Exhibition: ‘Cindy Sherman’ at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York

Exhibition dates: 26th February – 11th June 2012

Installation view of the exhibition Cindy Sherman at MoMA, New York showing at left and centre, Cindy Sherman society portraits (2008)

Ceaselessly inventive, the bodies (literally) of work of Cindy Sherman are a wonder to behold. From film stills to head shots, from history portrait to society portraits, Sherman constantly reinvents herself, her variations of identity exploring “the complexity of representation in a world saturated with images,” her iterations into the construction of femininity and masculinity constantly “provocative, disparaging, empathetic, and mysterious.”

Where to next? Her recent series of digitally altered landscapes and portraits (Cindy Sherman at Metro Pictures, New York, April – June 2012) seem less resolved than her earlier work, becoming almost a pastiche of themselves. Despite their massive size they seem to lack resolution, the great female impersonator of our time relying for effect on Self as feminine earth (m)Other, tricked up in dubious, quasi-ethnic regalia. Sherman is almost sacrosanct with regard to criticism but it’s about time someone said it: these images are pretty awful.

After so many simulacra, so many layerings and expositions of identity isn’t it about time Sherman got back to basics and ditched these grandiose notions of identity sublime. The sublimation (an unconscious defence mechanism by which consciously unacceptable instinctual drives are expressed in personally and socially acceptable channels) of her/Self, her actual body, the energy of her (non) presence is finally starting to wear thin. Will the real Cindy Sherman (if ever there is such a thing) please stand up and tell us: what do you really stand for, where as a human being, is your spirit really at?

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

Installation view of the exhibition Cindy Sherman at MoMA, New York showing Cindy Sherman history portraits (1988-1990)

Installation view of the exhibition Cindy Sherman at MoMA, New York showing Cindy Sherman headshots (2000-2002)

Cindy Sherman (American, b. 1954)
Untitled Film Still #21
1978
Gelatin silver print
7 1/2 x 9 1/2″ (19.1 x 24.1cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Horace W. Goldsmith Fund through Robert B. Menschel

Cindy Sherman (American, b. 1954)
Untitled Film Still #6
1977
Gelatin silver print
9 7/16 x 6 1/2″ (24 x 16.5cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Acquired through the generosity of Jo Carole and Ronald S. Lauder in memory of Eugene M. Schwartz

Cindy Sherman (American, b. 1954)
Untitled Film Still #56
1980
Gelatin silver print
6 3/8 x 9 7/16″ (16.2 x 24cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Acquired through the generosity of Jo Carole and Ronald S. Lauder in memory of Mrs. John D. Rockefeller 3rd

Gallery 2

In fall 1977, Sherman began making pictures that would eventually become her groundbreaking Untitled Film Stills. Over three years, the series (presented here in its entirety) grew to comprise a total of seventy black-and-white photographs. Taken as a whole, the Untitled Film Stills – resembling publicity pictures made on movie sets – read like an encyclopaedic roster of stereotypical female roles inspired by 1950s and 1960s Hollywood, film noir, B movies, and European art-house films. But while the characters and scenarios may seem familiar, Sherman’s Stills are entirely fictitious; they represent clichés (career girl, bombshell, girl on the run, vamp, housewife, and so on) that are deeply embedded in the cultural imagination. While the pictures can be appreciated individually, much of their significance comes in the endless variation of identities from one photograph to the next. As a group they explore the complexity of representation in a world saturated with images, and refer to the cultural filter of images (moving and still) through which we see the world.

Wall text from the exhibition

Cindy Sherman (American, b. 1954)
Untitled #137
1984
Chromogenic colour print
70 1/2 x 47 3/4″ (179.1 x 121.3cm)
Philadelphia Museum of Art
Purchased with the Alice Newton Osborn Fund, 1985

Cindy Sherman (American, b. 1954)
Untitled #458
2007-08
Chromogenic colour print
6′ 5 3/8″ x 58 1/4″ (196.5 x 148cm)
Glenstone

Gallery 3

Fashion – a daily form of masquerade that communicates culture, gender, and class – has been a constant source of inspiration for Sherman and a leading ingredient in the creation of her work. Throughout her career the artist has completed a number of commissions for fashion designers and magazines, and this gallery gathers many of these works. Sherman’s fashion pictures challenge the industry’s conventions of beauty and grace. Her first such commission, made in 1983, parodies typical fashion photography. Rather than projecting glamour, sex, or wealth, the pictures feature characters that are far from desirable – whether goofy, hysterical, angry, or slightly mad. Later commissions resulted in more extreme images of characters with bloodshot eyes, bruises, and scars. These exaggerated figures reached ostentatious heights in a 2007-08 commission, in which fashion victims – including steely fashion editors, PR mavens, assistant buyers, and wannabe fashionistas – wear clothing designed by Balenciaga and ham it up for the camera. Sherman’s interest in the construction of femininity and the mass circulation of images informs much of her work; the projects that take fashion as their subject illustrate the artist’s fascination with fashion images but also her critique of what they represent.

Wall text from the exhibition

Cindy Sherman (American, b. 1954)
Untitled #424
2004
Chromogenic colour print
53 3/4 x 54 3/4″ (136.5 x 139.1cm)
Holzer Family Collection

Gallery 5

Sherman, who photographs alone in her studio, has used a variety of techniques to suggest different locations and imaginary (sometimes impossible) spaces, extending the narrative possibilities of her images. In her first foray into colour, in 1980, the artist photographed herself in front of rear-screen projections of various cityscapes and landscapes, evoking films from the 1950s and 1960s that used similar techniques to create the illusion of a change in location. In later series, such as the head shots (2000-2002), clowns (2003-04), and society portraits (2008), the artist used digital tools to create a variety of environments. The garish fluorescent colours in a clown picture contribute to the disturbing quality of the portrait, while a fairy tale forest provides a dreamy backdrop for a well-to-do lady.

Wall text from the exhibition

The Museum of Modern Art presents the exhibition Cindy Sherman, a retrospective tracing the groundbreaking artist’s career from the mid-1970s to the present, from February 26 to June 11, 2012. The exhibition brings together 171 key photographs from the artist’s significant series – including the complete Untitled Film Stills (1977-80), the critically acclaimed centerfolds (1981), and the celebrated history portraits (1988-90) – plus examples from all of her most important bodies of work, ranging from her fashion photography of the early 1980s to the breakthrough sex pictures of 1992 to her 2003-04 clowns and monumental society portraits from 2008. In addition, the exhibition features the American premiere of her 2010 photographic mural. An exhibition of films drawn from MoMA’s collection selected by Sherman will also be presented in the Museum’s theatres in April. Cindy Sherman is organised by Eva Respini, Associate Curator, with Lucy Gallun, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Photography, The Museum of Modern Art.

Cindy Sherman is widely considered to be one of the most important and influential artists of our time and her work is the unchallenged cornerstone of post-modern photography. Masquerading as a myriad of characters in front of her own camera, Sherman creates invented personas and tableaus that examine the construction of identity, the nature of representation, and the artifice of photography. Her works speak to an increasingly image-saturated world, drawing on the unlimited supply of visual material provided by movies, television, magazines, the Internet, and art history.

Ms. Respini says, “To create her photographs, Sherman works unassisted in her studio and assumes multiple roles as photographer, model, art director, make-up artist, hairdresser, and stylist. Whether portraying a career girl or a blond bombshell, a fashion victim or a clown, a French aristocrat or a society lady of a certain age, for over 35 years this relentlessly adventurous artist has created an eloquent and provocative body of work that resonates deeply with our visual culture.”

The American premiere of Sherman’s recent photographic mural (2010) will be installed outside the galleries on the sixth floor. The mural represents the artist’s first foray into transforming space through site-specific fictive environments. In the mural Sherman transforms her face via digital means, exaggerating her features through Photoshop by elongating her nose, narrowing her eyes, or creating smaller lips. The characters, who sport an odd mix of costumes and are taken from daily life, are elevated to larger-than-life status and tower over the viewer. Set against a decorative toile backdrop, her characters seem like protagonists from their own carnivalesque worlds, where fantasy and reality merge. The emphasis on new work presents an opportunity for reassessment in light of the latest developments in Sherman’s oeuvre.

Entering the galleries, the exhibition strays from a chronological narrative typical of retrospectives, and groups photographs thematically to create new and surprising juxtapositions and to suggest common threads across several series. A gallery devoted to her work made for the fashion industry brings together commissions from 1983 to 2011. Sherman’s interest in the construction of femininity and mass circulation of images informs much of the work that takes fashion as its subject, illustrating not only a fascination with fashion images but also a critical stance against what they represent. A gallery exploring themes of the grotesque focuses on bodies of work from the mid-1980s through the mid-1990s, including disasters (1986-89) and sex pictures (1992). Sherman’s investigation of macabre narratives followed a trajectory of the physical disintegration of the body, and features prosthetic parts as a stand-in for the human body. A gallery devoted to Sherman’s exploration of myth, carnival, and fairy tales pairs works from her 2003 clowns with her 1985 fairy tales series. These theatrical pictures revel in their own artificiality, with menacing characters and fantastical narratives.

Galleries devoted to single bodies of work are interspersed among the thematic rooms. Sherman’s seminal series the Untitled Film Stills, comprising 70 black-and-white photographs made between 1977 and 1980, are presented in their entirety (the complete series is in MoMA’s collection). Made to look like publicity pictures taken on movie sets, the Untitled Film Stills read like an encyclopaedic roster of female roles inspired by 1950s and 1960s Hollywood, film noir, B movies, and European art-house films. While the characters and scenarios may seem familiar, Sherman’s Stills are entirely fictitious. Her characters represent deeply embedded clichés (career girl, bombshell, girl on the run, housewife, and so on) and rely on the persistence of recognisable manufactured stereotypes that loom large in the cultural imagination.

