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.
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.
Jack London (American, 1876-1916) Homeless people in Itchy Park, Spitalfields 1902 From People of the Abyss
NOTE: Photograph not in the exhibition
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) 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.”
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.
Norah Smyth
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.
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.
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
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 Meth
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
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
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
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.’
1975: homeless men in Spitalfields, photographed by the Czech documentarist Markéta Luskačová.
Marketa Luskacova
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.’
1976: children play on rubble on waste ground on Usher Road, Tower Hamlets.
Tom Learmonth
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.
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
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.
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)
Four Corners 121 Roman Road, Bethnal Green, London E2 0QN Nearest tube: Bethnal Green, Central Line
Opening hours: Tuesday to Saturday 11am – 6pm Thursday 11am – 8pm (July and on 31 Aug)
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.”
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 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
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
“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.”
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
On the door: Vorsitzender des altestenrates (Chairman of the Board of Elders)
Between the foreign and the familiar
This exhibition presents photographs of Jewish ghettos under Nazi control during the Second World War. Mainly featuring photographs of the Łódź ghetto during its period of existence (December 1939 – August 1944) before its destruction, the images were taken by a variety of German and Jewish photographers.
“Tens of thousands of photos were taken in the ghettos, mostly by German photographers but also by several Jewish ones. Many of the German photographers acted in an official capacity for several different organisations of the Nazi state. Others photographed for personal objectives. The few Jewish photographers who managed to work in the ghettos did so in an official capacity for the Jewish ghetto leadership.” (Text from the Museum für Fotografie website)
Jewish photographers such as Mendel Grossman, Arie Ben Menachem and Henryk Ross were officially banned by both Jewish and German authorities from taking personal photographs, but all did so in order to “leave behind a testimony for all generations about the great tragedy unfolding before his eyes.” (Mendel Grossman) If they had of been caught, the photographers and their families would have been killed for taking them.
When the ghetto was liquidated – what a euphemism that is, with over 210,000 human beings starved to death or murdered in the extermination camps leaving only 877 in hiding when the Russians arrived – the photographers hid their precious negatives in the ground in barrels or at the bottom of a well hoping to survive and return after the war to dig up evidence of that most important aspect of life in the ghettos… the value of life and comradeship itself and the atrocities that can be enacted one human being against another. Some photographers hid in the ruins of the ghetto, escaped the city to go into hiding with the resistance, others survived the extermination camps and the death marches, still others succumbed to the genocide.
As the intelligent quotation from Bernd Huppauf observes below, what is important when viewing these photographs is that we pay attention to the details, that unlearning “the seeing of the familiar and replacing a gaze of understanding and empathy with a growing sense of the tensions, and twisted connections, between the foreign and the familiar is a prerequisite for a photo-history beyond a history of mere illustrations.”
As Huppauf says, “Repeated confirmation, through images, of the knowledge that an inhumane ideology will produce inhumane pictures offers little insight.”
Dr Marcus Bunyan
PS. I have added appropriate bibliographic and historical information to the posting where possible.
Many thankx to the Museum of Photography, Berlin for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“As far as the construction of a pictorial history of the war of extermination is concerned, it is mandatory not to facilitate but rather to render more difficult the reading its photographs. More often than not they are read as parts of a story of encompassing generalisations concerning the immoral and barbaric ideology of the Nazi-system. But such forgone conclusions render the reading of images sterile. As long as the answer to the question as to what they show is known in advance, they will remain silent. Repeated confirmation, through images, of the knowledge that an inhumane ideology will produce inhumane pictures offers little insight. The questions as to what these images show, what they meant for the photographers and what they mean for us are answered neither by varied references to the murderous practices of Nazi-racism nor by reference to the pathological psyche of actors as individuals. Focusing on the concreteness of details and the iconography of the pictures will make ‘visible’ what can be seen in the photos and break the blockade of silence… Unlearning the seeing of the familiar and replacing a gaze of understanding and empathy with a growing sense of the tensions, and twisted connections, between the foreign and the familiar is a prerequisite for a photo-history beyond a history of mere illustrations. The empty ritual of repetitions will only be avoided in as far as the homogenising concept of a photo-history of the Third Reich as a mirror image of Nazi ideology and practices is dissolved and replaced with perspectives capable of reflecting upon differences and specificities in the pictorial self-representation of the time and the social production of attitudes and habits, visually represented in images.”
Bernd Huppauf. Emptying the Gaze: Framing Violence through the Viewfinder, 1997, p. 7.
Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem, in cooperation with the Kunstbibliothek of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin and the Freundeskreis Yad Vashem e. V., presents the highly acclaimed exhibition Flashes of Memory. Photography During the Holocaust at Berlin’s Museum für Fotografie (Museum of Photography). Featured for the first time in Germany, the exhibition presents a critical account of visual documentation – photographs and films – created during the Holocaust by German citizens and Nazi propaganda photographers, by Jewish photographers in the ghettos, and by members of the Allied forces during liberation. The exhibition focuses a spotlight on the circumstances under which each photograph was captured. It shows how the worldview of the documenting photographer – both official and private – influenced the image captured, while emphasising the different and unique viewpoints of the Jewish photographers as direct victims of the Holocaust.
For the German Nazi regime, photography and film played a crucial role in manipulating and mobilising the masses. These forms of propaganda were an elementary part of the National Socialist ideology. Conversely, the work of Jewish photographers during the Holocaust was part of their struggle for survival – depicting the living conditions of those incarcerated in ghettos. For the Jews, unsanctioned photography in the ghetto was punishable by death. Nonetheless, it was critical for them to document the atrocities so that the truth could one day be transmitted to all of humanity.
Upon liberation, the Allies recognised the need to document what they discovered in order to, combat future denial of these atrocities, justify their enormous losses on the battlefield, and gather evidence for upcoming war crimes trials. They were guided by the desire to educate the German population in the “spirit of democratic values.”
Flashes of Memory. Photography During the Holocaust displays photographs, films and artefacts, including cameras from archives and museums in the US, Europe and Israel. The exhibition curated by Director of the Yad Vashem Museums Division Vivian Uria was first opened in Jerusalem in January 2018 for International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Publication
An English-language as well as a German-language edition of the exhibition catalogue is available at the price of 38 € in the bookstore of the Museum für Fotografie.
Press release from the Museum für Fotografie website
To my knowledge this photograph is not in the exhibition
“Having an official camera, I could capture the entire tragic period in the Lodz ghetto. I did it knowing that if I were caught, my family and I would be tortured and killed.”
Henryk Ross
Memory Unearthed: The Lodz Ghetto Photographs of Henryk Ross by Bernice Eisenstein (Author), Robert Jan van Pelt (Author), Michael Mitchell (Author), Eric Beck Rubin (Author), Maia-Mari Sutnik (Editor) March 24, 2015 (Hardback)
Emotionally resonant photographs of everyday life in the Jewish Lódz Ghetto taken during WWII
From 1941 to 1944, the Polish Jewish photographer Henryk Ross (1910-1991) was a member of an official team documenting the implementation of Nazi policies in the Lódz Ghetto. Covertly, he captured on film scores of both quotidian and intimate moments of Jewish life. In 1944, he buried thousands of negatives in an attempt to save this secret record. After the war, Ross returned to Poland to retrieve them. Although some were destroyed by nature and time, many negatives survived.
This compelling volume (originally published in 2015 and now available in paperback), presents a selection of Ross’s images along with original prints and other archival material including curfew notices and newspapers. The photographs offer a startling and moving representation of one of humanity’s greatest tragedies. Striking for both their historical content and artistic quality, his photographs have a raw intimacy and emotional power that remain undiminished.
Pages from Memory Unearthed: The Lodz Ghetto Photographs of Henryk Ross by Bernice Eisenstein (Author), Robert Jan van Pelt (Author), Michael Mitchell (Author), Eric Beck Rubin (Author), Maia-Mari Sutnik (Editor) March 24, 2015 (Hardback)
Exhibition texts
Visual documentation is one of the major factors in shaping historical awareness of the Holocaust. Alongside archival documentation of the period’s events and the research on these records, visual documentation has contributed significantly towards knowledge of the Holocaust, influenced the manner in which it has been analysed and understood, and affected the way it has been engraved in the collective memory.
The camera, with its manipulative power, has tremendous impact and far reaching influence. Although photography purports to reflect reality as it is, it is essentially an interpretation of it, since elements such as worldview, values and moral perception influence the choice of the object to be photographed as well as how it is presented. When visual documentation is also used as a historical document, its use requires attributing the greatest of importance to these components.
Different parties photographed during the Holocaust. For the Nazi German regime, the visual media played a crucial role in propaganda as a means of expression and a tool for manipulating and mobilising the masses. This kind of documentation attests to Nazi ideology and how German leaders sought to mould their image in the public eye. Conversely, Jewish photography was a component in the struggle for survival of the Jews imprisoned in the ghettos, and a manifestation of underground activity that testified to their desire to document and transmit information on the tragedy befalling their people. The Allied armies, who understood the propaganda value of photographing the camps they liberated, documented the scenes revealed to them, bringing in official photographers and encouraging soldiers to document the Nazi horrors as evidence for future war crimes trials and in an effort to re-educate the German population.
This exhibit presents a critical examination of documentation through the camera lens, focusing on the circumstances of the photograph and the worldview of the photographer, while referring to the Jewish photographers’ different and unique viewpoints as direct victims of the Holocaust.
All items on display are replicas of the originals, except the cameras. The exhibition is curated by Vivian Uria, Director of the Yad Vashem Museums Division.
Political photography and filming in Nazi Germany
In the years following World War I, photography became a widespread pastime in Germany, both professionally and as a hobby. The Nazi Party was greatly aware of the importance of visual media as a propaganda and recruitment tool. As a result, this sector was developed vigorously after its rise to power. The Nazification (the process whereby the Nazi regime took over aspects of German life) of photography was first expressed in official photography, which served its communications efforts, the movie industry, and government institutions. Nazification was also significant in amateur photography, with the Party extending its patronage to photography clubs and periodicals. These processes were clearly reflected in the representation of the Jews in antisemitic propaganda and their increased persecution as documented by private photography.
“Today, many millions in many countries read [them] in the papers… hear them on the radio… and see them illustrated in pictures broadcast via the most modern technical means over continents and oceans to the great news agencies, or in innumerable copies in weekly news digests in movie theatres across the globe. Thereby public opinion is created.” Joseph Goebbels, “PK,” Das Reich, no.20, May 18, 1941, p. 2
Two Viewpoints on Photography in the Ghettos
The first ghettos were established in German-occupied Poland at the end of 1939. During 1940, their number grew rapidly. Most ghettos were created as a temporary and haphazard way to isolate the Jews from their surroundings. However, the majority eventually became the permanent residence for hundreds of thousands of Jews.
Tens of thousands of photos were taken in the ghettos, mostly by German photographers but also by several Jewish ones. Many of the German photographers acted in an official capacity for several different organisations of the Nazi state. Others photographed for personal objectives. The few Jewish photographers who managed to work in the ghettos did so in an official capacity for the Jewish ghetto leadership.
However, both by German and Jewish photographers, the borders between official and private photography were oftentimes blurred. The bias in German official photography was clear, and aimed at conveying various propaganda messages. In contrast, Jewish photography was carried out for the most part as a survival strategy vis-à-vis the Germans, with the goal of documenting and displaying a more realistic view of life in the ghetto.
Liberation of the Camps – Function and Distribution
Visual documentation played a central role for the Allied nations in revealing Nazi persecution, as well as displaying their own moral superiority visà-vis the fascist enemy. The Soviets were the first to liberate the concentration camps. Since private photography was almost nonexistent in the USSR during the war, visual evidence of liberation by Soviet forces remained in the hands of the official photographers. In contrast, the British and Americans encouraged their troops to engage in private photography in the liberated camps, as part of the effort to disclose Nazi crimes to the public as widely as possible. Another important consideration was the collection of visual documentation for trials of German war criminals, which the Allies planned to hold after the war.
To a great extent, liberation photos and films, including those that were staged, molded the collective and visual memory of the Holocaust for generations to come.
Pnina Tory (née Oshpitz), born in 1930 in Lithuania, describes her family; moving to and living in Kaunas when the war began, at which point her entire family was taken to jail for three days; the death of her first husband, Pinchas Sheinzon, at the Seventh Fort; entering the Kaunas ghetto with her daughter, Shulamit; assisting Avraham Tory, who was keeping a diary of life in the ghetto, by hiding the pages of the diary and taking dictation from him when he was too tired to write; marrying Avraham on August 10, 1944; going into hiding with Avraham and Shulamit; escaping with her daughter and husband in March 1945 and settling in Budapest, Hungary; sneaking into Italy, where she stayed for two years, with the help of a Palestinian Jewish Brigade; and immigrating to Palestine with Avraham and Shulamit on October 17, 1947.
Arie Ben Menachem collaborated with Mendel Grossman, photographing, developing and distributing photos. During the Great Szpera, Grossman was obliged by the German authorities to photograph the corpses of Jews murdered in the streets for identification purposes – Menachem helped him in this by numbering the cartons in which the corpses were packed. In 1943, he created his own photo album with collages, using Grossman’s photos and an ironic commentary on the pages of the album in order to show the cruelty of the ghetto. In it, he described hunger, poverty and deportations.
In 1944, Menachem together with his family and the album were transported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, where the album was taken from him and, thanks to the activities of the underground, he was to find himself in Kraków. After arriving in Auschwitz, Menachem’s mother, Hinda, was murdered. Arie Ben Menachem and his father were then transported to Groß-Rosen and to the Flossenburg camp, where Menachem’s father died during the death march. He himself survived, rescued by the American army, and after a few months in the hospital, in 1945 he made his way through Italy through Italy to Palestine, where he lived in the kibbutz Bet She’an, changed his name from Princ to Menachem, in order to commemorate his father and because of to the fact that one of the SS men in the Flossenburg camp had a dog whose name was Princ, and that he also married Ewa Bialer, whom he met in the ghetto. … In 1946, an album of Menachem was published by the Central Jewish Historical Commission, although the original of the album has not been found. After being liberated from captivity, Menachem began documenting the history of the Łódź ghetto, translated the “Kronika Getta Łódzkiego” into Hebrew and collaborated on the publication of the “Encyclopaedia of the Righteous Among the Nations” by Yad Vashem. He was also involved in cooperation with the District Commission for the Investigation of Crimes against the Polish Nation and was a member of the Union of Lodz residents in Israel, based in Tel Aviv. He was one of the experts on the history of the Łódź ghetto, having extensive library collections on the Litzmannstadt Ghetto and the Holocaust.
The Łódź Ghetto or Litzmannstadt Ghetto (after the Nazi German name for Łódź) was a Nazi ghetto established by the German authorities for Polish Jews and Roma following the Invasion of Poland. It was the second-largest ghetto in all of German-occupied Europe after the Warsaw Ghetto. Situated in the city of Łódź, and originally intended as a preliminary step upon a more extensive plan of creating the Judenfrei province of Warthegau, the ghetto was transformed into a major industrial centre, manufacturing war supplies for Nazi Germany and especially for the Wehrmacht. The number of people incarcerated in it was increased further by the Jews deported from Nazi-controlled territories.
On 30 April 1940, when the gates closed on the ghetto, it housed 163,777 residents. Because of its remarkable productivity, the ghetto managed to survive until August 1944. In the first two years, it absorbed almost 20,000 Jews from liquidated ghettos in nearby Polish towns and villages, as well as 20,000 more from the rest of German-occupied Europe. After the wave of deportations to Chełmno extermination camp beginning in early 1942, and in spite of a stark reversal of fortune, the Germans persisted in eradicating the ghetto: they transported the remaining population to Auschwitz and Chełmno extermination camps, where most were murdered upon arrival. It was the last ghetto in occupied Poland to be liquidated. A total of 210,000 Jews passed through it; but only 877 remained hidden when the Soviets arrived. About 10,000 Jewish residents of Łódź, who used to live there before the invasion of Poland, survived the Holocaust elsewhere.
“Mendel takes out his camera. No more flowers, clouds, natures, stills, or landscapes. Amid the horror all around him he has found his destiny: to photograph and leave behind a testimony for all generations about the great tragedy unfolding before his eyes.”
Mendel Grossman, With a Camera in the Ghetto (Lochamei HaGeta’ot: Ghetto Fighters’ House and HaKibbutz Hameuchad Publishing House, 1970), p. 101 (Hebrew).
In the Lodz ghetto, thousands of photographs managed to survive and, in surviving, to commemorate the lives and deaths of the Jews there. Mendel Grossman was already a photographer when the ghetto was sealed in May, 1940, though previously he had photographed beauty and movement. He managed to get a job with the Department of Statistics in the ghetto, photographing “official” subjects such as employees of ghetto factories for the pictures on their work permits, and products made in the ghetto workshops for purposes of attracting German clients. Grossman’s job was the perfect camouflage for his true intention: to secretly record the terrible conditions in the Lodz Ghetto, and the suffering of the Jews there, for posterity. Grossman photographed, as well, the brutality of the Germans. His photography can be said to be photographic commemoration, as well as a form of resistance.
Grossman was strictly forbidden by Chaim Rumkowski, the head of the Lodz Judenrat, to take pictures in the ghetto. On December 8, 1941, Rumkowski wrote to Grossman, “I inform you herewith that you are not allowed to work in your profession for private purposes… Your photographic work is confined only to the activity in the department in which you are employed. You are therefore strictly prohibited to do any photographic work.” Much more threatening were the German prohibitions. As the pictures he took – including public executions, deportations to the death camp at Chelmno, and the bloating and misery of the ghetto inhabitants – were damning evidence against the Germans, Grossman could have been killed for taking them. Yet, despite pleas by his family and friends to stop endangering himself, Grossman continued to photograph what he saw in the Lodz ghetto. However, to fool the Germans and the police, he took his pictures in secret. Grossman slashed open the pockets of his coat, and kept his hands hidden inside them. His camera stayed underneath the coat, suspended by a strap around his neck. From his pockets, Grossman was able to manipulate the camera, aim, open his coat slightly, and snap the photographs. In this fashion, he accumulated thousands of pictures that tell us what life was like in the Lodz ghetto.
