks both knowledge and authenticity.

Contemporary conceptual photography is full of false prophecies.

Perhaps the photographers need to ask: what really matters? What are the things in my life that I will not negotiate on. That I hold onto at the core of my being. Then perhaps the images that emerge from that investigation will again begin to mean something to them… and to others.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

Gondoliers on the Grand Canal, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and the antiquities of Rome: numerous photographs by Giorgio Sommer, the Alinari brothers, Carlo Naya, and Robert Macpherson, among others, shaped the image of Italy as a place of longing. The Städel Museum is presenting a selection of early photographs of Italy. The exhibition unites altogether ninety major photos of the years 1850 to 1880 from the museum’s own collection.

About the exhibition

People have been dreaming their way to Italy for generations: the Mediterranean climate, multifaceted natural environment, and wealth of culture and art treasures have long since made the country a favourite travel destination. When the development of the railway system led to a boom in tourism in the second half of the nineteenth century, photography studios opened in the vicinity of the most popular sights. Even before the invention of the picture postcard, the photographic views on sale there were a prized souvenir for travellers, and also sold internationally by mail order. Johann David Passavant, then director of the Städel, began purchasing photos for the museum’s collection as far back as the 1850s. From these prints, both the art-interested public and students of the affiliated art academy were able to get an idea of southern Europe and its artistic and natural treasures. This brought distant countries closer while, simultaneously, the motifs in circulation determined what was considered worth seeing. To this day, the sceneries captured in photographs at that time continue to have an impact.

Text from the Städel Museum, Frankfurt

Installation views of the exhibition Images of Italy: Places of Longing in Early Photography at the Städel Museum, Frankfurt showing in the bottom image at left, Venice, Ca’ d’Oro (c. 1870-1880, below); and at centre, Carla Naya’s Venice: View of the Marciana Library, the Campanile and the Doge’s Palace (c. 1875, below)

Carlo Ponti (Italian 1823-1893)
Venice, Ca’ d’Oro
c. 1870-1880
Albumen print mounted on cardboard
24.9 x 33.1cm
Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main
Acquired in 2012 as a gift from Alexander Rasor

The Ca’ d’Oro is the most famous of the more than 200 palaces lining the Canal Grande on both sides. Even today, a ride down the main waterway is one of the most popular tourist attractions in Venice. Captured in a frontal view from the canal and for the part isolated from its surroundings, the facade offers an opportunity for in-depth study of the architectural details. The rich decoration, complete with colonnades, tracery, and reliefs, is distinct down to the tiniest detail. The objective character of the view is underscored by the text on the back, which provides basic information on the building and its owners in a few sentences. By accompanying his prints with remarks of this kind in at least two languages, Carlo Ponti catered to a broad public – not only tourists but also exponents fo the young discipline of art history.

Wall text from the exhibition

Carlo Naya (Italian, 1816-1882)
Venice: View of the Marciana Library, the Campanile and the Doge’s Palace
c. 1875
Albumen print mounted on cardboard
41.3 x 54.1cm
Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main

Against the backdrop of the Doge’s Palace on the Piazza San Marco, the gondola glides across the surface of the water, seemingly without a sound. At first sight, what we have before us is a snapshot bearing close resemblance to those taken by present-day visitors to Venice in their effort to capture the special charm of the onetime maritime republic. However, closer inspection reveals that there is nothing at all spontaneous about this image. The two gondoliers merely stage the poses required to propel the vessel forwards. In fact, they are using their oars to hold the gondola in place so that the shot of it will be in focus. Over the course of his long career, Carlo Naya photographed nearly eery one of Venice’s architectural landmarks – and thus advanced to become the city’s most prominent chronicler in the second half of the nineteenth century

Wall text from the exhibition

Installation views of the exhibition Images of Italy: Places of Longing in Early Photography at the Städel Museum, Frankfurt showing in the bottom image at centre, Robert Macpherson’s Tivoli: Waterfall (c. 1860-1865, below); and at right, Adolphe Braun’s Rome: Detail of Michelangelo’s Moses (c. 1875, below)

Robert Macpherson (Scottish lived Italy, 1814-1872)
Tivoli: Waterfall
c. 1860-1865
Albumen print mounted on cardboard
40 x 30.5cm
Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main, property of the Städelscher Museums-Verein e.V.

Adolphe Braun (French, 1811-1877)
Rome: Detail of Michelangelo’s Moses
c. 1875
Carbon print
48.6 x 36.1cm
Acquired in 2011 with support from the Kulturstiftung der Länder and the Hessischer Kulturstiftung, property of the Städelscher Museums-Verein e.V.

Owing to their immovability, sculptures were gratifying motifs for photographers. Every shot nevertheless posed many challenges. Meticulous calculations of the light were necessary to capture the plasticity of the three-dimensional works in the best way possible. Depending on the surface structure, various reflections might appear, and they were to be avoided. In the case of Michelangelo’s famous Moses from the tomb of Pope Julius II in Rome, Adolphe Braun concentrated on the upper body. The indeterminate dark background sets off the silhouette and three-dimensional forms of the white marble to particularly striking effect. To conceal the niche behind the sculpture, the photographer applied an asphalt solution to the negative. He moreover retraced certain details – for example the prophet’s left eye and the tip of his beard – with grey ink to heighten the contrasts.

Text from the Städel Museum website

Adolphe Braun (French, 1811-1877)
Rome: Detail of Michelangelo’s Moses (detail)
c. 1875
Carbon print
48.6 x 36.1cm
Acquired in 2011 with support from the Kulturstiftung der Länder and the Hessischer Kulturstiftung, property of the Städelscher Museums-Verein e.V.

Installation view of the exhibition Images of Italy: Places of Longing in Early Photography at the Städel Museum, Frankfurt showing Giorgio Sommer’s Gulf of Naples: View of Sorrento (c. 1880-1890, below)

Giorgio Sommer (Italian born Germany, 1834-1914)
Sorrento: View of the City from the West [Gulf of Naples: View of Sorrento]
c. 1880-1890
Albumen print mounted on cardboard
20.9 x 25.5cm
Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main
Acquired in the 19th century

Installation view of the exhibition Images of Italy: Places of Longing in Early Photography at the Städel Museum, Frankfurt showing at top left, Carlo Naya’s Venice. Cavalli Palace and the Grand Canal looking towards the Santa Maria della Salute church (c. 1877, below); and at bottom left, Carlo Naya’s Venice: View of the Canal Grande and Santa Maria della Salute from the Ponte della Carità (Moonlight Effect) (c. 1870, below)

Carlo Naya (Italian, 1816-1882)
Venice. Cavalli Palace and the Grand Canal looking towards the Santa Maria della Salute church
c. 1877
Albumen print mounted on cardboard
Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main

Carlo Naya (Italian, 1816-1882)
Venice: View of the Canal Grande and Santa Maria della Salute from the Ponte della Carità (Moonlight Effect)
c. 1870
Albumen print mounted on cardboard
Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main
Acquired in the 19th century

The mysterious aura of the “Floating City” in the silvery light of the moon had already been discovered in painting. The painter Friedrich Nerly, for example, had made a name for himself with nocturnal views of Venice. In the photography medium, it was Carlo Naya who specialised in this area. He had to go to tremendous pains, however, to achieve comparable effects. He shot the buildings and the cloudy sky separately during the day, strongly underexposing the film, and then assembled the negatives. When the print was developed on bluish prepared photo paper, the lighter zones took on the appearance of reflected moonlight. The scenes were extremely popular with tourists because they intensified the myth of Venice conveyed by romantic literature – as a place of intrigues and secret love affairs. Naya and Nerly were acquainted, and the photographer reproduced the works of the painter from 1865 onwards.

Text from the Städel Museum website

Giorgio Sommer (Italian born Germany, 1834-1914) (attributed)
Venice: View of the Canal Grande and Santa Maria della Salute from the Ponte della Carità
c. 1860-1870
Albumen print mounted on cardboard
18.0 x 23.9cm
Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main
Acquired in the 19th century

Early photographers took orientation from veduta painting, which owed its development to eighteenth-century tourism. As in Nerly’s composition, the dome of Santa Maria della Salute also dominates the scene in the shot by Carlo Naya. Here, however, it does not mark the centre of the composition but has been shifted to the right, drawing the viewer’s gaze somewhat further into the depths towards the Adriatic Sea. Owing to technical limitations, photographers had to do without the reproduction of atmospheric phenomena. The long exposure times transformed the waves into a smooth surface. To prevent the movement of the clouds in the sky from causing streaks, the photographer covered that area of the negative with black or red ink before exposure. The result was an evenly bright background that sets off the minute details of the pin-sharp architecture to especially good effect.

Text from the Städel Museum website

Installation views of the exhibition Images of Italy: Places of Longing in Early Photography at the Städel Museum, Frankfurt showing various photographers’ views (including Carlo Naya, Giovanni Battista Brusa and Carlo Ponti) of the Bridge of Sighs (see below)
Photo: Städel Museum – Norbert Miguletz

Giovanni Battista Brusa (Italian, active in Italy c. 1860-1880)
Venice, Bridge of Sighs
c. 1860
Albumen print mounted on cardboard
26.4 x 19.7cm
Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main
Acquired in the 19th century

The so-called Bridge of Sighs led from the Doge’s Palace to the Prigioni Nuove, the “New Prison”. On their way across, convicts are said to have issued a sigh at the brief glimpse of freedom. The famous Venice landmark is one of the world’s most photographed bridges – and that was already the case in the nineteenth century. Countless photographers have adopted the same slightly oblique angle of view from the pedestrian bridge Ponte della Paglia opposite the south façade of the Bridge of Sighs. Their photos differ in the play of shadows – as determined by the respective position of the sun – the tonal richness, and the number of gondolas. This perspective on the bridge has etched itself in the collective visual memory and is still encountered in the social media today as the ideal angle for holiday pics.

Text from the Städel Museum website

Carlo Ponti (Italian, 1823-1893)
Venice, Bridge of Sighs
c. 1860-1870
Albumen print mounted on cardboard
35.2 x 25.5cm
Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main
Acquired in the 19th century

Travel routes to art: owing to its ancient past and wealth of art treasures, Italy had already long been a favourite destination for artists, scholars, and affluent citizens. In the mid-nineteenth century, the new medium of photography further inflamed the yearning for Italy. In the years that followed,thanks to the invention of the railway, more people than ever were able to set off for the South and the land of their dreams. Photographic views of the most popular destinations were sold as souvenirs right on site or marketed all over Europe by way of mail-order trade. The spread and technical refinement of photography moreover offered art scholars a means of studying artworks in faithful reproductions independently of location. It was in the 1850s that then director Johann David Passavant acquired the first photographs for the Städel collection. In the German art-historical perception, Italy and its art were outstanding and exemplary. Photographic views of the same accordingly account for a large proportion of the Städel Museum’s photography holdings. They have lost nothing of their appeal to this day.

Text from the Städel Museum website

Enrico Van Lint (Italian, 1808-1884)
Pisa: The Leaning Tower
c. 1855
Albumen print mounted on cardboard
14.5 x 10.9cm
Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main

To this day, the Leaning Tower of Pisa is one of the most photographed sights in Italy. In the 1850s, the trained sculptor Enrico Van Lint repeatedly photographed the tower and the other buildings on the Cathedral Square from different perspectives. Under good weather conditions, the exposure times ranged between 20 seconds and 7 minutes, on overcast days up to 18 minutes. In the second half of the nineteenth century – long before the invention of the picture postcard – travellers to Italy could purchase the small-scale prints as souvenirs. This view by Enrico Van Lint is one of the oldest objects in the Städel Museum’s ancient photography collection which, like the photo itself, dates back to around 1850.

Text from the Städel Museum website

Jakob August Lorent (American lived Italy, 1813-1884)
Venice: View of Santa Maria della Salute from the Molo
c. 1853
Albumen print from wax-paper negative
38.4 x 47.7cm
Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main
Acquired in 2011 with support from the Kulturstiftung der Länder and the Hessische Kulturstiftung, property of the Städelscher Museums-Verein e.V.

Gondoliers on the Grand Canal, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and the antiquities of Rome: Numerous photographs by Giorgio Sommer, the Alinari brothers, Carlo Naya, and Robert Macpherson, among others, shaped the image of Italy as a place of longing. From 23 February to 3 September 2023, the Städel Museum is presenting a selection of early photographs of Italy. The exhibition unites altogether ninety major photos of the years 1850 to 1880 from the museum’s own collection, taking visitors on a photographic tour along the best-known routes with stops in Milan, Venice, Florence, Rome, and Naples.

People have been dreaming their way to Italy for generations: the Mediterranean climate, multifaceted natural environment, and wealth of culture and art treasures have long since made the country a favourite travel destination. When the development of the railway system led to a boom in tourism in the second half of the nineteenth century, photography studios opened in the vicinity of the most popular sights. Even before the invention of the picture postcard, the photographic views on sale there were a prized souvenir for travellers, and also sold internationally by mail order. Johann David Passavant, then director of the Städel, began purchasing photos for the museum’s collection as far back as the 1850s. From these prints, both the art interested public and students of the affiliated art academy were able to get an idea of southern Europe and its artistic and natural treasures. This brought distant countries closer while, simultaneously, the motifs in circulation determined what was considered worth seeing. To this day, the sceneries captured in photographs at that time continue to have an impact.

Philipp Demandt, director of the Städel Museum, on the exhibition: “‘Images of Italy’ invites visitors along on a photographic journey: from Milan, Venice, and Florence to Rome and Naples. At the same time, the show offers insights into the history of the Städel Museum’s photography collection. Johann David Passavant, the museum’s director at the time, recognised the possibility of providing unlimited access to artworks and cultural treasures with the help of the photography medium early on – thus upholding our founder Johann Friedrich Städel’s guiding principle in splendid manner.”

The beginnings of the photography collection

With reproductions of artworks, photography also created new possibilities for the developing discipline of art history. It was in the 1850s that Johann David Passavant (1787-1861), then director of the Städelsches Kunstinstitut, acquired the first photographs for the museum. Amassed from a range of different sources, the prints convey the wealth of motifs and forms distinguishing a cultural region appreciated at the time as one of Europe’s most important. In the German art-historical perception, Italy and its art were outstanding and exemplary. Photographic views of them accordingly account for a large proportion of the Städel Museum’s photography holdings. They served visitors and students alike as study objects and a means of exploring proportions, light conditions, and perspectives.

“The exhibition retraces the unique history of the development of photography in nineteenth-century Italy. The first section looks at how the medium entered the Städel Museum in the form of collection items and took on ever greater importance in connection with the emerging tourist industry. From there the show proceeds to images of Italy’s most important destinations, thus presenting a comprehensive – and singularly striking – stocktaking of its cultural landscape in the period in question. The sights of those days still attract the photographic eye today. The views are often the same ones we travel to now,” comments exhibition curator Kristina Lemke.

A tour of Italy in pictures

After crossing the Alps, the classical route of a trip to Italy for purposes of education and enjoyment took travellers through the North to Milan, Genoa, and Venice, onwards from there to Florence and Rome, and finally to Naples and Pompeii. Starting in the 1850s, photographers recorded the main architectural and natural attractions in pictures. In terms of visual language, the photographs exhibit a close similarity to paintings, drawings, and prints. To lend images an idyllic mood, the photographers chose their vantage points with care, waited for a time of day that would produce a finely gradated play of light and shade, and integrated models to enliven their compositions. Many of them, such as Pompeo Pozzi (1817-1880), Gioacchino Altobelli (1814-1878), and Enrico Van Lint (1808-1884) had initially trained as artists. The rapidly growing photography trade also offered numerous emigrants a source of income: Robert Macpherson (1814-1872), Eugène Constant (active in Rome 1848-1852), Jakob August Lorent (1813-1884), Alfred August Noack (1833-1895), and Giorgio Sommer (1834-1914), for example, came to Italy from the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. The widely circulating motifs shaped the travel canon.

The photographic views popular back then convey an image of Italy as a timeless place of longing. Only to an extent can they be understood as mirrors of reality. The region was shaped above all by a national unification movement that got underway after 1815: the Risorgimento, which – punctuated by frequent military disputes – would only end in 1870 with the capture of Rome. Yet the political conflicts did little to discourage the development of tourism and photography taking place in the same decades.

Photographers and motifs – a selection

To this day, the Leaning Tower of Pisa is one of the most photographed sights in Italy. In the 1850s, the trained sculptor Enrico Van Lint (Pisa 1808-1884) repeatedly photographed the tower and the other buildings on the Cathedral Square from different perspectives. Under good light conditions, the exposure times ranged between 20 seconds and 7 minutes, on overcast days between 8 and 18 minutes. Dating from around 1855, the view by Van Lint on display in the show is one of the oldest objects in the Städel Museum’s photography collection.

Alfred Noack (Dresden 1833 – Genoa 1895) completed artistic training in Dresden before emigrating to Italy in the late 1850s. After four years in Rome, he opened a photo studio in Genoa that served him as a base for explorations of the Ligurian Riviera. Here he captured the Sestri Levante section of the coast, a popular holiday destination, in photos he composed in painting-like manner. By reducing the depth of field after the manner of traditional landscape painting, Noack was able to create suggestive atmospheric images.