Other series presented in depth include Sherman’s 1981 series of 12-colour photographs known as the centerfolds. Originally commissioned by Artforum magazine, these send-ups of men’s erotic magazine centerfolds depict characters in a variety of emotional states, ranging from terrified to heartbroken to melancholic. With this series, Sherman plays into the male conditioning of looking at photographs of exposed women, but she turns this on its head by taking on the roles of both (assumed) male photographer and female pinup. The history portraits investigate the relationships between painter and model, and are featured in depth in the exhibition. These theatrical portraits borrow from a number of art historical periods, from Renaissance, Baroque, Rococo, and Neoclassical. This free-association sampling creates an illusion of familiarity, but not with any one specific era or style (just as the Untitled Film Stills evoke generic types, not particular films). The subjects (for the first time, many are men) include aristocrats, Madonna and child, clergymen, women of leisure, and milkmaids, who pose with props, elaborate costumes, and obvious prostheses.

Sherman has explored the experience of ageing in a youth- and status-obsessed society with several bodies of work made since 2000. For her headshots from 2000-2002 (sometimes called Hollywood / Hamptons), the artist conceived a cast of characters of would-be or has-been actors (in reality secretaries, housewives, or gardeners) posing for head shots to get an acting job. With this series, Sherman underscores the transformative qualities of makeup, hair, expression, and pose, and the recognition of certain stereotypes as powerful transmitters of cultural clichés. Her monumental 2008 society portraits feature women “of a certain age” from the top echelons of society who struggle with today’s impossible standards of beauty. The psychological weight of these pictures comes through in the unrelenting honesty of the description of ageing and the small details that belie the attempt to project a certain appearance. In the infinite possibilities of the mutability of identity, these pictures stand out for their ability to be at once provocative, disparaging, empathetic, and mysterious.

Press release from the MoMA website

Cindy Sherman (American, b. 1954)
Untitled #193
1989
Chromogenic colour print
48 7/8 x 41 15/16″ (124.1 x 106.5cm)
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection

Cindy Sherman (American, b. 1954)
Untitled #213
1989
Chromogenic colour print
41 1/2 x 33″ (105.4 x 83.8cm)
Courtesy the artist and Metro Pictures, New York

Cindy Sherman (American, b. 1954)
Untitled #216
1989
Chromogenic colour print
7′ 3 1/8″ x 56 1/8″ (221.3 x 142.5cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Werner and Elaine Dannheisser

Gallery 7

Sherman’s history portraits (1988-90) investigate modes of representation in art history and the relationship between painter and model. These classically composed portraits borrow from a number of art-historical periods – Renaissance, baroque, rococo, Neoclassical – and make allusions to paintings by Raphael, Caravaggio, Fragonard, and Ingres (who, like all the Old Masters, were men). This free-association sampling creates a sense of familiarity, but not of any one specific era or style. The subjects (for the first time for Sherman, many are men) include aristocrats, Madonnas with child, clergymen, women of leisure, and milk-maids, who pose with props, costumes, and obvious prostheses. Theatrical and artificial – full of large noses, bulging bellies, squirting breasts, warts, and unibrows – the history portraits are poised between humorous parody and grotesque caricature.

A handful of Sherman’s portraits were inspired by actual paintings. Untitled #224 was made after Caravaggio’s Sick Bacchus (c. 1593), which is commonly believed to be a self-portrait of the artist as the Roman god of wine. In Sherman’s reinterpretation, the numerous layers of representation – a female artist impersonating a male artist impersonating a pagan divinity – create a sense of remove, pastiche, and criticality. Even where Sherman’s pictures offer a gleam of art-historical recognition, she has inserted her own interpretation of the canonised paintings, creating contemporary artefacts of a bygone era.

Wall text from the exhibition

Cindy Sherman (American, b. 1954)
Untitled #359
2000
Chromogenic color print
30 x 20″ (76.2 x 50.8cm)
Collection Metro Pictures, New York

Gallery 8

After almost a decade of staging still lifes with dolls and props, in her 2000-2002 head-shots series Sherman returned to a more intimate scale and to using herself as a model. The format recalls ID pictures, head shots, or vanity portraits made in garden-variety portrait studios by professional photographers. First exhibited in Beverly Hills, the series explores the cycle of desire and failed ambition that permeates Hollywood. Sherman conceived a cast of would-be or has-been female actors posing for head shots in order to get acting jobs; later, for an exhibition in New York, she added East Coast types. Whichever part of the country they’re from, we’ve seen these women before – on reality television, in soap operas, or at a PTA meeting. With these pictures, Sherman underscores the transformative qualities of makeup, hair, expression, and pose, and the power of stereotypes as transmitters of cultural clichés. She projects well-drawn personas: the enormous pouting lips of the woman in Untitled #360 suggest a yearning for youth, while the glittery makeup and purple iridescent dress worn by the character in Untitled #400 indicate an aspiration to reach a certain social status. In her role as both sitter and photographer, Sherman has disrupted the usual power dynamic between model and photographer and created new avenues through which to explore the very apparatus of portrait photography itself.

Cindy Sherman (American, b. 1954)
Untitled #465
2008
Chromogenic colour print
63 3/4 x 57 1/4″ (161.9 x 145.4cm)
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
Purchase, with funds from the Painting and Sculpture Committee and the Photography Committee, 2009

Cindy Sherman (American, b. 1954)
Untitled #466
2008
Chromogenic colour print

Cindy Sherman (American, b. 1954)
Untitled #474
2008
Chromogenic colour print
7′ 7″ x 60 1/4″ (231.1 x 153cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Acquired through the generosity of an anonymous donor, Michael Lynne, Charles Heilbronn, and the Carol and David Appel Family Fund

Gallery 10

Set against opulent backdrops and presented in ornate frames, the characters in Sherman’s 2008 society portraits seem at once tragic and vulgar. The figures are not based on specific women, but the artist has made them look entirely familiar in their struggle with the impossible standards of beauty that prevail in a youth – and status – obsessed culture. At this large scale, it is easy to decipher the characters’ vulnerability behind the makeup, clothes, and jewellery. The psychological weight of these pictures comes through the unrelenting honesty of their description of ageing, the tell-tale signs of cosmetic alteration, and the small details that belie the characters’ attempts to project a polished and elegant appearance. Upon careful viewing, they reveal a dark reality lurking beneath the glossy surface of perfection. As with much of her work, in her society portraits Sherman has demonstrated a remarkable capacity to channel the zeitgeist. These well-heeled divas presaged the financial collapse of 2008, the end of an era of opulence – the size of the photographs alone seems a commentary on an age of excess. Among the numerous iterations of contemporary identity, these pictures stand out as at once provocative, disparaging, empathetic, and mysterious.

Wall text from the exhibition

Cindy Sherman (American, b. 1954)
Untitled #475
2008
Chromogenic colour print
7′ 2 3/8″ x 71 1/2″ (219.4 x 181.6cm)
The Broad Art Foundation, Santa Monica

Gallery 11

Because the majority of Sherman’s pictures feature the artist as model, they showcase a single character. In the 1970s Sherman experimented with cutouts of multiple figures, in her whimsical 1975 stop-motion animated short film Doll Clothes and her rarely seen 1976 collages, which were achieved through a labor-intensive process of cutting and pasting multiple photographs. When Sherman began working digitally in the early 2000s, she was able to more easily incorporate multiple figures in one frame, allowing for a variety of new narrative possibilities. Where the early works chart the movements and gestures of a single character through space, the multiple figures in recent works interact with one another to create tableaus.

Wall text from the exhibition

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Exhibition: ‘Behind the Curtain – The Aesthetics of the Photobooth’ at the Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne

Exhibition dates: February – 20th May 2012

Artists:  Jean-Michel Alberola, Louis Aragon, Marie-Berthe Aurenche, Richard Avedon, Alain Baczynsky, Jared Bark, Marc Bellini, Jacques-André Boiffard, André Breton, Hansjürg Buchmeier, Anita Cruz-Eberhard, Sabine Delafon, Anne Deleporte, Paul Eluard, Max Ernst, Michael Fent, Michel Folco, Valentine Fournier, Lee Friedlander, Näkki Goranin, Jeff Grostern, Susan Hiller, Dick Jewell , Svetlana Khachaturova, Jürgen Klauke, Jacques-Henri Lartigue, Naomi Leibowitz, Leon Levinstein, Annette Messager, Willy Michel, Daniel Minnick, Suzanne Muzard, Raynal Pellicer, Mathieu Pernot, Steven Pippin, Jacques Prévert, Raymond Queneau, Arnulf Rainer, Timm Rautert, Bruno Richard, Gerhard Richter, Thomas Ruff, Michel Salsmann, Tomoko Sawada, Joachim Schmid, Cindy Sherman, Lorna Simpson, Dimitri Soulas, Yves Tanguy, Amanda Tetrault, Roland Topor, Franco Vaccari, Andy Warhol, Gillian Wearing, Jan Wenzel, David Wojnarowicz and the group Fluxus.

Franco Vaccari (Italian, b. 1936)
Esposizione in tempo reale num. 4: Lascia su queste pareti una traccia fotografica del tuo passaggio (Exhibition in real time: leave a photographic sign of your passage on these walls) (detail)
1972
Collage of photobooths mounted on cardboard, gelatin silver prints
45.5 x 58.5cm
© Franco Vaccari, property of the Artist

This is one exhibition I wish I could really see in person. Such a fascinating subject!

The images are timeless, contextless and quite beguiling. The exhibition questions the aesthetics of the photobooth through six major themes: The Booth, Automatism, The Strip, Who Am I?, Who Are You?, Who Are We?. In Melbourne there are still two black and white photobooths outside the Elizabeth Street exit of Flinders Street railway station, standing there like silent sentinels of a bygone age. I remember when I was younger queueing to have my photograph taken, for student cards and for my first passport. You needed two nearly identical black and white shoulder up portraits, no smiling, no glasses on. Now you just go to the chemist for your colour renditions. The magic and the fun has gone.