Grossman caught on film the deportations of the Lodz Jews to their deaths at Chelmno – he photographed people writing their last notes to their families, and children waiting behind chain-link fences to be taken to an unknown destination during the “Sperre”, the horrifying deportation in September, 1942 where almost all the children under ten years old were taken from the ghetto, and later murdered at Chelmno. …
Perhaps Grossman’s most successful photographic record was the one he made of his family. During the four years of the ghetto’s existence, Grossman lived together with his parents, two sisters, brother-in-law and little nephew, Yankush, in a crowded apartment. He watched and photographed his family as they carried on their day-to-day lives, waiting in never-ending lines for whatever food was being distributed, wolfing the food down first at the table, and then later, in bed under blankets, because the cold was so brutal (and perhaps the table had been burned for heat). As he carefully watched his family through the eye of his camera, he saw them slowly fading away. The many pictures he took of his family’s step-by-step deterioration created a horrifying photographic record typical of many other families in the ghetto. Looking at these pictures, the love and tenderness he felt towards his family members is evident. Grossman’s brother-in-law was the first in the family to die, on a rainy day after he came home from work. He dropped dead of starvation and exhaustion, wearing the same shabby clothes and wooden clogs in which Grossman had photographed him previously, gulping down soup. His father, emaciated and wrapped in a tallit, died as his son stood at his deathbed with his camera, recording his last moments. His mother, also photographed, died of starvation.
Grossman’s sadness is perhaps most palpable as we watch his the deterioration of his sister’s little son Yakov (Yankush) Freitag, a beautiful little boy. In the first pictures, a smile plays on his face as he helps his mother with her many chores, including waiting on infinite lines to bring home food. He was, no doubt, a curious child with an impish smile, well-tended by his mother. Ultimately, however, ghetto life reduced him to a sallow, blank-faced boy, robbed of his childhood and his natural inquisitiveness, deadened somehow. The contrast between the picture where, his eyes closed in delight, Yankush anticipates eating a single cherry brought to him by his uncle, “God knows from where, because nothing of the sort could have been found in the ghetto,” and that in which he is pictured sucking on a frozen carrot typical of the spoiled food available in the Lodz ghetto, his eyes full of pain and his hands swollen from the cold, are emblematic of the fate of Jewish children in the ghetto.
The story of Grossman’s family was typical of Jewish families in the Lodz ghetto, where over 20% of the population was killed by starvation. Grossman, by intensively photographing his loved ones, created a record of his family’s, and the ghetto’s, slow and ineluctable march toward death.
Grossman hid over ten thousand negatives in round tin cans – he gave many of the pictures away to whoever wanted them. He emphasized again and again in conversations with friends that he expected the negatives to reach Israel and to be exhibited as testimony of what took place in the ghetto, proof of this great crime. As the ghetto was being liquidated, he hid the tin cans in a wooden crate in a hollow space he made under the windowsill in his apartment. They were found by Grossman’s sister, Fajge, after the war ended, after Grossman himself had died at the age of 32 on a death march. All ten thousand negatives were indeed sent to Israel, to Kibbutz Nitzanim. However, when the Kibbutz fell into Egyptian hands during the War of Independence, the treasure was lost. Only the prints distributed by Grossman, and some hidden by his friend Nachman Zonabend at the bottom of a well in the ghetto, survived.
Sheryl Silver Ochayon. “Who Took The Pictures?” on the Yad Vashem website Nd [Online] Cited 13/06/2023
My Secret Camera Gulliver Books, Hardcover – April 1, 2000 Photographs by Mendel Grossman (Photographer), text by Frank Dabba Smith (Author)
In 1940 as Nazi troops rolled across Europe, countless Jewish families were forced from their homes into isolated ghettos, labor and concentration camps. In the Lodz Ghetto in Poland, Mendel Grossman refused to surrender to the suffering around him, secretly taking thousands of heartrending photographs documenting the hardship and the struggle for survival woven through the daily lives of the people imprisoned with him. Someday, he hoped, the world would learn the truth. My Secret Camera is his legacy.
George Kadish, born Zvi (Hirsh) Kadushin (1910 – September 1997), was a Lithuanian Jewish photographer who documented life in the Kovno Ghetto during the Holocaust, the period of the Nazi German genocide against Jews.
Prior to World War II he was a mathematics, science and electronics teacher at a Hebrew High School in Kovno, Lithuania.
As a hobby, Kadish was a photographer. He was skilled at making home-made cameras. During the period of Nazi control of Lithuania (along with indigenous Lithuanian collaborators) he successfully photographed various scenes of life and its difficulties in the ghetto in clandestine circumstances. Kadish constructed cameras by which he could photograph through the buttonhole of his coat or over a window sill. He was able to photograph sensitive scenes that would attract the ire of Nazis or collaborators, such as scenes of people gathered for forced labor, burning of the ghetto, and deportations.
The Kovno ghetto had two parts, called the “small” and “large” ghetto, separated by Paneriu Street. Each ghetto was enclosed by barbed wire and closely guarded. Both were overcrowded, with each person allocated less than ten square feet of living space. The Germans continually reduced the ghetto’s size, forcing Jews to relocate several times. The Germans destroyed the small ghetto on October 4, 1941, and killed almost all of its inhabitants at the Ninth Fort. Later that same month, on October 29, 1941, the Germans staged what became known as the “Great Action.” In a single day, they shot 9,200 Jews at the Ninth Fort.
Kadish took every opportunity possible to document day-to-day life in the Kovno ghetto and, after his escape in 1944, the ghetto’s final days. The results constitute one of the most significant photographic records of ghetto life during the Holocaust era. Photographing life in the Kovno ghetto was an extremely risky venture. The Germans strictly prohibited it, and as with all defiant acts, they did not hesitate to murder offenders.
Acquiring and developing film secretly outside the ghetto were just as perilous as using hidden cameras inside. Kadish received orders to work as an engineer repairing x-ray machines for the German occupation forces in the city of Kovno. Once in the city, he discovered opportunities to barter for film and other necessary supplies. He developed his negatives at the German military hospital, using the same chemicals he used to develop x-ray film, and succeeded in smuggling them out in sets of crutches.
The subjects of Kadish’s photographic portraits were varied, but he seemed especially interested in capturing the reality of the ghetto’s daily life. In June 1941, witnessing the brutality of the initial pogroms, he photographed the Yiddish word Nekoma (“Revenge”) found scrawled in blood on the door of a murdered Jew’s apartment.
Camera in hand, or whenever necessary, placed to record subjects through a buttonhole of his overcoat, he photographed Jews humiliated and tormented by Lithuanian and German guards in search for smuggled food, Jews dragging their belongings from one place to another on sleds or carts, Jews concentrated in forced work brigades, and so forth. Kadish also recorded the new regimen of regulated daily activities at the Ältestenrat’s (as the Jewish council in Kovno was known) food gardens and in schools, orphanages, and workshops. In addition to depicting the severe conditions of ghetto life, he had an insider’s eye for portraiture, the desolation of deserted streets, and the intimacy of informal, improvised gatherings.
Among Kadish’s last photographs from inside the ghetto are those recording the deportation of ghetto prisoners to work camps in Estonia. In July 1944, after escaping from the ghetto, across the river, he photographed the ghetto’s liquidation. Once the Germans fled, he returned to photograph the ghetto in ruins and the small groups who had survived the final days in hiding.
Saving the Collection
Kadish recognised early on the danger of losing his precious collection. He enlisted the assistance of Yehuda Zupowitz, a high-ranking officer in the ghetto’s Jewish police, to help hide his negatives and prints. Zupowitz never revealed his knowledge of Kadish’s work or the location of his collection, even during the “Police Action” of March 27, 1944, when Zupowitz was tortured and killed at the Ninth Fort prison. Kadish retrieved his collection of photographic negatives upon his return to the destroyed ghetto.
After Germany’s surrender on May 8, 1945, Kadish left Lithuania for Germany with his extraordinary documentary trove. In the American zone of occupied Germany, he mounted exhibitions of his photographs for survivors residing in displaced persons camps. Since then, several museums, including New York’s Jewish Museum, have formally exhibited his work.
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC. “George Kadish,” on the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum website Nd [Online] Cited 13/06/2023
The Kovno Ghetto was a ghetto established by Nazi Germany to hold the Lithuanian Jews of Kaunas during the Holocaust. At its peak, the ghetto held 29,000 people, most of whom were later sent to concentration and extermination camps, or were shot at the Ninth Fort. About 500 Jews escaped from work details and directly from the ghetto, and joined Jewish & Soviet partisan forces in the distant forests of southeast Lithuania and Belarus. …
Resistance
Throughout the years of hardship and horror, the Jewish community in Kovno documented its story in secret archives, diaries, drawings and photographs. Many of these artefacts lay buried in the ground when the ghetto was destroyed. Discovered after the war, these few written remnants of a once thriving community provide evidence of the Jewish community’s defiance, oppression, resistance, and death. George Kadish (Hirsh Kadushin), for example, secretly photographed the trials of daily life within the ghetto with a hidden camera through the buttonhole of his overcoat.
The Kovno ghetto had several Jewish resistance groups. The resistance acquired arms, developed secret training areas in the ghetto, and established contact with Soviet partisans in the forests around Kovno.
In 1943, the General Jewish Fighting Organization (Yidishe Algemeyne Kamfs Organizatsye) was established, uniting the major resistance groups in the ghetto. Under this organisation’s direction, some 300 ghetto fighters escaped from the Kovno ghetto to join Jewish partisan groups. About 70 died in action.
The Jewish council in Kovno actively supported the ghetto underground. Moreover, a number of the ghetto’s Jewish police participated in resistance activities. The Germans executed 34 members of the Jewish police for refusing to reveal specially constructed hiding places used by Jews in the ghetto.
Der Stürmer (pronounced [deːɐ̯ ˈʃtʏʁmɐ]; literally, “The Stormer / Attacker / Striker”) was a weekly German tabloid-format newspaper published from 1923 to the end of World War II by Julius Streicher, the Gauleiter of Franconia, with brief suspensions in publication due to legal difficulties. It was a significant part of Nazi propaganda, and was virulently anti-Semitic. The paper was not an official publication of the Nazi Party, but was published privately by Streicher. For this reason, the paper did not display the Nazi Party swastika in its logo. …
Most of the paper’s readers were young people, and people from the lowest strata of German society. Copies of Der Stürmer were displayed in prominent red Stürmerkästen (display boxes) throughout the Reich. As well as advertising the publication, the cases also allowed its articles to reach those readers who either did not have time to buy and read a newspaper in depth, or could not afford the expense. In 1927, Der Stürmer sold about 27,000 copies every week. By 1935, its circulation had increased to around 480,000.
Heinrich Hoffmann (12 September 1885 – 15 December 1957) was Adolf Hitler’s official photographer, and a Nazi politician and publisher, who was a member of Hitler’s intimate circle. Hoffmann’s photographs were a significant part of Hitler’s propaganda campaign to present himself and the Nazi Party as a significant mass phenomenon. He received royalties from all uses of Hitler’s image, even on postage stamps, which made him a millionaire over the course of Hitler’s rule. After the Second World War he was tried and sentenced to 10 years in prison for war profiteering. He was classified by the Allies’ Art Looting Investigators to be a “major offender” in Nazi art plundering of Jews, as both art dealer and collector and his art collection, which contained many artworks looted from Jews, was ordered confiscated by the Allies. Hoffmann’s sentence was reduced to 4 years on appeal. In 1956, the Bavarian State ordered all art under its control and formerly possessed by Hoffmann to be returned to him.
Ohrdruf was a German forced labor and concentration camp located near Ohrdruf, south of Gotha, in Thuringia, Germany. It was part of the Buchenwald concentration camp network. …
As the American troops advanced towards Ohrdruf, the SS began evacuating almost all prisoners on death marches to Buchenwald on April 1. During these marches, SS, Volkssturm, and members of the Hitler Youth killed an estimated 1,000 prisoners. Mass graves were re-opened and SS men tried to burn the corpses. The SS guards killed many of the remaining prisoners in the Nordlager that were deemed too ill to walk to the railcars. After luring them to the parade ground, claiming that they were to be fed, the SS shot them and left their corpses lying in the open.
In addition to those killed on the death marches, an estimated 3,000 inmates died from exhaustion or were murdered inside the camp. Together with those worked to death here but moved elsewhere to die, estimates of the total number of victims are around 7,000.
Liberation
Ohrdruf was liberated on April 4, 1945, by the 4th Armored Division, led by Brigadier General Joseph F. H. Cutrona, and the 89th Infantry Division. It was the first Nazi concentration camp liberated by the U.S. Army.
When the soldiers of the 4th Armored Division entered the camp, they discovered piles of bodies, some covered with lime, and others partially incinerated on pyres. The ghastly nature of their discovery led General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe, to visit the camp on April 12, with Generals George S. Patton and Omar Bradley. After his visit, Eisenhower cabled General George C. Marshall, the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington, describing his trip to Ohrdruf:
… the most interesting – although horrible – sight that I encountered during the trip was a visit to a German internment camp near Gotha. The things I saw beggar description. While I was touring the camp I encountered three men who had been inmates and by one ruse or another had made their escape. I interviewed them through an interpreter. The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty and bestiality were so overpowering as to leave me a bit sick. In one room, where they were piled up twenty or thirty naked men, killed by starvation, George Patton would not even enter. He said that he would get sick if he did so. I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in a position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to ‘propaganda.’
At Ohrdruf concentration camp, 4th Armored Division soldier David Cohen said: “We walked into a shed and the bodies were piled up like wood. There are no words to describe it.” He said the smell was overpowering and unforgettable.
Seeing the Nazi crimes committed at Ohrdruf made a powerful impact on Eisenhower, and he wanted the world to know what happened in the concentration camps. On April 19, 1945, he again cabled Marshall with a request to bring members of Congress and journalists to the newly liberated camps so that they could bring the horrible truth about German Nazi atrocities to the American public. That same day, Marshall received permission from the Secretary of War, Henry Lewis Stimson, and President Harry S. Truman for these delegations to visit the liberated camps.
Ohrdruf had also made a powerful impression on Patton, who described it as “one of the most appalling sights that I have ever seen.”
Rüdiger Halt (German) (designer) Leni Riefenstahl (German, (photographer) Die Götter des Stadions (The Gods of the Stadium) 1938 Offset lithographic film poster for the film Olympia printed on off-white paper, and adhered to a white linen backing Height: 35.250 inches (89.535cm) Width: 25.250 inches (64.135cm)
Poster for the German propaganda sports film, “Olympia” (The Gods of the Stadium), about the 1936 Summer Olympics held in Berlin, released in April, 1938. The poster features a photographic image of German Olympic athlete Erwin Huber in a discus throwing stance. Huber participated in the 1928 and the 1936 games. The poster image is reproduced from a scene in the opening of the film. The stance is reminiscent of the Discobolus, an ancient Greek statue of a discus thrower, which symbolises the Olympics and the athletic ideal. Nazi authorities used the games to promote an image of a new, strong, and united Germany to foreign spectators and journalists while masking the regime’s targeting of Jews and Roma (Gypsies), as well as Germany’s growing militarism. Germany fielded the largest team, 348 athletes, and won the most medals. The games were used to promote the myth of “Aryan” racial superiority, physical prowess, and symbolise that “Aryan” culture was the rightful heir of classical antiquity. Leni Riefenstahl, who directed “Triumph des Willens” (“Triumph of the Will”), shot at the 1934 Nuremberg Rally, was commissioned by the Nazis to produce a film about the Berlin games, which would also promote all these ideals. Riefenstahl made two films, “Olympia Part I: Festival of the Nations” and “Part II: Festival of Beauty” and combined them to create “Olympia.” Riefenstahl’s work pioneered numerous cinematographic techniques and won Best Foreign Film honours at the Venice Film Festival and a special award from the International Olympic Committee (IOC) for depicting the joy of sport.
J.C. Leyendecker (American, 1874-1951) Ivory Soap It Floats Painting for Ivory soap advertisement, 1900 Gouache on board Private collection Image courtesy of the National Museum of American Illustration, Newport, RI
Featured in mainstream national magazines, ads for Ivory soap often depicted scenes of conventional domesticity. Some, however, were erotic, like this one by Leyendecker featuring a man in a floor-length robe, whose crotch is suggestively rendered.
The Eye of the Beholder
“Leyendecker’s subjects exemplify an elite white masculinity that was hardly representative of the diversity of the United States in his time, or since” observes Sonya Abrego. The artist’s subjects are white, cultured, privileged, “upholding racial, social and nationalist hierarchies”.
But how representations were and are understood depends on the eye of the beholder. At the time that Lyendecker was painting and illustrating commercial magazines his flirtatious subliminal erotic messages would have been all too decipherable to a knowing gay male readership – even as these very illustrations “passed” the scrutiny of heterosexual normativity. For gay men “passing” allowed them to hide their real identity and to fit into society without discrimination and fear of loosing their job, their home and/or going to jail.1 Leyendecker’s works both hide and transgress the taboo when they pass inspection.
For the initiated, Leyendecker’s paintings and illustrations were at the very heart of the subversion of hegemonic masculinity – “a practice that legitimises men’s dominant position in society and justifies the subordination of the common male population and women, and other marginalised ways of being a man.”2 Witness the man holding the “stiff rod” of the golf club in Men with Golf Clubs (c. 1909, below); the knowing looks of the two men in Men and Woman, Arrow Shirts with Golf Clubs and Collie (1910, below); the camp hands on hip languid pose of the man on the Cover of Saturday Evening Post (June 29, 1907, below) and the butcher, hand of hip, frontal crotch shot with Janet Jackson garment malfunction / nipple exposure that is Cover of Collier’s (June 24, 1916, below). The fact that some of the paintings such as Record Time, Cool Summer Comfort (c. 1920, below) feature Leyendecker’s lover of 48 years Charles A. Beach, only adds to the surreptitious nature of the paintings societal relationship. Much as the gay movie star Rock Hudson had to keep his private and public lives separate in order to “pass”, so Leyendecker kept his gay relationship a secret from the public.
While the exhibition would like us to address Leyendecker’s work within a broader context (according to curator Donald Albrecht talking about the artist in “gender terms, racial terms, sexual terms,” treating him in an intersectional way) – that is, through “the interconnected nature of social categorisations such as race, class, and gender as they apply to a given individual or group, regarded as creating overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination or disadvantage”3 – this is only, and can only ever be, a post-post-posterior inflection on the rump of his work, a point of view wholly constructed in the present (the word and concept becoming popular after 1989 when the term ‘intersectionality’, which has its roots in Black feminist activism, and was originally coined by American critical legal race scholar Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw). Attitudes may have changed over the years and in some parts of the world, but to believe that heterosexual Black, white or Asian men would have understood the intersectional relationships in Leyendecker’s work back in the day is contemporary fairy floss. While it would be nice to think of Leyendecker’s work in all it’s supposed intersectional glory this was not how the work was seen by the general public (and white men in particular) when it was produced and published.