In 1856, the photographer Georg Sommer (1834 – Naples 1914) moved to Italy and, under the name Giorgio Sommer, became one of Naples’s most successful entrepreneurs. The exhibition presents, among others, his views of the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II (c. 1868-1873) in Milan, the island of Capri, and a spectacular series of shots capturing the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in April 1872. Sommer photographed the rare natural spectacle at half-hour intervals from a boat lying at anchor a safe distance away in the Gulf of Naples. The Leipzig Illustrierte Zeitung featured woodcut reproductions of these images that can be regarded as forerunners of the later emerging field of photojournalism.

Carlo Naya (Tronzano Vercellese 1816 – Venice 1882) advanced to become the most prominent chronicler of Venice in the second half of the nineteenth century. At first sight, his photo of a gondola against the backdrop of the Library of Saint Mark, Campanile, and Doge’s Palace (c. 1875) looks like a snapshot, but nothing about it is spontaneous. Over the course of his long career, Naya captured nearly every one of Venice’s architectural landmarks, among them the so-called Bridge of Sighs. In the nineteenth century, the famous sight was one of the world’s most photographed bridges. Countless photographers have set up their camera on the same spot. The resulting view of the bridge has etched itself in the collective visual memory and is still encountered in the social media today as the ideal angle for holiday pics.

Carlo Ponti (Sagno 1823 – Venice 1893) produced views of popular architectural sights in Venice. Among the photos by Ponti on display in the exhibition is one of the Ca’ d’Oro (c. 1870-1880) providing information about the edifice in two languages on the back. With this souvenir, the photographer catered not only to tourists, but also to persons interested or specialising in the history of art and culture. In the image, the building’s rich decoration – with colonnades, tracery, and reliefs – is distinct down to the tiniest detail.

Leopoldo Alinari, who had trained as an engraver, went into business for himself as a photographer in 1852. Two years later he founded a studio with his brothers Romualdo and Giuseppe. In addition to portraits, the Fratelli Alinari offered views of the city’s famous monuments. In 1859, they came to international fame with reproductions of drawings by Raphael. From that time forward, photographic reproductions of artworks, for example from the Uffizi, were a permanent feature of the family company’s product range – and likewise among the Städelsches Kunstinstitut’s purchases.

The exhibition also presents the remarkable photographic composition entitled Rome: Fishermen on the Tiber near the Castel Sant’Angelo (c. 1860) by Gioacchino Altobelli (Terni 1814 – Rome 1878), who had previously been active as a history and portrait painter. Altobelli was one of Rome’s most successful photographers. The Ponte Sant’Angelo with its Baroque sculptures by Gian Lorenzo Bernini divides the pictorial field about halfway between top and bottom, leaving plenty of space for the reflections of St Peter’s Basilica and the Castel Sant’Angelo in the smooth surface of the Tiber. The photographer was judicious in his choice of staffage in the foreground: the figures serve to point the viewer’s gaze to the main monuments.

Meticulous calculations of the light were necessary to capture the plasticity of sculptures in the best way possible. That is because, depending on the surface structure, various reflections might appear, and they were to be avoided. In the case of Michelangelo’s figure of Moses from the tomb of Pope Julius II in Rome, Adolphe Braun (Besançon 1811 – Dornach 1877) concentrated on the upper body. To conceal the niche behind the sculpture, the photographer applied an asphalt solution to the negative. He moreover retraced certain details – for example the prophet’s left eye and the tip of his beard – with grey ink to heighten the contrasts.

In the shot of the Pantheon (c. 1870) by the Fratelli D’Alessandri, the building still boasts a feature today no longer extant – the bell towers by the great Roman Baroque artist Gian Lorenzo Bernini. Thanks to the angle of view, the photograph captures not only the temple façade with its rectangular outline, but also the domed rotunda. At the same time it portrays the urban setting, complete with cafés, shops, and pedestrians, creating a suspenseful contrast between the permanence of the structure and the fugacity of the moment.

For nineteenth-century travellers to Rome, an excursion to the surrounding region was a must. In Tivoli, the great waterfall in the park of the Villa Gregoriana had already been attracting artists since the eighteenth century. They usually concentrated on staging the spectacular natural scenery in interplay with the remains of ancient culture. In Tivoli: Waterfall (c. 1860-1865), Robert Macpherson (Edinburgh 1814 – Rome 1872) – a surgeon by training – focussed solely on the plunging water and the bright reflections off the mist it causes. The oval shape heightens the image’s poetic effect and draws all the more attention to the motif.

Press release from the Städel Museum

A. De Bonis (Italian, active 1850-1870) (attributed)
Rome: Man Reading in the Garden of the Cloister of San Giovanni in Laterano
c. 1855-1860
Albumen print mounted on cardboard
25.5 x 19.6cm
Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main
Acquired in 2011 with support from the Kulturstiftung der Länder and the Hessischer Kulturstiftung, property of the Städelscher Museums-Verein e.V.

Fratelli D’Alessandri (Italian, 1858-1930)
Antonio D’Alessandri (Italian, 1818-1893)
Paolo Francesco D’Alessandri (Italian, 1827-1889)
Rome: Pantheon
c. 1870
Albumen print mounted on cardboard
17.1 x 21.9cm
Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main
Acquired in the 19th century

No other metropolis offered a comparable rich and closely interwoven legacy of built monuments and art treasures from antiquity to the modern age. The Pantheon is a prime manifestation of Rome’s special status as the “Eternal City”. The best-preserved edifice of Roman antiquity, it was converted into a Christian church in AD 609. Since the Renaissance it has moreover served as the final resting place of prominent personages, among them Raphael. In this shot, the building still boasts a feature today no longer extant – the bell towers by the great Roman Baroque artist Gian Lorenzo Bernini. Thanks to the angle of view, the photograph by the D’Alessandri brothers captures not only the temple façade with its rectangular outline, but also the domed rotunda. At the same time it portrays the urban setting, complete with cafés, shops, and pedestrians, creating a suspenseful contrast between the permanence of the structure and the fugacity of the moment.

Text from the Städel Museum website

Jakob August Lorent (American lived Italy, 1813-1884)
Venice: The Horses of San Marco
c. 1853
Salt print mounted on cardboard
33.6 x 46.4cm
Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main
Acquired in 2011 with support from the Kulturstiftung der Länder and the Hessische Kulturstiftung, property of the Städelscher Museums-Verein e.V.

Robert Macpherson (Scottish lived Italy, 1814-1872)
Rome: The Fountain of the Dioscuri on Quirinal Hill
1860
39.6 x 30.9cm
Albumen print mounted on cardboard
Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main
Acquired in 2011 with support from the Kulturstiftung der Länder and the Hessischer Kulturstiftung, property of the Städelscher Museums-Verein e.V.

Carlo Naya (Italian, 1816-1882)
Venice: Riva degli Schiavoni (with Carlo Naya’s studio in the left foreground)
c. 1865-1875
Albumen print mounted on cardboard
43.7 x 53.9cm
Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main
Acquired in 2011 with support from the Kulturstiftung der Länder and the Hessischer Kulturstiftung, property of the Städelscher Museums-Verein e.V.

August Alfred Noack (Italian, 1833-1895)
Genoa: Fishing Boat on the Beach of Nervi, View of Torre Gropallo and Monte Fasce
c. 1870
Albumen print mounted on cardboard
20.5 x 28.0cm
Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main
Acquired in the 19th century

In the 1850s Alfred Noack immigrated to Italy, like Giorgio Sommer. After four years in Rome he opened a photographic studio in Genoa and intensely studied the landscapes of the coast of Liguria. His photographs of the beach of Nervi, with rocky bits of land reaching diagonally into the picture plane, appear exceptionally modern. The angle he chose draws the viewer into the picture, an effect heightened by the abandoned boat. The careful tinting makes the single elements of the landscape melt into monotone areas, clearly distinguished by sharp contours.

Text from the Städel Museum website

August Alfred Noack (Italian, 1833-1895)
Riviera di Levante: The Coast near Sestri Levante
c. 1870
Albumen print mounted on cardboard
21.6 x 27.8cm
Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main

Alfred Noack completed artistic training in Dresden before emigrating to Italy in the late 1850s. After four years in Rome, he opened a photo studio in Genoa which served him as a base for explorations of the Ligurian Riviera. Here he captured the Sestri Levante section of the coast, a popular holiday destination, in a photo composed in painting-like manner. The splendid agave blossom in the foreground leads the gaze from lower left to upper right, close up to far away. By reducing the depth of field after the manner of traditional landscape painting, Noack has achieved a suggestive atmospheric image. This effect is further enhanced by the path alluded to at the lower left, which prompts the viewers to stroll through the Mediterranean landscape themselves – at least in their imaginations.

Text from the Städel Museum website

Gioacchino Altobelli (Italian, 1814-1878?)
Rome: Fishermen on the Tiber near the Castel Sant’Angelo
c. 1860
Albumen print mounted on cardboard
27.7 x 38.0cm
Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main
Acquired in the 19th century

Gioacchino Altobelli had previously been active as a history and portrait painter. Here he staged Christian Rome in a photographic composition distinguished by the utmost harmony. The Ponte Sant’Angelo with its Baroque sculptures by Gian Lorenzo Bernini divides the pictorial field about halfway between top and bottom, leaving plenty of space for the reflections of St Peter’s Basilica and the Castel Sant’Angelo in the smooth surface of the Tiber. The photographer was judicious in his choice of staffage in the foreground. The pipe smoker’s fishing rod and the long stick leaning against the shoulder of the man on the bank point the viewer’s gaze to the main monuments, which appear all the more imposing as a result. At the same time, with the fishing motif Altobelli was alluding to symbolic imagery widespread in the Christian pictorial tradition. He was one of the city’s most successful photographers.

Text from the Städel Museum website

Edizioni Brogi (Italian, active 1860s-1920s publisher)
Giacomo Brogi (Italian, 1822-1881)
Carlo Brogi (Italian, 1850-1925) son of Giacomo Brogi
Naples: Macaroni Maker
c. 1880-1890
Albumen print mounted on cardboard
19.9 x 25.2cm
Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main
Acquired in the 19th century

Naples held great appeal for tourists not only because of its charming coastal scenery and awe-inspiring Mount Vesuvius, but also thanks to its customs and traditions. Particularly from the 1880s onwards, Italian-based photographers increasingly marketed studies of human beings that shaped and continually fuelled the cliché of the poor but carefree population of Southern Italy. The Edizioni Brogi company staged its native performers against the backdrop of an osteria. In the foreground, a scruffy-looking man and two barefoot boys stand side by side, grinning cheerfully into the camera while eating macaroni with their hands as if it was the most natural thing in the world. To lend the artificial arrangement a connection to reality, Brogi claims in the printed text above that the photograph had been made “from life”.

Text from the Städel Museum website

Fratelli Alinari (founded 1852)
Leopoldo Alinari (Italian, 1832-1865)
Romualdo Alinari (Italian, 1830-1891)
Giuseppe Alinari (Italian, 1836-1890)
Florence: Loggia dei Lanzi
c. 1870
Albumen print mounted on cardboard
41.2 x 32.5cm
Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main
Acquired in the 19th century

Along with Venice, Rome, and Naples, Florence also made a name for itself as an important centre for photography in Italy. It was there that Leopoldo Alinari, who had trained as an engraver, set up his own business in 1852. Two years later his brothers Romualdo and Giuseppe founded a photo studio. In addition to portraits, the Alinari offered views of the city’s famous monuments which they sold primarily to tourists. In 1859, they came to international fame with reproductions of drawings by Raphael in photographs of “high artistic value”, as the Photographisches Journal reported. From that time forward, photographic reproductions of artworks, for example from the Uffizi, were a permanent feature of the family company’s product range. Still in existence today, the Alinari Archive is a unique document of Italian art and architecture.

Text from the Städel Museum website

Giorgio Sommer

Giorgio Sommer (Italian born Germany, 1834-1914)
Florence: Fountain of Neptune
c. 1860-1870
Albumen print mounted on cardboard
18.1 x 24.5cm
Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main

Giorgio Sommer (Italian born Germany, 1834-1914)
Rome: The Market on Piazza Navona
c. 1862
Albumen print mounted on cardboard
27.4 x 37.4cm
Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main
Acquired in 2011 with support from the Kulturstiftung der Länder and the Hessischer Kulturstiftung, property of the Städelscher Museums-Verein e.V.

Giorgio Sommer (Italian born Germany, 1834-1914)
Amalfi: Valle dei Mulini
c. 1860-1870
Albumen print mounted on cardboard
17.6 x 23.5cm
Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main
Acquired in the 19th century

Giorgio Sommer (Italian born Germany, 1834-1914)
Amalfi: View from the Coast
c. 1860-1870
Albumen print mounted on cardboard
18.4 x 24.3cm
Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main
Acquired in the 19th century

The area on the Gulf of Salerno figured prominently in Giorgio Sommer’s product range. By photographing striking sites from different perspectives, he amassed a large repertoire of multifarious views. Here we see the harbour of the once-powerful maritime republic Amalfi from a slightly elevated vantage point. On the beach, nets have been spread out between the boats for patching. The long masts of the sailing vessels point our gaze to the characteristic steep cliffs. According to the Baedeker travel guide of 1867, the region offers “a charming new landscape scene at almost every turn”. The intricately interleaved and overlapping houses have carved out a place for themselves at the foot of the rugged slopes.

Text from the Städel Museum website

Giorgio Sommer (Italian born Germany, 1834-1914) (attributed)
Amalfi: Seaside Promenade
c. 1860-1870
Albumen print mounted on cardboard
17.8 x 24.1cm
Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main
Acquired in the 19th century

Wall text from the exhibition

Giorgio Sommer (Italian born Germany, 1834-1914)
Milan: Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II
c. 1868-1873
Albumen print mounted on cardboard
24.0 x 18.2cm
Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main
Acquired in the 19th century

The shopping mall erected in Milan between 1865 and 1867 inspired praise from the author of Baedeker’s Handbook for Travellers (1870): “Among Europe’s glass arcades, this is the most beautiful and magnificent by far.” Giorgio Sommer captured the prestigious edifice in a single shot. On the one hand the angle of view emphasises the longitudinal axis connecting the Piazza della Scala and the Piazza del Duomo. On the other hand, the choice of a vantage point to the left of the centre enables the onlooker to appreciate the richly ornamented arcades. Sommer moreover made use of the light entering from above to bring out the delicate structure of the architecture.

Wall text

Giorgio Sommer (Italian born Germany, 1834-1914)
Naples: The Eruption of Mount Vesuvius on 26 April 1872, 3.00 pm, 1872
1872
Albumen print mounted on cardboard
18.1 x 24.1cm
Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main, property of the Städelscher Museums-Verein e.V.

When Mount Vesuvius began emitting masses of lava in April 1872, Giorgio Sommer photographed the rare natural spectacle at half-hour intervals from a boat lying at anchor a safe distance away in the Gulf of Naples. In the end he had created a series of shots documenting the volcanic emission. A display of the omnipotence of natural forces, the tower of ash several kilometres high sends shivers down the viewer’s spine. The photographs met with keen interest not only from tourists. In the Illustrierte Zeitung (Leipzig) they were also reproduced as woodcuts that can be regarded as forerunners of photojournalism. Unlike the relatively matter-of-fact photos that served as their basis, the printed reproductions turn the scene into an emotionally charged landscape veduta. The gulf and the city of Naples fill the foreground; the fire-spewing mountain looms up behind them like a mighty omen.

Text from the Städel Museum website

Giorgio Sommer (Italian born Germany, 1834-1914) (attributed)
Naples: View of Capri from Massa Lubrense
c. 1860-1865
Albumen print mounted on cardboard
18.0 x 23.8cm
Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main
Acquired in the 19th century

On his wanderings in Southern Italy, Giorgio Sommer concentrated more than most of his photographer colleagues on the beauty of the landscape. He had the help of natural circumstances to arrive at this especially striking shot of Capri, an island in the Gulf of Naples that is still as popular with tourists as ever. The olive trees at the left and right frame it in such a way as to create a picture within a picture. The use of treetops for this purpose is a classical element of landscape painting. The two barefoot boys at the left not only enliven the composition but also serve as scale figures and underscore the vastness of natural setting. At the same time, they point to another area of Sommer’s repertoire: genre scenes from what was imagined to be typical everyday life in Southern Italy.