The whole performance has the illusion of the cinematic. You queue to get in, drawing back the curtain and closing it behind you, as they close the doors of the cinema. The privacy of the booth, not in darkness but behind a curtain that shields your face from prying eyes but leaves the lower half of your body exposed. Behind where you will be sitting another curtain – drawn or open? What background do you want? You adjust the seat up and down so that your face is at the correct level with the mark on the screen, enter your money and wait. The red light comes on, you (com)pose yourself and a couple of seconds later: flash! Your eyes try to recover in time for the next red light: flash!

Time seems to slow down and almost stop between the flashes of light. The experience of your performance before the screen possesses such a visceral, tense, gut feel but also a disembodied feeling. I never know how I am going to look on the cinematic film strip, not at 24 frames a second, but at 4 frames per minute. What happens to the time in between? Standing outside the booth waiting for a strip of paper with your impression on it, not knowing what the images are going to be like, whether the development of the image in such a short space of time has worked correctly – and the smell of the chemicals on the paper as you handle the still wet strip. Magic…

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to the Musée de l’Elysée for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Mathieu Pernot (French, b. 1970)
Jonathan, Mickael, Priscilla, cabine du photomaton (Jonathan, Mickael, Priscilla, Photobooth)
1996
Three gelatin silver prints
540 x 195cm
© Mathieu Pernot / collection Musée de l’Élysée, Lausanne

Cindy Sherman (American, b. 1954)
Untitled
1975
Gelatin silver print
30.5 x 20.4cm
© Courtesy of the Artist, Metro Pictures, collection Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne

Gillian Wearing (English, b. 1963)
Self Portrait at 17 Years Old
2003
Framed C-type print
115.5 x 92cm
Collection of Contemporary Art Fundació ‘La Caixa’, Barcelone
© Gillian Wearing, courtesy Maureen Paley, London

Anne Deleporte (French, b. 1960)
I.D. Stack #6
1992
Stack of photobooth portraits, gelatin silver and chromogenic prints
6 x 5 x 3cm
© Anne Deleporte

When the first photobooths were set up in Paris in 1928, the Surrealists used them heavily and compulsively. In a few minutes, and for a small price, the machine offered them, through a portrait, an experience similar to automatic writing. Since then, generations of artists have been fascinated by the concept of the photobooth. From Andy Warhol to Arnulf Rainer, Thomas Ruff, Cindy Sherman and Gillian Wearing, many used it to play with their identity, tell stories, or simply create worlds.

Behind the Curtain – the Aesthetics of the Photobooth, an exhibition created by the Musée de l’Elysée, is the first to focus on the aesthetics of the photobooth. It is divided into six major themes: the booth, the automated process, the strip, who am I ?, who are you?, who are we? Provider of standardised legal portraits, it is the ideal tool for introspection and reflection on others, whether individually or in groups. By bringing together over 600 pieces made on different media (photographs, paintings, lithographs and videos ) from sixty international artists, the exhibition reveals the influence of the photobooth within the artistic community, from its inception to the present day.

The exhibition questions the aesthetics of the photobooth through six major themes.

The Booth

An isolated space, closed in as if it were some sort of modern confessional, the photobooth is an invitation to the most intimate revelations. Generally located in public spaces-subway station, department store or train station-it also offers an extraordinary observation point onto the urban hustle and bustle. It is a world in between the intimate and the public, the inside and the outside, the debarred and the open.

Automatism

From the Surrealists to the most contemporary artists, all have been fascinated by the automatism of the photobooth. The machine does the work. The author vanishes behind the almighty technology. Malfunction can occur at times. The result is a form of poetry of the automatism made visible in its faults, failures or blunders.

The Strip

As a series of juxtaposed images, the strip recreates spatial or temporal continuities. It reconstructs improbable spaces: a closer look shows that, in fact, the adjacent image is the following image. Through this succession of images, the photobooth holds, as if folded into it, the principle of the cinema. Putting images side by side is already telling a story.

Who am I?

Identity is embodied within the space of the photobooth. It is a space for self-staging, where social, ethnic, sexual, community or any other identity can be strengthened or undone. One can pretend to ascertain one’s naked identity through the mirror of the photobooth, or on the contrary, by pulling faces or in disguise, to establish metamorphoses of the self. The photobooth is the ideal introspective tool.

Who are you?

The photobooth is not only a place suitable for self-reflection, it is also a place in which the other can be questioned, in particular through the legal identification system that delivers what is commonly referred to as ‘ID’. In devoting oneself to the compulsive and bulimic collecting of photobooth strips, one can also get lost in the faces of others.

Who are we?

While it allows us to reflect upon our own identity, or other people’s, the photobooth is also an opportunity to ponder about the nature of the couple, or the group. Inside the booth, some build their image through the mirror of the other, or of others; they pose in pairs or more, thus asserting their affiliation to a social entity. The photobooth reinforces our gregarious instinct; it embodies collective identity.

With works by Jacques-Henri Lartigue, Willy Michel, Lorna Simpson, Amanda Tetrault and the collection of albums of purikuras (see photograph below: in Japan, the name purikuras refers to a photo sticker booth or the product of such a photo booth. The name is a shortened form of the registered trademark Purinto Kurabu (プリント倶楽部). The term derives from the English print club. Jointly developed by Atlus and Sega, the first purikura machines were sold in July 1995).

Press release from the Musée de l’Elysée website

Anonymous
Collection of albums of purikuras
1995-2010
Collection of digital images printed on stickers mounted in booklets
Various sizes from 9 x 12.8cm to 11.9 x 14.5cm
© Kenji Hirasawa (art collector)

Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987)
Frances Lewis
1966
Acrylic and silkscreen on linen, 12 panels
162.5 x 167.6cm
© Collection The Sydney and Frances Lewis Foundation / 2011
The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Artists Rights Society ( ARS ), New York

Jan Wenzel (German, b. 1972)
Vohang (Curtain)
2009
From the series Instant History
Montage of four photobooth prints, chromogenic prints
41.7 x 31.7cm
© Jan Wenzel / Kleinschmidt Fine Photographs

Yves Tanguy (French, 1900-1955)
Selfportrait in a Photobooth
c. 1929
Gelatin silver print
20.5 x 3.8cm
© Collection Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne / 2011, ProLitteris, Zurich

Anonymous
Walter and I at the BIG SLIDE
c. 1970
Gelatin silver print
c. 20.5 x 3.8cm
© Collection Näkki Goranin

Arnulf Rainer (Austrian, b. 1929)
No title (Automatenportraits)
August 1969
Courtesy Galerie m Bochum
© Arnulf Rainer

Alain Baczynsky (Belgian, b. 1953)
Regardez, il va peut-être se passer quelque chose… (Look, maybe it will be something going on…)
1979-1981
© Collection Centre Pompidou, dist. RMN

Susan Hiller (American-born artist who lived in London, 1940-2019)
Midnight, Euston
1983
© Susann Hiller; Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre, London

Jan Wenzel (German, b. 1972)
Bastler II
2000
© Jan Wenzel & Kleinschmidt Fine Photographs

Musée de l’Elysée
18, avenue de l’Elysée CH
1014 Lausanne
Phone: + 41 21 316 99 11

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Exhibition: ‘Pieter Hugo: This must be the place’ at The Hague Museum of Photography, The Netherlands

Exhibition dates: 3rd March – 20th May 2012

Pieter Hugo (South African, b. 1976)
Mallam Mantari Lamal with Mainasara, Abuja
2005-2007
From the series The Hyena & Other Men
© Courtesy of Stevenson Gallery, Kaapstad / Yossi Milo, New York

Sexy, scary and very sad.

The hand of the monkey Clear on the thigh of Dayaba Usman (see second photograph below) – and the look on his face – makes one wonder who is really in chains.

Marcus

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

Pieter Hugo (South African, b. 1976)
Dayaba Usman with the monkey Clear, Abuja
2005-2007
From the series The Hyena & Other Men
© Courtesy of Stevenson Gallery, Kaapstad / Yossi Milo, New York

Pieter Hugo (South African, b. 1976)
Mummy Ahmadu and a snake charmer with a rock python, Abuja
2005-2007
From the series The Hyena & Other Men
© Courtesy of Stevenson Gallery, Kaapstad / Yossi Milo, New York

The South African photographer Pieter Hugo’s (1976) monumental photographs, centred around contemporary Africa, are now well known around the world. He has already won numerous awards including the KLM Paul Huf award in 2008 and was recently nominated for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2012. The Hague Museum of Photography will be the first museum to exhibit a comprehensive survey of Hugo’s work from 2002-2011. Together with many previously unseen works, the exhibition will include a curated selection of his most well-known series: The Hyena & Other Men, the bizarre Nollywood and the striking Permanent Error. His impressive portraits tell personal stories about recurring themes throughout his oeuvre, namely those people who inhabit the margins of society in Sub-Saharan Africa.   The differences between the West and Africa, rich and poor, white and black are confronted in Hugo’s vivid compositions. Many of his series are prompted by newspaper articles, or radio and television pieces, which he finds compelling. He came in contact, for instance with the group of men who travel around Nigeria with hyenas and pythons, through an image sent via cell phone camera by a friend. He decided to accompany the group on their travels, and the outcome of this experience is The Hyena & Other Men (2005-2007), a series of portraits from a travelling group of street performers, who together with their – sometimes forcefully – tamed animals earn money to continue travelling.

In the series Permanent Error (2009-2010) he offers portraits of young men and woman who live amidst an immense waste dump of broken computers, mother boards and keyboards. To earn money these young people burn the computers dumped here as a means to extract valuable metals. The dangerous and poisonous vapours produce a hell on earth, where the quality of life is already challenging. The people who pose for Hugo stand in front of the camera with a defiant self-confidence.