Today the eye of the beholder can still be just as blinded and prejudiced… for the dominant stereotype of the body, that of the white male, constantly reinforces its value in a capitalist consumer society. Body processes are drawn into social relations through fashion, sport, body culture, etc and, “As soon as we are articulated as a male or female body, a raced, classed, or sexed body in the context of the larger culture, a subject position construed hierarchically is not far behind, due in part to that means of articulation, our language. We take up a position according to a dialectic of presence and lack in terms of our relative proximity (still generally connected to our biological bodies) to the monied white male as signifier.”4
What we can do in this case is to inform the ‘conditions of understanding’ of the beholder: in other words, by making the viewer informed of the processes of production we can undermine the “ability of dominant groupings to define their bodies and lifestyles as superior, worthy of reward, and as, metaphorically and literally, the embodiment of class.”5 While the self is a social construction it is still all to easy for the dominant hegemonic group within a culture or society to identify and impose a valuable body – for example, that of the muscular mesomorph or the body of the athlete (or super jock). What we must encourage are processes in society “which will make it extremely difficult for any one group to impose as hegemonic, as worthy of respect and deference across society, a single classificatory scheme of ‘valuable bodies’.”6
A difficult task but I believe a worthy one.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Footnotes
1/ “Passing is the ability of a person to be regarded as a member of an identity group or category, such as racial identity, ethnicity, caste, social class, sexual orientation, gender, religion, age and/or disability status, that is often different from their own. Passing may be used to increase social acceptance in order to cope with stigma by removing stigma from the presented self and could result in other social benefits as well. Thus, passing may serve as a form of self-preservation or self-protection in instances where expressing one’s true or prior identity may be dangerous.”
3/ Definition of intersectionality by Oxford Languages on the Google website
4/ Leslie Heywood. Dedication To Hunger: The Anorexic Aesthetic in Modern Culture. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996, p. 12.
5/ Chris Schilling. The Body and Social Theory. London: Sage Publications, 1993, p. 140.
6/ Ibid., p. 143.
Many thankx to the New-York Historical Society for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the art work for a larger version of the image.
“An effeminate man … expresses his abdication of power. For a man to behave effeminately is an expression of the paradox. With each flap of the wrist he slides deeper into the underclass and, in so doing, betrays the birthright of men to mythic power. Such gestures are violations of masculinity, insults to the meaning of manhood. This is why they are met with such contempt by so many, including many gay men who long for the power of patriarchy.”
Brian Pronger. The Arena of Masculinity: Sports, Homosexuality, and the Meaning of Sex. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990, p. 221.
“The Arrow collar man – handsome, well-groomed, and always dapper in crisp shirts with starched white collars – was a pop culture icon. He was so dashing that women who weren’t quite familiar with the idea of a brand personification yet, wrote to Arrow’s parent company hoping they could meet him. He shares a lot in common with the Gibson Girl of the same era: an elegant, youthful ideal of American beauty. But unlike Charles Dana Gibson’s illustrated feminine creation, which he insisted was an amalgam of modern American women of his time, The Arrow Collar Man was originally modelled after a specific person, Charles Beach, who happened to also be Leyendecker’s partner. The two lived together for close to fifty years, and he helped manage the illustrator’s career, a relationship that would have likely disappointed the Arrow man’s female fans. …
Leyendecker’s subjects exemplify an elite white masculinity that was hardly representative of the diversity of the United States in his time, or since. It was working in line with nationalist standards of rugged masculinity espoused from the top by figures like Teddy Roosevelt that permeated the culture at large…
Installation view of the exhibition Under Cover: J.C. Leyendecker and American Masculinity at the New-York Historical Society showing at left, Thanksgiving: 1628-1928 (Pilgrim and Football Player) (1928, below); and at right, Ivory Soap It Floats (1900, above) Photo: Glenn Castellano, New-York Historical Society
A new exhibition at the New-York Historical Society examines the work and influence of J.C. Leyendecker (1874-1951), a preeminent illustrator and commercial artist who helped shape American visual culture in the first three decades of the 20th century through captivating advertisement campaigns including the legendary “Arrow Collar Man” and countless covers for the Saturday Evening Post. As a gay artist whose illustrations for a mainstream audience often had unspoken homoerotic undertones, his work is especially revealing for what it says about the cultural attitudes towards homosexuality of the period. Under Cover: J. C. Leyendecker and American Masculinity is organised by New-York Historical from the collection of the National Museum of American Illustration, Newport, RI.
Born in 1874 in Montabaur, Germany, Leyendecker immigrated to Chicago in 1882 with his parents and three siblings. Showing an early artistic talent, Leyendecker and his youngest brother, F. X., studied at the Art Institute of Chicago before moving to Paris where they developed their distinctive styles. Upon returning to the United States, the brothers entered a publishing renaissance and soon found themselves at its center, New York City. In 1914, they moved into a 14-room house in New Rochelle, New York, along with Charles Beach, for 48 years.
J.C. Leyendecker (American, 1874-1951) Men with Golf Clubs Painting for Arrow Collar advertisement, c. 1909 Oil on canvas National Museum of American Illustration, Newport, RI
In Leyendecker’s illustrations, interactions between men often took place in homosocial spaces such as all-male dormitories, clubs, haberdasheries, and gymnasiums. In this example, the men’s informal dress and posture plus the heraldic marks of Harvard and Yale in the window suggest an elite college clubhouse and seem to target the ad to college men.
J.C. Leyendecker (American, 1874-1951) Men and Woman, Arrow Shirts with Golf Clubs and Collie Painting for Arrow Collar advertisement, 1910 Oil on board National Museum of American Illustration, Newport, RI
Leyendecker developed campaigns for Arrow collars depicting handsome, idealised men wearing shirts and detachable collars manufactured by Cluett Peabody & Co. These ads often depicted fashionable men in stylish settings engaged in activities such as boating, golfing, or reading in men’s clubs. Even when women are present, the men depicted seem indifferent to them, often sharing sexually charged glances with each other instead.
J.C. Leyendecker (American, 1874-1951) Couple in Boat Painting for Arrow Collar advertisement, 1912 Oil on canvas National Museum of American Illustration, Newport, RI
The exhibition locates Leyendecker’s work within the evolution of commercial illustration, when advertisers sought to sell products by emotion and feeling, not only by factual representation of a product’s utilitarian characteristics. These commercial trends can be seen in Leyendecker’s advertising illustrations for Arrow collars.
A new exhibition examines the work and influence of J.C. Leyendecker (1874-1951), a preeminent illustrator and commercial artist who helped shape American visual culture in the first three decades of the 20th century through captivating advertising campaigns including the legendary “Arrow Collar Man” and countless covers for the Saturday Evening Post. As a gay artist whose illustrations for a mainstream audience often had unspoken homoerotic undertones, his work is especially revealing for what it says about the cultural attitudes towards homosexuality of the period.
The exhibition showcases 19 of the artist’s original oil paintings and a wealth of related ephemera, and features both Leyendecker’s editorial work, such as magazine covers, as well as commercial illustrations that appeared in the pages of popular publications, on roadside billboards, in store windows, and on mass transit. Laying the groundwork of Leyendecker’s implied gay narratives, these ads starred fashionable men in stylish settings engaged in activities such as boating, golfing, or reading in men’s clubs.
Under Cover delves into the early politics of sexual identity and gender while simultaneously examining how Leyendecker helped establish a nationalistic ideal of elite and athletic white male beauty. To address this aspect of his work, the exhibition juxtaposes some of Leyendecker’s paintings with artefacts that offer counter-narratives to his works’ exclusionary nature, including depictions of fashionable African American men during the Harlem Renaissance, as well as a selection of contemporaneous advertisements with homoerotic connotations and a digital show of images depicting gay culture in New York during Leyendecker’s time.
Under Cover is organised by New-York Historical from the collection of the National Museum of American Illustration, Newport, RI. The show is guest-curated by Donald Albrecht, and coordinated at New-York Historical by Rebecca Klassen, curator of material culture.
Text from the New-York Historical Society website
J.C. Leyendecker (American, 1874-1951) In the Yale Boathouse 1905 Oil on canvas National Museum of American Illustration, Newport, RI
This painting was one of seven by Leyendecker that illustrated Ralph D. Paine’s “A Victory Unforeseen,” published in the July 1905 issue of Scribner’s Magazine. The short story centres on a Yale-Harvard boat race, and in this image, the hero cools himself off by pouring a pail of water over his sweating shoulders.
Installation view of the exhibition Under Cover: J.C. Leyendecker and American Masculinity at the New-York Historical Society showing at third right, Man and Woman Dancing (1923, below); at second right, Couple in Boat (1912, above); and at right, Thanksgiving: 1628-1928 (Pilgrim and Football Player) (1928, below) Photo: Glenn Castellano, New-York Historical Society
Installation view of the exhibition Under Cover: J.C. Leyendecker and American Masculinity at the New-York Historical Society showing at left centre, Record Time, Cool Summer Comfort (c. 1920, below); at centre, In the Yale Boathouse (1905, above); and at right, Thanksgiving: 1628-1928 (Pilgrim and Football Player) (1928, below) Photo: Glenn Castellano, New-York Historical Society
“A Superb Example of the Common Man”
As a gay artist, Leyedecker demonstrated a marked flare for portraying the male body either semi-nude or wearing body-revealing clothing. As a specialist in images of men, Leyedecker painted a whole range of male types from the mass market – from feminised men, like those in interwoven sock ads who pose languidly while they look at and caress their stockings; to elegant men of leisure like the Arrow Collar Man; to masculine icons such as the sailor, lifeguard, and athlete. Some of these types were consistent with the era’s theories linking race, gender, and bodily appearance. (Leyedecker’s attitudes toward these issues is unknown). His athletes embodied the tenets of muscular Christianity, and influential philosophy whose proponents believed in manly athleticism as a means toward a patriotic and moral good. President Theodore Roosevelt, who advocated the movement’s principles, noted that Leyendecker’s illustrations depicted “a superb example of the common man.”
Wall text from the exhibition
Installation views of the exhibition Under Cover: J.C. Leyendecker and American Masculinity at the New-York Historical Society showing at left in the bottom image, Cover of Saturday Evening Post (June 29, 1907, below) and Cover of Collier’s (June 24, 1916, below); at second right, In the Yale Boathouse (1905, above); and at right, Thanksgiving: 1628-1928 (Pilgrim and Football Player) (1928, below) Photo: Glenn Castellano, New-York Historical Society
J.C. Leyendecker (American, 1874-1951) Men reading Arrow Collar advertisement 1914 Oil on canvas National Museum of American Illustration, Newport, RI
Installation view of the exhibition Under Cover: J.C. Leyendecker and American Masculinity at the New-York Historical Society showing at left top, Men Reading (1914, above) and at left bottom, Men with Golf Clubs (c. 1909, above) Photo: Glenn Castellano, New-York Historical Society
Homo-sociability
Many of Leyendecker’s paintings portray male behaviour as well as their social and physical interactions. In his illustrations, there interactions often take place in all-male queer spaces such as dormitories, clubs, haberdasheries and gyms. Leyendecker had access to these spaces, and as a gay man he might have been attuned to their potential for same-sex desire and connection. Often, when women are present in his work, the men seem indifferent to them, sometimes sharing sexually charged glances with each other instead.
Since Leyendecker operated within the collaborative nature of the modern advertising profession, he did not have control over what happened to his images after the created them. His work was often subject to revisions at the hands of art directors and others. These changes, whether intentional or not, sometimes had the effect of fortifying or mitigating the images implications of same-sex attraction.
Wall text from the exhibition
Installation view of the exhibition Under Cover: J.C. Leyendecker and American Masculinity at the New-York Historical Society showing at left top, Men Reading (1914, above) and at left bottom, Men with Golf Clubs (c. 1909, above); at centre, The Donchester – the Cluett Dress Shirt (1911, below); and at right, In the Stands 2 (1913, below) Photo: Glenn Castellano, New-York Historical Society
J.C. Leyendecker (American, 1874-1951) The Donchester – the Cluett Dress Shirt Arrow shirt advertisement, 1911 Oil on canvas National Museum of American Illustration, Newport, RI
J.C. Leyendecker (American, 1874-1951) In the Stands 2 Arrow shirt advertisement, 1913 Oil on canvas National Museum of American Illustration, Newport, RI
Installation views of the exhibition Under Cover: J.C. Leyendecker and American Masculinity at the New-York Historical Society at left, The Donchester – the Cluett Dress Shirt (1911, above); and at right, In the Stands 2 (1913, above) Photo: Glenn Castellano, New-York Historical Society
Masculinity and Style
Leyendecker skilfully painted fashionable white men interaction with one another. His 1911 ad for Dorchester dress shirts depicts two men in evening clothes leaning slightly toward each other, possibly to share an intimate story. The whit man-about-town ideal in Leyendecker’s work was only one of many examples of masculinity that circulated in this period. Another kind was advanced by leaders of the Harlem Renaissance, a flourishing of African American art and literature. They understood the power of visual representation and self-presentation to denigrate or uplift their race, especially in the eyes of white audiences. Black Harlem Renaissance writers and artists and their allies forged an elite cultural vanguard. They produced illustrated books, drawings, and photographs that conveyed nuanced and realistic images of Black masculinity through elegant dress and deportment. Queer Black men participated in and were represented by these efforts.
Wall text from the exhibition
Installation view of the exhibition Under Cover: J.C. Leyendecker and American Masculinity at the New-York Historical Society showing at second left, In the Stands 2 (1913, above); at centre, Portrait of an American Sailor, Charles Beach (1918, below); at third right, Man and Woman with Spanish Shawl (1926); and at right, Couple in Boat (1912, above) Photo: Glenn Castellano, New-York Historical Society
J.C. Leyendecker (American, 1874-1951) Portrait of an American Sailor, Charles Beach 1918 Oil on canvas National Museum of American Illustration, Newport, RI
Installation view of the exhibition Under Cover: J.C. Leyendecker and American Masculinity at the New-York Historical Society showing at centre, Portrait of an American Sailor, Charles Beach (1918, below); at second right, The S.S. Leviathan (1918, below); and at right, Man and Woman with Spanish Shawl (1926) Photo: Glenn Castellano, New-York Historical Society
J.C. Leyendecker (American, 1874-1951) The S.S. Leviathan House of Kuppenheimer advertisement, 1918 Oil on canvas National Museum of American Illustration, Newport, RI
New-York Historical Society Exhibition Explores the Work of J.C. Leyendecker, a Pivotal Gay Artist and Illustrator Who Helped Shape American Visual Culture.
This spring, a new exhibition at the New-York Historical Society examines the work and influence of J.C. Leyendecker (1874-1951), a preeminent illustrator and commercial artist who helped shape American visual culture in the first three decades of the 20th century through captivating advertising campaigns including the legendary “Arrow Collar Man” and countless covers for the Saturday Evening Post. As a gay artist whose illustrations for a mainstream audience often had unspoken homoerotic undertones, his work is especially revealing for what it says about the cultural attitudes towards homosexuality of the period. Under Cover: J. C. Leyendecker and American Masculinity, on view May 5 – August 13, 2023, is organised by New-York Historical from the collection of the National Museum of American Illustration, Newport, RI.
“Under Cover: J.C. Leyendecker and American Masculinity deepens our understanding of the struggle for full civil rights as Americans of the LGBTQ+ community,” said Dr. Louise Mirrer, president and CEO of New-York Historical. “The exhibition is part of New-York Historical’s ongoing commitment to tell stories of Americans whose lived experience, though important and consequential to our history, is so often absent from textbooks in schools and colleges. New-York Historical’s collaboration with the American LGBTQ+ Museum, which will be housed in our institution’s new wing, will further enable meaningful conversations about LGBTQ+ history and its rightful place within the American narrative.”
“J.C. Leyendecker was an amazingly talented artist whose illustrations have come to embody the look and feel of the first half of the century while simultaneously demonstrating how fluidity in gender expression and gay representation were actually quite common at the time, contrary to current assertions that they are unique to our own moment,” said Donald Albrecht, guest curator. “Not only did his work exemplify the zeitgeist, but it depicts a deeply nuanced view of sexuality and advertising that broadens our understanding of American culture.”
Under Cover: J.C. Leyendecker and American Masculinity showcases 19 of the artist’s original oil paintings and a wealth of related ephemera, and features both Leyendecker’s editorial work, such as magazine covers, as well as commercial illustrations that appeared in the pages of popular publications, on roadside billboards, in store windows, and on mass transit. His aesthetic influence extended to Norman Rockwell, his colleague and eventual successor as the Post’s premier illustrator. The exhibition is organised into two primary sections: one exploring Leyendecker’s depictions of the male body, either semi-nude or clad in body-revealing garments, and a second focusing on his images of male intimacies, often of men sharing sexually charged looks. The model for many of his illustrations was Charles Beach, his lover and eventual business manager.
Under Cover delves into the early politics of sexual identity and gender while simultaneously examining how Leyendecker helped establish a nationalistic ideal of elite and athletic white male beauty. To address this aspect of his work, the exhibition juxtaposes some of Leyendecker’s paintings with artefacts that offer counter-narratives to his works’ exclusionary nature, including depictions of fashionable African American men during the Harlem Renaissance. Also providing crucial context: a selection of contemporaneous advertisements with homoerotic connotations and a digital show of images depicting gay culture in New York during Leyendecker’s time, including plays about lesbians and men in drag that appeared on Broadway, effeminate male nightclub performers, and gay artists who wrote poems and created drawings about same-sex desire.
The exhibition locates Leyendecker’s work within the evolution of commercial illustration, when advertisers sought to sell products by emotion and feeling and not only by factual representation of a product’s utilitarian characteristics. These commercial trends can be seen in Leyendecker’s work creating advertising illustrations for companies such as Gillette razors, Ivory soap, House of Kuppenheimer menswear, and Interwoven socks. He also developed campaigns for Arrow collars depicting handsome, idealised men wearing shirts and detachable collars manufactured by Cluett, Peabody & Co. Laying the groundwork of Leyendecker’s implied gay narratives, these ads starred fashionable men in stylish settings engaged in activities such as boating, golfing, or reading in men’s clubs. In his work, Leyendecker created drawings depicting multiple kinds of masculinity for the mass market, from feminized men like the languidly posed males in Interwoven ads who look at and caress their sheer stockings to elegant men of leisure like the Arrow Collar Man to manly men like muscular sailors, lifeguards, and athletes.