Text from the Städel Museum website

Giorgio Sommer (Italian born Germany, 1834-1914) (attributed)
Naples: Largo del Municipio
c. 1860-1870
Albumen print mounted on cardboard
18.1 x 23.9cm
Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main
Acquired in the 19th century

Giorgio Sommer (Italian born Germany, 1834-1914)
Pompeii: Panoramic View
c. 1860-1870
Albumen print mounted on cardboard
18.2 x 24.1cm
Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main
Acquired in the 19th century

Giorgio Sommer (Italian born Germany, 1834-1914)
Monreale: Panoramic View
Before 1886
Albumen print mounted on cardboard
20.2 x 25.6cm
Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main
Acquired in the 19th century

Städel Museum
Schaumainkai 63
60596 Frankfurt

Opening hours:
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Thursday 10.00am – 9.00pm
Monday closed

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Exhibition: ‘Tina Modotti’ at Fundación MAPFRE Photography Center (Barcelona)

Exhibition dates: 8th June – 3rd September 2023

Curator: Isabel Tejeda

Johan Hagemeyer (Dutch, 1884-1962)
Tina Modotti in the role of María de la Guarda in the film The Tiger’s Coat, Hollywood
1920
Gelatin silver print
© Johan Hagemeyer
Courtesy: Galerie Bilderwelt, Reinhard Schultz

Tina Modotti’s first contact with the performing arts came upon her arrival in San Francisco in 1913, at just 16 years old.

After performing theatre works, in 1920 she will participate in three films: The Tiger’s Coat (1920) by Roy Clements, in which she interpreted the role of the Mexican Jean Ogilvie; Riding with Death (1921) by Jacques Jaccard, in the personage of Rosa Carilla; and I Can Explain (1922) by George D. Baker, with Carmencita Gárdez.

The I of the world

Strong fierce compassionate women! Intelligent, class-conscious human beings who embrace social and political change, with photography being the agent for that change. I would embrace Tina Modotti as this type of artist – her photography a “reflection of her way of seeing life, social sensitivity and revolutionary fervour.”

She was a surrealist/feminist artist who represented the lives and “conditions of workers, women and their role within the community” through both the forms and symbols of working class emancipation and through “honest photography” – eloquent photographs of everyday Mexican life that have a biting directness linked to a surreal reality. Surrealism does not always involve the strange and absurd.

Much as Eugène Atget’s photography “which focussed on seemingly ordinary sights on the streets of Paris – a door knocker, a mannequin, a window rail – is seen as a forerunner of Surrealist and modern approaches to photography…”1 so both Atget and Modotti’s rejection of artistic self-consciousness and “artistic effects” in favour of in Atget’s case, “simple documents”, and in Modotti’s case, “honest photography”, lead to photographs that examine the fleeting nature of material objects and reality itself.

Modotti inserts her/self into these honest photographs through an embodiment of spirit. She brings to her photography how she feels about the world, what she feels passionately about in that world, what she cares deeply about… and in the process of “capturing time, light and memory shapes new states of beings and opens possibilities where by the improbable and the impossible are envisioned as an embodiment of the photographers past, present and future imaginings.”

Through a melding of the artist’s political, social, and aesthetic ideals and through her sur/reality, she becomes the I of the world.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

1/ “Surrealism did not always involve the strange and absurd. For example, the photography of Eugène Atget (1857-1927), which focussed on seemingly ordinary sights on the streets of Paris – a door knocker, a mannequin, a window rail – is seen as a forerunner of Surrealist and modern approaches to photography… Only a year before his death, in 1926, Atget was approached by Man Ray for approval to use his photograph, L’Eclipse – Avril 1912 for the front cover of the publication La Révolution Surréaliste. Despite protestations that, “these are simply documents I make,” Atget’s rejection of artistic self-consciousness combined with his pictures of an old, often hauntingly deserted Paris, appealed to Surrealists.”

Anonymous. “Surrealist photography,” on the V&A website [Online] Cited 07/08/2020

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

“In reality, what I try to produce is not art, but honest photography, without tricks or manipulations, while most photographers still look for “artistic effects” or the imitation of other means of graphic expression, which results a hybrid product and one that fails to impart to the work that they produce the most valuable trait that it should have: PHOTOGRAPHIC QUALITY.”

Tina Modotti quoted in “On Photography,” Mexican Folkways, Vol. 5, No. 4, 1929, reprinted in Robert Miller, Tina Modotti, and Spencer Throckmorton, Tina Modotti : Photographs (New York: Robert Miller Gallery, 1997)

Pure your gentle name, pure your fragile life,
bees, shadows, fire, snow, silence and foam,
combined with steel and wire and
pollen to make up your firm
and delicate being.

Part of the epitaph for Tina Modotti on her tomb by Chilean poet Pablo Neruda

The life of Tina Modotti (Udine, Italy, 1896 – Mexico City, 1942) was marked by some of the most important historical events of the 1920s and 1930s. Born in northern Italy, she soon emigrated to the United States, where she met Edward Weston in 1923, who will significantly influence her career. In that same year they moved together to Mexico where she developed photographic work for almost a decade that started from modernist aesthetics to immediately give way to a very personal look, a reflection of her way of seeing life. Her social sensitivity developed in parallel to her political militancy and her activism within the Communist Party, within which she will treat David Alfaro Siqueiros, Diego Rivera or Frida Kahlo. With her desire to awaken consciences, Modotti made images that denounce injustices and honour the dispossessed. Some of them, with a strong propaganda sense, were made for periodicals and magazines.

After intense research work due to the limited production of the photographer, this exhibition will bring together around 200 photographs, mostly vintage copies, and relevant documentary material. The show will also include works by photographers around her, such as Edward Weston, and one of the films that Modotti starred in in Hollywood.

Text from the Fundación MAPFRE website

The Tiger’s Coat movie poster
1920
From The Moving Picture World 1920

The Tiger’s Coat is a 1920 American silent drama film directed by Roy Clements and starring Lawson Butt, Tina Modotti and Myrtle Stedman.

Tina Modotti (Udine, 1896 – Mexico City, 1942) lived in the eye of the storm throughout her life. Her interesting life and artistic career were framed by some of the most important historical events of the 1920s and 1930s and by her constant double commitment: artist-photographer and revolutionary-anti-fascist militant.

Born into a working-class family in Udine, in northern Italy, she emigrated and grew up in the United States, where she became a film actress in Hollywood in the 1920s and met Edward Weston, who introduced her to photography and with whom she moved to Mexico in 1923.

Almost all his photographic work was produced between that date and 1930. During these Mexican years, and following her apprenticeship with Weston, Modotti evolved from an interest in abstract forms to a gaze centred on the human being and on denouncing inequality and injustice. The precarious conditions of workers, urban poverty, and the role of women in the community became, among other similar issues, the main themes of a photography conceived as political propaganda.

This exhibition, Tina Modotti’s most extensive to date, is the result of extensive research, which has made it possible to bring together many vintage prints by Modotti. In addition to the nearly 250 photographs on display, grouped chronologically into four sections, the exhibition includes documentary material, one of the films that Modotti starred in in Hollywood and some works by Edward Weston.

Text from the Fundación MAPFRE website

Tina Modotti

Tina Modotti’s life was marked by some of the most important historical events of the 1920s and 1930s. The nomadic life she led and the turbulent political militancy caused Modotti to suddenly leave many of the countries where she lived, which, as the curator of the exhibition, Isabel Tejeda points out, “decontextualizes and disarranges her production from the start, so that it is impossible to accurately date many of her images”, although it can be stated that almost all of his photographic work was produced between 1923 and 1930.

During these Mexican years, and after his apprenticeship with Weston, the artist evolved from the perfection of formalism to a different and personal perspective conditioned by his way of seeing life, as an emigrant, woman and political activist in which his attraction to the human being and social injustices stands out.

He then portrayed the precarious conditions of workers, inequalities and misery in urban areas. It also focused on women and their role within the community, and on the forms and symbols of the emancipation of the working class. In his desire to raise awareness, Modotti made images that denounce injustices and honour the dispossessed, some of which were for propaganda purposes and intended to be printed in magazines and other publications.

The exhibition presented by Fundación MAPFRE is made up of approximately 240 photographs, mostly period copies, which are grouped into four sections: Early years: from Udine to Los Angeles, Mexico on the other side of the camera, Photography and political commitment and The move to political action: Spain at war.

In addition to emphasising her relationship with Spain, the exhibition reconstructs the figure of Modotti, both as an artist / photographer and as a revolutionary / anti-fascist militant. In addition, there is an extensive amount of documentary material and one of the films that Modotti starred in in Hollywood. The tour is completed with works by photographers from his immediate surroundings, such as Edward Weston.

Text from the Fundación MAPFRE website

Tina Modotti (Italian, 1896-1942)
Circus tent
Mexico, 1924
Platinotype
Collection Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona
Acquisition

Tina Modotti (Italian, 1896-1942)
Roses
Mexico, 1924
Paladiotype, period or vintage impression
Fundación Televisa Collection and Archive, Mexico City

Roses, Mexico, is an extreme close-up of four roses. Cropped to fill the frame from edge to edge, this is not a traditional still-life photograph of roses arranged in a vase. Here, the roses lay prone and slightly wilted, just beyond their prime, thus reflecting the passage of time and the ephemerality of delicate blooms. Much like a traditional vanitas still life that asked the viewer to contemplate mortality by reflecting on the fleeting nature of material objects, Roses brings this subject to modern photography. As photography historian Carol Armstrong notes, Roses “calls on the line of figural abstraction identified, not with [Alfred] Stieglitz, [Paul] Strand and the ‘straight’ photograph, but with Georgia O’Keeffe and her blown-up genital flowers, which like [Edward] Weston’s single-object photographs reduced the flora still-life that had been the traditional purview of the female painter to one (or two or four) item(s), expanded to fill the entire field of the image.”

The theme of the still-life preoccupied Modotti throughout much of her brief photography career. A relative newcomer to photography, she made use of the still-life photograph as a means to work through various formal issues including composition, framing, light, pattern, and tone. At this time, she was working with a large-format camera, which was unwieldy, not easy to transport, and forced the photographer to carefully compose the image, rather than creating images on the move with a handheld camera. The still-life, which was easy to set up and did not alter, was the perfect vehicle for mastering the myriad technical complexities of a photograph.

Karen Barber. “Tina Modotti Artist Overview and Analysis,” on The Art Story website 12 Nov 2018 updated 2023 [Online] Cited 06/08/2023

Edward Weston (1886-1958)
Portrait of Tina Modotti
1924
Gelatin silver print
Fundación Televisa Collection and Archive, Mexico City

Tina Modotti (Italian, 1896-1942)
Elisa
1924
Palladium print
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Donation of Edward Weston

Tina Modotti (Italian, 1896-1942)
Telegraph cables
c. 1924-1925
Gelatin silver print
Fundación Televisa Collection and Archive, Mexico City

Tina Modotti (Italian, 1896-1942)
Post with Cables
Mexico City, c. 1925
Gelatin silver print
Fundación Televisa Collection and Archive, Mexico City

In this 1925 photograph of isolated telephone wires, Modotti shifts the perspective, removing any reference to the ground that holds the telephone poles in place. Instead, the carefully composed image focuses on the angles and patterns produced by the wires and clouds, to create a work that mingles modernism and social concerns. During this period Mexico was undergoing increased modernization and industrialization, which Modotti symbolizes in her photograph of telephone wires. Modotti thus presents an optimistic view of Mexico’s modernization and the promise of instant communication brought about by the installation of telephone systems that seemed to open up Mexico to the rest of the world.

Lauded by the Mexican avant-garde group, Estridentistas, who aligned their work with the Mexican Revolution and sought to modernize Mexico, Modotti’s photograph was included in their journal Horizonte because it represented dynamism, technology, and progress. The photograph’s framing and its use of oblique angles and unusual perspective, brought it into alignment with other modernist painters and photographers, including Paul Strand, Charles Sheeler, and Charles Demuth, but also with European avant-garde photographers like László Moholy-Nagy, Man Ray, and Albert Renger-Patzsch. Although the tendency to focus on the subject / object was characteristic of her former mentor Edward Weston’s work, Diego Rivera praised Modotti’s work as “more abstract, more ethereal, and even more intellectual” than Weston’s.

Karen Barber. “Tina Modotti Artist Overview and Analysis,” on The Art Story website 12 Nov 2018 updated 2023 [Online] Cited 06/08/2023

Tina Modotti (Italian, 1896-1942)
Zapotec peasant woman with a jug on her shoulder
1926
Platinotype
Fundación Televisa Collection and Archive, Mexico City

Tina Modotti (Italian, 1896-1942)
Untitled (Indians carrying loads of corn husks for the making of “tamales”)
1926-1929
Gelatin silver print
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco
Art Supporting Foundation donation, John “Launny” Steffens, Sandra Lloyd, Shawn and Brook Byers, Mr. and Mrs. George F. Jewett, Jr., and anonymous donors

Tina Modotti (Italian, 1896-1942)
Untitled
c. 1926-1929
Gelatin silver print
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco
Art Supporting Foundation donation, John “Launny” Steffens, Sandra Lloyd, Shawn and Brook Byers, Mr. and Mrs. George F. Jewett, Jr., and anonymous donors

Tina Modotti (Italian, 1896-1942)
Tank Nr. 1
1927
Gelatin silver print

Tina Modotti (Italian, 1896-1942)
Workers’ Parade
1926
Gelatin silver print
Fundación Televisa Collection and Archive, Mexico City

Workers Parade

A closely cropped image of a sea of sombreros, Workers Parade, much like her earlier photograph Roses, focuses in on the subject by eliminating all extraneous information. The politically charged subject matter, along with the unusual camera angle, attention to light and dark, and the texture and pattern produced by photographing the scene from above recalls the slightly later work of Alexander Rodchenko, and in particular, his Gathering for a Demonstration (1928). The ubiquitous sombrero would have been immediately recognizable to the Mexican viewer for its connection to the campesinos and trabajadores, the Mexican workers, who were gathered for the annual May Day parade in Mexico City. May Day, traditionally celebrated on the first of May, commemorates International Workers’ Day, often with large parades and gatherings as a demonstration of solidarity among workers. This was a calendar event that Modotti had been familiar with since childhood due to her father’s involvement in these very same parades.

Among Modotti’s earliest politically motivated photographs, Workers Parade brings together her formal concerns with her interest in using art to express her political beliefs and her desire to make her photography socially relevant. On a symbolic level, as noted by Sarah Lowe, Workers Parade conveys the power of unity by “suggesting that the source of power to make political changes lies with the peasants.” This photograph signaled a turning point in Modotti’s work toward a new modern form of photography that addressed contemporary issues and events in order to instigate and effect change.

Karen Barber. “Tina Modotti Artist Overview and Analysis,” on The Art Story website 12 Nov 2018 updated 2023 [Online] Cited 06/08/2023

Tina Modotti (Italian, 1896-1942)
Men reading “El Machete”
c. 1927
Gelatin silver print
Fundación Televisa Collection and Archive, Mexico City

In this photograph of a peasant reading El Machete, the newspaper of the Mexican Communist Party, Modotti brings her careful attention surrounding composition, cropping, light and dark, and texture, to a subject with great social and political significance. Modotti had joined the Communist Party of Mexico this same year after learning that Italy had fallen to fascism. She brought her revolutionary zeal to her photographs of the late 1920s, many of which she published in Communist newspaper El Machete, a newspaper for workers and peasants. Whilst many photographers of this period, including Edward Weston and Paul Strand, were focused on a romanticized view of a timeless Mexico, Modotti turned to her camera to its people and to the real effects of its ongoing changes. She often collaborated with workers to produce photographs that were intended to raise class-consciousness and depict their daily lives.

At a moment when new governmental education reforms sought to educate the lower and working classes in Mexico, a seemingly straightforward image of a man reading a newspaper also had subversive undertones, particularly to the middle class. As Sarah Lowe notes: “The young obrero reading El Machete is a reminder that the Revolution’s promise of universal literacy would only be fulfilled by the activism of the people.” Although she viewed photography through the lens of modernism, she also believed that photography was a form of mass communication and an important means of enhancing visual literacy.

Karen Barber. “Tina Modotti Artist Overview and Analysis,” on The Art Story website 12 Nov 2018 updated 2023 [Online] Cited 06/08/2023

Tina Modotti (Italian, 1896-1942)
Bandolier, Corn, Sickle
1927
Gelatin silver print
Fundación Televisa Collection and Archive, Mexico City

A carefully composed photograph of a bandolier, an ear of corn, and a sickle, married Modotti’s interest in the photographic still life with objects symbolic of Mexico and the revolution – the sickle, a popular Communist symbol, corn, a symbol of Mexico and its rural farmers, and the bandolier (a pocketed belt for holding ammunition), the symbol of the Mexican Revolution. Politically active after 1925, Modotti joined the Communist Party of Mexico (CPM) in 1927. Due to her Communist-inflected worldview, her photographs from the late 1920s took a decided turn toward Communist symbolism, in lieu of overt propaganda.

As Sarah Lowe has stated, “her eloquent arrangements – founded on a stringent formal control – relocates the commonplace into the realm of the symbolic. They become potent revolutionary icons, offering a metaphorical union of artista [artist], campesino [farm laborer], and soldado [soldier], thus functioning as both formal still life and propaganda.” Lowe further suggests that in so doing, Modotti created a new kind of political picture. In this respect, Modotti’s relationship with Frida Kahlo becomes more than a shared friendship, and also incorporates shared artistic practice. Kahlo also infused still-lives with political objects and slogans, and as such transforms a seemingly domestic process of making art into a highly charged political statement.