From a different perspective comes his series about Nollywood (2008-2009) in Nigeria, the biggest film industry in the world after Hollywood and Bollywood. Here, stories that have for centuries been part of an oral tradition are told in dramatic films in which a central role is reserved for themes such as romance, witchcraft, bribery and prostitution. It is this world, where the everyday and the surreal exist simultaneously, that Hugo finds fascinating. In this series Hugo depicts actors and assistants posing in the role of movie characters. The result is an absurd tableau such as a photo of a half-naked woman sitting on a bed with a bloody knife stuck between her breasts. All the while she stares blankly at the camera. In another image, a woman well-dressed in Nigerian clothing sits completely unfazed by the man next to her made-up as the devil.

Press release from The Hague Museum of Photography website

Pieter Hugo (South African, b. 1976)
Escort Kama, Enugu
2008-2009
From the series Nollywood
© Courtesy of Stevenson Gallery, Kaapstad / Yossi Milo, New York

Pieter Hugo (South African, b. 1976)
Obechukwu Nwoye, Enugu
2008-2009
From the series Nollywood
© Courtesy of Stevenson Gallery, Kaapstad / Yossi Milo, New York

Pieter Hugo (South African, b. 1976)
Abdulai Yahaya, Agbogbloshie Market, Accra
2009-2010
From the series Permanent Error
© Courtesy of Stevenson Gallery, Kaapstad / Yossi Milo, New York

Pieter Hugo (South African, b. 1976)
David Akore, Agbogbloshie Market, Accra
2009-2010
From the series Permanent Error
© Courtesy of Stevenson Gallery, Kaapstad / Yossi Milo, New York

The Hague Museum of Photography
Stadhouderslaan 43
2517 HV Den Haag
Phone: 31 (0)70 – 33 811 44

Opening hours:
Tuesday – Sunday, 11am – 5pm
Closed Mondays

The Hague Museum of Photography website

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Exhibition: ‘Andy Warhol: Polaroids / MATRIX 240’ at Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, University of California

Exhibition dates: 27th January – 20th May 2012

PLEASE NOTE: This posting contains nude photographs. If you do not like please do not look!

Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987)
Untitled
Pages 8 and 9 of The Andy Warhol Photographic Legacy Program, Vol. III
of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Twenty-Year Report, 1987–2007

ONE PERSON has found one of the images below offensive; so just for them please note that his posting has a PENIS and A-RRRRRR-SE rating. For all others, enjoy another spectacular Andy posting!

Marcus

Many thankx to BAM/PFA for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image (especially the two images directly below). View the complete The Andy Warhol Photographic Legacy Program Vol. III as a pdf (3.7Mb pdf)

“I’ve never met a person I couldn’t call a beauty.”

Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987)
Untitled
Pages 38 and 39 of The Andy Warhol Photographic Legacy Program, Vol. III
of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Twenty-Year Report, 1987–2007

The University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive presents Andy Warhol: Polaroids / MATRIX 240. The exhibition features a selection of Warhol’s Polaroid portraits drawn from an extraordinary gift of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts to the museum. From 1970 to 1987, Warhol, armed with his Polaroid Big Shot camera, captured a wide range of individuals – the royalty, rock stars, executives, artists, patrons of the arts, and athletes who epitomised seventies and eighties high society, but also as many unknown subjects. From January 27 through May 20, 2012, BAM/PFA will feature a group of approximately forty of these photographs, including portraits of Caroline, Princess of Monaco; Diane von Furstenberg; and O.J. Simpson.

Famous for his contributions to Pop Art, Warhol used photography as a central part of his art-making process. Before turning to fine art, Warhol worked in advertising and commercial art, experiences that informed his approach to portraiture. In 1962, he debuted his first silkscreen paintings of celebrities, serialising pictures he pulled from magazines and press photos. In addition to using found images, Warhol eventually incorporated his own photography into his practice. In 1969 he launched inter/View magazine, which featured his photos of celebrities. By the 1970s and 1980s, portrait commissions were a major source of his income, and many of his Polaroids would serve as the basis for these works.

While each of the images in Andy Warhol: Polaroids is unique, the consistency of composition, poses, and plain white backdrop equalises the superstars and lesser-known subjects. To Warhol, they were all beautiful people. But even within this uniform staging, we see the artist finding numerous ways to create memorable, varied, and iconic compositions. Though these photos may be small in size, together the Warhol Polaroids provide a glimpse into the artistic process of one of the twentieth century’s most important artists.

From 1970 to 1987 Andy Warhol took scores of Polaroid and black-and-white photographs, the vast majority of which were never seen by the public. These images often served as the basis for his commissioned portraits, silk-screen paintings, drawings, and prints. In 2007, to commemorate its twentieth anniversary, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts launched the Andy Warhol Photographic Legacy Program. Designed to give a broad public greater access to Warhol’s photographs, the program donated over 28,500 of Warhol’s original Polaroids and gelatin silver prints to more than 180 college and university museums and galleries across the country. Each institution received a curated selection of over one hundred Polaroids and fifty black-and-white prints.

The number of images he took at each session varied as greatly as the figures he photographed. Repetition, a recurring motif in Warhol’s paintings, plays both a conceptual and practical role in his photography. By making several Polaroids, he had more material from which to work. By shooting at length, more about the sitter was exposed. Seen all together, the Polaroids destabilise the iconic status that a Warhol image assumes when displayed singly. On its own, a Polaroid image is fully identified with the artwork that ultimately grew out of it; the face depicted becomes a kind of signifier for larger cultural concepts of beauty, power, and worth.

Text adapted from “Andy Warhol’s Photographic Legacy,” in The Andy Warhol Photographic Legacy Program, Vol. III of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Twenty-Year Report, 1987-2007 (New York: The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc, 2007), 4-5.

View the complete Vol. III as a pdf (3.7Mb pdf)

Text and press release from the BAM/PFA website

Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987)
Billy Squier
1982
Polacolor 2
4 1/4 x 3 3/8 in
Gift of the The Andy Warhol Center for the Visual Arts
© The Andy Warhol Center for the Visual Arts

Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987)
Daryl Lillie
11/1978
Polacolor 2
4 14 x 3 3/8 in
© The Andy Warhol Center for the Visual Arts

Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987)
Heather Watts
after June 1986
Polacolor ER
4 1/4 x 3 3/8 in
© The Andy Warhol Center for the Visual Arts

From 1970 to 1987 Andy Warhol took thousands of Polaroid pictures, the vast majority of which were never seen by the public. These images often served as the basis for his commissioned portraits, silkscreen paintings, drawings, and prints. Warhol captured a wide range of individuals with his Polaroid Big Shot camera. The royalty, rock stars, industrialists, artists, patrons of the arts, and athletes who epitomised 1970s and 1980s high society, as well as unknown sitters, are represented with a sense of dignity and verve. Warhol was interested in a new definition of “Society” that emerged in this period. In the introduction to the 1979 publication Andy Warhol’s Exposures, the artist wrote:

“Now it doesn’t matter if you came over on the Mayflower, so long as you can get into Studio 54. Anyone rich, powerful, beautiful, or famous can get into Society. If you’re a few of those things you can really get to the top.”1

Warhol’s images not only documented, but participated in, the creation of this new social world, satisfying both the need of his subjects to be seen and the desire of the viewer to gain access to this milieu through the act of looking. Warhol worked in advertising and commercial art before turning to fine art, experiences that informed his approach to portraiture. In 1962, he debuted his first silk-screen paintings of celebrities, serialising pictures appropriated from magazines or press photos of the time. In addition to employing found images, Warhol eventually incorporated photography into his practice and, in 1969, started a magazine (originally called inter/VIEW) that often featured his own photographs of celebrities. By the 1970s and 1980s, portrait commissions became a main source of his income.

Warhol’s Polaroids are strikingly intimate, an effect achieved in part by his personal relationship with the sitters and in part by formal aspects of the images. The artist often provided a luncheon in advance of the photo session, establishing a bond with his subject and a tone for the shoot. In the resulting Polaroids, the sitter is in direct eye contact with Warhol and the camera. The strong sense of immediacy created by the sitter’s open gaze is enhanced by the tight compositions in which the subject, pressed up close to the picture plane, is isolated from any context. A feeling of vulnerability appears in some of the portraits (as suggested by the bared shoulders of Unidentified woman (blond with bangs), for example), indicating a willingness to be exposed as well as the seductive nature of the artist and the photo shoot itself. The closeness forged between photographer and sitter and captured by the camera offers an illusion of sharing these private moments and of entering into Warhol’s circle of beautiful people and their glamorous lives.

While each image is unique, the consistency of composition, poses, and plain white backdrop equalises the celebrities and the unknown subjects of Warhol’s Polaroids. After all, to Warhol, they were all beautiful people. Polaroids of individuals who are not immediately recognisable pique our curiosity. Who is the enigmatic Frau Buch? Like many of Warhol’s subjects, she is photographed with a prop. The small dog that she hugs may not identify her, but it suggests a dimension of her personality. In other Polaroids, Warhol used props as identifying elements like the attributes in Renaissance portraiture – major-league baseball pitcher Tom Seaver is shown with his mitt and NFL legend O.J. Simpson clutches a football. The teddy bear in the arms of the subject of Unidentified girl (blue t-shirt with teddy bear) represents an aspect childhood that everyone can relate to, although the girl is actually a scion of the new high society: Jade, the daughter of Mick and Bianca Jagger.

Warhol’s Polaroids were designed to be source material for his canvases. He would direct the sitter in a series of poses, which gave the artist ample material from which to create the subsequent silkscreen portraits. Subjects such as fashion designer Diane Von Furstenberg and patron of the arts Daryl Lillie are photographed wearing thick white makeup, black eyeliner, and bright red lipstick that evoke the stage or a high-fashion photo shoot; however, the makeup also served to flatten the images for a smooth effect in the screen-print transfer. The Polaroid Big Shot’s strong flash overexposes many images and increases the contrast, an effect Warhol deployed in the subsequent silkscreens; the flash also seems to catch each sitter – celebrities and unknowns alike – in the sudden glare of a paparazzo’s camera.