Leyendecker’s suggestive images aligned with his era’s sexual mores. Starting in the latter decades of the 19th century, small but dense subcultures that defied sexual and gender conventions became increasingly visible in cities like New York. Members of these subcultures often identified themselves with specific styles of dress, mannerisms, and language. As a gay Manhattanite immersed in the city’s sophisticated visual culture industries, Leyendecker was most likely cognisant of these gay identity markers, sometimes depicting them in his illustrations.
Under Cover is organised by New-York Historical from the collection of the National Museum of American Illustration, Newport, RI. The show is guest-curated by Donald Albrecht, and coordinated at New-York Historical by Rebecca Klassen, curator of material culture. Drawing on three decades of scholarship, the exhibition is aided by a committee of advisors: Dr. Elspeth Brown, Professor of History at the University of Toronto; Dr. Monica L. Miller, Professor of English and Africana Studies, Barnard College; and Dr. Michael Murphy, Associate Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Illinois Springfield.
Press release from the New-York Historical Society
J.C. Leyendecker (American, 1874-1951) Cover of Saturday Evening Post June 29, 1907 National Museum of American Illustration, Newport, RI
Leyendecker’s Ivy League athletes embodied the ideals of muscular Christianity, a philosophy whose proponents believed in athleticism as a means toward a patriotic and moral good. President Theodore Roosevelt, who advocated the movement’s principles, noted that Leyendecker’s illustrations depicted “a superb example of the common man.”
J.C. Leyendecker (American, 1874-1951) Cover of Collier’s June 24, 1916 National Museum of American Illustration, Newport, RI
As a gay male artist, Leyendecker demonstrated a marked flair for depicting the male body either semi-nude or wearing body-revealing clothing. In this cover, Leyendecker partially exposes the athlete’s left nipple.
J.C. Leyendecker (American, 1874-1951) Cover of Collier’s November 10, 1917 National Museum of American Illustration, Newport, RI
During World War I, Leyendecker adapted his flair for depicting men to produce images of sailors and soldiers endowed with a healthy, heroic, and muscular masculinity.
Robert Minor (American, 1884-1952) “Army Medical Examiner: ‘At last a perfect soldier!'” The Masses, July 1916 Reproduction The Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University Libraries
Home-front depictions of World War I were not always as positive as those created by Leyendecker. Chronicling the war’s dehumanising and deathly toll, this illustration from the leftist magazine The Masses rendered the male body with biting satire.
Installation view of the exhibition Under Cover: J.C. Leyendecker and American Masculinity at the New-York Historical Society showing Record Time, Cool Summer Comfort (c. 1920, below) Photo: Glenn Castellano, New-York Historical Society
By using the same model (Charles Beach) for each figure in this painting, Leyendecker implied that the muscled swimmer and eel-attired collegian were the same person. Reinforcing this idea, the catalog copy assets that the company makes American clothes perfectly fitted to the athletic American man’s body.
Men’s clothing manufacturer B. Kuppenheimer was founded in Chicago in 1876 by Bernard Kuppenheimer, a German Jewish immigrant, along with his son Jonas Kuppenheimer and Samuel Nathan. It was one of many American men’s clothiers with German Jewish founders and/or owners. Subjected to anti-Semitic satire in print media, manufacturers like Kuppenheimer were anxious to project a brand identity though advertising that embraced white, Christian ideals like the college man in the Leyendecker illustration.
Wall text from the exhibition
J.C. Leyendecker (American, 1874-1951) Record Time, Cool Summer Comfort Painting for Kuppenheimer advertisement, c. 1920 Oil on canvas National Museum of American Illustration, Newport, RI
By pairing a muscled swimmer with a well-tailored collegian, both modelled by Charles A. Beach, this advertisement illustrated Kuppenheimer’s claim in the ad for “truly American clothes” designed “for the American figure” and expressing “the American personality.” Men’s clothing manufacturer B. Kuppenheimer was founded in Chicago in 1876 by Bernard Kuppenheimer, a German Jewish immigrant, along with his son Jonas and Samuel Nathan.
J.C. Leyendecker (American, 1874-1951) Man and Woman Dancing Painting for Arrow Collar advertisement, 1923 Oil on canvas National Museum of American Illustration, Newport, RI
This illustration features models Phyllis Frederic and Brian Donlevy, who launched his acting career in the early 1920s while posing for Leyendecker. Donlevy went on to perform in Broadway plays and silent films, eventually taking on major roles in Hollywood movies.
Paralleling Leyendecker’s idealised depictions of white men and often stereotypical images of Black ones, members of the Harlem Renaissance produced illustrated books, drawings, and photographs that conveyed positive images of Black masculinity through elegant dress and deportment. Taken by Carl Van Vechten, a gay white critic, novelist, and Renaissance promoter, this photograph of author and artist Richard Bruce Nugent signalled its subject’s gayness by including a bust of Antinous, the male lover of the Roman emperor Hadrian.
J.C. Leyendecker (American, 1874-1951) Thanksgiving: 1628-1928 (Pilgrim and Football Player) Painting for cover of Saturday Evening Post, November 24, 1928 Oil on canvas Private collection Image courtesy of the National Museum of American Illustration, Newport, RI
Juxtaposing a modern muscular football player with a Pilgrim, Leyendecker’s painting for the 1928 Thanksgiving cover of the Saturday Evening Post positions the popular sport not only as a Thanksgiving pastime, but also as a cultural marker of American-ness. By the time the Post published this cover, football had been emerging for decades as an emblem of masculinity.
Installation view of the exhibition Under Cover: J.C. Leyendecker and American Masculinity at the New-York Historical Society showing at right, Leyendecker’s Easter – Man in the Mirror Painting for cover of Saturday Evening Post, April 11, 1936 (below) Photo: Glenn Castellano, New-York Historical Society
J.C. Leyendecker (American, 1874-1951) Easter – Man in the Mirror Painting for cover of Saturday Evening Post, April 11, 1936 Oil on canvas National Museum of American Illustration, Newport, RI
In his work, Leyendecker created drawings depicting multiple kinds of masculinity for the mass market, from preening, dandified men like this artwork’s subject to elegant men of leisure like the Arrow Collar Man to manly men like muscular sailors, lifeguards, and athletes. Timed to Easter, this cover illustration was also one of many instances of the artist creating Post illustrations themed to the seasons and holidays.
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A short text this week because I’m suffering from sinusitis and headache.
Annelies Štrba’s “intimate family scenes… breaking away from the rules of perfect photographic reproduction” are the antithesis – or anti-thesis – of last weeks posting were the curators conceptualised 1930s American documentary photography as a sort of reality-dream.
Here there is no need to conceptualise such a response to the photographs for Štrba’s unconventional, poetic photographs really are a mixture of dream and reality. At the limits of visibility Štrba’s glances, glimpses, clefts, over / under exposures, double exposures, colour disfigurations and ingressions – the process by which a potentiality enters into actuality – offer to the viewer a “no place” of becoming, where “recognition” is the trigger of exposure.
Like the sudden gust of wind drops the ripe apple. (Minor White)
It is difficult in a posting to leave an “impression” of an artists body of work in so few photographs, especially an artist who works in series of images. Therefore, I heartily recommend viewing the familial architectural Shades of Time series (1970-1997) on Annelies Štrba’s website.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Fotostiftung Schweiz for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
The exhibition Annelies Štrba – “My Otherness Colourfully Unfolds” focuses on Annelies Štrba’s early works. Black-and-white photo canvases, colour photographs and the projection Shades of Time show images from the years 1974 to 1997. These works are framed by her later expressionist video stills, a newly conceived projection with photographs from the years up to 2015 and staged scenes of fairy-tale princesses sleeping in enchanted landscapes. All the pictures revolve around the theme of family. Their juxtaposition enables an understanding of how this artist’s personal and artistic development over time is reflected in her view of children and grandchildren.
Annelies Štrba (b. 1947) is an observer and magician: She captures fleeting moments and creates dream images; life and art intertwine. When her children were small, the camera was part of everyday family life; at night, the mother would develop her prints in the darkroom. Again and again, she adopted new techniques and forms of presentation, for instance when she began working with video in the 1990s and when she eventually started to paint over photographs printed on canvas. While her earlier analogue works play with snapshot aesthetics, her video stills and edited digital photographs achieve the intensity of expressionist paintings.
The Fotostiftung Schweiz collection contains a big group of Štrba’s early black-and-white photo canvases and colour photographs – intimate family scenes, but also bleak facades of large-panel-system buildings and high-rises.
This retrospective exhibition, whose title quotes a poem by Emmy Hennings, presents these works for the first time. They are positioned around two newly conceived projections of the work cycles with which Annelies Štrba translated her view of the family into images: Shades of Time brings together photographs taken between 1974 and 1997, showing the children Sonja, Samuel and Linda as they grow up. Noonday is dedicated to her children’s children. When these series are seen together, the interweaving of eras becomes tangible. The visual worlds, characterised by subjectivity and intuition, merge to form one comprehensive cosmos.
Installation view of the exhibition Annelies Štrba – “My Otherness Colourfully Unfolds” at the Fotostiftung Schweiz, Winterthur, Zurich
Annelies Štrba (b. 1947) is one of Switzerland’s most internationally renowned contemporary artists using photography. In her works, she captures fleeting moments and creates dream images; life and art intertwine. This exhibition at Fotostiftung Schweiz presents, for the first time, large-format photo canvases from the collection and a projection specially conceived for Fotostiftung Schweiz.
The exhibition Annelies Štrba – “My Otherness Colourfully Unfolds” focuses on Annelies Štrba’s early works. Black-and-white photo canvases, colour photographs and the projection Shades of Time show images from the years 1974 to 1997. These works are framed by her later expressionist video stills, a newly conceived projection with photographs from the years up to 2015 and staged scenes of fairy-tale princesses sleeping in enchanted landscapes. All the pictures revolve around the theme of family. Their juxtaposition enables an understanding of how this artist’s personal and artistic development over time is reflected in her view of children and grandchildren.
From the attic to Kunsthalle Zurich
Despite her photographic apprenticeship, which she commenced at the age of 16, Annelies Štrba is a self-taught artist, as she never attended an art school. In 1969, she married Bernhard Schobinger, whom she accompanied and assisted in his work as a goldsmith and artist. Štrba came into contact with the art scene in her husband’s gallery for contemporary art, which he opened in Richterswil, where the pair lived. Mostly though, she took care of their three children: Sonja, Samuel and Linda. With the little ones in tow, she sold selected clothes and shoes for the punk and new wave scene at the Bürkliplatz flea market in Zurich to support their modest household. Meanwhile, without any ambition at first, she documented family life with her camera, developing her prints at night in the attic and storing them in boxes.
It was in Bernhard Schobinger’s 1987 publication Devon-Karbon-Perm that Štrba’s photographs first attracted attention. Her presentation of Schobinger’s jewellery in photographs that look raw and unmediated, and reproductions of handmade prints with scratches and streaks, bear witness to a confident photographic language, vehemently rejecting any smoothness, perfection or conformity. However, it was not until 1990, at the age of 43, that Annelies Štrba first appeared as an artist in her own right. Bernhard Mendes Bürgi, who was Kunsthalle Zurich’s curator at the time, offered her an exhibition. Against all expectations and advice (from the men involved), Annelies Štrba decided to enlarge her intimate sketchy pictures on photo canvases, in formats of up to 100 by 150 centimetres. From the very start, she emphasised the difference between a mother’s snapshots hoarded in a photo album and the visual works that were now revealed to the public. The formats and the rough unprotected surface of the canvases gave the photographs the presence of paintings. Štrba abstracted and thereby intensified the peculiar mood of the everyday scenes. She superimposed a heaviness, a seriousness, on the photographs of the children playing, sleeping or sitting together in the kitchen, which turned them into symbolic images of the human condition: loneliness in togetherness, eeriness in the familiar, the depths of the family.
Shades of Time: changes in the visual language
As the children grew older and the artist became more successful, her radius of movement increased: In the 1990s, Annelies Štrba received a studio scholarship from Landis+Gyr. She travelled to England, Scotland, Ireland and Japan, and exhibited in Berlin, London, New York, Paris and Tokyo. In 1997, Lars Müller Publishers released her extensive monograph Shades of Time (which has long since been out of print). In this book’s series of images, a change can be seen in her visual language and attitude to life over the years: landscapes passing by the car window, house facades, gardens, but above all Sonja and Linda as young women continuing the game with the camera, on equal footing, and obviously enjoying it. The birth of the first grandchild, Samuel-Maria, brings a Madonna-like depiction of maternal love and care into Štrba’s visual cosmos – a motif that had been absent until then, not least because the mother had remained hidden behind the camera.
First video works and video stills
Also in 1997, Štrba produced her first video, because a filmed portrait of the artist was required for the Whitechapel Gallery in London and she did not want to leave the making of it to anyone else. Enthused by the possibilities for manipulation offered by this technique, which was new to her, she put the still camera aside and concentrated on video works, in addition to video stills produced as stand-alone images. By adjusting or saturating the colours and using visual distortion, she created special aesthetics that looked painterly and technical at the same time. The motifs also liberated themselves more and more radically from the domesticity of the previous years. Landscapes, cityscapes and flowers served as visual composition elements, as did the silhouettes of her adult daughters.
However, still photography and children did come back to dominate Annelies Štrba’s imagery once again. From countless photographs of her grandchildren, especially Linda’s daughter Shereen, a new cycle of works emerged, culminating in the 2015 publication Noonday: Colourful scenes, many of which were taken at the artist’s home in Amden, show a children’s paradise comprising brightly coloured fabrics, cushions, blankets and a trove of princess dresses.
“My Otherness Colourfully Unfolds”
The photo canvases that were purchased in 2015 and 2021 with support from the Förderverein Fotostiftung Schweiz, among others, and supplemented by generous donations from the artist, are presented for the first time in this exhibition, whose title quotes a poem by Emmy Hennings, The motifs also appear in a digital interpretation of the Shades of Time slide show, newly conceived in 2020. In addition, Štrba has composed a projection from the Noonday picture series specifically for this exhibition in Winterthur, with a soundtrack produced by her son, Samuel Schobinger. The Shades of Time and Noonday projections run alternately in the exhibition, one after the other, uniting their eras in a never-ending flow of images. The inclusion of selected video stills, mounted behind glass in a large format, also visualises the themes of the artist’s life and her tireless pursuit of image forms for her cosmos.
With the exhibition Annelies Štrba – “My Otherness Colourfully Unfolds”, Fotostiftung Schweiz continues its commitment to honouring female photographers. Like previous presentations of female artists, such as Pia Zanetti and Manon, this show offers a focused retrospective on an oeuvre that shaped the history of photography in Switzerland. The exhibition was curated by Teresa Gruber, curator at Fotostiftung Schweiz.
Press release from the Fotostiftung Schweiz
Installation view of the exhibition Annelies Štrba – “My Otherness Colourfully Unfolds” at the Fotostiftung Schweiz, Winterthur, Zurich showing at left, Linda (1991, below); Hiroshima (1994, below); and Linda and Sonja with Samuel-Maria (1995, below)
Annelies Štrba (b. 1947) is a keen observer, but also a magician: She intuitively captures fleeting moments, then transforms them into images that come across as symbolic. Today, she is one of Switzerland’s most internationally renowned artists working with photography. Her first solo exhibition though, in 1990 at Kunsthalle Zurich, was provocative. An unknown at the time, she appeared in public with her intimate family scenes, defying all expectations and breaking away from the rules of perfect photographic reproduction. Shortly afterwards, Annelies Štrba’s works were exhibited in Berlin, London and New York. She has continued to amaze ever since. Always open to new stylistic devices, techniques and modes of presentation, she translates her view of the world into unconventional poetry.
In this exhibition at Fotostiftung Schweiz, her early work comes to the fore: Black-and-white photo canvases, colour photographs and (in a reconceived digital interpretation from 2020) the slide show Shades of Time present images from the 1970s through to 1997. They show Štrba’s children Sonja, Samuel and Linda growing up. There are also indications of an initial shift in the visual language here, towards more movement and a playful handling of motifs, in which the daughters participate as young women. These almost traditional works are framed by the video stills created later. By means of manipulation carried out on the monitor, colours are remixed and stills dissolve into shimmering structures.
Annelies Štrba’s grandchildren then brought her back to photography. With a mobile phone camera and digital photography, she accompanied her heroines and heroes through everyday life, opening up a new colourful cosmos, which she encapsulated under the title Noonday in 2015. From that group of works, Štrba has also composed a projection, specifically for this exhibition in Winterthur. The Shades of Time and Noonday projections run alternately in the exhibition, one after the other, uniting their eras in a never-ending flow of images. Finally, princesses sleeping in fairy-tale landscapes (usually granddaughter Shereen is the performer) whisk the observer away to the land of dreams: The artist had begun to work on the picture surfaces with brush and paint. Štrba made reference to art history and her own images, reproducing, defamiliarising and creating objects, into which the marks of time are, in turn, inscribed.
In 2015 and 2021, Fotostiftung Schweiz was able to purchase a group of Annelies Štrba’s canvases, with support from the society Friends of Fotostiftung Schweiz, among others. These works were supplemented by generous donations from the artist. Representing various phases of her early work, they are now being exhibited together for the first time – and confronted with later works.
Biography
Annelies Štrba was born in 1947 in Zug. After training as a photographer and completing her first professional assignments, she married Bernhard Schobinger in 1969, whom she accompanied and assisted in his work as a goldsmith and artist. Štrba came into contact with the art scene in her husband’s gallery for contemporary art, which he opened in Richterswil. Mostly though, she took care of their three children: Sonja, Samuel and Linda. With the little ones in tow, she sold selected clothes and shoes for the punk and new wave scene at the Bürkliplatz flea market in Zurich to support their modest household. Meanwhile, without any ambition at first, she documented family life with her camera, developing her prints at night in the attic and storing them in boxes. It was in Bernhard Schobinger’s 1987 publication Devon-Karbon-Perm that Štrba’s photographs first attracted attention. Her presentation of Schobinger’s jewellery in pictures that look raw and unmediated, and reproductions of handmade prints with scratches and streaks, bear witness to a confident photographic language, vehemently rejecting any smoothness, perfection or conformity. However, it was not until 1990, at the age of 43, that Štrba first appeared as an artist in her own right. Bernhard Mendes Bürgi, who was Kunsthalle Zurich’s curator at the time, offered her an exhibition.