Karen Barber. “Tina Modotti Artist Overview and Analysis,” on The Art Story website 12 Nov 2018 updated 2023 [Online] Cited 06/08/2023

Tina Modotti (Italian, 1896-1942)
Canana, sickle and guitar
1927
Gelatin silver print
Fundación Televisa Collection and Archive, Mexico City

Tina Modotti (Italian, 1896-1942)
Hat, hammer and sickle
México 1927
Gelatin silver print
Fundación Televisa Collection and Archive, Mexico City

Tina Modotti (Italian, 1896-1942)
Committee of the Organisation of the Pioneers of the Communist Party of Mexico
Mexico City, 1928
Gelatin silver print

Tina Modotti (Italian, 1896-1942)
Woman with flag
México City, c. 1928
Gelatin silver print
Fundación Televisa Collection and Archive, Mexico City

The life of Tina Modotti (Udine, August 16th 1896 – Mexico City, January 5th 1942) was influenced by some of the most important historical events of the 1920s and 30s. A citizen of the world – as many have considered her – Modotti’s work and her life have been surrounded by uncertainties that have only been resolved after in depth study, although some gaps still remain.

Modotti lived in several countries, among them Spain, which coupled with her agitated political militancy led to the dispersion of her work. Consequently, as pointed out by the show’s curator Isabel Tejeda, this “decontextualizes and disorients her production, making it impossible to date many of her images with precision.” Nevertheless, one could argue that most of her photographic work was produced between 1923 and 1930 while she was in Mexico. During those years, after her apprenticeship with Edward Weston, Modotti evolved from the perfection of abstract forms to a different and more personal gaze that was conditioned by her outlook on life and her notable attraction to human beings and social injustice. She went on to portray the precarious conditions of workers, inequalities, and misery in urban areas. Likewise, she focused on women and their role within the community as well as the forms and symbols of working class emancipation. In her eagerness to promote awareness, Modotti produced images denouncing injustice, while honouring the dispossessed; some had propagandistic purposes and were intended for publications and magazines.

The exhibition being presented at Fundación MAPFRE is the most comprehensive show dedicated to Tina Modotti to date. Thanks to the work of Isabel Tejeda, we are able to contemplate a large number of the artist’s originals that have been assembled through the curator’s research. Nearly 200 photographs (predominantly vintage prints) have been grouped chronologically into four sections. Furthermore, a wide range of documentary materials will be on display along with the projection of one of the Hollywood films Modotti featured in. The exhibition is completed with works by photographers that were closely related to her, such as Edward Weston. This exhibition reconstructs Modotti’s figure without fissures for the first time, both in terms of her facets as an artist / photographer and as a revolutionary / antifascist militant.

KEYS

Tina Modotti and film

Tina Modotti’s first contact with the performing arts took place in San Francisco, in 1913, when she was only 16 years old. In 1920, after participating in a few plays, she made her way into the world of film. At the time, actresses were sought out to embody heroines, adventurers, or femme fatales. With her dark hair and complexion, Tina seemed to fit the prototype of an exotic woman; a cliché that she would try to distance herself from shortly after. Modotti was cast in three films: Tiger’s Coat (1920) by Roy Clemens, in the role of Jean Ogilvie; Riding with Death (1921) by Jacques Jaccard, as Rosa Carilla; and I Can Explain (1922) by George D. Baker, as Carmencita Gárdez.

Ideal of beauty, social ideal, political ideal

After her instruction with Edward Weston (it should be noted that she did not receive a formal education in photography) Tina Modotti’s work developed within the group that dominated artistic life in Mexico in the 1920s. Between 1926 and 1929 Modotti dissected popular Mexican life; not only were individuals worthy of her attention, but also water tanks, houses, the corn peasants ate and the hats they wore, sickles symbolising communism, machetes, or the woman (appearing like a sculpture) who carried a flag and personified the commitment to the revolutionary struggle. All of her images possess great clarity and substance. They leave no room for rhetoric, while allowing for the artist’s political, social, and aesthetic ideals to fuse into one.

Mexican social landscape

Some authors have pointed to Tina Modotti’s proletariat origins as the basis for her way of confronting social motifs and human figures. If some have defined this part of her work as “reportage photography”, one must point out that the artist’s curiosity and will to capture a person’s life in one image separates her from simple illustrative intent. One could argue that her portrayals of indigenous Mexican people, women, babies, and children are ethnographic photographs, albeit produced in a spontaneous way without an anthropological purpose. Therefore, despite being her point of departure, Modotti distances herself from the travellers who ventured into Mexican lands with a manner of curiosity that lay between science and romanticism.

International Red Aid

The Spanish section of the MOPR (International Red Aid) was established clandestinely in 1923 with the objective of disseminating political propaganda amid the climate of Primo de Rivera’s (1923-1930) dictatorship and had as another of its objectives to defend the Spanish Republic and its anti-fascist ideals. The MOPR spread throughout the entire world after its founding in the Soviet Union in 1922. Politically, the organisation had to follow the directives of the Communist Party, but in its facet dedicated to solidarity it played a key role in humanitarian aid. In Spain, after the October Revolution in Asturias in 1934, it became the main organisation dedicated to helping and aiding political detainees and their families. However, during the Spanish Civil War, the MOPR would constitute the true basis for the medical system of the Republican military.

The exhibition

Tina Modotti’s life was marked by some of the most important historical events decades of the 1920s and 1930s. Citizen of the world, as many have considered her, both her life like her work are surrounded by gaps that only after an in-depth study have could be completed, although not entirely.

The nomadic life that she led and the agitated political militancy caused Modotti to leave with sudden departure from many of the countries where she lived, which, as the curator of the exhibition points out, Isabel Tejeda, “decontextualizes and messes up her production from the start, so it is impossible to accurately date many of her images”, although it can be said that almost all her photographic work was produced between 1923 and 1930. During these Mexican years, and after her apprenticeship with Weston, the artist evolved from the perfection of the abstract forms to a different and personal perspective conditioned by her way of
seeing life, in which her attraction to human beings and social injustices stand out. She then portrayed the precarious conditions of workers, inequalities and misery in urban areas. She also focused on women and their role within the community, and on forms and symbols of the emancipation of the working class. In her eagerness to raise awareness, Modotti goes on to make images that denounce injustices and honour the dispossessed, some of which have a propaganda purpose and are intended to be printed in magazines and other publications.

The exhibition that Fundación MAPFRE is presenting is the most extensive that has been made of Tina Modotti until today. Thanks to the work of Isabel Tejeda, today we can see in our exhibition halls a great number of period prints (vintage copies) by the author, gathered after a deep work of research. There are about two hundred and forty photographs that are grouped together chronologically in four sections. In addition, an extensive amount of documentary material is shown and one of the films Modotti starred in in Hollywood. The selection is completed with works by photographers from her immediate environment, such as Edward Weston.

Text from Fundación MAPFRE

Tina Modotti (Italian, 1896-1942)
Man with log
1928
Gelatin silver print
Fundación Televisa Collection and Archive, Mexico City

Tina Modotti (Italian, 1896-1942)
Woman’s hands washing clothes
1928
Gelatin silver print. Later print, printed by Manuel Álvarez Bravo
Fundación Televisa Collection and Archive, Mexico City

Tina Modotti (Italian, 1896-1942)
Baby Nursing
1926-1927
Gelatin silver print
Fundación Televisa Collection and Archive, Mexico City

Tina Modotti (Italian, 1896-1942)
Mujer con Jicara en la cabeza (Woman with Jicara on her head)
Juchitán, Oaxaca, 1929
Gelatin silver print
Fundación Televisa Collection and Archive, Mexico City

In this iconic black and white photograph, a woman dominates the picture frame. Standing with arm raised holding a large gourd on her head, she gazes off to the right, somewhere out of the picture frame. She wears a circular pendant and earrings, and a traditional Tehuana dress with geometric patterns, the costume that has been so well made visible by the work of Modotti’s friend, Frida Kahlo. The careful framing, cropping, and pose emphasize the image’s angular forms. Shot from below to emphasize the woman’s noble and heroic stature, the photograph was taken during a trip to Tehuantepec in Southern Mexico. Unlike Modotti’s earlier photographs, the photographs taken in Tehuantepec were largely unposed, typically street photographs that captured the daily lives of the women that lived there.

Like other artists and writers in Mexico, Modotti was influenced by Mexicanidad, which embraced native cultures and indigenous subjects as part of the larger renewal in Mexican art and culture in the 1920s. This interest is evident in Woman from Tehuantepec. One of Modotti’s most iconic images, it became a potent symbol of Mexicanidad and an exercise in photographic modernism. As Sarah Lowe has noted, “the image function[s] like still life, precisely because Modotti chose not just any woman, but a well-known Mexican type – the Tehuana – to photograph. As pictured by Modotti, these women of Tehuantepec were an ideal subject, and provided her with an already-given meaning since Tehuantepec is a matriarchal society, there women have a significant voice in the running of the local economy and politics. Modotti uses the Tehuana to make a powerful political point: that women were capable of independent political action.”

Karen Barber. “Tina Modotti Artist Overview and Analysis,” on The Art Story website 12 Nov 2018 updated 2023 [Online] Cited 06/08/2023

Tina Modotti (Italian, 1896-1942)
Tehuantepec woman with jicalpextle
1929
Gelatin silver print
Fundación Televisa Collection and Archive, Mexico City

Tina Modotti (Udine, 1896 – Mexico City, 1942) took part in some of the most relevant historical events of the first half of the 20th century, such as the economic migration of Europeans to America at the turn of the century, the birth of silent film in the West Coast of the United States, post-revolutionary agrarianism in Mexico, political muralism, the vindication of indigenous Mexican culture, the incorporation of women into the public sphere, the battle between Stalinists and Trotskyists after the revolution of 1917, International Red Aid, and the Spanish Civil War. To some degree, despite the abundance of biographies written about her, certain biographical gaps still exist that are slowly being filled. She was one of the pioneers of women’s photography during the 1920s and although nearly 400 images can be attributed to Modotti today, the number continues to rise with each new discovery; this exhibition being one example. Likewise, Tina Modotti exerted a great influence on later Mexican photography, from Manuel Álvarez Bravo to Graciela Iturbide.

Modotti took up photography through Edward Weston, although she exceeded the North American artist’s formalist teachings through the immediate construction of her own autonomous compositions that possess a unique and personal vision.

Modotti arrived in Mexico after spending her teenage years in San Francisco and Los Angeles and was part of the “Mexican Renaissance”; a time of post-revolutionary cultural splendour. Integrated within the circle of Mexican artists and muralists, her work incorporated a type of embodied photography into Weston’s formalism. Her gaze was influenced by her modest upbringing, being an economic immigrant and a woman, and by her sensibility toward social injustice. A member of the Mexican Communist Party since 1927, she denounced the situation of dispossessed people with her camera, focusing on the construction of a new imaginary for Mexican women.

After being expelled from Mexico in 1930 for being a communist, her photographic militancy soon became full-fledged activism. Apparently, Modotti abandoned photography in the 1930s to dedicate herself to political militancy. Mid-way through the decade, she was sent to Spain by the Communist Party where she would have a key role throughout the Civil War. Taking on the coordination of International Red Aid (MOPR), she organised the escape from Spain of the so-called “children of the war”, coordinated the management of military hospitals – where she also worked as a nurse – and carried out propagandistic and political tasks. At the end of the conflict she crossed the Pyrenees along with thousands of political exiles.

She died in Mexico City in 1942.

Early Years: From Udine to Los Angeles

Tina Modotti was born in 1896 into a modest family from Udine. In 1906 her father migrated to the United States in hopes of reuniting the family later. She arrived to San Francisco on her own in 1913, a city that was home to nearly twenty thousand Italians at the time. She worked in the textile industry, but also took part in the amateur theatre scene. In 1915 she met Roubaix de l’Abrie Richey (Robo) who she moved to Los Angeles with. There she met Edward Weston, modelling for him from 1920 onward. She also wrote and published her first poems and tried her luck in film, taking part in three movies. In The Tiger’s Coat, Modotti played the role of a Mexican Woman. Her physical appearance, dark hair, and Mediterranean skin typecast her into the stereotypical roles U.S. audiences associated with the exotic, romantic, and wicked myth of Latina women. Likewise, as can be observed in her family albums, she played with her ability to shift identities through clothing and costume (she posed dressed up as a ballerina in a pair of pants symbolising the empowerment of modern women and as a character from the Arabian Nights).

Mexico: On the Other Side of the Camera

In 1923 Tina Modotti moved to Mexico City with Edward Weston where they opened a portrait studio. The pair explored and took photographs of the country; this can be observed in Convent of Tepotzotlán and in Zuno’s house, the courtyard (whose exact authorship is unknown, as is the case with other photographs in this exhibition). At the time, the nation was experiencing what became known as the “Mexican Renaissance”. Modotti allowed herself to be influenced by this cultural splendour, soon becoming one of its prominent figures and transforming Mexican photography.

Her work evolved rapidly in Mexico. Modotti incorporated a personal gaze into the formalist perfection she learned from Weston that was influenced by her outlook on life and her attraction to human beings and the denouncement of social injustice (for example, in this section one can compare the photographers’ different approaches when depicting the circus tent or portraying the anthropologist Anita Brenner and the champion of the Náhuatl language Luz Jiménez).

During these early years Modotti worked on several still lives composed mainly of flowers, such as lilies, geraniums, roses, and cacti. Nevertheless, the artist also produced portraits in which she captured the powerful bond between a mother and her daughter (An aztec baby or Luz and baby) that went beyond the mere commodification of female bodies. Some of these images were later used in illustrated magazines of the time as examples of a Mexican identity whose origin was grounded in indigenous culture.

She also documented the work of Mexican muralists, such as Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco, among others. Modotti’s photographs were featured in some of the most important publications of the time, including Idols Behind Altars by Anita Brenner and the monograph by Ernestine Evans on muralism in Mexican Folkways magazine.

In late 1926 Weston returned to the United States. Earlier that year Modotti had acquired a new Graflex camera in San Francisco that was lighter than the Corona she previously used. With renewed energy, she set off to photograph Mexico, which for her was embodied in its people.

Photography and Political Commitment. Mexico Is Its People

After becoming affiliated to the Communist Party in 1927, Modotti’s political commitment became more accentuated. She was part of International Red Aid and also collaborated as a translator and a photographer with the newspaper El Machete, whose audience was mainly peasants. Similarly, she attended and photographed demonstrations and participated in political associations such as Manos Fuera de Nicaragua (Hands Off Nicaragua).

She avoided poses and portrayed individuals in real situations, both in the city and in countryside villages; a line of citizens at Monte de Piedad Nacional to pawn their belongings, peasants at agrarian schools, tortilla, cabbage, and hat sellers, corn porters, washerwomen, mothers carrying their children, children at Colonia de la Bolsa living in poverty, popular festivities, etc. Some of them were published in newspapers, such as El Machete, and subsequently in foreign magazines, such as AIZ, Der Arbeiter-fotograf, New Masses, and Put’ Mopr.

Modotti contemplated the dilemma of representation. How to find a visual language that was accessible to the people without betraying her aesthetic principles? She found a formula in symbolic photography. For example, Woman with flag is not merely an image about communism; instead, it expresses the ability of human beings to become empowered through willpower and political ideals. Modotti also produced still lives whose juxtaposed elements represent basic abstract concepts that speak of the people as an emancipated entity and of a communist vision of the future born from the land itself (Sickle, canana and corn cob and Guitar neck, canana and corn cob). In her photographic manifesto of 1929, coinciding with her solo exhibition at the Biblioteca Nacional, Modotti declared that she did not consider herself an “artist”, but rather a “photographer”; a trade she conceived as any other, in consonance with her proletariat ideas.

Toward Political Action: Spain at War

In 1930 Tina Modotti was expelled from Mexico and returned to Europe after having been falsely accused of taking part in an attack against Mexican president Pascual Ortiz Rubio. She spent a short time in Berlin, trying to continue her photographic pursuit unsuccessfully. However, Modotti would soon move to the Soviet Union where she focused on her activities as a member of International Red Aid (MOPR).

The Communist Party sent Modotti to Spain during the Spanish Republic. When the Civil War broke out, she coordinated MOPR under different aliases, reorganizing the Cuatro Caminos Worker’s Hospital (whose purpose was tending to injured militants), supervising, reporting, and writing articles under the names María, Carmen Ruiz, and Vera Martini for MOPR’s newspaper Ayuda. Semanario de la solidaridad [Help. Weekly of Solidarity], and supervising propaganda (in other words, the dissemination of the organisation’s activities). Politically dependent on the Communist Party, MOPR played a major role in humanitarian aid during the war, becoming the main organisation geared toward helping and aiding political detainees and their families, as well as being an important part of the Republican military health system.

In 1937 Modotti participated in the organisation of the Second International Congress for the Defense of Culture in Madrid, Valencia, and Barcelona. Among the participants were André Malraux, Anna Seghers, Ernest Hemingway, Aleksey Tolstoy, Octavio Paz, Elena Garro, Rafael Alberti, María Teresa León, Robert Capa, and Gerda Taro.