Warhol’s Polaroids borrow from paparazzi and high-fashion photography and at the same time elevate an inexpensive, everyday medium to the realm of high art. Warhol embossed his name in capital letters in the lower right-hand border of most of the Polaroids, marking them as a painter would sign a canvas. For Warhol, coming from the world of advertising, this was also a kind of branding. He wrote of Jade Jagger: “She never calls me Andy always Andywarhol, as if it were one word – or a brand name, which I wish it were.”2 Warhol’s portraits confuse the boundaries of advertising and art, high and low, celebrity portraiture and the depiction of everyday people, and even photography and painting. His subjects are perpetually illuminated by the afterimage of a flashbulb, their faces immortalised by Warhol’s style

Fabian Leyva-Barragan, Curatorial Intern
Stephanie Cannizzo, Assistant Curator

1/ Warhol, Andy and Colacello, Bob . Andy Warhol’s Exposures (New York: Andy Warhol Books / Grosset & Dunlop, Inc., 1979), p. 19

2/ Ibid., pp. 28-29

Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987)
John Lennon
1971
Polacolor ER
4 1/4 x 3 3/8 in
Gift of the The Andy Warhol Center for the Visual Arts
© The Andy Warhol Center for the Visual Arts

Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987)
Apollonia Von Ravenstein
c. 1979
Polacolor ER
4 1/4 x 3 3/8 in
Gift of the The Andy Warhol Center for the Visual Arts
© The Andy Warhol Center for the Visual Arts

Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987)
Sylvester Stallone
2/1980
Polacolor ER
4 1/4 x 3 3/8 in
Gift of the The Andy Warhol Center for the Visual Arts
© The Andy Warhol Center for the Visual Arts

Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987)
Pia Zadora
1983
Polacolor ER
4 1/4 x 3 3/8 in
Gift of the The Andy Warhol Center for the Visual Arts
© The Andy Warhol Center for the Visual Arts

Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987)
Tom Seaver
1977
Polacolor Type 108
4 14 x 3 3/8 in
Gift of the The Andy Warhol Center for the Visual Arts
© The Andy Warhol Center for the Visual Arts

Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987)
R.C. Gorman
1979
Polacolor Type 108
4 1/4 x 3 3/8 in
© The Andy Warhol Center for the Visual Arts

Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

BAMPFA is located at 2155 Center Street
between Oxford Street and Shattuck Avenue, in downtown Berkeley
Phone: (510) 642-0808

Opening hours:
Wednesday – Sunday, 11am – 7pm
Closed Mondays and Tuesdays

Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive website

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Exhibition: ‘The Mind’s Eye: 50 Years of Photography by Jerry Uelsmann’ at Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA

Exhibition dates: 11th February – 15th July, 2012

Jerry Uelsmann (American, 1934-2022)
Untitled (Pigeon Hill, Bloomington, Indiana)
1958-1959
Gelatin silver print
5 3/8 x 9 1/8 in (13.6 x 23.3cm)
© Jerry Uelsmann

More wonderful photographs from this magnificent photographer as featured in this touring exhibition. It is invaluable to see other images from the artist’s oeuvre (especially early work from the 1950s to observe thematic development), not just the most famous of the surreal montages. Untitled (1966, below) is an absolute ripper that I have never seen before while Untitled (1959, bottom) is as disturbing in a fantastical way as any of Joel-Peter Witkins’ theatrical tableaux vivant.

See my other posting on this exhibition from the Harn Museum of Art, Florida.

Marcus

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

Jerry Uelsmann (American, 1934-2022)
Room #1
1963
Gelatin silver print
9 1/8 x 13 3/4 in (23.3 x 34.8cm)
© Jerry Uelsmann

Jerry Uelsmann (American, 1934-2022)
Untitled
1966
Gelatin silver print
6 1/2 x 6 5/8 in (16.6 x 16.8cm)
© Jerry Uelsmann

Jerry Uelsmann (American, 1934-2022)
Untitled
1962
Gelatin silver print
8 1/2 in x 7 3/4 in (21.5 x 19.6cm)
© Jerry Uelsmann

Jerry Uelsmann (American, 1934-2022)
Bless Our Home and Eagle
1962
Gelatin silver print
13 3/8 x 10 1/2 in (33.8 x 26.5cm)
© Jerry Uelsmann

Beautiful and surreal, funny and provocative, the photographs of Jerry Uelsmann are icons of American photo history. The Peabody Essex Museum (PEM) presents the first retrospective of Uelsmann’s work in over 30 years. The Mind’s Eye: 50 Years of Photography by Jerry Uelsmann features 90 works spanning the artist’s celebrated and wide-ranging career, with well-known works shown alongside never-before-seen recent images.

As a pioneer of contemporary photography and master of experimental darkroom technique, Uelsmann has continuously pushed the creative and technical boundaries of photography, revealing new visual possibilities and critical considerations for the medium. In the late 1950s, Uelsmann began experimenting with multiple enlargers and advanced masking, diffusing, burning and dodging techniques, to create imaginary images in the darkroom decades before the advent of Photoshop. Uelsmann’s ingenious work references Surrealists like Rene Magritte, Max Ernst, and Man Ray, as well as Modern photographers such as Edward Weston and Ansel Adams. He has spent his career advocating for the acceptance of experimental photography as an art form.

“For more than half a century, Uelsmann has challenged conventional ideas about what photography can and should do,” said Phillip Prodger, exhibition curator and PEM’s curator of photography. “Uelsmann’s pictures provide a valuable touchstone for understanding new trends in photographic art. His ideas and example have become ever more relevant as photography embraces Photoshop and other computer technologies for altering and manipulating photographs.”

The Mind’s Eye presents works drawn from the artist’s personal archive of vintage materials and, in addition to photographic prints, includes a selection of three-dimensional photographic sculptures, films, artist’s books, albums and work prints to give viewers first-hand insight into Uelsmann’s creative process and expressive range. Through experimental techniques, Uelsmann has explored universal themes of relationships, family, home and politics by creating unexpected and surprising juxtapositions.

“My visual quest is driven by a desire to create a universe capable of supporting feelings and ideas,” said Jerry Uelsmann. “I am drawn to art that challenges one’s sense of reality.”

Born in Detroit in 1934, Uelsmann received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Rochester Institute of Technology in 1957 and Master of Science and Master of Fine Arts degrees from Indiana University in 1960. He is recently retired from the faculty of the University of Florida, which he joined in 1960. Uelsmann received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 1967 he had his first solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Press release from the PEM website

Jerry Uelsmann (American, 1934-2022)
Magritte’s Touchstone (first version)
1965
Gelatin silver print
© Jerry Uelsmann

Jerry Uelsmann (American, 1934-2022)
Untitled
1977
Gelatin silver print
13 1/8 x 10 5/8 in (33.5 x 27.1cm)
© Jerry Uelsmann

Jerry Uelsmann (American, 1934-2022)
Untitled
1996
Gelatin silver print
19 5/8 x 14 3/4 in (49.8 x 37.4cm)
© Jerry Uelsmann

Jerry Uelsmann (American, 1934-2022)
Untitled
1976
Gelatin silver print
19 1/2 x 14 1/2 in (49.5 x 36.9cm)
© Jerry Uelsmann

Jerry Uelsmann (American, 1934-2022)
Bloomington, Indiana
1958
Gelatin silver print
7 7/8 x 7 1/4 in (19.9 x 18.3cm)
© Jerry Uelsmann

Jerry Uelsmann (American, 1934-2022)
Untitled
1959
Gelatin silver print
13 1/2 x 5 5/8 in (34.2 x 14.3cm)
© Jerry Uelsmann

Peabody Essex Museum
East India Square
161 Essex Street
Salem, MA 01970-3783 USA
Phone: 978-745-9500, 866-745-1876

Opening hours:
Open Tuesday – Sunday 10am – 5pm
Closed Mondays

Peabody Essex Museum website

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Review: ‘Jane Brown / Australian Gothic’ at Edmund Pearce Gallery, Melbourne

Exhibition dates: 25th April – 12th May 2012

Jane Brown (Kuwait, Australia, b. 1967)
Big Trout, New South Wales
2010
Museo silver rag print
59 x 46cm

As you should know by now, this blog tries to promote the work of less well known artists and subject matter. So instead of concentrating on the wonderful aerial bushfire photographs of the well-known artist John Gollings (showing in the same gallery in different spaces with the work of Michael Norton) I have decided to do a posting on the exhibition Australian Gothic by Jane Brown.

This is a good exhibition of small, darkly hewn, traditionally printed silver gelatin photographs, beautifully hung in the small gallery at Edmund Pearce and lit in the requisite, ambient manner. There are some outstanding photographs in the exhibition. The strongest works are the surrealist tinged, film noir-ish mise-en-scènes, the ones that emphasise the metaphorical darkness of the elements gathered upon the stage. Photographs such as Big Trout, The Female Factory, Adelong, New South Wales and Captain’s Flat Hotel, New South Wales really invoke a feeling of unhomely (or unheimlich), where nature is out of kilter. These images unsettle our idea of Oztraliana, our perceived sense of Self and our place in the world. They disrupt normal transmission; they transmutate the seen environment, transforming appearance, nature and form. Less successful in this quest are the bushfire landscapes. I feel these add little to the narrative thread of the exhibition and could have easily been left out in a judicious cull of the photographs. This would have made the overarching story line stronger still.