Triptych
The first room of the exhibition introduces Annelies Štrba’s various spheres by means of a brightly coloured triptych – a group of three, albeit constituting one female figure. By extracting two stills from a video work and mirroring one of them, the artist has created a ‘community’ and arranged it as a psychedelic altarpiece: Shown frontally and immersed in golden brown, the internally calm queen is bowed to by her brightly dressed servants on the left and right – one in blue, the other in magenta, with glowing contours. Due to the coarse resolution of the video images, the surface and figure disintegrate into pixel-like patches of colour, bringing to mind the structure of paintings. The pictures’ saturated defamiliarised colouring makes reference to expressionist works.
Canvases
For her first exhibition, at Kunsthalle Zurich in 1990, Annelies Štrba enlarged her photographs on canvases in formats of up to 100 by 150 centimetres. From the very start, she emphasised the difference between a mother’s snapshots hoarded in a photo album and these visual works that were now revealed to the public. The formats and the rough unprotected surface of the canvases gave the photographs the presence of paintings. At the same time, they came across like washed-out yellowed pictures from a bygone era. Štrba abstracted and thereby intensified the peculiar mood of the everyday scenes. She superimposed a heaviness, a seriousness, on the photographs of the children playing, sleeping or sitting together in the kitchen, which turned them into symbolic images of the human condition: loneliness in togetherness, eeriness in the familiar, the depths of the family.
Kitchen pictures
The kitchen was the heart of the Richterswil house in which Annelies Štrba and Bernhard Schobinger raised their three children Sonja, Samuel and Linda together. Here, they did not merely cook and eat, but also received visitors, discussed and pondered. In this room, which looks cramped and humble, cosiness and chaos merge. Years pass, and suddenly adult daughters are sitting at the same table. The video Max, Annelies Štrba’s first video piece, marks a turning point in her oeuvre and shows a bizarre kitchen spectacle. Although all movements are in slow motion, the activeness of Sonja and Linda setting and clearing the table contrasts with the rather passive attitude that they exhibit in many photographs. In flowing dresses, they make preparations, but these do not lead to anything and instead seem to represent an inherently strange ritualistic process. Annelies Štrba produced this video when a filmed portrait of the artist was required for a 1997 exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in London and she did not want to leave the making of it to anyone else. Enthused by the possibilities for manipulation offered by the technology, which was new to her, she put the still camera aside and concentrated on video works, in addition to video stills produced as stand-alone images.
Shades of Time projection
Also in 1997, Lars Müller Publishers released an extensive monograph that encompassed Annelies Štrba’s photographic oeuvre. Its title, Shades of Time, was provided by a sign on a shop front, photographed from a moving car during a trip to England. Years and impressions pass by in an associative and only roughly chronological sequence. The shots of sleeping and playing children are replaced by house fronts and landscapes. The heaviness of the early domestic scenes dissolves into increasing movement and colourfulness. This shift in photographic language can also be interpreted autobiographically. In 2001, Annelies Štrba conceived a slide show in which the images were projected in groups of three, with a techno audio accompaniment by Peter Ford. The duplication and mirroring of some individual motifs give rise to arrangements that sometimes appear ornamental or even sacral. The digital version of this projection was made in 2020, in collaboration with video company in Zofingen.
Noonday projection
While growing up, Annelies Štrba’s grandchildren presented her with a new world of images: a chaotic clarity, a banal colourfulness, in which there is also room for laughter and group photos. Annelies Štrba cleverly combined the children’s joy in dressing up and acting with spontaneous photo shoots. Mostly though, she reacted impartially to life as it happened, proudly taking part in the daily routine and marvelling at it. Štrba herself remains invisible, but her backdrop, her colourfully designed nest, as if made for her little protagonists, frames the action. In 2015, the book Noonday, comprising over three hundred pages, was released by Lars Müller Publishers. In 2023, the artist has collaborated with video company to compose a Noonday projection, adding new motion to the captured moments, with the accompaniment of a soundtrack by her son Samuel Schobinger.
Buildings
Already in her first exhibitions, Annelies Štrba placed architectural photographs between the pictures of her children. The bleak facades of residential blocks and high-rise buildings that she photographed on her travels through Silesia contrast with the depictions of cosiness at home. Often, the photographer seems to just glance at these buildings in passing. People also live in most of them, including families. On the other hand, the ruins of Einstürzende Neubauten (collapsing new buildings) captured in the Polish city of Sosnowiec recall Soviet planning and memorialise the Berlin band of the same name, founded in 1980. Štrba’s interest in experimental and electronic music is also incorporated into her video works and projections.
Fairy-tale pictures
The motif of sleeping children connects the Shades of Time and Noonday groups of works with NYIMA and Momoka. For the latter, Annelies Štrba edited digital photographs, some of which were taken in the context of Noonday, but also took new photographs: staged scenes, mostly featuring her granddaughter Shereen. All of them show resting girls – in forests, in meadows or on sofas, seemingly immersed in deep sleep. In their princess dresses, they appear to be from another time. Defamiliarisation of colours and superimposition of multiple exposures transform the photographs into visualisations of these dainty figures’ dreams. Aesthetically and compositionally, they resemble the famous painting by the Pre-Raphaelite John Everett Millais, which depicts the drowned Ophelia lying in a stream, surrounded by plants, flowers and her magnificent gown. The romantic beauty of Štrba’s pictures can also evoke associations with the relationship between sleep and death.
Sleeping children
The exhibition’s final room completes the circle and leads back to the beginnings of Annelies Štrba’s photographic oeuvre. While the kitchen has already been examined as an important motif, we now look into the bedroom or children’s room. The artist remembers how, after long evenings in the darkroom, she used to find her children asleep. She would often feel an urge to photograph them like this, cosy in their nests, or surrounded by evidence of play. However, the bed is also a platform on which the state of being awake can be presented: Time and time again, the artist produced portraits of her children sitting on beds.
Text from the exhibition leaflet
Installation view of the exhibition Annelies Štrba – “My Otherness Colourfully Unfolds” at the Fotostiftung Schweiz, Winterthur, Zurich showing at right, Linda with Shereen (2000, below)
Installation view of the exhibition Annelies Štrba – “My Otherness Colourfully Unfolds” at the Fotostiftung Schweiz, Winterthur, Zurich showing at left, Nyima 410, Nyima 409, Nyima 408 (2009, below); and on the right a photograph from the series Shades of Time (1970-1997)
In Tibetan Nima (also spelled as “Nyima”) is also a female or male given name which means ‘the sun’, also the one with radiance of the Sun. And in Hebrew as a female given name it means ‘grace, mercy’.
Dialogue: Old English dialogas (plural), from Latin from Greek dialogos, from dia ‘through’ + logos ‘word’
“As we define it, dialogue is “a communicative process in which people with different perspectives seek understanding.” To be in dialogue means that participants are not only engaging each other in light of their different views, but they are also striving to achieve a degree of mutual understanding.”
Jason Combs. “What is Dialogue?” on the University of Dayton website Monday October 28, 2019 [Online] Cited 01/07/2023
Short and sweet because I’m not feeling well.
What an inspired pairing for an exhibition. “Each [artist] addresses race, class, representation, and systems of power in their work, creating photographic series grounded in Black history and realities that speak to the human condition.”
From street-based photographs of everyday life to conceptual excavations of Black Histories, they produce incisive thought provoking works “that intermingle past and present, referenc[ing] African Americans whose lives and stories have been co-opted or lost.”
I love them both for their commitment to and passion for life in all its different forms. Bringing people together. Expressing a degree of mutual understanding.
#BlackLivesMatter #AllLivesMatter
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the J. Paul Getty Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Dawoud Bey and Carrie Mae Weems have been friends and colleagues for more than 40 years. Each addresses race, class, representation, and systems of power in their work, creating photographic series grounded in Black history and realities that speak to the human condition. This exhibition sheds light on their unique trajectories and modes of presentation, and their shared consciousness and principles. Organised by the Grand Rapids Art Museum.
In 1976 I had been making photographs for a couple of years. I had certainly been looking at a lot more photographs than I had actually made. From looking at photographs in books and magazines and going to exhibitions of pictures by Mike Disfarmer at MoMA, Richard Avedon at Marlborough, and haunting whatever other places there were to see photographs in New York in the early 1970s, I had begun to educate myself, with the intent of adding something to the conversation through my own pictures.
The artist Janet Henry, who was from the same Jamaica, Queens neighborhood that I lived in, had gotten a job in the Education Department at the Studio Museum in Harlem, then located above a Kentucky Fried Chicken on 125th Street and Fifth Avenue in a large second floor loft space. When Frank Stewart, the museum’s staff photographer and photo teacher, left to do a commissioned project in Cuba, Janet called me and asked if I would take over the class. On the first day of class a few students straggled in. One of them, a seemingly shy woman with big expressive eyes, introduced herself, “Hi, my name is Carrie. Do you think I could be a photographer?” she asked, holding her Leica camera in her hand. That began what has now been 33 years of friendship and camaraderie with one of the most brilliant people I know.
From the very beginning, Carrie Mae Weems has had a sharp intelligence that was looking for a way into the world. From her early documentary photographs to the more expansive and materially varied recent works, she has consistently set out to visually define the world on her own terms and to redefine for all of us the nature of the world that we are in. After all these years I still anticipate her work with a fresh sense of wonderment, knowing that her restless search for the deeper meaning of things will yield a continuing rich trove of objects and images. On a Sunday morning in May I called from my home in Chicago to reconnect with my dear friend while she was traveling in Seville, Spain.
Since meeting at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1977, Dawoud Bey and Carrie Mae Weems have been intellectual colleagues and companions.
From the outset of their careers, both have operated from a deep social commitment to participate in, describe, and define culture. In seeking to express themselves fully, each has expanded possibilities within photography and video to address their chosen subjects.
Dawoud Bey & Carrie Mae Weems: In Dialogue, on view April 4 through July 9, 2023, brings together for the first time a focused selection of work from a period of over 40 years by two of today’s most important and influential photo-based artists. Each grapples with issues of race, class, and representation in their work, making art grounded in the experiences and realities of Black Americans while also speaking to the broader human condition.
“The Museum’s Department of Photographs has made great strides in recent years in building an exhibitions program that highlights more expansive narratives of photographic history,” says Timothy Potts, Maria Hummer-Tuttle and Robert Tuttle Director of the J. Paul Getty Museum. “Dawoud Bey and Carrie Mae Weems are two artists who reframe American traumas that have been ignored or simplified in the national historical record. We are proud to showcase their work in dialogue with one another.”
Jim Ganz, senior curator of photographs, adds, “These artists are two of the most dynamic and insightful of our time. As presented in this extraordinary exhibition, their eloquent dialogue gives unique perspective on their shared concerns as image makers.”
Dawoud Bey (American, born 1953) creates photographs that focus on individuals, communities, and important but often overlooked American histories. His carefully composed images convey the dignity and rich inner lives of his subjects. Carrie Mae Weems (American, born 1953) first gained recognition in the 1980s for exploring identity, race, power, and history, themes that still fuel her art. Over her career, Weems has turned increasingly to staged photography and the use of text to heighten the emotional intensity of her work.
This exhibition is divided into five sections, starting with early pictures that both artists made in the photodocumentary tradition and followed by ambitious, groundbreaking explorations of the medium as it developed technologically and artistically. The exhibition then focuses on how both artists moved beyond candid pictures of everyday life and began making larger scale work that is more planned than spontaneous. Bey’s portraiture evolved from street-based glimpses of the world made with a handheld camera to portraits that are formal but intimate, in which his subjects appear at ease and engage directly with the lens. With her Kitchen Table Series, Weems transitioned from representing real people in their natural environments to creating staged photo essays. For each artist, the techniques developed in this period became the foundation for future projects.
In Resurrecting Black Histories, each artist addresses the 19th century and its legacies in distinctive ways. Bey’s carefully composed landscapes evoke the experience of fleeing along the Underground Railroad, the clandestine network that helped enslaved people escape the South. Weems, by incorporating texts that intermingle past and present, references African Americans whose lives and stories have been co-opted or lost.
In Memorial & Requiem, Bey and Weems reference traumatic 20th-century events. They worked with community partners to stage scenes meant to reinvigorate discussion of the American legacy of racial violence. Each photographer also created a related video, bringing their own sensibility – Bey’s searching, intimate gaze; Weems’ choreographed social commentary – to the moving image, using sequencing and sound to deepen engagement with American history.
The exhibition ends with Revelation in the Landscape, where both Bey and Weems contemplate the built environments in which we live and how those spaces affect our perceptions of the world and ourselves. Bey returns to the Harlem neighbourhoods he photographed in the late 1970s, tracking the changes wrought by gentrification. Weems photographs imposing sites in Rome, inserting herself into historical places imbued with power and legacy. Both series reveal the economic and institutional forces that shape daily life.
In conjunction with the exhibition Getty has created a community program inspired by the exhibition, L.A.: In Dialogue. This program brings Dawoud Bey & Carrie Mae Weems: In Dialogue to a wider Los Angeles community, furthering the influence of the two artists and introducing their work to a new generation of artists and viewers. The artist-led program will host educational workshops for local teens and young adult photographers, and will teach participants techniques in black-and-white photography and the artistic practice of capturing portraiture and place. They will explore themes from the exhibition, collaborate with peers, and explore their local communities: Culver City (Black Image Center), South L.A. (LA Commons), Downtown L.A. (Inner-City Arts), and Venice Beach (Venice Arts). This program will result in a satellite exhibition that will open in June 2023.
Related programming includes Dawoud Bey and Carrie Mae Weems in Conversation on Tuesday, April 4 at 4pm. That evening at 7pm, the Museum presents master saxophonist David Murray in concert with his newly formed quartet as part of the exhibition programming.
The pose of the figures, other than the obvious reference to the Pieta, reminds me of that famous and most moving Eugene W. Smith photograph Tomoko and Mother in the Bath (1971)
The J. Paul Getty Museum 1200 Getty Center Drive Los Angeles, California 90049
I love artists who push the boundaries of seeing / being, body / Self, self / spirit.
Artists who see and feel the world in unique and tantalising – excites the senses or desires of (someone) – ways.
Hannah Villiger is one such artist.
Her fragmentary, space-related assemblages (Works or Blocks) investigate the representation of the female body, “its classification in the media, questions of surface, space and body, and the objectification of the body. In Villiger’s work, the skin – where humans enter a dialogue with their environment – is a setting for highly topical questions of gender and ethnicity, as well as vulnerability and healing. The body was the artist’s primary working material. We encounter it abstracted or deconstructed; it can be human, but also of plant or artificial origin.” (Exhibition text)
But more than that, it is the conceived ‘idea in the mind’ strangeness of Villiger’s out of body gridded experiences… that promote in the viewer an acknowledgement of the physicality, touch, and emotion of actually living and feeling in the human body and beyond. Touch your skin, run your hands over the shape of your mouth, feel your ears, raise your foot, look at your reflection. Marvel at the bodies distortion, energy, spirit. For there is only one you. “I listen to my naked, bare body, the outside of it, the inside of it, traversing it.”
You are unique. An individual, unique, sentient animal. A human – being.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Museum Susch for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“With my Polaroid camera I listen to my naked, bare body, the outside of it, the inside of it, traversing it. Thus I create images that I can correct immediately.”
Hannah Villiger
“The longest distance between the camera and any body part is between raised arm and my toes. I always trigger the camera myself, sometimes without looking through the viewfinder. I tilt the camera to an angle of 90, 180, 270 degrees. I turn myself – literally – upside down.”
Hannah Villiger. On My Book Envy
Hannah Villiger (1951-1997) was an extraordinary voice in the late 20th-century contemporary art, but her work came to an abrupt end with her untimely death. She became known above all for her photographic works based on the body.
Muzeum Susch is hosting the largest presentation of Hannah Villiger’s oeuvre in fifteen years. Hannah Villiger: Amaze Me offers new perspectives on the work of this important Swiss artist. Villiger’s large-format works based on Polaroid photographs make a lasting contribution to the genre of the self-image within art history. At the same time, her explorations of the body can be discussed against the background of numerous contemporary themes. Her oeuvre spans from the drawings she made in the 1970s to the black-and-white photographs and works with the Polaroid camera that she created from the 1980s onwards. These fragmentary close-ups of her own body, greatly enlarged via an internegative and mounted on aluminium, are presented individually or assembled into space-related ensembles. The results are unlimited possibilities of at times spectacular views of the body. The exhibition expands the view of Villiger to include contemporary themes and issues. The focus is on the representation of the female body, one’s own perspective, as well as that of others, on the human physique, its classification in the media, questions of surface, space and body, and the objectification of the body. In Villiger’s work, the skin – where humans enter a dialogue with their environment – is a setting for highly topical questions of gender and ethnicity, as well as vulnerability and healing. The body was the artist’s primary working material. We encounter it abstracted or deconstructed; it can be human, but also of plant or artificial origin. Although Villiger’s early death brought her oeuvre to an abrupt end, her works point unwaveringly to the present.
Running from 4 January to 2 July 2023, Muzeum Susch presents Hannah Villiger: Amaze Me, a comprehensive survey dedicated to the Swiss artist Hannah Villiger (1951-1997) with contributions from contemporary artists Alexandra Bachzetsis, Lou Masduraud (b. 1990) and Manon Wertenbroek (b. 1991).
The exhibition Hannah Villiger: Amaze Me offers new perspectives on the work of this important Swiss artist. Hannah Villiger’s (1951-1997) large-format works based on Polaroid photographs make a lasting contribution to the genre of the self-image within art history. At the same time, her explorations of the body can be discussed against the background of numerous contemporary themes.
Muzeum Susch is hosting the largest presentation of Hannah Villiger’s work in fifteen years. The exhibition spans her oeuvre, from the drawings she made in the 1970s to the black-and-white photographs and works with the Polaroid camera that she created from the 1980s onwards. These fragmentary close-ups of her own body, greatly enlarged via an internegative and mounted on aluminium, are presented individually or assembled into space-related ensembles. The results are unlimited possibilities of at times spectacular views of the body. On display are vintage prints, existing though often still unknown individual works, as well as so-called blocks, large-format assemblages of up to fifteen square picture panels. Some of these will be shown for the first time in the exhibition in Susch.