There is no trace of the photographs Modotti produced in Spain, although some authors suspect that three of the 17 images found in Viento del pueblo, poesía en la guerra [Wind of the People, Poetry in War] by Miguel Hernández might be hers. What seems to be clear is that the publication of the book of poems as a photobook was Modotti’s idea.

She returned to Mexico with Vittorio Vidali, her partner at the time, and died prematurely in 1942 due to a heart attack. After Modotti’s passing, her Mexican friends and Spanish republican exiles honoured her in Mexico City. The last photograph she produced, which will be on display for the first time in this exhibition, was of her dog Suzi.

Her work was progressively forgotten until the 1970s when it began to be exhibited and studied.

Text from Fundación MAPFRE

Anonymous photographer
Italian photographer, actress and political activist Tina Modotti (1896-1942) at an exhibition of her work at the National Library in Mexico City in December 1929
1929
Gelatin silver print

Tina Modotti (Italian, 1896-1942)
Portrait of a Pregnant Woman
Berlin, Germany, 1930
Gelatin silver print
Fundación Televisa Collection and Archive, Mexico City

Her extensive political activism and bohemian lifestyle earned her enemies. When on January 10, 1929, Julio Antonio Mella was assassinated, and shortly thereafter an assassination attempt was made on Mexican President Pascual Ortiz Rubio, the press suspected Modotti as the perpetrator. Called “the fierce and bloody Tina Modotti,” she was expelled from the country in 1930.

First, she moved to Weimar Berlin, then, after the rise to power of Hitler, she moved to Moscow, Warsaw, Paris, and Madrid, always finding friends in Communist circles. From 1936 she participated in the Spanish Civil War using the pseudonym Maria. She stayed in Spain until the collapse of the Republican government in 1939 when she returned to Mexico. In 1942 she died in a taxi from heart failure which many described as suspicious. Diego Rivera believed that it was her lover Vittorio Vidali who orchestrated her death because Tina Modotti “knew too much.”

Magda Michalska. “Tina Modotti: Photographer Made Revolutionary,” on the Daily Art website 2 October 2022 [Online] Cited 06/08/2023

Tina Modotti exhibition at Fundación MAPFRE catalogue cover

The Legacy of Tina Modotti

Her work was largely unknown until the 1990s, when a cache of her remarkable photographs was discovered in an Oregon farmhouse. Long overshadowed by her extraordinary life and her relationship with Edward Weston, she was viewed as his muse, rather than as a gifted photographer in her right. Despite a remarkably short career in photography – just seven years – she created a body of iconic images that confirmed her place in history. By fusing rigorous formalism with a desire to effect social change, she reconceived revolutionary photography through the language of modernism. Her work is now a touchstone in the history of photography, reflecting equally the tenets of modernist photography and the experience of post-revolutionary Mexico. Modotti’s photographs continue to inspire many, including many women and activists interested in making a socially and politically relevant art.

In the realms of Straight Photography, Modotti’s work is interesting to consider in comparison to that of Dorothea Lange and Imogen Cunningham, three women known to have had a dialogue in 1925 when Modotti returned to San Francisco for a short while. Like Cunningham and Lange, Modotti excelled in formal technique and as such influenced the next generation of highly skilled photographers. In subject matter and energy however, there is also a strong Surrealist and feminist edge to the work of Modotti extending her field of influence even wider. She is one of many European artists, including Leonora Carrington and Leonor Fini, who found freedom of expression in Mexico City; in this respect Modotti’s oeuvre adds to the history of a place as cultural and artistic capital for a time.

Karen Barber. “Tina Modotti Artist Overview and Analysis,” on The Art Story website 12 Nov 2018 updated 2023 [Online] Cited 06/08/2023

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Exhibition: ‘Conditions of Living: Home and Homelessness in London’s East End’ at Four Corners, London

Exhibition dates: 30th June – 2nd September 2023

Photographers: the exhibition features work by Katalin Arkell, Peter Arkell, Cyril Arapoff, Chris Bethell, A.R. Coster, Firmin, John Galt, David Granick, Bert Hardy, Brian Harris, Hawkins, Nick Hedges, David Hoffman, Tom Learmonth, Steve Lewis, Jack London, Marketa Luskacova, Anthony Luvera, MacGregor, Monty Meth, Douglas Miller, Moyra Peralta, Ray Rising, Reg Sayers, Andrew Scott, Alex Slotzkin, Norah Smyth, Humphrey Spender, Andrew Testa, Paul Trevor, Edith Tudor-Hart, as well as several unknown photographers.

Jack London Collection (American, 1876-1916)
People of the Abyss
1902
© Huntington Library, San Marino, California

1902: a policeman disturbs a rough-sleeping youth in Whitechapel, one of many photographs by the American author Jack London that illustrated his book The People of the Abyss.

Another insightful, socially-minded (ie. actively interested in social welfare or the well-being of society as a whole) exhibition from Four Corners who champion creative expression, education and empowerment and build upon almost 50 years of radical, socially-engaged approaches to photography and film.

“This timely exhibition draws shocking comparisons with today’s housing precarity, high rents and homelessness. From Victorian slums and the first model estates, to the mass postwar council house construction and the subsequent demolition of many tower blocks, it ends with post-Thatcherite gentrification and its impact on affordable housing.” (Press release)

I have included bibliographic information on the artists in the posting where possible.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

PS. For more information on slum photography and urban poverty please see the essay by Sadie Levy Gale. “Exposed,” on the AEON website 21 August 2023 [Online] Cited 31/08/2023

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

Images of housing, homelessness and resistance in London’s East End

Our summer exhibition explores how photographers have represented conditions of housing and homelessness for over a century. From workhouses to slums, damp council flats to Thatcherite gentrification, images reveal the systemic poverty that East Londoners have endured and how the medium of photography has been used to campaign for change. We are delighted to feature new artwork by Anthony Luvera, which addresses economic segregation in Tower Hamlets’ housing developments, a phenomenon known as ‘poor doors’. Created with a forum of local residents, this examines the rise of market-driven ‘affordable’ housing and the state of social housing today.

This exhibition is supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England and the National Lottery Heritage Fund. We particularly thank Getty Images Hulton Archive and Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives for their generous contributions which made this exhibition possible. We are grateful for the kind support of Report Digital.

Text from the Four Corners website

Jack London (American, 1876-1916)
Homeless people in Itchy Park, Spitalfields
1902
From People of the Abyss

NOTE: Photograph not in the exhibition

Jack London (American, 1876-1916)
View in Hoxton
1902
From People of the Abyss

NOTE: Photograph not in the exhibition

Jack London (American, 1876-1916)
Homeless women in Spitalfields Garden
1902
From People of the Abyss

NOTE: Photograph not in the exhibition

Not many people know that the famous American author Jack London was also a skilled documentary photographer and photojournalist. He took thousands of pictures over the years from the slums of London’s East End to the islands of the South Pacific.

In 1902 Jack London visited his namesake city London where he took pictures of its people and their everyday life. In the book “The People of the Abyss”, London describes this first-hand account by living in the East End (including the Whitechapel District) for several months, sometimes staying in workhouses or sleeping on the streets. The conditions he experienced and wrote about were the same as those endured by an estimated 500,000 of the contemporary London poor.

Even before, Jack London had talked about a book on the London slums with George Brett, one of his publishers. Thus, the writer knew what he was ought to expect ‘down there’: “He meant to expose the underside of imperialism, the degradation of the workers…”. The “evolutionary Socialist” wanted to find “the Black Hole of capitalism”.

With this preconceived vision in his mind, he disguised himself as an American sailor who had lost his ship and went into the East End taking pictures and experiencing their life. To be more precise, he wandered about Whitechapel, Hoxton, Spitalfields, Bethnal Green, and Wapping to the East India Docks. Jack London disguised as one of the working-class poor and pretended to be one of them, which made it easier for him to get to know the conditions of their everyday life. …

In his 1903 “The People of the Abyss”, the American gives this description of the poor Londoners: “the air he breathes, and from which he never escapes, is sufficient to weaken him mentally and physically, so that he becomes unable to compete with the fresh virile life from the country hastening on to London Town… It is incontrovertible that the children grow up into rotten adults, without virility or stamina, a weak-kneed, narrow-chested, listless breed, that crumples up and goes down in the brute struggle for life with the invading hordes from the country.”

Anonymous. “London’s East End life through the lens of Jack London, 1902,” on the Rare Historical Photos website Nd [Online] Cited 04/08/2023

Jack London (American, 1876-1916)
Whitechapel on a bank holiday
1902
From People of the Abyss

NOTE: Photograph not in the exhibition

Jack London (American, 1876-1916)
Frying Pan alley, Spitalfields
1902
From People of the Abyss

NOTE: Photograph not in the exhibition

1914: residents of a street in Bow, photographed by the activist and suffragette Norah Smyth. A street in Bow in 1914 where the East London Federation of the Suffragettes (ELFS) took care of children during the first world war. Smyth documented children in Bow through a series of intimate street photographs.

Smyth, a suffragette, socialist and pioneering female photographer was a founding member of the East London Federation of Suffragettes (ELFS) and right-hand woman to Sylvia Pankhurst, who set up the federation in 1914.

Her years of activism included a spell as a prominent member of the Communist Workers’ Party (CWP) during the 1920’s. Her active participation in the international socialist movement came to an end with the dissolution of the CWP. After twelve years in the East End of London, it was time to move on. Smyth decided to join brother Maxwell in Florence, where she took up a post at the British Institute.

Jane McChrystal. “The adventures of Norah Smyth: her life as a suffragette, philanthropist and artist,” on the Roman Road LDN website 22 March 2023 [Online] Cited 04/08/2023

1920: a poverty-stricken family make a meal from a loaf of bread in Shadwell, traditionally an area of slum housing where the population lived in closely packed tenements.

Exhibition reveals East End’s history of poor housing and homelessness

Opening at Four Corners Gallery this month, Conditions of Living: Home and Homelessness in London’s East End takes a visual journey from workhouses to slums, damp tower blocks to homeless shelters, exploring how photographers have represented these conditions for over a century. It sheds light on little-known histories: the tenants’ rent strikes of the 1930s, post-war squatting, and ‘bonfire corner’, a meeting place for homeless people at Spitalfields Market for more than twenty years.

This timely exhibition draws shocking comparisons with today’s housing precarity, high rents and homelessness. From Victorian slums and the first model estates, to the mass postwar council house construction and the subsequent demolition of many tower blocks, it ends with post-Thatcherite gentrification and its impact on affordable housing.

The exhibition features new work by the artist Anthony Luvera, which addresses the rise of economic segregation in recent housing developments across Tower Hamlets, a phenomenon commonly known as ‘poor doors’. Also titled Conditions of Living, this socially engaged artwork by Luvera is built upon extensive research into the social, political, and economic contexts behind the rise of market-driven ‘affordable’ housing provision and the state of social housing today, and is created in collaboration with a community forum of local residents who live in the buildings themselves. This new work builds upon Luvera’s twenty-year career dedicated to working collaboratively with people who have experienced homelessness, and addressing issues of housing precarity and housing justice.

Anthony Luvera says: ‘London is one of the world’s last major cities still to ban the practice of allowing property developers to build ‘poor doors’, despite proclamations by successive governments and mayors about stopping the appalling practice. My work with people experiencing homelessness began twenty years ago in Spitalfields. To be back in Tower Hamlets creating this new work about economic segregation in housing developments and the broken social housing system feels urgent, especially at a time when the costs of living crisis has sunk its claws into the lives of ordinary working people.’

Carla Mitchell, Artistic Director at Four Corners says: ‘this is a highly relevant exhibition, given the extortionate London rents which create forms of social cleansing for long established local communities. We were inspired by Four Corners’ own building, which was a Salvation Army working men’s hostel.’

Four Corners

We are a cultural centre for film and photography, based in East London for fifty years. Our exhibitions explore unknown social histories that might not otherwise be told.

Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives

THLHLA holds outstanding resources for the study of the history of London’s East End. Run by the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, collections cover the areas of Bethnal Green, Poplar and Stepney. Explore the changing landscape and lived experiences of individuals and communities in Tower Hamlets through original documents, images and reference books.

Press release from Four Corners

1932: portrait of an impoverished family in Stepney. Edith Tudor-Hart was one of the most significant documentary photographers of the period. Closely affiliated with the Communist party, she recorded the conditions of the working class.

Edith Tudor-Hart, née Suschitzky, was one of the most significant documentary photographers working in Britain in the 1930s and 1940s. Born in Vienna, she grew up in radical Jewish circles. Edith married Alex Tudor-Hart, a British doctor, and the pair moved to England. There she worked as a documentary photographer, closely associated with the Communist Party, compiling a remarkable archive of images of working people in London and later, the south of Wales. Although still active in the 1950s, the difficulties of finding work as a woman photographer led eventually to Tudor-Hart abandoning photography altogether.

1940: a couple carry their salvaged belongings after bomb damage to their home, photographed by photojournalist Bert Hardy, best known for his work for Picture Post

Bert Hardy

If one photographer sums up the spirit and sheer brilliance of the seminal British newsweekly Picture Post, it is Bert Hardy (1913-1995). Alongside Bill Brandt and Don McCullin, former Victoria & Albert curator Mark Haworth-Booth regarded Hardy as one of the three greatest British photojournalists from the genre’s Golden Age. Indeed, Hardy stands alongside Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa and Werner Bischoff as the giants of 20th-century photography.

London born and entirely self-taught, Hardy was one of the UK’s first professionals to embrace the 35mm Leica in favour of a traditional large-format press camera. The smaller camera and faster film suited his instinctual shooting style and allowed him to consistently create something unique even in high-pressure situations. His confidence and courage enabled him to produce some of the most memorable images of the Blitz and postwar England and Europe. An inspiration to a generation of photojournalists, Hardy was often greeted as warmly by his subjects as he was by his peers – so much so one dubbed him the ‘professional Cockney’.

Anonymous. “Bert Hardy,” on the Getty Images Gallery website Nd [Online] Cited 04/08/2023

1951: workers stand on the ruins of Trinity church in Poplar, which was destroyed during the Blitz, and overlook new housing built in the wake of slum clearances.

Monty was born above a barber’s shop in Bethnal Green, east London, the youngest of three sons of Millie Epstein, a domestic servant, and Max Meth, a Czech Jewish immigrant who found intermittent work as a bread roundsman and tailor.

Educated at the local Mansford St Central school, Monty learned photography at the Cambridge and Bethnal Green boys’ club, which he credited with rescuing him from teenage pilfering, and at 14 went to work as a messenger for the Fleet Street picture agency Photopress, then on to the Topical Press agency. He returned after second world war service in the Navy to become a prize-winning photographer and photojournalist.

Martin Adeney. “Monty Meth obituary,” on The Guardian website Sun 28 Mar 2021 [Online] Cited 03/08/2023

David Granick (British, 1912-1980)
Stifford Estate
1961
Retouched by Chris Dorley-Brown
© Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives

1961: the now demolished Stifford Estate in Tower Hamlets, built in the late 1950s to replace slum housing, and comprised of three 17-storey tower blocks. Photographed by lifelong Stepney resident David Granick, who recorded the East End pre-gentrification.

David Granick (1912-1980) was a photographer who lived in the East End his whole life. His colour slides laid untouched until 2017 when a local photographer, Chris Dorley-Brown, examined them at Tower Hamlets Local History Library & Archives. These images capture the post-war streets of Stepney, Whitechapel, Spitalfields and beyond in the warm hues of Kodachrome film at a time when black and white photography was the norm.

David Granick was born in 1912 and lived his whole life in Stepney. A Jew, a keen photographer and a long-serving member of the East London History Society, he gave lectures on various local history themes illustrated with colour slides taken by himself or his fellow members of the Stepney Camera Club. Bequeathed to Tower Hamlets Local History Library & Archives after his death in 1980, where they have been preserved ever since, these photographs show the East End on the cusp of social change.

The London East End In Colour 1960-1980 David Granick 2019 Hoxton Mini Press

David Granick (British, 1912-1980)
Spitalfields Market
1973
Photo restoration by Chris Dorley-Brown
© Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives

Photojournalist David Hoffman has spent more than 40 years photographing the happenings on the streets of London, with a particular focus on his East End hometown, and with his lens predominantly focused on those less fortunate than most.

His subjects have included the homeless, the addicted, and the enraged, and spanned slums, shelters, and the streets, in good spirits and bad.

‘Really, my work is about oppression,’ he explains, ‘It’s not about class, but how people’s lives are constrained and shaped by society. And that’s most visible at the bottom of society. You and I are constrained, too, but in far less, and far less damaging, ways.’ Besides, he adds, ‘No one’s going to get a feature published on how the middle class is having a tough time.’

What defines his work, Hoffman says, is that ‘I’m always looking for extremes.’

Hoffman’s first photographic training came from a course at the University of York, where, with Chris Steele-Perkins, he set up a Student Union-sponsored darkroom. Steele-Perkins went on to work for Magnum Photos and become their president. In contrast, after two years Hoffman ‘slung the course in at the same time that they slung me’.

He moved back to London in 1969, to the East End in 1970, and worked ‘rubbish jobs’ to support his photography.