One of the best photographs in the exhibition is Lathamstowe (2011, below). This dark, brooding, intense photograph is a beautifully realised visualisation, one that balances scale, tone, light, form and darkness to create a haunting image that stays with you a long time after you have seen it. This one images says it all: the artist has talent. More please!

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

Jane Brown (Kuwait, Australia, b. 1967)
Bushfire Landscape I
2011
Fibre based, silver gelatin print
16.5 x 20.5cm

Jane Brown (Kuwait, Australia, b. 1967)
Bushfire Landscape II, Lake Mountain, Victoria
2010
Fibre based, silver gelatin print
16.5 x 19.5cm

Jane Brown (Kuwait, Australia, b. 1967)
The Female Factory (convict women’s prison), Ross, Tasmania
2009
Fibre based, silver gelatin print
15.8 x 19.5cm

Jane Brown (Kuwait, Australia, b. 1967)
Front Bar, Wonthaggi Hotel, Victoria
2012
Fibre based, selenium toned, gelatin silver print

Jane Brown (Kuwait, Australia, b. 1967)
Bush Christmas, Victoria
2011
Fibre based, selenium toned, gelatin silver print

Jane Brown (Kuwait, Australia, b. 1967)
Lathamstowe
2011
Fibre based, silver gelatin print
16.5 x 16.5cm

“I find it interesting how monochrome is used to differentiate the living and the dead, the past and the present. It has an ability to transcend the constraints of time, memory and death. I examine this a lot in my work – landscapes seem to have vestiges or traces of past life and memorials become otherworldly.”

Jane Brown. ‘Weekend Australian Review’, August 2011

“The antipodes was seen as a world of reversals, the dark subconscious of Britain. It was for all intents and purposes Gothic par excellence.”

Gary Turcotte. “Australian Gothic,” in Marie Mulvey-Roberts (ed.). The Handbook to Gothic Literature. 1998

Comprising photographs taken in rural New South Wales, the ACT, Victoria and Tasmania, this exhibition takes its cue from the gothic imaginings of colonial Australia. We see images of a convict past, the bush Christmas, unforgiving landscapes and melancholic hotels. It carries echoes of the cinema of Wake in Fright (1971) and the Cars that Ate Paris (1974). Rendering visible the themes of the melancholic and the uncanny, Australian Gothic manifests itself in rural isolation – where the homely becomes unhomely (or unheimlich) and where nature is out of kilter.

Jane Brown (Kuwait, Australia, b. 1967)
Adelong, New South Wales
2011
Fibre based, silver gelatin print
16.5 x 20.5cm

Jane Brown (Kuwait, Australia, b. 1967)
Tumbarumba, New South Wales
2012
Fibre based, silver gelatin print
16.5 x 19.5cm

Jane Brown (Kuwait, Australia, b. 1967)
One Way, Hobart, Tasmania
2009
Fibre based, silver gelatin print
16.5 x 19.5cm

Jane Brown (Kuwait, Australia, b. 1967)
Unheimlich, French Island, Victoria
2010
Fibre based, silver gelatin print
19 x 16cm

Jane Brown (Kuwait, Australia, b. 1967)
Captain’s Flat Hotel, New South Wales
2012
Fibre based, silver gelatin print
21.5 x 17.5cm

Edmund Pearce Gallery

This gallery has now closed.

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Exhibition: ‘Polixeni Papapetrou: The Dreamkeepers’ at Stills Gallery, Sydney

Exhibition dates: 28th March – 5th May 2012

Polixeni Papapetrou (Australian, 1960-2018)
The Wanderer No. 3
2012
From The Dreamkeepers
Pigment print
105 x 105cm

I absolutely love these. The colours, the spaces, the ambiguous vistas, the fantastical archetypes, the fables. What springs to mind, with the use of masks to disguise youth positioned within the decorous landscape, is the notion of “passing”. Passing on (as in dying), passing through (as in travelling), in passing (as in an aside) and just “passing” (passing yourself off as someone or something else) to hide your true character or feelings. Gay men did this in the 1950s and 60s all the better to fit into society, for if it was found that you were homosexual you could loose your job, your apartment and even your life. Of course, there is also the passing of time, the longing for misspent youth in these masked ephebes and adolescent women. Age shall not weary them…

Wandering, dreaming, remembering, keeping, collecting, counting. These neophytes on the path of life, both old/wise, young/hidden pass through (into?) our dreams. Papapetrou creates visions that elude the senses, visions that slip between dreaming and waking, between conscious and subconscious realms. As John Berger and Jean Mohr have observed,

“Cameras are boxes for transporting appearances. Are the appearances which a camera transports a construction, a man-made cultural artefact, or are they, like a footprint in the sand, a trace naturally left by something that has passed? The photographer choses the events he photographs. This choice can be thought of as a cultural construction. The space for this construction is, as it were, cleared by his rejection of what he did not choose to photograph.”1

As an artist Papapetrou has the intelligence to leave this nature/nurture question open in her photographs. Her skill as an artist is in choosing the right things to photograph. This enables her creatures to pass through liminal spaces, the space of our consciousness. Through this process a trace will always be left with us, for this is a strong body of work, well realised, in passing.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

1/ Berger, John and Mohr, Jean. Another Way of Telling. New York: Pantheon Books, 1982, pp. 92-93.

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

Polixeni Papapetrou (Australian, 1960-2018)
The Wave Counter
2011
From The Dreamkeepers
Pigment print
105 x 105cm

Polixeni Papapetrou (Australian, 1960-2018)
The Mystical Mothers
2011
From The Dreamkeepers
Pigment print
105 x 105cm

Polixeni Papapetrou (Australian, 1960-2018)
The Lantern Keeper
2012
From The Dreamkeepers
Pigment print
105 x 105cm

“These transitional places in one’s life are often the most creative, and as we grapple for answers and clarity what is often realized is ambiguity and confusion that reigns supreme. Like fairy stories, Papapetrou uses absurdity to make symbolic sense of world she struggles to understand.”

Susan Bright. Between Worlds catalogue 2009

In Polixeni Papapetrou’s work there is identification with the world of children that is rare and remarkable. She sees children themselves as ‘between worlds’, between infancy and adulthood. Yet she does more than identify, creating fantastical worlds that only adults can truly understand and relate to.

A man in blue striped pyjamas stands on a rock by the sea, leaning into the wind. His body seems young yet he supports himself with a walking frame. His face is old, oversized, a little grotesque. He is The Wavecounter. Like the other characters in Polixeni Papapetrou’s series The Dreamkeepers, he is lithe in body yet gnarly of physiognomy, both young and old. Gazing out in contemplation these dream keepers look with anticipation to the future, or is it with nostalgia to the past? The timeless backdrops of shoreline or hilltop reflect this ambiguity, echoing through landscape the collapsing of thresholds and blurring of boundaries.

Papapetrou’s art practice has involved collaboration with her children and their friends for over 10 years. As they have grown and transformed so too have the roles they perform and spaces they inhabit. It is the awkward evolution of adolescence that informs the in-between space of The Dreamkeepers. To parallel the cripplingly self-conscious yet powerfully self-realising period of our lives, Papapetrou engages part reality, part fantasy from which a space of unreality emerges, the space of archetype. Here the anonymity afforded by masks separates her adolescent actors from who they really are, and allows them to stand in for us all. In this way, Papapetrou asks us to consider how masks, whether symbolic or literal, not only conceal identity, but also expand and transform it.

The aged masks do so in The Dreamkeepers by confounding adolescence, as the characters exude a quiet lack of self-consciousness, despite their disturbing appearance. They arouse a gentle pathos, reminding us of our own shapeshifting, of time playing out on our bodies and minds. The abstract meeting of these two ages may indicate the latent wisdom and self-acceptance that only realises with maturity, or the cyclical nature of our life spans that inevitably brings us back to the vulnerability of youth. In either case the work is a powerful testament to the surrendering of childhood.

Also on exhibition is a small selection of works from Papapetrou’s current work in progress. Using ghillie suits, she transforms her actors into animate objects – rocks with life and seaweed with attitude.

Press release from the Stills Gallery website

Polixeni Papapetrou (Australian, 1960-2018)
The Holiday Makers
2011
From The Dreamkeepers
Pigment print
105 x 105cm

Polixeni Papapetrou (Australian, 1960-2018)
The Mender
2011
From The Dreamkeepers
Pigment print
105 x 105cm

Polixeni Papapetrou (Australian, 1960-2018)
The Joy Pedlars
2011
From The Dreamkeepers
Pigment print
105 x 105cm

Polixeni Papapetrou (Australian, 1960-2018)
The Shell Collectors
2012
From The Dreamkeepers
Pigment print
105 x 105cm

Polixeni Papapetrou (Australian, 1960-2018)
The Lighthouse Keepers
2011
From The Dreamkeepers
Pigment print
105 x 105cm

Polixeni Papapetrou (Australian, 1960-2018)
The Photographer
2011
From The Dreamkeepers
Pigment print
105 x 105cm

Stills Gallery

This gallery has now closed.

Stills Gallery website

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Exhibition: ‘Gerhard Richter. Atlas’ at the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden

Exhibition dates: 4th February – 22nd April 2012

Installation photograph of Gerhard Richter. Atlas
Kunsthalle im Lipsiusbau
Photograph: David Brandt, 2012
© Gerhard Richter Archive, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden

Meaning arises out of context – or the lack of it. Unlike the grids of the Bechers which promote multiple ways of seeing and construct narrative tension these images do not increase the photographic narrative. They are like the parrots, finches or scarab beetles in a display case at a natural history museum – part of a taxonomic classification system, where one out of a thousand is the most impressive beetle, the bird with the brightest plumage, where the composition is the most surprising. Multiples as collected here are fascinating but emerge from a slightly obsessive mind (which any collectors mind is!)