The exhibition expands the view of Villiger to include contemporary themes and issues. The focus is on the representation of the female body, one’s own perspective, as well as that of others, on the human physique, its classification in the media, questions of surface, space and body, and the objectification of the body. In Villiger’s work, the skin – where humans enter a dialogue with their environment – is a setting for highly topical questions of gender and ethnicity, as well as vulnerability and healing. The body was the artist’s primary working material. We encounter it abstracted or deconstructed; it can be human, but also of plant or artificial origin. Although Villiger’s early death brought her oeuvre to an abrupt end, her works point unwaveringly to the present.
The undiminished relevance of Villiger’s work is underscored by the inclusion of works by the contemporary artists Alexandra Bachzetsis, Lou Masduraud and Manon Wertenbroek. These younger women artists present thematically related works – distributed throughout the entire exhibition – in dialogue with Villiger and at the same time represent strong contemporary positions. The artists have been selected based on their exploration of similar themes to those of Villiger. Bachzetsis in collaboration with Julia Born presents This Side Up, a video installation of the artist moving in all directions in a confined space, much like the way Villiger writhes, turns and shapes her own body under the eye of her Polaroid camera. Masduraud presents Petrifying basin (kisses with the nymphs), a sculptural installation and small wall objects that playfully and sensually rethink organic life and anchors mythological traditions in the present day. And finally, Wertenbroek presents a selection of objects addressing the boundaries between the skin and surrounding world and reflects on themes such as unveiling and veiling.
On the exhibition and Hannah Villiger, Muzeum Susch’s found Grazyna Kulczyk says, “Female artists are no longer afraid to document their bodies being destructed due to illness or ageing – often the artworks become projects showing chronicles of pain. Observing and recording their own bodies has become a form of manifesto for female artists, reclaiming the subjectivity of the body. Female artists have painted, photographed and sculpted themselves. In this way, the shame of nakedness or imperfection has often become a point of pride. Hannah Villiger, through photographs of her body, become the body’s conscious sculptor.”
The exhibition is accompanied by a monograph on the latest research on Hannah Villiger’s practice and influence. Villiger is often likened to an artist’s artist, which has inspired the editors to invite artists who knew her to contribute texts, including Katja Schenker, Beat Streuli, and Claudia and Julia Müller. The book, part of a series of monographs by Muzeum Susch and Skira, will be published in March 2023.
Hannah Villiger (1951-1997) grew up as the fourth of five children in Cham (CH). After completing her studies at the School of Applied Arts in Lucerne, Villiger spent a period travelling and living between Toronto, Rome, Montefalco and Switzerland until she finally settled in Basel in 1977. In Basel, she produced her first black-and-white photographs as well as wood and Plexiglas objects. In 1980 Villiger fell ill with open tuberculosis and spent a month isolated in the Basel Cantonal Hospital, followed by a stay in a sanatorium in Davos. Despite her poor health, Villiger continued to create and exhibit her work. From 1981 to 1982 she undertook a world road-trip with Susan Wyss, with whom she had been in a relationship since 1975. In the early 1980s, Villiger began to use Polaroid cameras primarily to explore her body, serving as a working material, and increasingly moved away from the classic black-and-white and colour photographs. In 1988 in Paris, she met Mouhamadou Mansour (“Joe”) Kébé, with whom she had a son with in 1991. Between 1992 and 1997, Villiger taught at the Basel School of Art and Design. She died of heart failure in 1997.
Curators: Christine Barthe: Head of the Photography Heritage Department at the Musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac; Annabelle Lacour: Head of the Photography Collection at the Musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac
Warning: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers should be aware that this posting contains images and names of people who may have since passed away.
Unknown photographer Portrait of a Persian Dignitary Tehran, 1848 Daguerreotype Photo: RMN – Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay) Hervé Lewandowski
I wish we had tele-transportation so that I could go and see this incredible exhibition about the beginnings of photography practiced outside Europe.
It took me many hours to construct this posting. Placing the information into a logical order was an important consideration, matching the installation photographs with the exhibition texts and individual images so that the story makes sense. Finding country of origin and dates for the photographers was another issue. Further bibliographic information has been added from sources around the internet to fill out life stories and sometimes this information was difficult to find.
Congratulations to the curators for assembling a photographic tour de force in which “the production of these images is diverse and responds to different wishes, desires, and fits into various different contexts.” In other words what was the force majeure, the greater force, that directed the what, where, when, how, who and for whom of their production. Here, force is the operative word… for many of the foremost contexts are both anthropological and geographic (to record what people and places looked like) under the guise of European colonial conquest: to “capture” the spirit of the people and conquered lands under force of occupation.
More interesting are the photographs taken by photographers of their own people, for example different Indian “casts” taken by a Indian born photographer. How did they picture themselves using a European machine? In this context we must remember that the images were usually taken to fulfil a commercial brief, either taken for a rich patron or to be sold through the photographers studio to local and foreign clients.
Predominantly using a Western pictorial language, sometimes these local photographers step outside the mould of making a portrait or casting a ‘type’ or recording a monument within the landscape by embodying within their art the aesthetics of their own cultural history. For example, “Lai Afong’s photographic compositions show the technical and aesthetic influence of traditional Chinese painting, known as guóhuà.” (Wikipedia) “In many regions, from Colombia to West Africa to Madagascar, and from Iran to Japan to India, photography was adopted and sometimes adapted to social uses and local cultures and in many places seems to satisfy the desire for self-representation and the construction of modern identities.” (Exhibition text)
Undoubtedly this was the exception rather than the rule – for the rule of the lawful image was usually Western in power and aesthetic. As the exhibition text notes, “The 19th century in Europe was characterised by a need to accumulate objects, knowledge and also territory. Through photography, landscapes became lands to be mapped and conquered, and their inhabitants subjects to be studied. In the scientific field, the natural history model influenced the use of photography. It contributed to the myth of virgin territories and was a tool in the growing geographical discipline, making claims of exhaustivity: see everything, photograph everything.” And one might add, own everything, both physically and visually (through the photographers and viewers gaze).
Thus the European photographer of the 19th century taxonomically ordered the world around him through a classification of the visual culture of the exotic. Anthropologically, “within the framework of a science then racial, and in a project typology inherited from natural history classification methods, photography is a tool that establishes visual categories that shape racial stereotypes.” This racial science was to have a lasting impact well into the 20th century through the now debunked theory of eugenics (which has no association with anthropology) – “the study of all agencies under human control which can improve or impair the racial quality of future generations” (Galton) – influencing cultures around the world with devastating impact especially through the genocide of untermensch, or what were seen as racial subhumans, by the Nazi party in Germany in the 1930s-1940s.
What is undeniable is the inalienable presence of the sitter in these powerful portraits. This is William Lane in the here and now, with his strong face and sorrowful eyes. This is Botcudo “brought to France by a certain Mr. Porte and are going to stay in Paris for a few months.” This is his representation but also his spirit from the past, this impression all that is left of his life force today. But it is enough. We pay reverence to his life. This is a half-length portrait of a 77-year-old Japanese man… what did he do in his life, what journey led him to be present in front of the camera in February 1890, the learnt lines on his open face evidence of a hard life well lived. And these are Majeerteen Woman trapped in silver like ghosts in a machine, a movement of mutable energy through time and space that still has me engaging with their life even today. Bless them all.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“Among the 101 photographers on show, 52 are Westerners and 49 are indigenous. This near-parity was made possible by the rise, over the last decade, of acquisitions of works by artists from the four continents.”
Quotation by curator Christine Barthe, head of the heritage unit at the Quai Branly’s photographic collection and co-curator of the exhibition with Anabelle Lacour, head of the photographic collection
Installation views of the exhibition Photographs. An Early Album of the World (1842-1911) at the musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, Paris showing in the two bottom images the section ‘Daguerreotypes for anthropology’ and in the bottom image the daguerreotypes of Henri Jacquart (French, 1809 – died after 1873) from September 1851 (below)
Many places in the world became accessible through photography as soon as it was invented in 1839. From the 1840s, darkrooms were taken on official expedition ships and crossed the borders of Europe. From Mexico to Gabon, the camera served the taste of the time for archaeological and geographical description and curiosity about the models encountered. In the second half of the 19th century, photography was used to examine all areas of the globe. This thirst for images was notably fuelled by the European colonial conquest.
Starting from the Musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac’s photograph collection, completed by exceptional loans from public and private collections, the exhibition considers the routes and the dissemination of photography outside Europe in the 19th century. Through a selection of photographs produced between 1842 and 1911 in Asia, Africa, Oceania and the Americas, it aims to understand better the development and the different appropriations of the medium locally by bringing to light less well-known photographs, patrons, phenomena and forms of photography in different parts of the world. An attempt to rebalance the history of photography, too often centred on Europe and the United States.
This exhibition is an adaptation of the exhibition Photographs. 1842-1896: An Early Album of the World designed by the Musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac and presented at the Louvre Abu Dhabi from 25 April to 13 July 2019.
Text from the musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac website
There was a time without photography, and there were places without cameras. Even if it is hard to imagine nowadays, it was not so long ago. Since its invention in 1839, photography has extended its reach at varying paces into all the visible spaces and every corner of the globe: starting in familiar places, spreading to nearby regions and neighbouring countries, and finally making it way into more far-flung lands as well. From the most extraordinary scenes to the most trivial, from breathtaking scenery to the food on our plates, nothing is too intimate or too grandiose to escape our desire to take a picture of it.
But how did it all start? How did photography spread, contributing to our view of the world? Who are the players who make this “photo album of the world”?
Since the 1840s, photography has accompanied countless scientific and military expeditions and trips. It was part of the usual conquest of the world, in the context of colonial expansion by the European powers, which intensified in the second half of the 19th century. As a tool to describe landscape and map territories, it contributed to the knowledge and control of Indigenous populations. Europe did not have a monopoly over this modern technology, however. Photography travelled and was transformed. In many regions, from Mexico and Colombia to Sierra Leone and Madagascar, Iran, Japan and India, it was adopted and sometimes adapted to social practices and local cultures, to create, control and conserve an image of the self and one’s environment.
The exhibition revisits some of this early histories of photography outside of Europe.
There was a time without photography and places without a camera. Even if it is difficult to imagine it today, this period is not so far away.
Since the announcement of its invention in 1839, photography has more or less quickly invaded all visible spaces, penetrated all places on the scale of the globe: familiar places, nearby regions, then neighbouring countries, also the most distant. From the most extraordinary to the most trivial, from the sublime landscape to the content of our plates, nothing was too intimate or too grandiose to escape the desire to create its image.
How did it all start? How did photography come about? propagated, participating in the global geographical imagination? Who are the actors who make up this “world album”?
Since the 1840s, photography has accompanied the countless voyages and scientific and military expeditions. It participates in the visual conquest planetary, in the context of the colonial expansion of the European powers which accelerated in the second half of the 19th century. Description tool landscapes, territorial mapping, it supported the knowledge and population control. But Europe did not have a monopoly on this modern technology. Photography travels, transforms, takes root. In many regions, Mexico, Colombia, West Africa in Madagascar, from Iran to Japan via India, it has been adopted and sometimes adapted to social uses and local cultures to build, control and maintain an image of oneself and one’s environment.
This exhibition proposes to return to some of these stories from the beginnings of photography practiced outside Europe.
First appearances
The first technique that was widely used in the early days photography, between the 1840s and 1850s, takes its name “daguerreotype” of its inventor Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre. It’s about of a copper plate coated with silver and made sensitive to light. Relatively expensive to manufacture and requiring learning, this technique was widely used to produce portraits. The long exposure time made it difficult to apply it to the landscape. These images are unique because formed directly on the silver plate, they cannot therefore give rise to several tests. The difficulty of their realisation as well as their cost explain their rarity today. European and American practice in its very beginnings, the daguerreotype quickly exported around the world. new technique modifying the relationship to its own image, the daguerreotype is also used as a tool of scientific description. Practiced by travellers and traveling photographers, it was also adopted very early in many photographic studios of major world cities, such as Mexico City, Bogotá and Lima. In Tehran, the daguerreotype is practiced at the court of the Shah of Persia from 1845.
Daguerreotypes for anthropology
If photography is quickly adopted by travellers and offers a new vision of the real world, it also serves a new discipline: anthropology. In France, the first scientific applications of photography to this burgeoning field are experienced in the years 1840-1850. Within the framework of a science then racial, and in a project typology inherited from natural history classification methods, photography is a tool that establishes visual categories, that shape racial stereotypes. Daguerreotypes made on demand from the anthropology laboratory of the National Museum of Natural History show the importance attached by scientists to skulls, casts and human skeletons, central in a discipline marked by the medicine and comparatism. Produced by professionals like Louis-Auguste Bisson, or by employees of the Museum like Henri Jacquart, these examples testify of an objectification of bodies that photography reinforces. These daguerreotypes are produced or collected by the institution in the same way as the portraits of living people.
Twenty years after the conquest of Algeria, the Arab horsemen have stopped fighting, and are but the shadows of those who for years thwarted the French army. They came to Paris for a show set up by the Museum, Children of the Desert, a fantasia on the Champ de Mars in June, 1851. They too are photographed, and casts of their bodies taken for science – but as popular artists, these horsemen leave their names under their portraits and are paid to pose.
Catherine Darley. “Ghosts (1) – Shadows,” on the Poemas del río Wang blog 10/08/2012 [Online] Cited 07/05/2023
Installation views of the exhibition Photographs. An Early Album of the World (1842-1911) at the musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, Paris showing in the bottom image the section ‘Recreated worlds: photo studios’ (below)
Recreated worlds: photo studios
In the second half of the 19th century, travel by land and sea developed considerably. European colonial expansion was one of the drivers behind the rise in global photographic coverage, not only did cameras and photographers travel, but so did their models. Members of the Indigenous elites made regular diplomatic trips or came to Europe to study. At the major colonial world’s fairs between 1870 and the early 20th century, groups were brought to European cities to be exhibited.
From the 1860s onwards, a great number of photo studios were set up in major cities. Those involved in this new commercial practice adapted to demand from a tourist clientele in search of exoticism, and sets and accessories were used to recreate artificial worlds. These widely distributed images with simplistic, sometimes demeaning captions, transmitted and perpetuated stereotypes. Photos with the frame centred on the face were often taken to respond to the need for description expressed in the field of physical anthropology. But studio decors also attracted a local clientele keen to create souvenirs with their loved ones.
Looking at these portraits, many questions remain today: Who are these individuals? What can we find out about their interactions with the photographer and their participation when being photographed?
Portraits of Aboriginal Australians
The aboriginal populations were privileged subjects of the first commercial photographers in Australia. Produced in the studio, these portraits obey 19th century racialist scientific interests; they are designed to document what was then considered to be an endangered population. German photographer John William Lindt, based in Grafton, New Wales of the South, produces a series of portraits of the aboriginal populations of Clarence Valley, marketed in the form of portfolios from the 1870s.
Combining exoticism and pictorial tradition, his pictures met with great success. Despite this problematic production context and the sometimes artificial nature stagings, this visual heritage is now a resource important for the descendants of the communities. In Australia, research have been undertaken since the 1990s to obtain information on the models, their identity and their territory of origin. The photography model known as “Mary Ann of Ulmarra” was identified in 2013 as Mary Ann Williams, née Cowan, through research conducted by one of his descendants.
Text from the exhibition
John William Lindt (Australian born Germany, 1845-1926) Mary Ann of Ulmarra (Mary Ann Williams, née Cowan) 1873 Albumen print
Lindt took at least sixty photographs in this series of studio portraits of Clarence River Aborigines, although extant albums usually contain fewer than a dozen each. When first published, these studio tableaux were regarded as accurate. Reference: An Eye for Photography: the camera in Australia / Alan Davies. Carlton, Vic: Melbourne University Press, 2004, p. 60.
Antoine Julien Nicolas Fauchery (French, 1823-1861) and Richard Daintree (Australian born United Kingdom, 1832-1878) Untitled (Two Aborginal Australian men and three women posing in front of a studio backdrop) Victoria possibly Mt Franklin, 1858 9.20 x 21.20cm
John Beattie (1859-1930) came to Tasmania from Scotland at the age of nineteen, in 1878. Within a year, he was using the brand-new dry-plate photographic technique to take a series of views of Lake St Clair. He joined the Anson Brothers studio, and worked with the three siblings until he bought them out in 1891. In the 1890s he established a museum of curiosities he had collected. The first of the island’s wilderness photographers – with a keen interest in preservation of the environment – Beattie became the ‘official’ photographer for the Tasmanian Government. In addition to his well-known series of photographs of convicts, he made a number of portraits of Aboriginal people, of whom he said ‘for about thirty years this ancient people held their ground bravely against the invaders of their beautiful domain.’
Of Scottish origin, John Watt Beattie landed in Australia in 1878. The following year, he moved to Tasmania to a farm in New Norfolk, northwest of Hobart. Feeling more interest in going out in the bush than for the work of the farm, he then devotes himself to the photography of countryside. He was appointed official government photographer of Tasmania in 1896. Able to promote his work, he also enthusiastically supported the development of the tourism industry. In 1906, he traveled to Melanesia, Polynesia and the Norfolk Islands and derives hundreds of widely distributed photographs.
Text from the exhibition
Charles Woolley (Australian, 1834-1922) William Lanne 1866 Albumen silver photograph
William Lanne (1834-1869), also known as King Billy or William Laney, is said to have been Truganini’s third partner. Lanne was captured along with his family in 1842 and taken to the Aboriginal camp at Wybelenna on Flinders Island. He moved for a time to Oyster Cove in 1847, before spending the years until 1851 in a Hobart orphanage. Four years later he joined a whaling ship. Regarded as the last surviving male of the Oyster Cove clan, Lanne died in March 1869 from a combination of cholera and dysentery. Following his death an argument broke out between England’s Royal College of Surgeons and Tasmania’s Royal Society over who should have his remains for scientific purposes. A member of the College of Surgeons, William Crowther, managed to break into the morgue where Lanne’s body was kept, decapitating the corpse, removing the skin and inserting a skull from a white body into the remnants. The Royal Society, discovering Crowther’s work, moved to thwart any further violations by amputating the hands and feet and discarding them separately. In this state, Lanne’s body was buried.