‘I did van driving and jobs like that. I would work to save up money, and then take time off to do photography (until my money ran out).’ A polytechnic course helped: ‘It was a poor course and taught me nothing but I had three years being supported on grants so I could really put some effort into my photography’, and squatting ‘meant that I didn’t have to spend my time working to raise the rent and could build my photography into a survivable income.’

Amy Freeborn. “David Hoffman: chaos, riots, slums and the East End,” on the Roman Road LDN website 27 November 2014 [Online] Cited 04/08/2023

1975: homeless men in Spitalfields, photographed by the Czech documentarist Markéta Luskačová.

Marketa Luskacova’s work is marked by her own lived experiences. Themes like cultural identity and social behaviour are at the core of her candid photographs. Born in Prague in 1944 during the communist regime, Luskacova graduated from Charles University with a degree in Sociology in 1967 and studied Photography at FAMU (1967-1969). Around this time, she began to take photographs as a means to document local traditions in some of the poorest communities of Slovakia.

She moved to London in 1975, where she continued her career as a photographer. She began to document her surroundings, producing captivating portraits of everyday life in some of the least privileged areas of the city. She felt particularly drawn towards the cultural atmosphere of Brick Lane and Spitalfields street markets, where she used to buy her own groceries.

‘I was poor and I needed to do my shopping there as it was the cheapest place to buy things. I could identify with the people in Brick Lane because they were immigrants and they were in need of cheap goods. Once I had done my shopping, I would leave my bag with a stall holder while I took my photographs.’

In her series London Street Markets, Luskacova documents daily life in the city, capturing powerful and emphatic portraits of its people and their traditions and offering a glimpse into the diverse cultural fabric of London East End’s society in the seventies.

‘I don’t go to Brick Lane regularly anymore, sometimes six months pass between one visit and another … I photographed what I saw there and what I thought it was good to record, be it a face or a smile, an animal or a shoe. I believe in the evidential quality of photography, and I know that unless things are done in a visually interesting way they are not remembered.’

Anonymous. “Artist Profile: Marketa Luskacova,” on the Arts Council Collection website Nd [Online] Cited 04/08/2023

1976: children play on rubble on waste ground on Usher Road, Tower Hamlets.

Born in Liverpool but brought up in England, Wales, India and Australia, he studied on the first BA degree in photographic arts in the UK, at the Polytechnic of Central London. “There I developed a social and political view of what photography could and should do,” he says. “My work concentrated on the community in the East End of London. After graduating I worked in community photography projects in the East End and freelanced as a photojournalist in the wide sense of the word; I wrote as well as photographed.”

1978: Mrs Baldwin on the balcony of her flat on the Mansford Street Estate, Bethnal Green. The estate of more than 700 homes was built over 20 years from 1957.

Andrew Testa (English, b. 1965)
Bailiffs move along rooftops towards protesters as they evict Claremont Road on the route of the M11 motorway
1994
© Andrew Testa

1994: bailiffs move along rooftops towards protesters as they evict occupants of Claremont Road on the route of the M11 motorway, prior to the demolition of the houses.

2004: assisted self-portrait of Ruben Torosyan by Anthony Luvera. Luvera started the project in 2001, helping homeless people to document their lives and experiences.

Anthony Luvera (born 1974) is an Australian artist, writer and educator, living in London. He is a socially engaged artist who works with photography on collaborative projects, which have included working with those who have experienced homelessness and LGBT+ people. Luvera is an Associate Professor of Photography at Coventry University… Luvera has worked extensively with people who have experienced homelessness. Many of these projects use his “assisted self-portrait” methodology, where the subject of the photograph, assisted by Luvera, makes and selects the pictures.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Photographs and Assisted Self-Portraits

Photographs

I had never wanted to photograph homeless people before. I’d read the (de)constructive writings by photo critics on ‘others’, poverty and representation. I knew about the complexities of the find-a-bum school of photography trounced by Martha Rosler. So in December 2001, when it was put to me by a friend to get involved as a photographer at Crisis Open Christmas, the annual event for homeless people in London, the invitation threw me. “I’d much prefer to see what the people I met would photograph.”

Over the following months, the conversation with my friend about photography and homelessness bounced louder in the back of my head. I became extremely interested in how homeless people have been represented and in questions about the process of representation itself. To what degree could the apparently fixed proximities between photographer, subject and camera be dismantled and reconfigured? How could a ‘subject’ become actively involved in the creation of a representation? What use, if any, would all this serve in the meanings offered in the final presentation?

I sourced 1,000 cameras and processing vouchers, and spent every day and many late nights at the following Crisis Open Christmas…

Between 25 and 40 people dropped in to each following weekly session. Around a big communal table, we gathered to look at the photos, to show and tell the stories held in the images, and to drink endless cups of tea. The sessions were high-energy, swarming with vibrant personalities. The youngest participant was 19 and the oldest was nearing 90. Different people got involved for different reasons. Some wanted to make snapshots of their special times, favourite places, friends and family. While others had ideas about art and concepts to explore with photography. I explained how to use the cameras and listened to each participant’s ambitions, encouraging everyone to simply go and do it. I never brought along photography books or showed my own photographs, nor did I tell any of the participants how or what to photograph. When looking at the photographs I asked each participant to pull out their favourites, or the images that best represented what they wanted to show. With permission I took scans of these photographs and held the negatives in a file. Release forms and licenses were provided, written especially for the project by specialist intellectual property copyright lawyers. Permission was not always given, which was always completely respected.

I never asked why anybody was homeless. Though over time stories came out with the photographs. In the four years the sessions have taken place I have worked with over 250 people. Every person I’ve met has a very different and particular story to tell. Some are entirely abject, while others are remarkable for their ordinariness. All are compelling in their own way. And while there may be commonalities between the experiences of particular individuals, not one situation of any participant could be seen as being broadly representative of the cause or experience of homelessness.

Ruben Torosyan

Ruben Torosyan left Georgia in the late 1980’s when the country was still under harsh Soviet rule. Not issued a birth certificate and unable to get a passport, Ruben was determined to get to the capitalist West to create a better life for himself. He spent over five years traveling across Europe attempting to obtain political asylum in over 15 different countries. In every place he was unsuccessful, largely for the same bureaucratic reasons, boiling down to the incredible fact that Ruben has absolutely no official way of proving who he is or where he comes from. In Spain Ruben smuggled himself on to a shipping freight container. Squished in with bottles and bags for his excrement, and packets of biscuits to eat, he travelled for 35 nights in complete darkness to get to New York. After failing to get legal rights to remain there, and escaping detainment, he struggled on the streets of Brooklyn in conditions worse than back home in Georgia. After two years, determined not to go back to Georgia, Ruben did the same shipping container trip to Ireland to get to London, where shortly after we met.

Ruben came to the sessions with a very clear idea about what he wanted to use the cameras to photograph in making his contribution to the archive; the discrepancy between what he expected London to be and what, in his experience, it actually was. Ruben’s depictions of dirty, litter strewn streets (serendipitously replete with the newspaper headline, “I Feel Used”), a naked man with mental health issues running down the road, people begging and a poor woman walking by without shoes, are for him, depictions of the filthy, hostile, brutal and ugly place that is London. Where there is “no mercy and the food is rubbish”.

Anthony Luvera. “Photographs and Assisted Self-Portraits,” in Source, Issue 47 2006 published on the Anthony Luvera website [Online] Cited 03/08/2023 (with permission of the author)

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London E2 0QN
Nearest tube: Bethnal Green, Central Line

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Thursday 11am – 8pm (July and on 31 Aug)

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Exhibition: ‘The Catalonia of Jules Ainaud (1871-1872)’ at Fundación MAPFRE Photography Center (Barcelona)

Exhibition dates: 8th June – 3rd September 2023

Curator: Jep Martí

Jules Ainaud (French, 1837-1900)
Montserrat (Barcelona). The Devil’s Rock
September 1871
Arxiu Fotogràfic de Barcelona

I’ve assembled five photography exhibitions before they all finish around the 3rd of September, so let’s have a posting on a Monday!

After the recent Louis Stettner posting, this is the second of three fine photography exhibitions at Fundación MAPFRE.

The third of the trio, an exhibition on the revolutionary (in more ways than one) Italian photographer Tina Modotti, will be posted this weekend – to be followed in quick succession by the exhibitions Conditions of Living (photographs of the housing in the East End of London), Images of Italy (19th century views of Italy) and Berenice Abbott’s New York Album.

As usual, an eclectic mix if ever there was one.

As also with this exhibition which “brings to light” the Spanish views of the Levante peninsula and Catolonia by the long forgotten photographer Jules Ainaud, acknowledging his place in photographic history.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

Jules Ainaud has been a practically unknown photographer, until his work is now exhibited today one hundred and fifty years after it was first seen in Barcelona. Ainaud always worked for Jean Laurent, whose studio was, as is well known, was one of the great centres for the production of photographs in Spain in the middle decades of the 19th century and up to 1885.

Ainaud was one of the photographers that Laurent “commissioned” to obtain images of some provinces and thus complete his catalogue. In his case, the Levante peninsula and a large part of Catalonia, in an activity that as a whole lasted between 1870 and 1872. The exhibition recovers practically all the images corresponding to Catalonia, in an exhibition that wants to give Ainaud his proper place in photographic history.

Text from the Fundación MAPFRE website

Jules Ainaud (French, 1837-1900)
Barcelona. The Main Theater
1872
Arxiu Fotogràfic of Barcelona

Jules Ainaud (French, 1837-1900)
Barcelona. The Provincial Council
1872
Arxiu Fotogràfic de Barcelona

Jules Ainaud’s Catalonia (1871-1872)

This exhibition, which continues the line of exhibition programming started by Fundación MAPFRE with the desire to deepen the knowledge of photographic archives and funds, presents the photographic work that Jules Ainaud made during his trip through Catalonia between 1871 and 1872. The exhibition restores the legitimate authorship of this photographer and makes his work known.

It has been more than 150 years since the set of photographs that Jules Ainaud took in Catalonia between 1871 and 1872 on behalf of the J. Laurent house were exhibited at the Ateneu Barcelonès for the first and only time. Like the photographs of the Levant area that this house marketed, for a long time these images had been considered to be the work of Jean Laurent himself. “today (…) with the documentary evidence on the table, it can be affirmed that Jules Ainaud was the effective author of these shots taken in this area that the J. Laurent house used for marketing between 1872 and 1879”, says the curator of the exhibition, Jep Martí Baiget.

The firm J. Laurent, for which Ainaud worked, was founded in Madrid in 1856 by the Frenchman Jean Laurent, and represents the main example in Spain of the emergence and development, since the middle of the 19th century, of companies destined to satisfy the increasingly intense demand for photographic images, for private portraits, but also for reproductions of works of art, landscapes and views of cities and monuments.

The exhibition presents one hundred vintage copies on albumen paper from wet collodion glass negatives. In addition, it includes fourteen stereoscopic views and thirteen reproductions of the glass plate negatives of these views, which allow one to appreciate the richness of image detail compared to works on paper. All these photographs were part of the catalogs that the Laurent company used for marketing between 1872 and 1879. The tour is completed with an oil portrait of Ainaud, the only one that is preserved, documentation and four letters that talk about the author’s trip to Catalonia in 1871 and 1872.

Text from the Fundación MAPFRE website

Jules Ainaud (French, 1837-1900)
Barcelona. Private house of the 17th century
1872
Arxiu Fotogràfic de Barcelona

Jules Ainaud (French, 1837-1900)
Barcelona. Panoramic view of Barcelona, from Montjuïc
1872
Arxiu Fotogràfic de Barcelona

Jules Ainaud (French, 1837-1900)
Poblet (Tarragona). Royal Gate of the convent
September 1871
National Library of Spain, Madrid

Jules Ainaud (French, 1837-1900)
Tarragona. The Cyclopean Wall
1871-1872
National Library of Spain, Madrid

Jules Ainaud (French, 1837-1900)
Tarragona. View of the port from the city
1871-1872
National Library of Spain, Madrid

It is now over one hundred and fifty years since the set of photographs Jules Ainaud took in Catalonia between 1871 and 1872, commissioned by the Laurent house, were exhibited for the first and only time to date at the Ateneo Barcelonés. Like the pictures of the Levante area marketed by that firm, this interesting set of images was long considered to be the work of Jean Laurent himself.

Jules Ainaud’s Catalonia (1871-1872) is the first public presentation that restores his legitimate authorship and highlights his contribution to the history of our photography.

The firm “J. Laurent & Cía.” for which Ainaud worked had been founded in Madrid in 1856 by the Frenchman Juan Laurent and represents the main example in Spain of the appearance and development, from the mid-19th century onwards, of companies aimed at satisfying the increasingly intense demand for photographic images, initially of private portraits, but soon also of reproductions of works of art, landscapes and views of cities and monuments.

This exhibition brings together around a hundred period prints on albumen paper from wet collodion glass negatives and is completed by fourteen stereoscopic views and thirteen reproductions of the glass plate negatives of these views, which allow the richness of the image details to be appreciated in comparison with the works on paper. All the prints were included in the catalogues that the Laurent company used to market them between 1872 and 1879.

Text from the Fundación MAPFRE website

Jules Ainaud (French, 1837-1900)
Barcelona. The castle of Montjuïc
1872
National Library of Spain, Madrid

Jules Ainaud (French, 1837-1900)
Barcelona. Plaza del Comercio, before the Palace
June 4, 1872
National Library of Spain, Madrid

Jules Ainaud (French, 1837-1900)
Tarragona. General view of Tarragona
1871-1872
National Library of Spain, Madrid

Jules Ainaud (French, 1837-1900)
Tarragona. Quarries of Tarragona
February 8, 1872
National Archaeological Museum of Tarragona

Antoni Caba (Spanish, 1838-1907)
Portrait of Jules Ainaud Escande
1872
Oil on canvas
National Museum of Art of Catalonia, Barcelona
Donated by the relatives of Carmen de Lasarte, 1965
© National Museum of Art of Catalonia, Barcelona

‘The Catalonia of Jules Ainaud (1871-1872)’

KBr Fundación MAPFRE
Av. del Litoral, 30 08005 Barcelona
Phone: +34 932 723 180

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Tuesdays – Sundays (and public holidays) 11am – 8pm

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Exhibition: ‘Louis Stettner’ at Fundación MAPFRE Recoletos Room (Madrid)

Exhibition dates: 1st June – 27th August 2023

Curator: Sally Martin Katz

Louis Stettner (American, 1922-2016)
Boulevard de Clichy, Paris [Boulevard de Clichy, París]
1951
Gelatin silver image
29.7 × 44.8cm
Courtesy Louis Stettner Archive, Paris
© Louis Stettner Estate

The (in)significant moment

Some thoughts by others on the work of Louis Stettner gleaned from curating this posting:

1/ The elegance of absolute solitude.

2/ The greatest beauty is often found in the quiet moments, in a face, a composition, a living detail.

3/ Stettner preferred to picture solitary individuals, picking them out from their social settings with his camera’s framing and timing.

4/ Stettner called his photography humanist realism.

5/ Spontaneous, of the moment, impassioned and to be thought about later

6/ Gestural skill, compositional skill, fragmented bodies, isolated.

7/ To photograph workers was an act of resistance and also homage.

8/ “His visual sensibility was so varied, so protean that it overlapped with just about every other photographer of his era who worked as he did, in the mode of lyric observation of daily life. One could make an exhibition pairing his pictures with similar works by a wide range of great figures, among them Roy DeCarava, Willy Ronis, Louis Draper, Aaron Siskind, Walker Evans, Lisette Model, Morris Engel, Edouard Boubat, Shawn Walker, Jerome Liebling, André Kertész, W. Eugene Smith, Dorothea Lange, Beuford Smith, Robert Frank, Robert Doisneau, Sid Grossman, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Brassaï, Bill Brandt, Izis, Louis Faurer, William Klein, Weegee, and Ruth Orkin. There is something of Stettner’s work in theirs, and theirs in his. My list is long, but it could be much longer. If we were to draw a Venn diagram of the styles of the great observational photographers of the last century, we would find Stettner at the point where they all intersect.”

David Company. “To Value What is in Front of Us. The Photography of Louis Stettner,” on the David Company website Nd [Online] Cited 18/08/2023

The question is, how can we do this underrated artist’s work “justice”. Justice means giving each person what he or she deserves or, in more traditional terms, giving each person his or her due. And by justice in Stettner’s case I mean, how can we value and cherish his photographs then, now and in the future… without them being seen as derivative of others but valued in and of themselves.

In this regard I believe David Campany has hit the nail on the head in his article “To Value What is in Front of Us. The Photography of Louis Stettner” which I heartily recommend you read. He observes, “Humanist realism is not a style, and not even a world view or a disposition. It is more like a reminder to value what is in front of us; to hold it, to appreciate it, to think about it, and to come back to it.”

To value what is in front of us.

Much as I asked you in the last posting about Jewish photographers in the ghettos during the Second World War to look at their photographs with an open and clear mind, to pay attention to the details, to unlearn the familiar and look afresh at the connections and tensions within and between images… then here again we must not become imbued to the familiarity of Stettner’s images because they look like a Robert Frank or a Walker Evans, but we must fully appreciate the value of what is in front of us.