This photomontage of impressions, ground and movement blurs the history and memory embedded in each photograph. The assemblage of all these visions ranges far and wide but ultimately collapses time and space into one huge universal snapshot. As in advertising imagery the individual documentary-style images mean relatively little – it is the overall impression that impinges on the consciousness. If you watch MTV and stop to analyse the individual images in a pop video you soon acknowledge their vacuousness. The context of the singular image is lost. In this display the grid controls the photographs position relative to each other and the viewer – a compositional design matrix that has a symbolic function. The grid both decontextualises and recontextualises the floating signifier.

Richter obviously uses them as an aide-memoire. Some remind me of the folded photographs found in Francis Bacon’s studio; others Bacon’s portraits of blurred bodies; yet more, ethnographic mappings of Indigenous bodies or criminals cut out of newspapers. Others remind me of Surrealist experiments and the colour photographs the paintings of Gerhard Richter. Funny about that…

They may be the source material of a great artist but in this regimented form of prosaic knowledge they become like bugs caught in amber.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

“I see countless landscapes, photograph barely one in 100,000, and paint barely 1 in 100 of those that I photograph,”

Gerhard Richter, 1986

“If the grids of art are about arrangement, synchronic vision, connections and knowledge, a standing back to grasp a pattern, then the grids of life are just as much about chance, disconnections among the connections, and the inability of the elements within the grid to perceive, and know, the larger patterns of which they are a part, so that it is only a ‘higher’ consciousness standing outside the grid that will be able to see it all (with or without understanding it). How you know and form a grid depends on whether you are inside or outside it. You can ‘form’ a grid both actively and passively, wittingly and unwittingly – either by simply being part of a grid or by actually assembling one… The grid becomes a potentially totalizing system with which reality (the real of experience as well as the real of the mind), another totalizing system, must endlessly play its games of elusiveness and containment, chaos and order, freedom and necessity.”

Aveek Sen. “The Grid and More,” in ‘What We Talk About When We Talk About Photography,’ on the Fotomuseum Winterthur website, 7th April 2012

Gerhard Richter. Atlas

The film for the special exhibition!

The ATLAS occupies an outstanding position in Gerhard Richter’s entire work. It is both the basis of his painterly oeuvre and an independent work. As a so-called work in progress, the artist, who was born on February 9, 1932 in Dresden, has repeatedly revised and supplemented the ATLAS for more than four decades.

The ATLAS was on display in a special exhibition at the Gerhard Richter Archive of the Dresden State Art Collections.

Installation photograph of Gerhard Richter. Atlas
Kunsthalle im Lipsiusbau
Photograph: David Brandt, 2012
© Gerhard Richter Archive, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden

In celebration of Gerhard Richter’s 80th birthday, the Gerhard Richter Archive of the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden presents the ATLAS of the artist in the Kunsthalle im Lipsiusbau. The ATLAS takes a prominent role in the oeuvre of Gerhard Richter. It is the basis of many of his paintings just as it is an artwork in its own right. The ATLAS consists of approximately 800 framed panels with more than 15,000 photographs, newspaper clippings, sketches and designs, which Richter had accumulated for work in his studio from the early 1960s onwards. In 1972, he ordered and arranged the collection on boards and presented it under the title ATLAS for the first time. Ever since then, he has continuously added new material. The conceptual character of the ATLAS offers unique insights into the mindset of the artist, into the development of some ideas for works as well as into the creational process of several of his paintings.

Gerhard Richter’s ATLAS merits a special place within his oeuvre as a whole. It not only forms the basis of his entire work as a painter but is also an autonomous artwork in its own right. Born in Dresden on 9th February 1932, Richter has been constantly revising and augmenting this “work in progress” for more than four decades.

ATLAS may be seen as an accompaniment, commentary and extension of the entire oeuvre of Gerhard Richter, for it also develops its own perspectives and poses its own questions. ATLAS is Richter’s reflection not only on his own work but also on the everyday world of images that he himself has documented photographically in their thousands. “I see countless landscapes, photograph barely one in 100,000, and paint barely 1 in 100 of those that I photograph,” Richter wrote in 1986. This photographed, yet and seemingly inexhaustible flood of images has afforded Richter a concentrated, ready accessibility of motifs for his future works. Indeed, for some of his paintings, he has been able to draw upon old motifs in his ATLAS, some of them dating back more than a decade.

The accompanying artist’s book “ATLAS” is not just intended as a means of documenting the exhibition. Gerhard Richter sees it as an alternative presentation to the exhibited panels, one that permits an additional, different, non-linear approach to the material. By 1964, Richter had collected a vast amount of pictorial source material for his painting, first keeping it in drawers and portfolios. Five years later he began to sift through this material with a critical eye, grouping the individual photographs, reproductions and sketches into different themes and pasting them onto separate panels. Richter then soon recognised the intrinsic artistic quality of these collections of source material and, in 1972, framed the panels and exhibited them at the Museum Hedendaagse Kunst in Utrecht under the title ATLAS. Meanwhile this repository of source material has grown from its original 343 panels to its present 783, with more than 8,000 individual motifs.

Press release from the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden website

Gerhard Richter (German, b. 1932)
Atlas. Plate 9. Photographs of papers and books etc
1962-1968
© Gerhard Richter 2011

Gerhard Richter (German, b. 1932)
Atlas. Plate 13. Photographs of papers and books etc
1964-1967
© Gerhard Richter 2011

Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden
Residenzschloss Taschenberg 2
01067 Dresden Germany

Kunsthalle im Lipsiusbau opening hours:
Daily 10am – 6pm
Closed Mondays

Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden website

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Exhibition: ‘Ladies and Gentlemen: The Camera as a Mirror’ at the Moderna Museet, Malmö, Sweden

Exhibition dates: 18th February 2012 – 22nd April 2012

Curator: Magnus af Petersens

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

Cindy Sherman (American, b. 1954)
Untitled Film Still #56
1980
© Cindy Sherman. Courtesy of the Artist and Metro Pictures

Samuel Fosso (Cameroon, b. 1962)
Sans titre. De la série Années 70
1970-1980
Gelatin silver print
© Samuel Fosso, Courtesy JM Patras/Paris

Malick Sidibé (Malian, 1936-2016)
Danser le Twist (Dance the Twist)
1965
Gelatin silver print

This spring we will be showing more than forty photographs from the period 1950-90 taken by leading artists such as Andy Warhol, Cindy Sherman, Robert Mapplethorpe, Samuel Fosso, Tracey Moffatt, and Elina Brotherus. The exhibition focuses on the art of portrait photography and how the artist in his or her studio creates images that depict people not just as they actually are, but also as they would like to appear.

Moderna Museet’s collection of photography is among the foremost in Europe, it includes some of the most prominent figures in the history of photography. Andy Warhol, Cindy Sherman, and Robert Mapplethorpe are all big names in photography, artists whose work often revolves around concepts of identity, sexuality, and performativity. The photography studio is a place for masquerades and manipulations, a stage where various identities and roles can be tested. It therefore problematises the idea that a portrait is meant to convey some truth about the subject’s inner life. How do we distinguish a staged scene from reality? Is it even possible to make such a distinction? How free are we to form our own identity? If it’s a matter of choosing a role, what roles are available to us?

Andy Warhol’s Polaroid pictures, whose title, Ladies and Gentlemen, has also provided the name for the exhibition, are examples of his interest in – or rather his obsession with – celebrities. From industrial magnates to movie stars, from rock musicians to the “superstar” friends who hung out around the Factory, his fabled studio. In the world of pop art and popular culture, surface is everything. Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs are instead classically composed – stylised and aesthetically formed. In the controlled environment and lighting of the photo studio, he strives not for realism but for beauty. Here role-play becomes a part of the picture’s constructed character.

In Cindy Sherman’s suite of images called Untitled Film Stills (1977-1980), she plays with film clichés. The scenes and characters in her photographs seem familiar, but in fact it’s always Sherman herself we see in the leading role. Using the camera as a mirror, she takes on and explores various roles. It’s a game of trying on identities that is familiar to teenagers in particular the world over, a game we play in an attempt to find ourselves, or rather to construct an individual identity. One of the many ways in which Sherman’s pictures have been interpreted is as a feminist critique of the limited number of roles available to women.

This exhibition also presents several works by Seydou Keïta, Malick Sidibé, and Samuel Fosso, studio photographers who work primarily with portrait photography. Keïta’s studio was next-door to a movie theater in Bamako, the capitol city of Mali. Sidibé takes pictures not just in his studio but also at weddings and other parties. His photographs from Bamako in the 1960s reflect the great hope that came with liberation from French colonial power. Fosso opened his studio in Bangui, in the Central African Republic, when he was still a teenager. He is best known for a series of self-portraits in which he dons a variety of outfits to assume different roles.

Press release from the Moderna Museet website

Francesco Vezzoli (Italian, b. 1971)
Portrait of H.R.H The Princess of Hanover (Before & After Salvador Dalí)
2009
© Francesco Vezzoli/BUS 2012

Moderna Museet Malmö
Gasverksgatan 22 in Malmö

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

Opening hours:
Tuesday – Sunday 11 – 17
Mondays closed

Moderna Museet Malmö website

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Exhibition: ‘Karlheinz Weinberger: Intimate Stranger’ at Kunstmuseum Basel, Museum for Gegenwartskunst

Exhibition dates: 21st January – 15th April 2012

Karlheinz Weinberger (Swiss, 1921-2006)
Hardau, Zürich
1962
Schwarz-Weiss Fotografie
50.7 x 58cm
Courtesy The Estate of Karlheinz Weinberger in care of Patrik Schedler, Zürich

Another relatively unknown artist, people whose work I like promoting in this archive. I certainly had never heard of this photographer. A self-taught part-time photographer who worked as a warehouseman most of his life, Weinberger published photographs in the homosexual magazine “Der Kreis,” the same early gay magazine that George Platt Lynes submitted photographs to in the last stages of his life.