Charles Alfred Woolley (17 December 1834-1922) was born in Hobart Town, Tasmania, Australia. He was an Australian photographer but also created drawings, portraits and visual art. He is best known for his photographic portraits of the five surviving Oyster Cove Aboriginal people taken in August 1866 and exhibited at the Intercolonial Exhibition of Australasia colonial exhibition in Melbourne the same year. …
In August 1866, Woolley took photographic portraits in his studio of the five surviving Oyster Cove Aboriginal people which became his best known work. These were exhibited at the Intercolonial Exhibition of Australasia colonial exhibition in Melbourne later that year. Two of the portraits were of Truganini, a female, and William Lanne, also known as King Billy.
These works are now exhibited in the National Library, and the State Libraries of New South Wales, Tasmania and Victoria. James Bonwick’s publication The Last of the Tasmanians (1870) included several of the photographs and shortly after engravings started to appear. Woolley exhibited the prints again in 1875 at the Victorian Intercolonial Exhibition. A few of the original sets survive, mainly in English collections, as well as copies that J. W. Beattie made.
After Lanne’s death in 1869, his grave was desecrated and his body mutilated and a full sized bust was produced by an artist named Francisco Santé. The Evening Mail advertised that it could be seen for a “small fee”. Though Woolley was not known as a sculptor, the Hobart Town Examiner reported that “numerous” busts he had produced were at Walch and Sons and Birchall’s bookshops.
Installation view of the exhibition Photographs. An Early Album of the World (1842-1911) at the musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, Paris showing the section ‘Conquering souls and spreading the word’ with, at left, three photographs by Augustine Dyer (Australian, 1858-1931) of Papua New Guinea (1884, see below)
Conquering souls and spreading the word
The movement of colonial conquest also proceeded through missionary work where competition between congregations and between nations played out, much like at the political level. The Pacific was a place of rivalry between the United Kingdom and France. Protestant societies established from 1875 onwards in south-eastern New Guinea found themselves in competition with the Catholic missionaries. National alliances were formed between explorers and missionaries, promoting each other’s work. At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, the development of illustrated travel press allowed these heroic stories to be shared with a wide audience. Conferences with photo projections organised by the Geographical and Anthropological Societies were part of this process, combining different sources of images and narratives and establishing a lasting visual culture of the exotic.
Dyer was the Australian Government Printing Office photographer who went to British New Guinea with John Paine (a studio photographer), for the purpose of recording the British annexation of the territory. He travelled more extensively with Paine in 1884 through PNG visiting Port Moresby, Motu-Motu, Kerepunu, etc.
Taking as its starting point the photography collection of the musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, a reference collection for the representation of the extra-European world in the early years of photography, the exhibition focuses on the trajectories and geographies of the medium outside Europe in the 19th century, from its invention. Through a selection of nearly 300 photographs taken between 1842 and 1911 in Asia, Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, it seeks to better understand the phenomenon of the global dissemination of photography and the regional histories of non-European photography.
A visual collection of the world
Many places in the world became accessible through photography after the official announcement of its invention. The technical details of the daguerreotype were revealed in Paris in August 1839 and, in September, the darkrooms were loaded onto ships and crossed the borders of Europe. A tool associated with Western technological modernity, taken on countless voyages and scientific and military expeditions around the world, the medium of photography was used in the second half of the 19th century to investigate everywhere on the globe. From Mexico to Gabon, photography was in turn an instrument of description and the visual appropriation of landscapes and monuments, a tool for knowledge and the control of populations, and an object of diplomacy with the local elite. European colonial expansion was one of the driving forces that greatly accelerated global photography.
Dissemination and local appropriation
The new medium spread throughout the world from the 19th century, with very varied adoption rates in different regions. Europeans were no longer the only ones experimenting with, commissioning and marketing photography. Its local roots can be linked to the relations of countries with the West and to the relationship of societies to images. The exhibition, which presents the work of European and local photographers on four continents, seeks to better understand the development and appropriation of the medium around the world on a local scale by bringing to light lesser-known photographers, sponsors, phenomena and photographic forms, in an attempt to rebalance a history of photography that too often focuses on Europe and the United States. In many regions, from Colombia to West Africa to Madagascar, and from Iran to Japan to India, photography was adopted and sometimes adapted to social uses and local cultures and in many places seems to satisfy the desire for self-representation and the construction of modern identities. If cameras and photographers travelled, their models also travelled. The indigenous elites made regular diplomatic visits or came to Europe for training. From the 1860s, many photography studios were set up in large cities to meet the demands of tourists looking for exoticism. But the studios’ decor also attracted a local clientele wanting to preserve the memory of their loved ones.
How far should photography be taken?
The 19th century in Europe was characterised by a need to accumulate objects, knowledge and also territory. Through photography, landscapes became lands to be mapped and conquered, and their inhabitants subjects to be studied. In the scientific field, the natural history model influenced the use of photography. It contributed to the myth of virgin territories and was a tool in the growing geographical discipline, making claims of exhaustivity: see everything, photograph everything. But this thirst for images, which began in 1840 in Europe and then spread rapidly throughout the world, met with contrasting situations. From the beginning, the question of limits arose: how far to go, under what conditions and for what purposes should a photograph be taken? This was sometimes a technical challenge, but above all an ethical question when it involved showing the horrors of wars or producing the image of scenes or objects that were supposed to remain hidden. Some photographers may have tricked, coerced or negotiated to get an image.
The selection of works, mostly taken from the quai Branly photography collection, highlights the diversity of photographic practices outside Europe at their origins and reveals early testimonies of indigenous photographers. By revealing the scientific, military and commercial uses, as well as the memorial and social functions of photography, and by presenting a wide range of objects and techniques, the exhibition invites us to re-examine today the meaning of the photographic gesture in these different non-European contexts.
Publication
Mondes photographiques, histoires des débuts
The book that accompanies the exhibition broadens its scope of study to offer the first decentralised history of early world photography. Taking as its base the photography collection of the musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, a reference collection for the representation of the extra-European world in the early years of photography, it deepens this study to focus on the trajectories and geographies of the medium outside Europe from the 19th century. Co-publication musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac / Actes Sud 400 pages. €69
Text from the musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac
In 1844, two Brazilian Indians were brought to France by a certain Mr. Porte and are going to stay in Paris for a few months. This man baptised Manuel (and the young woman baptised Marie) in the press, will arouse interest certain among the anthropologists of the Natural History Museum. Werner, painter from the Museum, paints their portrait in watercolour, while Thiesson photographs them using the daguerreotype. They also lend themselves at a moulding session in the anthropology laboratory. The five daguerreotypes that remain today from the photography session show us two people with the top of the body undressed, and the bottom dressed of what appears to be European clothing.
Text from the exhibition
This man from the Canaries counts among the very first non-Europeans to have been photographed, probably in Paris. His portrait illustrates the first scientific publication offering daguerreotypes to visually appreciate the anatomic characteristics of human skulls. The Botocudo Indian from Brazil was photographed in Lisbonne, in 1844, but he visited Paris; his name was Manuel, and his wife was Maris. They lodged with some man called Porte, who brought them to the Museum. There, people wanted to make casts of their faces, their torsos, their arms and legs. Manuel and Marie walked across Marville’s Paris – across that city that was to disappear; they walked on the Boulevard du Temple and might have even visited the theaters. Actors, spectators? Dressed, costumed, naked? Under applause, mockery, examination, or measurement?
Catherine Darley. “Ghosts (1) – Shadows,” on the Poemas del río Wang blog 10/08/2012 [Online] Cited 07/05/2023
Luis Garcia Hevia is the first Colombian photographer and daguerreotypist. He exhibited his first “two essays of daguerreotypes” at the exhibition of industry in Bogota in November 1841. He was also a painter and miniaturist.
Recreated Worlds: The Studios
In the second half of the 19th century, land and sea travel grow considerably. European colonial expansion is one of the driving forces behind the acceleration of global photographic coverage. If cameras and photographers travel, their models also travel. The indigenous elites make regular diplomatic visits or come to train in Europe. During major universal and colonial exhibitions, population groups are moved and exhibited in European metropolises, between the 1870s and the beginning of the 20th century.
From the 1860s, many photographic studios set up in the big cities. The actors of this new commercial practice adapt to the demand of a tourist clientele in search of exoticism. Staging and props recreate artificial worlds. When the framing refocuses on the face, it is often to respond to the descriptive need of physical anthropology. But the decor of the studio attracts also a local clientele anxious to preserve the memory of their loved ones.
Faced with these portraits, many questions persist today: who were these individuals? What can we know of their interaction with the photographer and their participation at the time of the shot?
In photography, the portrait genre has from the outset brought together goals and very different situations. Like today, it may have been used at recreational or law enforcement purposes, as a personal memento or as a means of recording. The very ambiguity of the medium lies in this possible permeability of domains: a family album image can leave the private sphere, a photograph made for an anthropological description can sometimes also be a true portrait, shedding light on the personality of its subject.
The images of Jacques-Philippe Potteau, produced for scientific purposes between 1860 and 1869 at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, confer a undeniable dignity to their models, sometimes photographed as part of diplomatic functions (embassies of India, Siam, Japan). Jean Lagrêne, Philippe Colarossi are closely associated with the artistic world, as models. If Jacques-Philippe Potteau, a technician employed by the Museum, took care to note the names of the people he photographs, the reason for their presence in the photographic workshop, or in the Parisian capital is not always known to us. This is currently under research.
Jacques-Philippe Potteau was a member of the anthropology department of the Muséum d’histoire naturelle, Paris. Between 1860 and 1869 he made a series of ethnographic portraits for the museum under the collective title Collection anthropologique du Muséum de Paris. In 1862 Potteau succeeded Louis Rousseau as the departmental photographer. Potteau showed his work at the London Photography Exhibit in 1862 and 1863, and the 1863 Paris International Photography Exhibit.
As early as the 1840s, cameras were on board on expedition ships departing from Europe. sailors, explorers, archaeologists, missionaries, artists are among the first experimenters of this new technology in remote regions, which are gradually passing under the yoke of the colonial powers. From Mexico to Gabon, photography is in turn an instrument of description and visual appropriation landscapes and monuments, a knowledge and control tool populations, or even an object of diplomacy vis-à-vis the local elite.
If the camera records with the same acuity the architectural detail, the landscape grandiose and the faces crossed, the authors gathered here turn out to be excellent technicians with a personal eye. Their travelogues relate the difficulties overcome: technical challenges, climatic constraints or even reluctance of local populations to pose. But these spectacular images, carried out in more or less accessible places, are also the result of a collaboration with many less visible local intermediaries: guides, interpreters, informants or porters – necessary to transport photographic equipment – played a decisive role.
The Briton Philip Henry Egerton worked for most of his life as senior civil servant for the colonial regime in northern India. He realises these photographs during a semi-official mission in the Himalayas, trying identify alternative routes for the wool trade across the border
India and Chinese Tibet. The Kangra and Kullu valleys, as well as the sites of Spiti and the Bara Shigri glacier are thus photographed for the first time. The images are published, accompanied by the story of their author, in 1864, with the support of the government of Punja.
Text from the exhibition
Philip Henry Egerton (Welsh, 1824-1893) Shigri Glacier – From the River (Main View) Negative June – August 1863; print 1863-1864 From Journal of a Tour Through Spiti, To The Frontier of Chinese Thibet, With Photographic Illustrations Albumen silver print 21.6 × 26.5cm (8 1/2 × 10 7/16 in.) Credit Line: The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles Public domain
Philip Henry Egerton (Welsh, 1824-1893) Shigri Glacier – Lower View Negative June – August 1863; print 1863-1864 From Journal of a Tour Through Spiti, To The Frontier of Chinese Thibet, With Photographic Illustrations Albumen silver print 21.6 × 26.5cm (8 1/2 × 10 7/16 in.) Credit Line: The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles Public domain
Improvised archaeologist and photographer with a taste for travel, Désiré Charnay is known to be the first to have brought back from several archaeological sites Mexicans a harvest of spectacular images. He uses the process of the negative on wet collodion glass, which requires him to carry heavy equipment. His fame was ensured by the publication, in 1861-1862, of the album photographic American cities and ruins.
Local stories and self-images
Europeans are not the only ones to experiment, order and market photography from the 19th century. The new medium is spreading to scale across the globe and has very variable rates of adoption depending on the region. Its local roots can be linked to the countries’ relations with the West or the relationship of societies to images. In Qajar Iran, in Siam (Thailand present day), in the princely courts of India and Java, royalty has been a patron enthusiast of photography and accelerated its growth by designating official photographers and importing equipment. The leaders take awareness of the potential of photography for the representation of power and the assertion of their authority. In India, Japan, China, West Africa and in Madagascar, indigenous photographers are getting professional training to practice, open their commercial studio in the major port cities, and very often work for a wider clientele, among the local and colonial elite. Photography is appropriate and adapted to social uses, it sometimes mixes to local visual traditions – such as painting or calligraphy – and seems in many places respond to the desire for self-representation and construction modern identities.
Royal appropriations of photography in Iran and Thailand
The monarchs Naser al-Din Shah (r. 1848-1896), in Iran, and Mongkut in Siam (Rama IV, r. 1851-1868), seduced by the technology and the possibilities of dissemination of the royal image, were important patrons. Naser al-Din Shah, defender of the arts and open to Europe, initiated himself into the practice, becoming an amateur keen. It promotes the development of photography through the diversity of actions which he led: in 1858, he established the Royal Photography Workshop within the of the Golestan Palace in Tehran, promotes the teaching of technique at school polytechnic of Dar ol-Fonoun, imports equipment, translates manuals, and appoints official court photographers who are given the title of Akkasbashi. Siam’s science-savvy King Mongkut also ramps up production photography at court. The Thai Francis Chit, who receives the title of “photographer of His Majesty the King of Siam”, produced several portraits of the royal family and views of official court events.
In Japan, a considerable boom during the Meiji era (1868-1912)
In Japan, photography developed as soon as the country opened up to trade international in 1859, and experienced considerable growth during the Meiji era (1868-1912), period of great modernisation. Uchida Kuichi and Ueno Hikoma, trained in Nagasaki, are among the most famous Japanese photographers of their time. They have developed a unique style with a pronounced taste for theatricality and sometimes humour. The production of ambrotypes, known as garasu shashin – “photography on glass” – is experiencing a particular boom in the field portraiture from the 1860s. Unique objects, they are mounted in boxes in raw paulownia wood, with traditional geometric shapes simple, used to preserve calligraphy or personal property.
The ambrotypes were intended for the private sphere of Japanese families, wishing to pass on the portraits of their loved ones as an inheritance. The tekagami-style accordion albums, richly decorated with gilding and sophisticated paintings, originally planned to accommodate calligraphy, have been diverted from their traditional use to receive prints large format photographs of Ichida Sota and Suzuki Shin’ichi II.
Tamoto Kenzō (田本 研造, 1832-1912) was a Japanese photographer. He was born in Kumano, in the Mie Prefecture of Honshu. When he was twenty-three, he moved to Nagasaki to study western culture. In 1859, he relocated to Hakodate, where he lost a foot due to frostbite. The surgeon who amputated his foot had an interest in photography, specifically ambrotypes, and Tamoto became his apprentice. It was not until 1866 that he began working as a photographer. In 1867, he photographed the construction of the last castle to be built in Japan, Fukuyama Castle. Tamoto took photographs of military leaders Enomoto Takeaki and Hijikata Toshizō during the Battle of Hakodate between 1868-1869. Tamoto opened his own portrait studio in Hakodate in 1869. Starting in 1871, he documented the improvements to infrastructure in the Hokkaido region, eventually presenting 158 photographs of the process to the Settlement Office.
Introduced in India in 1840, photography was used by the authorities British and quickly adopted by the Indian elite. Studios set up in major port cities like Bombay, Madras and Calcutta. Active members of the Photographic Society of Bombay, Narayan Dajee and Hurrychund Chintamon are among the first native photographers to practice from the 1850s with the local elite, Brahmans, members of the government, and at the same time participate in colonial projects ethnographic documentation. The technology aroused enthusiasm very early on many maharajas. Famous Indian photographer Lala Deen Dayal received the title of official photographer of the ruler of Hyderabad in 1884. In some princely states like Indore, Udaipur and Mewar, photography of painted court is a great success and is part of the tradition of royal portraiture of pageantry. Enlarged prints are coated with a vivid layer of paint and opaque, which emphasises the abundance of jewels and the sumptuous character clothes.
One of India’s earliest commercial photographers who specialised in portraiture, Hurrychund Chintamon was based in Bombay (now Mumbai). He received his training at Elphinstone College in 1855 under WHS Crawford, a secretary of the Photographic Society of Bombay, where Chintamon also exhibited his work the following year. He subsequently set up his photography studio in the city, initially photographing members of local mercantile families and later expanding his clientele to aristocracy and important political, administrative and literary figures, including Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy and Manickjee Antarya.
When Elphinstone introduced a course in photography in 1855, under instruction from the British East India Company, Chintamon was among the first batch of forty students to enroll. He graduated in 1856 with distinction, having twice earned the best photographs prize. The same year, he exhibited his photographs at the Bombay Photographic Society, along with others such as Narayan Daji, gaining the visibility he needed to operate as an independent professional. He also went on to produce a number of ethnographic images, some of which were displayed at the Exposition Universelle, or the Paris International Exposition, of 1867 for industrial, art and craft manufactures. His studio, Hurrychund & Co., which he set up at Rampart Row in 1858 flourished until 1881, when it ceased operations. …
Accompanying the proliferation of independent photography studios in the mid-nineteenth century, was the development of a hybrid aesthetic, seen also in Chintamon’s work. He evolved a visual style that combined the Victorian iconographies of class and refinement with the Indian symbols of ethnicity, caste and status. In staging his sitters, he used the popular European conventions of painted backdrops as well as props such as printed carpets and flower vases. The sitters were often posed or arranged to suggest an air of casualness or informality, in conspicuous contrast to their own self-conscious formality – likely a result of having to hold still during extended individual exposure times. This unintended tension between setting and sitter is another notable characteristic of Chintamon’s portraits.
Anonymous. “Hurrychund Chintamon,” on the Mapacademy website April 21, 2022 [Online] Cited 27/05/2023
Of British origin, P. A. Johnston and Theodore Julius Hoffmann founded the Johnston & Hoffmann studio, at its time the second largest European studio important in India. Established in Calcutta in 1882, they opened eight years later a annex to Darjeeling. Their studio is best known for its portraits of locals and royalty from Nepal, Sikkim and Tibet.