While Stettner was more interested in the significant moment (rather than the decisive moment), focusing on individuals, individual / details (but then we know nothing of subject’s life other than this, perhaps significant, perhaps insignificant, moment) it is the photographers clear seeing – his awareness of the serendipity of that moment – that makes these photographs of value to him and to us. Look at those faces, look at those spaces! What do they reveal to us over time?

Stettner knew the value of what a creative photographer could achieve when taking a photograph : “The photographer gives us a record of what happened at the instant of exposure, but the creative photographer unveils for us what we did not see or could not understand.” The photographs become a revelation of what is normally hidden from view.

For me what is revealed in these photographs is the ever changing nature of the human condition over which we are charged to exercise stewardship. They make me aware of fleeting, flickering time, they make me aware of individual lives and hard work sucked in the great maul of industry, and they make me aware that we are not doing a very good job of our guardianship nor are we being a good custodian to our legacy.

Of the best photographs that he took, Louis Stettner said: “When things work out, it’s like a miracle.”

We need that miracle now for things to work out for the human race.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

With a career spanning almost eighty years, the work of Louis Stettner (New York, 1922 – Paris, 2016) incorporates, in a very personal style, the tradition of American street photography and French humanist photography. He trained at the Photo League School in New York before moving to Paris in 1947, where he developed a close relationship with Brassaï, who became his friend and mentor.

Also very directly influenced by the poetry of Walt Whitman and the social concerns of Marxism, his photographs of New York and Paris reflect the celebration of life and exaltation of the modern city so characteristic of the author of Leaves of Grass, while his images of workers in the performance of their trades propose an explicit dignification of the proletariat. With more than 180 works, this exhibition is one of the largest organised to date in Spain, offering a comprehensive thematic exploration of his extensive career.

Text from the Fundación MAPFRE website

“A photograph should always have the last word. Surrounded by silence, it should by it presence dominate all those who look at it. Even the photographer should keep quiet. The picture taken, their work done.”

Louis Stettner. “The Case for the Indestructible Image,” in British Photography, 1952

“An image is capable of being like life at its very best – moving us deeply without our knowing fully why.”

“In the midst of noise, dirt, smoke and the risk of accidents, they seemed to me very sensitive people, of innate humanity and with a wonderful ability of organisation and perception of immediate reality. They always made me feel welcome and comfortable […] my stay in the factories was one of the most meaningful experiences of my life…”

“I work on intuition … If something strikes me as significant, I don’t censor what’s around me. I don’t come with any ideas to impose on reality; I let reality speak to me.”

“Time is the best proof of how valuable a photograph is, or how profound the content is … The fact these photographs get more exciting with time is a good sign.”

“The photographer must recognise order and sense in the turmoil of people and places and the thousand and one things which surround them. What he selects as important depends on his own personality and his attitude to life.”

“The photographer gives us a record of what happened at the instant of exposure, but the creative photographer unveils for us what we did not see or could not understand.”

Louis Stettner

“Stettner has always been fully conscious that the role of the photographer is not to turn away from all reference to reality, but on the contrary to express a profound experience with it.”

Brassaï, in his introduction to Early Joys, Photographs from 1947-1972, 1987

Louis Stettner: el fotógrafo desconocido más conocido del mundo

Te presentamos la mayor retrospectiva que se ha realizado hasta la fecha del fotógrafo estadounidense Louis Stettner (1922-2016). Con una visión general como hilo conductor, su obra abarca multitud de temas, desde entornos urbanos casi vacíos hasta bulliciosas escenas del metro de Nueva York, la rutina de trabajadores y obreros o los paisajes montañosos del macizo francés de los Alpilles.

Louis Stettner (American, 1922-2016)
Aubervilliers, France [Aubervilliers, Francia]
1947
Gelatin silver image
29.3 × 23cm
Courtesy Louis Stettner Archive, Paris
© Louis Stettner Estate

Louis Stettner was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1922 of immigrant Austrian parents. His photographic career spanned 70 years, and started at the age of thirteen with the gift of a box camera from his father and the discovery of an article by American photographer Paul Outerbridge Jr., describing the great potential of photography for interpreting the world. Throughout his teenage years, Stettner immersed himself in photography by frequenting the gallery of Alfred Stieglitz and the print room of the Metropolitan Museum of Art where he methodically worked his way through the complete history of American photography by studying original prints and back issues of the photographic journal Camera Work. After having enlisted in the army (1940-1941) and serving as a combat photographer with the US Infantry in the Pacific (1942-1945) during the Second World War, Stettner left his homeland in 1947 on a three-week trip to Paris which extended into five years. Here Stettner became an active and valued member of the local post-war photography scene, photographing the city constantly. During this time he worked as a freelance photographer for various magazines in Europe and the US and studied Photography and Cinema at the Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques (IDHEC) (1947-1949). In 1952 Stettner returned to the US, where he found a night job at a security company, roaming the streets by day with his camera. To supplement his income, he photographed for magazines and advertising agencies.

Anonymous text. “Louis Stettner,” on the Fifty One Gallery website Nd [Online] Cited 30/07/2023

Louis Stettner (American, 1922-2016)
Concentric Circles, Construction Site, New York [Círculos concéntricos, obra, Nueva York]
1952
Gelatin silver image
23 × 34.5 cm
Courtesy Louis Stettner Archive, Paris
© Louis Stettner Estate

Louis Stettner (American, 1922-2016)
Manhole, Times Square, New York [Tapa de alcantarilla, Times Square, Nueva York]
1954
Gelatin silver image
46.3 × 32.3cm
Courtesy Louis Stettner Archive, Paris
© Louis Stettner Estate

Louis Stettner (American, 1922-2016)
Brooklyn Promenade, Brooklyn, New York [Brooklyn Promenade, Brooklyn, Nueva York]
1954
Gelatin silver image
29.8 × 44.8 cm
Courtesy Louis Stettner Archive, Paris
© Louis Stettner Estate

Louis Stettner (American, 1922-2016)
Nancy Listening to Jazz, Greenwich Village, New York [Nancy escuchando jazz, Greenwich Village, Nueva York]
1958
Gelatin silver image
28.6 × 20.8cm
Courtesy Louis Stettner Archive, Paris
© Louis Stettner Estate

This exhibition is the largest retrospective to date on American photographer Louis Stettner (1922-2016), whose work has not been given the recognition it undoubtedly deserves. Organised chronologically, it showcases more than one hundred and ninety photographs spanning his entire career, including some previously unpublished images and some of his hitherto almost unknown colour work.

His experience as a photographer in World War II profoundly conditioned his understanding of life, so present in all his photography: a firm belief in the human being. Also influenced by his literary and philosophical readings (Plato, Karl Marx and Walt Whitman, fundamentally) and by his relationship, through the Photo League, with photographers such as Sid Grossman and Weegee, who conveyed to him the importance of photography as an instrument of social change, Stettner’s work offers us, in short, a vibrant celebration of life, of man’s courage to embrace the adversities and blessings of existence to the fullest.

With this overarching vision as a common thread, Stettner’s work encompasses a multitude of subjects, from almost empty urban environments to bustling scenes of the New York subway, the routines of workers and labourers, and the mountainous landscapes of the French Alpilles massif in his later years. Throughout his career he returned frequently to many of them, especially those connected to his social commitment and his concern for the underprivileged.

Text from the Fundación MAPFRE website

The Project

Louis Stettner (New York, 1922 – Paris, 2016) trained at the Photo League school in New York where he studied with Sid Grossman and coincided with Weegee, who became a close friend. In Paris he met Brassaï, who became his mentor. Despite being fully immersed in the debate on historic photography for much of the 20th century, Stettner’s work never received the recognition it deserved, possibly because he was not associated with a particular style. The exhibition now presented by Fundación MAPFRE, comprising more than 190 photographs which span the artist’s entire career, aims to remedy that forgotten status and introduce Stettner to the general public, while also celebrating the work of a photographer whose images captured the poetry of everyday life.

Summary

1/ Living between New York and Paris but without ever attaching himself to one city to the detriment of the other, Stettner remained rooted in these two worlds at a time when most photographers were only affiliated with one of them. In this sense, his work involves elements of both the aesthetic of New York street photography and the lyrical humanism of the French tradition.

2/ Stettner’s work encompasses a wide range of different themes, from almost deserted urban views to bustling scenes of the New York subway, the routine of office workers’ lives, labourers engaged in their daily activities, and the mountainous landscapes of the Alpilles, France in his final period.

3/ Stettner drew on numerous sources of inspiration for his work, both artistic and literary (essentially Plato, Karl Marx and Walt Whitman). Combined with his interest in philosophy and in the social and political issues of his day which he undoubtedly reflected in his work, this makes him a remarkable and unique artist.

Biographical note

Louis Stettner (New York, 1922 – Paris, 2016) was given his first camera at the age of thirteen. Shortly after that he began to make regular visits to the Metropolitan Museum of Art where he became acquainted with the magazine Camera Work. That publication introduced him to the work of photographers such as Alfred Stieglitz, Clarence H. White and Paul Strand, who made a profound impression on him. He soon began to move in Stieglitz’s circle and it was through the Photo League that he encountered the work of Weegee, Sid Grossman, Edward Weston and Lewis Hine.

Aged eighteen, Stettner joined the army as a war photographer in the Pacific, then returned to New York where he continued working with the Photo League. In 1947 he went to Paris where he lived for the next five years, organising the first retrospective of French photography in New York, held at the Photo League Gallery in 1948. During that project he met Brassaï whom he came to consider his master and with whom he established a long-lasting friendship.

In the 1950s Stettner returned to New York where he started to work with various magazines including Life, Time, Fortune and Paris-Match, as well as to write on photography, which became a regular practice from this date onwards. In the late 1960s he started teaching at Brooklyn College, part of Long Island University. Stettner’s life-long political commitment led him to take part in anti-Vietnam War protests and he spent five weeks taking photographs in the Soviet Union at a time when this was uncommon.

Stettner gave up teaching and writing in the early 1980s and focused on a reassessment of his own work. In 1990 he returned to France where he took up painting and sculpture. In 2001 he was made a Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government and during this period embarked on one of his series in colour, entitled “Manhattan Pastoral”, which he created during his summers in New York. This was also the period of a project with a large-format camera undertaken in the Alpilles mountain range in Provence (France). Stettner died in Paris on 13 October 2016 after the closure of his exhibition Ici ailleurs at the Centre Pompidou.

KEY THEMES

The Photo League

The Photo League (1936-1951) was a New York photographers’ collective which had its origins in the German association known as the Workers Camera League. It met regularly to discuss the connections between photography and politics – without ever adopting a programmatic stance although it was technically Left wing – and to promote photography as a tool of social critique. It was in this context that Stettner met photographers such as Sid Grossman and Weegee and at the age of just twenty-two he accepted a position as the association’s youngest teacher.

A photographer-writer

The 1950s and 1960s were characterised by a certain mistrust of photographers who wrote, possibly because they appeared to be located in a position mid-way between the two disciplines. Stettner always engaged in literary activity as well as photography, writing not just about himself but also about many of his artist friends and colleagues and not only those whose work he admired. His texts were to some degree comparable to his photographs: abrupt, spontaneous and impetuous. In the 1970s he wrote a monthly column in the magazine Camera 35 published by the Photo League, initially with the title “Speaking Out” and subsequently “A Humanist View”. Although he was a prolific writer it was not until the late date of 1979 that he published one of his photographic series in the book Sur le tas, depicting men and women at work.

Walt Whitman

One of the key figures for Stettner’s work was Walt Whitman, with whom he shared the belief that it was possible to find the beauty of the world in everyday, commonplace things. Leaves of Grass almost became his Bible and he carried a copy with him at all times. In his own words: “Whitman’s faith in his fellow human beings, his grasp of the entire life cycle and death, and his cosmic vision has been contagious to me. […] celebrates men and women and is not afraid, which is perhaps one of the reasons why I have never stopped photographing in the streets, wherever human beings are.”

Workers and labourers

Stettner’s social commitment and his concern for the underprivileged led him to regularly photograph workers and labourers with the aim of showing them as authentic, dignified individuals regardless of the precarious nature of their working conditions. In his own words: “I found them amidst a grinding noise, dirt, fumes and danger of accidents, to be very sensitive, innately human with a wonderful grasp of organisation and immediate reality. They have always made me feel welcome and at ease … my time in the factories was one of the most meaningful experiences in my life.” Stettner’s workers often appear strong and proud, frequently absorbed in their thoughts and dominating the image in which they appear. They transcend the context of their activities and reveal themselves as autonomous individuals who refuse to be bowed by the harshness of their daily activities.

The exhibition

The exhibition presented by Fundación MAPFRE is the most extensive retrospective to date on the American photographer Louis Stettner (1922-2016) and is also the first on his work to be organised in Spain. Structured chronologically, it features more than 180 photographs which span the artist’s entire career, among them previously unseen images as well as part of his output in colour, which is little known at the present time.

Stettner’s experience as a photographer in World War II had a marked influence on his vision of life, which is so present in his photographic oeuvre, namely his unshakable faith in humanity. He was also influenced by his reading of literary and philosophical texts (essentially Plato, Karl Marx and Walt Whitman) and by his relationship via the Photo League with photographers such as Sid Grossman and Weegee, from whom he assimilated the importance of photography as a tool for social change. In its totality Stettner’s output represents a vibrant celebration of life, the courage of individuals when facing adversity, and the blessings of our existence.

With this vision as its guiding thread, Stettner’s photographic corpus encompasses a wide variety of themes, from almost deserted urban views to bustling scenes of the New York subway, the routine of workers’ lives, labourers engaged in their daily activities, and the mountainous landscapes of the Alpilles, France, in his final period. Over the course of his career the artist frequently returned to these subjects, particularly those associated with his social commitment and his concern for the underprivileged.

Louis Stettner (American, 1922-2016)
Woman Holding Newspaper, New York [Mujer sujetando un periódico, Nueva York]
1946
Gelatin silver image
34.2 × 34.6cm
Courtesy Louis Stettner Archive, Paris
© Louis Stettner Estate

Early New York, 1936-1946, and Post-War Paris , 1947-1952

New York Beginnings / The Subway Series / Post-War Paris: The Empty City

Louis Stettner started to take photographs as a teenager. His earliest images include people chatting or customers in New York cafés. In 1946, following the end of World War II, he produced a series on the city’s subway which in which he photographed men and women engaged in their daily routine, going to work or returning home. Using a Rolleiflex camera, Stettner pretended to be adjusting it when he was in fact taking shots.

In July 1947 he moved to Paris with the aim of taking a course on film for a few weeks but he in fact remained for some years. His work of this period is defined by images often taken in the early hours of the morning, showing an empty city attempting to move on from the recent Nazi occupation. These photographs, taken with a large-format camera, convey a melancholy that is remote from the bustling Paris seen in the work of other photographers of the time such as Robert Doisneau. During this period Stettner met Brassaï, becoming a close friend, and was impressed by the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson. He wrote about both photographers in the magazine Camera 35 in his monthly column in which he expressed his ideas on the principal social, political and artistic ideas of the day while also using it to establish links between the European and American cultural scenes.

Brassaï on Stettner:

“Sterner has always been fully conscious that the role of the photographer is not to turn away from all reference to reality, but on the contrary to express a profound experience with it. He sees the photographer not only aware of the richness and beauty of the world but also responding to the diverse aspects of the society in which we live … No matter how passionately Louis may become involved with what is most immediate and commonplace around us, he does not allow himself to be seduced by the picturesque. Settler’s stimulant, his reestablished theme, is our natural environment, which he reveals with the utmost accuracy and the simplicity of great art. As for the people, they often move up centre stage to the social milieu around them … Often, there is pathos, sometimes anger and social comment; always they are made bigger rather smaller than life. This empathy for the most positive aspects in people pervades all his work … Perhaps the touchstone to all his photography is this magic amalgam of humanism and deep-rooted realism.”

Brassaï, introduction to Louis Sterner, Early Joys: Photographs from 1847-1972, New York, Janet Iffland, 1987.

Louis Stettner (American, 1922-2016)
Subway, New York
1946
Gelatin silver image
34.2 × 34.6cm
Courtesy Louis Stettner Archive, Paris
© Louis Stettner Estate

Louis Stettner (American, 1922-2016)
Train Station Near Málaga, Spain [Estación de tren cerca de Málaga, España]
1951
Gelatin silver image
30.4 × 20cm
Courtesy Louis Stettner Archive, Paris
© Louis Stettner Estate

Louis Stettner (American, 1922-2016)
Rue d’Alésia, Paris
1949
Gelatin silver image
Courtesy Louis Stettner Archive, Paris
© Louis Stettner Estate

Louis Stettner (American, 1922-2016)
Paris
1949
Gelatin silver image
Courtesy Louis Stettner Archive, Paris
© Louis Stettner Estate

On land or Sea: Spain, Europe, and the USA, 1949-1969

Pepe and Tony: Spanish Fishermen / Beaches and Country

Together with urban photography, Stettner was often attracted to natural locations and their inhabitants. In his travels around Europe he portrayed families relaxing on the beach, children playing in city squares and local people walking along the sunny streets of Malaga and Torremolinos. In 1956 he accompanied two Ibizan fishermen, Pepe and Tony, on their working days. These images use framings that fragment the men’s bodies, emphasising the sensation of proximity between the photographer and his subjects on the small boat. The men are summarised by a single gesture or action, giving rise to a celebration of strength and vitality. In Stettner’s photographs of activities of this type the emphasis is always on human dignity, heightened by the truncation of the framing, as is also the case with his images of agricultural labourers and city dwellers. The artist’s interest in workers and his desire to present them as authentic individuals characterises his photography and arises from his experience of observing people at work, regardless of the precarious nature of their working conditions.