While their might seem to be a dichotomy between the desirous photographs of male youth and the city toughs and “rowdies”, gay men have always been drawn to rough trade: from Oscar Wilde who was more sexually drawn towards the swarthy young rough trade to contemporary iconography of gay skinheads and punks, still a prevalent culture in London for example. Tattoos, shaved heads, braces, Docs – in Weinberger’s case rockabillies. Notice how in the photograph of the male reclining with candlestick, the form of the candlestick mimics the spidery tattoo on the hand in the photograph above. Notice also how the crouching nude lad looks almost identical to the lad in the photograph below, with his hands thrust into his pockets emphasising the crutch area. And the earlier crutch photograph with the mating of Elvis and Vince over a skull and cross bones which has delicious, subversive homosocial overtones. Toughs or not, there is always the desire for the dangerous and different.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

Karlheinz Weinberger (Swiss, 1921-2006)
Knabenschiessen, Albisgütli, Zürich
1961
Schwarz-Weiss Fotografie
50.5 x 60.5cm
Courtesy The Estate of Karlheinz Weinberger in care of Patrik Schedler, Zürich

Karlheinz Weinberger (Swiss, 1921-2006)
Fisherman with Hat, Sicily
c. 1960
Schwarz-Weiss Fotografie
18.5 x 24cm
Courtesy The Estate of Karlheinz Weinberger in care of Patrik Schedler, Zürich

Karlheinz Weinberger (Swiss, 1921-2006)
Drei zusammen (three together)
c. 1965
Schwarz-Weiss Fotografie
50 x 53.5cm
Courtesy The Estate of Karlheinz Weinberger in care of Patrik Schedler, Zürich

Karlheinz Weinberger (Swiss, 1921-2006)
Untitled, Zürich
c. 1962
Schwarz-Weiss Fotografie
23.8 x 30.4cm
Courtesy The Estate of Karlheinz Weinberger in care of Patrik Schedler, Zürich

Karlheinz Weinberger (Swiss, 1921-2006)
Untitled, Zurich
c. 1962
Schwarz-Weiss Fotografie
23.8 x 30.4cm
Courtesy The Estate of Karlheinz Weinberger in care of Patrik Schedler, Zürich

Karlheinz Weinberger (Swiss, 1921-2006)
Untitled, Zurich
c. 1962
Schwarz-Weiss Fotografie
29.7 x 39.1cm
Courtesy The Estate of Karlheinz Weinberger in care of Patrik Schedler, Zürich

The exhibition presents the rarely shown work of the photographer Karlheinz Weinberger (1921-2006). Together with magazines and a selection of vintage apparel, the pictures document a youth culture in Zurich that emerged after World War II whose members sought to subvert contemporary notions of “Swiss correctness.”

Weinberger spent the largest part of his life working as a warehouseman for Siemens-Albis in Zurich. In his free time, he was a self-taught photographer, portraying his lovers and people he met in the street. From the late 1940s on, he frequently published his pictures in “Der Kreis,” a homosexual magazine produced in Zurich from 1943 until 1967 that garnered international attention, pseudonymously signing his work as “Jim.” In 1958, he launched a major project for which he would photograph a group of teenagers, the city’s so-called “Halbstarke,” over an extended period of time. Weinberger’s unfailingly respectful approach allowed him to capture the non-conformism of these “rowdies” with regard to social convention and their play with stereotypes of masculinity and femininity, most readily evident in the way they dressed.

Wearing embroidered denim jackets and oversized belt buckles adorned with the likenesses of idols such as Elvis or James Dean, Weinberger’s adolescent subjects present themselves to his camera in public settings like members of a gang. Photographs such as those taken at the Knabenschiessen, a target shooting competition held at Zurich’s Albisgüetli, show them sprawling on the ground between fairground stalls and compact vans, illustrating the “Halbstarke”‘s refusal to fit in with the traditions surrounding this Zurich folk festival. In addition to the photographs in public settings, Weinberger also took pictures in the improvised studio in his living room. Scantily clad, some of his subjects, mostly young men, strike confident poses showing off their denim shorts and hats, while others cower, their eyes glancing at the camera with a vulnerable expression. Weinberger’s role is that of an Intimate Stranger: he records the attitudes of a generation and its marginal social position in unvarnished pictures and develops the photographs capturing the objects of his fascination in his own photo laboratory.

In an oeuvre that spanned many years, Weinberger portrayed what lay behind the curtains of 1960s bourgeois Switzerland, finding ways to document deviancy without ever putting his protagonists on display.

Press release from the Kunstmuseum Basel website

Karlheinz Weinberger (Swiss, 1921-2006)
Untitled
c. 1969
Schwarz-Weiss Fotografie
30.4 x 23.8cm
Courtesy The Estate of Karlheinz Weinberger in care of Patrik Schedler, Zürich

Karlheinz Weinberger (Swiss, 1921-2006)
Untitled
c. 1961
Schwarz-Weiss Fotografie
24 x 18cm
Courtesy The Estate of Karlheinz Weinberger in care of Patrik Schedler, Zürich

Karlheinz Weinberger (Swiss, 1921-2006)
Untitled
c. 1960
Schwarz-Weiss Fotografie
39 x 29cm
Courtesy The Estate of Karlheinz Weinberger in care of Patrik Schedler, Zürich

What is the story behind Karlheinz Weinberger and his photographs?

Weinberger was totally fascinated with photography. From the day he received his first camera at a very young age, which was given to him by a lover, he felt the urge to take pictures. Although he had a day job as warehouseman and never really made money with his shots, he maintained this passion until the end of his life. Under the pseudonym Jim he began, in the mid 50s, to publish portraits in a gay magazine. Most of them were taken whilst travelling in Southern Italy. In 1958, he met a young rocker named Jimmy Oechslin in the streets of Zurich and asked him, excitedly, if he could take his portrait. Through him he was introduced to the burgeoning gang culture in Switzerland. Teenagers under the influence of American culture celebrated their own lifestyle by wearing customised jeans and by riding motorcycles. Eventually, in the 80s and 90s, Weinberger went on to photograph the Hell’s Angels in Switzerland.

How would you describe Weinberger’s aesthetic?

Rough, personal, artistic. He was at times very commanding during photo shoots and had an almost ethnographic interest in gangs and biker culture. At times, a buckle belt was more important than a face. Through his passion for photography he was part of gangs without adopting their lifestyle.

Who are the people in these images?

In Germany and Switzerland the German term ‘Halbstarker’ was created in the 50s. It literally means half strong. The ‘half strongs’ were gangs of young people who were looking for an identity of their own. They rejected society’s expectation and were pioneers in the establishment of youth culture through music, cloths and assimilation of American culture.

Ricky Lee. “Karlheinz Weinberger: Rebel Youth,” on the AnOther website February 7th, 2011 [Online] Cited 06/04/2012

Karlheinz Weinberger (Swiss, 1921-2006)
The Jets, Basel
1962
Schwarz-Weiss Fotografie
Courtesy The Estate of Karlheinz Weinberger in care of Patrik Schedler, Zürich

Karlheinz Weinberger (Swiss, 1921-2006)
The Lions, Basel
c. 1962
Schwarz-Weiss Fotografie
Courtesy The Estate of Karlheinz Weinberger in care of Patrik Schedler, Zürich

Karlheinz Weinberger (Swiss, 1921-2006)
Zürich am Limmatquai
1962
Schwarz-Weiss Fotografie
30 x 24cm
Courtesy The Estate of Karlheinz Weinberger in care of Patrik Schedler, Zürich

Karlheinz Weinberger (Swiss, 1921-2006)
Milchbuck, Zürich
c. 1962
Schwarz-Weiss Fotografie
60.5 x 49cm
Courtesy The Estate of Karlheinz Weinberger in care of Patrik Schedler, Zürich

Karlheinz Weinberger(Swiss, 1921-2006)

Career

Karlheinz Weinberger was a self-taught photographer spending over sixty years producing intimate, often homoerotic photographs of rebellious male youth, mostly working-class men. Weinberger worked in the warehouse at Zürich’s Siemens factory during the day and his nights he spent shooting portraits of construction workers, bikers, and athletes for the underground gay journal Der Kreis. Weinberger published his works under the pseudonym Jim. In 1958 he began focusing his camera on the Halbstarken, an edgy, antiauthoritarian teen subculture whose members styled themselves as bad boys à la James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause or Elvis Presley.

Work

As early as 1948, Weinberger made contact with the gay magazine Der Kreis, where he used the pseudonym “Jim”. At the parties of the district subscribers, he showed off his musical talent and was the “house photographer”. From September 1952 to 1965 his photographs were an integral part of the circle. With around 80 photos published, he had a significant impact on homosexual aesthetics until the end of the magazine in 1967 and its successor magazine Club68. The photographs, which Weinberger published under the pseudonym “Jim”, mainly show workers and evoke the homoeroticism of simple men.

From 1958 Weinberger began photographing the hooligan scene in Zürich. He was also interested in rockers and tattooed people. Weinberger was one of the first photographers to get permission to document the Hells Angels’ local offshoot. Between 1964 and 1976 Weinberger also worked as a freelancer for various sports magazines and specialised in sports reports.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Karlheinz Weinberger (Swiss, 1921-2006)
Adler Gang, Zurich
c. 1966
Schwarz-Weiss Fotografie
Courtesy The Estate of Karlheinz Weinberger in care of Patrik Schedler, Zürich

Karlheinz Weinberger (Swiss, 1921-2006)
Lone Star Camp, Gossau
1967
Schwarz-Weiss Fotografie
Courtesy The Estate of Karlheinz Weinberger in care of Patrik Schedler, Zürich

Kunstmuseum Basel
St. Alban-Graben 16
CH-4010 Basel
Phone: 0041 (0)61 206 62 62

Opening hours:
Tuesday – Sunday 10am – 6pm
Closed on Monday

Kunstmuseum Basel website

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