Louis Stettner (American, 1922-2016)
Tony, “Pepe and Tony, Spanish Fishermen”, Ibiza, Spain [Tony, “Pepe y Tony, pescadores españoles”, Ibiza, España]
1956
Gelatin silver image
23.5 × 15.5cm
Courtesy Louis Stettner Archive, Paris
© Louis Stettner Estate

Louis Stettner (American, 1922-2016)
Commuters, Evening Train, Penn Station, New York [Volviendo del trabajo en el tren de la tarde, Penn Station, Nueva York]
1958
Gelatin silver image
44.5 × 29.8cm
Courtesy Louis Stettner Archive, Paris
© Louis Stettner Estate

Post-War New York, 1952-1969

Penn Station / City Streets / Nancy, the Beat Generation

In the 1950s Stettner returned to New York from Paris and took photographs of the city and other parts of New York State. In his series on Penn Station (1958) he portrayed passengers on trains but on this occasion from outside the carriages, in contrast to his series on the subway of 1946 when he was located inside. He captured private, tranquil moments of solitary self-absorption amidst the public spaces of the station and the train carriages. These images reveal Stettner’s ability to focus on individuals and convey their personality and emotions. As he himself wrote, he placed great emphasis on “showing what can’t easily be seen, capturing what’s most important, enriching our perception of life.” This may explain his interest in portraying individuals engaged in different activities but alone within the urban environment: a man leaning against a lamppost who seems to be looking straight into the lens, a young girl running along the pavement, or a solitary man walking in the shadowy dusk. In order to create his series “Nancy, the Beat generation” Stettner followed a beatnik called Nancy in Greenwich Village for five days, a subject who represented a new force of energy that implied a complete cultural shift in New York of the late 1950s.

“A city is a real city when it’s for the people that live and work there … When it becomes built for tourists, it loses its soul.”

~ Louis Stettner

Louis Stettner (American, 1922-2016)
Coming to America
1951
Gelatin silver image
Courtesy Louis Stettner Archive, Paris
© Louis Stettner Estate

Louis Stettner (American, 1922-2016)
Christmas Eve
1950-1951
Gelatin silver image
Courtesy Louis Stettner Archive, Paris
© Louis Stettner Estate

Louis Stettner (American, 1922-2016)
Little Girl Running, Lower East Side
1952
Gelatin silver image
Courtesy Louis Stettner Archive, Paris
© Louis Stettner Estate

Louis Stettner (American, 1922-2016)
Odd Man Out, Penn Station, New York (El bit raro, Penn Station, Nueva York)
1958
Gelatin silver image
Courtesy Louis Stettner Archive, Paris
© Louis Stettner Estate

Louis Stettner (American, 1922-2016)
Odd Man In, Penn Station, New York (El intruso, Penn Station, Nueva New York)
1958
Gelatin silver image
Courtesy Louis Stettner Archive, Paris
© Louis Stettner Estate

Louis Stettner (American, 1922-2016)
Woman with White Glove, Penn Station, New York [Mujer con guante blanco, Penn Station, Nueva York]
1958
Gelatin silver image
24.8 × 23.2cm
Courtesy Louis Stettner Archive, Paris
© Louis Stettner Estate

Louis Stettner (American, 1922-2016)
Legs-Up, Penn Station, New York (Piernas arriba, Penn Station, Nueva New York)
1958
Gelatin silver image
Courtesy Louis Stettner Archive, Paris
© Louis Stettner Estate

Louis Stettner (American, 1922-2016)
Malaga, Spain
1963
Gelatin silver image
Courtesy Louis Stettner Archive, Paris
© Louis Stettner Estate

Louis Stettner (American, 1922-2016)
Dutch Farmers, Holland
1962
From the series Workers
Gelatin silver image
Courtesy Louis Stettner Archive, Paris
© Louis Stettner Estate

Louis Stettner (American, 1922-2016)
Aluminum Foundry, Soviet Union [Fundición de aluminio, Unión Soviética]
1975
Gelatin silver image
33.8 × 22.5cm
Courtesy Louis Stettner Archive, Paris
© Louis Stettner Estate

The 1970s

Workers / Demonstrations / Spirit of the City

Marxist by political inclination and committed to the working class from a young age, in the 1970s Stettner’s political activism became more intense. He opposed the Vietnam War and supported the Black Panther movement. During those years he visited various factories around the world (the USA, France, the UK and the Soviet Union) to photograph workers. These are images in which once again he celebrates humanity and dignifies individuals who normally pass unnoticed. Stettner’s aim was not, however, to glorify them, nor did he focus on the machinery alongside them. He used his camera in a manner that extracts each individual in order to remove them from their industrial context, as he did in his photographs of anti-war demonstrations, although always making clear the context in which each individual moves.

Stettner was profoundly attracted to the beauty of the urban landscape and the life force of its inhabitants. This is evident in his photographs of ordinary people: couples chatting while they wait for the subway train, women sunbathing on a type of terrace while cars go past underneath them, or a mother and her son on the bus going somewhere.

Sterner was lifelong Marxist, dedicated to the cause of the proletariat and consistent in his opposition to capitalism. The 1970s saw his activism intensify: he was a supporter of the Black Panther movement, committed to racial and economic justice, and vehemently objected to the war in Vietnam. From 1971 to 1979 he wrote a monthly column in Camera 35 titled “Speaking Out,” offering his personal vision and critique of contemporary photography. Throughout the 1970s he toured factories in the United States, France, England, and the Soviet Union, photographing workers at work. Stettner avowed a “lifetime commitment” to the topic of work, producing images inextricably linked to his political engagement. His photographs do not aim to elicit pity or portray the plight of workers, nor do the attempt to glorify them. Instead, he uses his camera to depict workers in a dignified way, perhaps as they themselves would like to be seen. He celebrates their strength, individuality, and humanity. In particular, his use of tight framing extracts the workers from their industrial environment to focus on the human rather than the machine, while retaining sufficient information to provide context for his images. Likewise, his photographs of protestors and ordinary citizens of the 1970s contain a similar thread of humanism, capturing a range of raw emotions that reflect their strength and separations. For Sterner, the common people were a consistent focus of his photographic art, and he saw within them an almost heroic beauty.

Stettner on his photographs of workers:

“I was in a garment factory in New Jersey, quietly but stubbornly taking photographs of a seamstress at her machine. She was buxom, red-haired woman who had first been suspicious, then reassured, as I explained to her that I was working on a book of photographs about workers. She was working so fast, she was hardly able to look up as I spoke. Finally she was flattered and pleased by my picture-taking, and mumbled herself, “it’s about time.” Then in a tone of voice I shall never forget, full of bitterness and haunting torment of the years, she stopped her machine, stared into a dark shadowy corner of the workshop and almost shouted, “Nobody knows we’re alive!”

For the last two years I have been photographing in factories and construction sites, a study of workers at work. The subject is so immense that I did not intend to cover all aspects of the lives of the workers. Their social life and struggles are for a later project. I wanted to show not only the dignity and importance of workers and their work, but also to deal with the joys and anguish attached to productive labor. I hope that whatever I may have accomplished is seen as testimony to the fact that workers are very much alive.”

Louis Sterner, “Workers; From a Portfolio by Louis Sterner,” in World Magazine, November 23, 1974.

Louis Stettner (American, 1922-2016)
Bingo Factory, Long Island City
1972-1974
Gelatin silver image
Courtesy Louis Stettner Archive, Paris
© Louis Stettner Estate

Louis Stettner (American, 1922-2016)
Garment Worker, New Jersey
Nd
Gelatin silver image
Courtesy Louis Stettner Archive, Paris
© Louis Stettner Estate

Louis Stettner (American, 1922-2016)
Attaching Fender, Chrysler Automobile Assembly Plant, Delaware
1972-1974
Gelatin silver image
Courtesy Louis Stettner Archive, Paris
© Louis Stettner Estate

Louis Stettner (American, 1922-2016)
Worker, Bingo Factory, Long Island City
1972-1974
Gelatin silver image
Courtesy Louis Stettner Archive, Paris
© Louis Stettner Estate

Louis Stettner (American, 1922-2016)
Furniture Worker, Long Island City
1972-1974
Gelatin silver image
Courtesy Louis Stettner Archive, Paris
© Louis Stettner Estate

Louis Stettner (American, 1922-2016)
Assembly Line Worker, Long Island City, New York [Trabajadora en cadena de montaje, Nueva York]
1972-1974
Gelatin silver image
31.2 × 21.1cm
Courtesy Louis Stettner Archive, Paris
© Louis Stettner Estate

“In 1974, I started going into factories to photograph workers. I was moved to do this series because people spend most of their time at work, but very few artists follow them there. I also wanted to contribute to the great American tradition of photographing labor done before me by Jacob Reiss and Lewis Hine. I also felt very strongly about working people. They produce everything around us: clothing, food, shelter, yet they were at the bottom of the ladder. Politically they had little power. Economically, they were underpaid if not exploited. It seemed as if there was very little social justice as far as workers were concerned…Yes, my Workers series is my paean of praise, a long heroic poem in homage to working and salaried people everywhere. It was as if I wanted the lyricism of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel brought down to earth, finding it in the everyday factory.”

Louis Stettner quoted on the Louis Stettner Estate website Nd [Online] Cited 01/08/2023

Louis Stettner (American, 1922-2016)
Demonstrators on March in Support of United Farm Workers, New York [Manifestantes en una marcha de apoyo a la Unión de Campesinos, Nueva York]
1975-1976
Gelatin silver image
33.1 × 22.2cm
Courtesy Louis Stettner Archive, Paris
© Louis Stettner Estate

Louis Stettner (American, 1922-2016)
Self-Portrait, Santiago, Chile [Autorretrato, Santiago de Chile]
2000-2001
Gelatin silver image
33.7 × 33.5cm
Cortesía Archivo Louis Stettner, París
© Louis Stettner Estate

From the 1980s to New Millennium

Bowery Series Portraits / Reflections of the City

Among the unique characteristics of Stettner as a photographer is the influence of literature on him and his work, particularly Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass which he first read aged twelve. He shared Whitman’s humanism and the belief that it is possible to find beauty in the everyday and the commonplace. As he himself acknowledged, “I started to read him when I was twelve or thirteen, and have continued to read him all my life, carrying his Leaves of Grass with me in my camera bag when photographing in the streets.” Despite living in Paris for much of his life Stettner was devoted to his native New York and regularly returned there. One the areas that most appealed to him was the Bowery, which he would walk around and where he started to photograph homeless people in the 1980s. Many of the images from this period and those he took in the 1990s in both Paris and New York are characterised in terms of composition by reflections, shadows and off-centre framings, while at the same time the artist aimed to celebrate city life in all its aspects. Stettner’s work can be seen in both poetic and photographic terms; an ode to humanity that reflects his profound empathy and generosity of spirit.

Stettner was attracted in particular to New York City’s disappearing Bowery neighbourhood, where he befriended and photographed the individuals who made up its homeless population. He saw in their faces our contemporary society “waiting to be deciphered” and a “map of humanity” to lead us forward into the future. Many of his photographs from this period are characterised compositionally by reflections, shadows, and off-kilter framing, as he sought to celebrate city life in all its aspects. Sterner embraced Whitman’s faith in his fellow human beings and his belief that “all truths wait in all things,” a conviction that drew him constantly to the streets in search of the fundamental humanity of common people. Stettner’s Whitmanesque view of the world and his profound respect and admiration for its people unifies his diverse body of work and lies at the heart of his artistic vision. His entire oeuvre can be understood in poetic as well as photographic terms, an ode to humanity that reflects his deep empathy and generosity of spirit.

New York Colour: The 2000s

While continuing to work in black and white, in the 1990s Stettner began to experiment with colour photography, both in New York and Paris, moving to the latter city permanently and living there until his death. His use of colour captures the sensory overload of the scenes while the sensation of chaos is evoked through the frequent use of an off-centre composition. In many respects Stettner returned to the same compositional strategies that he had employed in previous series. He photographed workers and ordinary people while his solitary figures particularly evoke the loneliness and alienation of city life.

Les Alpilles, France, 2013-2016

One of Stettner’s final projects centred again on a natural setting. In order to create this work, between 2013 and 2016 he made thirteen trips to the Alpilles in Provence (France) with a large-format camera. For the artist it was a “magical place” and a uniquely photogenic one due to its combination of light and shadow. As he himself said, there is “no other place where nature expresses its imagination better”. In relation to all the other natural settings that he photographed, it was only with the images of the Alpilles that Stettner achieved what he termed the “humanisation of the landscape”. In an exemplary manner these images convey the strength of the trees, twisted and contorted to resist the wind, and the intimate space of the forest’s interior. Aged ninety and no longer able to walk around the city with his camera, Stettner travelled to these mountains with his family during the summer and captured the natural world in all its beauty and splendour, qualities that reflect his state of mind and philosophical reflections at the end of his life.

The catalogue

The catalogue that accompanies the exhibition includes reproductions of all the works on display. It also features texts by the curator, Sally Martin Katz, curator of photography at the SFMOMA, by the writer, curator and university academic David Campany, and by the university professors and writers Karl Orend and James Iffland. Finally, the publication includes a selection of articles by Louis Stettner himself which were published in the American magazine Camera 35.

Text from the Fundación MAPFRE website

Photographs, particularly those of the kind made by Louis Stettner, show what they cannot explain. The world’s appearance – captured and organised as a picture– is preserved, factual yet poetic and elusive. Faces encountered by chance on the subway. Hats on heads thinking thoughts we shall never know, and which the photographer could not have known either. A street corner with memory longer than ours, and much more obscure. In a window display from 1951, a black cat looking mysterious and quite contemporary, as black cats in photographs always seem to do. Café tables, awaiting or recovering from coffees and conversations. A worker’s arm, taut and purposeful. Newspapers brimming with old urgencies. Figures standing, walking or running between the life before and the life after. A ray of light. A crashing wave. We can marvel at Stettner’s spontaneous and empathetic artistry, making pictures out of the almost nothing of everyday life, turning non-moments into something momentous. But photographs have a way of covering their tracks, of cutting themselves free from the life stories from which they came, but which we will never really know: the stories of those people and things photographed, and the photographer’s own story too. Story, or narrative, is what is sacrificed in the making of a still photograph. It is not a loss. What we gain is our own occasion to respond, to fill in the missing pieces for ourselves, or to enjoy what is missing. …

It is clear that across the decades, Stettner preferred to picture solitary individuals, picking them out from their social settings with his camera framing and timing. When there are two or more figures, each seems to be somewhat alone. Even protesters striking against working conditions are isolated by Stettner from the collective crowd. Not always, but often. It is not uncommon for photographers to choose subjects and to photograph them in ways that mirror or express their own internal sense of themselves and their place in the world. Indeed, it is very difficult to avoid this. Stettner was certainly no doctrinaire Marxist, and neither was he some bourgeois flâneur of the urban scene, but there is a tension in his work between the two, as there is for most left-leaning photographers. What is politically committed photography? There are no clear-cut answers, and the question is made more sensitive because the kinds of people that are attracted to becoming photographers are often empathetic outsiders, loners, even social misfits resistant to putting their camera and observation at the service of collective action. For them, the camera is both a passport to the world and a psychological shield from it. The lens and viewfinder are portals of connection but also protecting screens.

Extract from David Campany, “To Value What is in Front of Us. The Photography of Louis Sterner.” Essay commissioned for the catalogue of the retrospective exhibition Louis Stettner, Fundación MAPFRE, Spain, 2023. In Spanish and Catalan. This English version from the David Campany website [Online] Cited 01/08/2023

Louis Stettner (American, 1922-2016)
Women from Texas, Fifth Avenue, New York [Mujeres de Texas, Fifth Avenue, Nueva York]
1975
Gelatin silver image
45.1 × 30.6cm
Cortesía Archivo Louis Stettner, París
© Louis Stettner Estate

Louis Stettner (American, 1922-2016)
Man out of the Shadow, New York (Hombre fur de la sombra, Nueva York)
1980-1981
Gelatin silver image
Cortesía Archivo Louis Stettner, París
© Louis Stettner Estate

Louis Stettner (American, 1922-2016)
Jardin du Luxembourg, Paris [Jardin du Luxembourg, París]
1997
Gelatin silver image
25.2 × 25.2cm
Cortesía Archivo Louis Stettner, París
© Louis Stettner Estate