Raja Lala Deen Dayal (Hindi: लाला दीन दयाल; 1844-1905; also written as ‘Din Dyal’ and ‘Diyal’ in his early years), famously known as Raja Deen Dayal) was an Indian photographer. His career began in the mid-1870s as a commissioned photographer; eventually he set up studios in Indore, Mumbai and Hyderabad. He became the court photographer to the sixth Nizam of Hyderabad, Mahbub Ali Khan, Asif Jah VI, who awarded him the title Raja Bahadur Musavvir Jung Bahadur, and he was appointed as the photographer to the Viceroy of India in 1885. He received the Royal Warrant from Queen Victoria in 1897.
Installation view of the exhibition Photographs. An Early Album of the World (1842-1911) at the musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, Paris showing the section ‘Composite photographs in Mexico’
Composite photographs in Mexico
In the history of painted photography practices, colourisation often aims to embellish the print considered monochromatic and dull. A set of photographs painted by landscape artist Conrad Wise Chapman show a association of these two techniques around picturesque and popular subjects. Other forms of formal hybridisation are attested in Mexico. Three shots set with a medallion were partially covered with feathers in the colours shimmering, to highlight clothes and certain elements of the decor. These composite objects are rare testimonies that combine the art of featherwork, widespread in Mexico during the pre-Hispanic and colonial periods, with the new technique of photography. The figure of the peddler is attributed to the photographer Augustin Péraire [below] and the image of the three women is a reproduction of a print of the popular figure showing the “China poblana”.
Installation view of the exhibition Photographs. An Early Album of the World (1842-1911) at the musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, Paris showing at second left, W.J. Sawyer’s Mr Sawyer, photo man (Nigeria, 1880-1890, below)
Photo of W. J. Sawyer and his sons taken in Calabar (possibly at his studio). W. J. Sawyer was a photographer based in Calabar, mostly active during the late 19th century and early 20th century, having photographed the Oba of Benin during the period of his craft.
W.J. Sawyer
The biography of W. J. Sawyer is still quite incomplete. He takes, on demand of the Spanish Commander Francisco Romero, several photographs in Bioko (current Equatorial Guinea), in 1883. The images are shown the same year at the International Colonial and Export Exhibition in Amsterdam. The picture showing a man accompanied by two boys could be a self-portrait of the photographer, as the title on the back suggests.
Rapid growth in West Africa
Photography was quickly adopted in many regions in the world from the 1840s to the 1860s. West Africa combines several factors which have fostered its rapid growth. Many ports connect the cities with each other and with the European continent, facilitating transatlantic and regional trade. In Freetown (current Sierra Leone), Lagos (current Nigeria), Libreville (current Gabon) established communities made up of elders freed and returning slaves from North and South America and the Caribbean. A cosmopolitan culture reigns in these cities where trade can develop.
As early as 1853, the African-American Augustus Washington left the United States and set up a daguerreotype studio in Monrovia. In the 1860s, Francis W. Joaque or J.P. Decker practice photography on an itinerant basis on the coast. These photographers respond to a local demand for photography loved ones or events to remember. They also include a clientele European, Joaque realising for example many portraits of the explorer Italian Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza. The Lutterodt dynasty establishes several studios photographers who operate in Accra (current Ghana) and Freetown between the years 1870 and 1940.
J. A. Green is one of West Africa’s most prolific photographers. Born in Nigeria, he is the son of a palm oil merchant. He practices photography from 1891 and provides images to a clientele African and European. He also trains other photographers. In this image, Green photographs a stage at the leader’s funeral slaver Amonibienye Ofori Long John. The tanda burial custom involves, for the elites, the public presentation of the body of the deceased dressed in his clothes of pageantry. Son Henry Obulu supports his father’s jaw to affirm his position as legitimate heir.
Text from the exhibition
Jonathan Adagogo Green
Jonathan Adagogo Green (J. A. Green), born in the village of Ayama (Peterside), Bonny (Rivers State, Nigeria) in 1873. The son of Chief Sunju Okoronkwoye Dublin Green and Madame Idameinye Green, he was looked after by his uncle Uruasi Dublin Green after his father’s death in 1875. He attended school in Lagos and possibly Sierra Leone. It is unknown where he trained as a photographer but by 1891 he had set up his photographic practice in Bonny. His work covered a range of themes including portraiture of British colonial officers, European merchants, prominent chiefs and their families, scenes of daily and ritual life, commerce and building – a body of work that appealed to both local elites and expatriate clients. Green died in 1905 at the age of 32, after practicing in the Niger Delta for 14 years. His work is in held in a number of collections in the UK, USA and Nigeria.
Text from the exhibition
Jonathan Adagogo Green (1873-1905) was according to some sources the first professional photographer in what is now Nigeria to have ethnic origins in that area. He is significant in being a pioneering photographer in what is now Nigeria, noted for his documentation of the colonial power and local culture, particularly his Ibani Ijo community.
Green was born in Bonny, present day Rivers State. “He studied photography in Sierra Leone and then established a studio in Bonny.” The area where he lived became part of the British Oil Rivers protectorate in 1884, which was renamed to the Niger Coast Protectorate in 1893. It was part of the Southern Nigeria Protectorate for the last few years of Green’s life, starting in 1900.
Green was active as a photographer for only a short lifetime, dying at the age of 32. “But during this period he was both energetically productive and remarkably adroit in serving both indigenous and colonial clienteles.” “When he set up shop his work was appreciated and rewarded by two very different communities.” His “strategic use of initials on his business cards and stamps… disguised his African origins”, part of his working with the colonial era officials.
William Ellis (29 August 1794 – 9 June 1872) was a British missionary and author. He travelled through the Society Islands, Hawaiian Islands, and Madagascar, and wrote several books describing his experiences.
In Madagascar, photography as a tool of social distinction
Photography is introduced to Madagascar by the British missionary William Ellis [above]. First rejected by Queen Ranavalona I (r. 1828-1861), the technology was enthusiastically adopted during the reign of Radama II (r. 1861-1863) by the king himself, the court and the Malagasy elite, responding to the desire for individualisation and social distinction from high society. Several European photographers mentioned the ease and familiarity of the models with the device. From the 1890s, the first Malagasy studios won great success with a population wishing to design and maintain a self-image. The photos presented here are the work of this first generation Malagasy photographers, including Joseph Razaka based in Antananarivo and Joseph Razafy in Toamasina.
Ulke Brothers Studio (Julius Ulke and Henry Ulke) Apsáalooke (Crow) delegation 1872 Albumen silver print from glass negative 8 x 10 in. National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution
Back row (standing) from left to right: Long Horse; Thin Belly; Bernard Prero (interpreter); unknown name, wife of Awé Kúalawaachish (Sits In The Middle Of The Land); Major F.D. Pease (agent); unknown name, wife of Uuwatchiilapish (Iron Bull); Frank Shane (interpreter); and Bear In The Water. Front row (seated in chairs) from left to right: Bear Wolf; White Calf; Awé Kúalawaachish (Sits In The Middle Of The Land); Uuwatchiilapish (Iron Bull); One Who Leads The Old Dog; and Peelatchixaaliash (Old Crow [Raven]). Front row (seated on the floor) from left to right: Stays With The Horses, wife of Bear Wolf; and Pretty Medicine Pipe, wife of Peelatchixaaliash (Old Crow [Raven])
This series by Timothy H. O’Sullivan comes from the album Photographs from Geographical explorations and surveys west of the 100th meridian Wheeler 1871-2-3, consisting of fifty photographs of explorations in the Western United States (New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, etc.). The set shows mainly landscapes and natural sites, some portraits of Zunis, Apaches and Navajos, and views of architecture and monuments.
The limits of visibility
The thirst for images which manifested itself as early as 1840 in Europe and then rapidly in the whole world has encountered contrasting situations. From the beginning arose the question of limits: how far to go? Under what conditions do a photography ? For what purposes? Technical challenge sometimes but above all question ethics when it comes to bearing witness to the horrors of war, or when it comes to to produce the image of scenes or objects that are supposed to remain hidden. Some photographers could trick, coerce or negotiate. The images produced are remained secret or, conversely, circulated widely. The life of photographs after the shot is a fundamental element of this medium, they are led to undergo multiple changes of meaning depending on the way we perceives them, from which they are presented. In this section are photographs that evoke certain situations limits: images of conflicts shown or hidden, sacred places of which a part remains invisible, images obtained by trickery. These photographs are not shown as trophies but as traces of practices that we can re-examine today.
Uncover the Sacred
For many photographers, the attraction of the forbidden or the opportunity to attend a singular event played into the desire to create an image. We consider today with a certain reserve these images of masks or places Holy. While they may still constitute factual documents, our attention now turns to the conditions of their realisation. In what contexts could they have been made, and what do they show us, apart from the very fact that they were produced in an exceptional way?
James album
The history of photography in Pueblo territory, in the United States, offers a rare example of strong reaction to the invasion of photography. The first reactions of mistrust from the Indian communities, from the 1890s, are linked to the dissemination of images and the tourist promotion of rituals supposed remain secret. The Hopi Snake Dance ceremony had become a major attraction. Often disrupted by ever-increasing numbers of visitors, it will be definitively prohibited to photographers in 1913, following the mobilisations of Hopi communities. The exhibition does not present here the photographs of this ritual that George Wharton James manages to capture, in order respect the Hopi restrictions. The exposed double page combines two times of shooting, the first image showing the perplexed waiting of the Indians in front the church of Acoma, and the second their reaction of just surprise and mistrust after shooting.
Félix Adrien Bonfils was a French photographer and writer who was active in the Middle East. He was one of the first commercial photographers to produce images of the Middle East on a large scale and amongst the first to employ a new method of colour photography, developed in 1880. …
Maison Bonfils produced thousands of photographs of the Middle East. Bonfils worked with both his wife and his son. Their studio became “F. Bonfils et Cie” in 1878. They photographed landscapes, portraits, posed scenes with subjects dressed up in Middle Eastern regalia, and also stories from the Bible. Bonfils took photographs in Lebanon, Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Greece and Constantinople (now Istanbul). While Bonfils produced the vast majority of his work, his wife, Lydie, and son Adrien were also involved in photography produced by the studio. As few are signed, it is difficult to identify who is responsible for individual photographs. Lydie is thought to have taken some of the studio portraits, especially those of Middle Eastern women, who were more inclined to pose for a female photographer. Adrien became more involved in the landscape photography at age 17, when Félix returned to Alès to have compiled collections of their photographs published and then to open a collotype printing factory. Félix died in Alès on the 9th of April 1855.
As Christine Barthe observes, “In the first ten years of photography, from 1841 to 1851, many travelers would try their hands at daguerreotypes outside Europe. Guillain’s photographs, taken in very difficult conditions, are not always perfect from a technical point of view, but they nevertheless represent the pioneering works in the history of photography.” They offer extraordinary insight into the people, the policies, and the places along the east coast of Africa during the mid nineteenth-century.
Ernest Philipp Benecke may have been part of a well-known German banking family of the same name from the Hamburg and Hanover area. Benecke made his only known photographs in Egypt and Nubia in 1852, which consisted of portraits and studies of the daily life of the cultures he visited. His works are among the earliest surviving photographs of non-Western civilizations.
Muhammad Sadiq Bey (1832-1902) was an Ottoman Egyptian army engineer and surveyor who served as treasurer of the Hajj pilgrim caravan. As a photographer and author, he documented the holy sites of Islam at Mecca and Medina, taking the first ever photographs in what is now Saudi Arabia. …
Born in Cairo, Sadiq was educated in Cairo’s military college and at the Paris École Polytechnique. He qualified as an colonel in the Egyptian army and returned to the military college to teach cartographic drawing.
In 1861, he was assigned to visit the region of Arabia from Medina to the port of Al Wajh and conduct a detailed survey. He took a small team and some surveying equipment as well as his own camera; photography was not part of the official mission. His records of the expedition are the earliest known detailed accounts of the region’s climate and settlements. His photographs of Medina were the first ever taken there. In 1880 he was assigned to accompany the Hajj pilgrim caravan from Egypt to Mecca as its treasurer. He was responsible for the safe passage of the mahmal, a ceremonial passenger-less litter, to Mecca. Again he brought a camera, becoming the first person to photograph Mecca, the Great Mosque, the Kaaba, and pilgrim camps at Mina and Arafat. …
Sadiq used a wet-plate collodion camera, which had been invented in the 1850s. This produced negatives on wet glass plates, requiring a portable darkroom. From these negatives he made albumen prints which he signed or, later, stamped.
The sanctuaries of Mecca and Medina are the holiest sites of Islam. As part of the Hajj which is one of the five pillars of Islam, pilgrims perform rituals at Mecca and other nearby sites. On his expeditions from 1861 to 1881, Sadiq photographed the interiors and exteriors of sites on the Hajj pilgrimage route as well as at Medina. Photographing the Al-Masjid an-Nabawi (Prophet’s Mosque) and its surroundings in Medina on 11 February 1861, he noted in his diary that no-one had taken such photographs before.
He used walls and mosque roofs as vantage points to capture panoramas of the cities. He also photographed people connected to the holy sites. As well as the Hajj pilgrims walking around the Kaaba, he photographed Shaykh ‘Umar al-Shaibi, the keeper of the key of the Kaaba, and Sharif Shawkat Pasha, guardian of the Prophet’s Mosque.
Jules Borelli (b. 1853, d. 1941) was a French traveller and explorer who travelled to Ethiopia from Egypt on 16 September 1885 to explore the Omo river. In this effort he was supported by his brother, a financier in Cairo and the owner of a fine collection of Egyptian antiquities. He was delayed from moving into western and southwestern Ethiopia by ase Ménilék II, who, out of political concerns, detained him at the capital of Éntotto for part of the period from July 1886 to November 1887. Finally, in November 1887. Borelli started out for the headwaters of the Omo river, and reached a point some 300 miles north of Lake Rudolf (Turkana) on 17 June 1888, three months after Count Samuel Teleki von Szek and Lieutenant Ludwig Ritter von Hohnel had arrived on the lake’s southern shore. Had Ménilék not detained him and had he not fallen ill with malaria, Borelli could have reached the lake well before Teleki and von Hohnel. During his travels, Borelli was given a good description of the lake by people in Ethiopia, who called it Lake Šambara.
Borelli arrived in Cairo on 15 November 1888, where he later met Teleki and von Hohnel who were returning to Europe from their trip. The latter assisted B. in drawing his maps of the country surrounding the Omo river. Borelli doubted von Hohnel’s unsubstantiated claim that two rivers flowed into Lake Rudolf, and, as was later proven, correctly deduced that only the Omo flowed into the lake. In 1889, Borelli invited von Hohnel to Paris to attend an international geographical congress, where both men lectured. Borelli described his Ethiopian travels in his beautifully illustrated and well documented book published in 1890.
Isidore van Kinsbergen (Bruges 1821-Batavia 1905) was a Dutch-Belgian engraver, who after an educational period in Bruges and Gent discovered the artistic wealth of the theatre. In Batavia (Jakarta) he proved to be a real all-rounder, combining decoration painting with singing, acting and management. In 1855, Van Kinsbergen also took up photography. He was invited to photograph ‘all peculiarities’ on the Dutch mission to Bangkok in 1862 and took part in two inspection tours covering Java, Madura and Bali (1862 and 1865). Between 1863 and 1867 and again in 1873 he was contracted by the Government of the Netherlands-Indies to photograph Java’s antiquities. Two series, together holding over 375 photos, constitute his art and archaeology legacy.
There is a less or even ‘unknown’ Van Kinsbergen as well, who commercially operated from a professional studio in Batavia. Thanks to research, more than 200 anonymous or wrongly attributed photos can now be assigned to him. How to recognize Van Kinsbergen in portraits, landscapes, views and ‘types’? After all, making a portrait or casting a ‘type’ is quite different from photographing monuments. Are characteristics found within his art and archaeology series evident in his so-called commercial work? Yes, but not in one stereotypical way. Besides a general artistic rendering of items and the careful use of light, his style is direct, full of contrast, academic and theatrical at the same time.
Isidore van Kingsbergen (1821-1905) is sometimes described as the “sleeping beauty” of nineteenth-century photography, because his remarkable body of work has never been presented in its entirety. Yet he was a flamboyant artist who appeals to the imagination. For the first time, this publication gives a broad overview of the exceptional qualities of this photo pioneer. Van Kinsbergen became famous for the almost four hundred photographs he took of Java’s antiquities at the behest of the Dutch colonial government and the Batavian Society. Detailed research has also brought to light a hitherto unknown part of his oeuvre, including the portraits he made at the courts of Yogyakarta, Surakarta, Bandung, Madura and Buleleng (Bali). In his studio, he used his experience as a theatre director to photograph people from various social backgrounds in an expressive manner. Due to his tireless efforts for new cultural projects, he has also been called as the “soul of colonial artistic life in Batavia.”
Unknown photographer Album of photographs of the Philippines Nd Photo: musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, Dist. RMN – Grand Palais image musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac
The text on the photo stating that this man is from Papua New Guinea is incorrect. He is from the Marquesas archipelago. Please see another photograph of Hitoro, King of the island Ua Pou by Eugene Maunoury on the Ua Pou Wikipedia entry.
Eugene Maunoury
Eugène Maunoury settled in Chile between 1858 and 1865, in Santiago and Valparaiso. Then, from 1861, he was at the head of a luxurious studio in Lima (Peru) which saw parade the elite of society. From 1862 he was a correspondent for the Nadar studio. However, these portraits of Marquesans taken in Peru are neither intended images exotic, or photographs intended for scientific use. They were made by Maunoury to protest against the kidnapping of these people intended for be employed in forced labor in the exploitation of guano, in Peru. Maunoury publishes in L’Illustration of August 29, 1863 an article denouncing the situation of the raid, using some of his portraits. We recognise the king of the island Ua Pou, in the Marquesas Archipelago.
Many places in the world have become accessible through photography since it was invented. In August 1839, the technical details of the daguerreotype were revealed in Paris, and from September onwards, cameras were taken on board the ships of countless scientific and military expeditions and voyages all around the world. Associated with technological modernity, photography was used in the second half of the 19th century to record the whole planet. From Mexico to Gabon, photography was in turn an instrument of description and the visual appropriation of landscapes and monuments, a tool for knowledge and the control of populations, and an object of diplomacy with the local elite.
European colonial expansion was one of the driving forces that greatly accelerated global photography. Taking as its starting point the collection of photographs at the musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, enriched by several exceptional loans from public and private collections, the exhibition focuses on the trajectories and geographies of photography outside Europe in the 19th century.
4 key questions for Christine Barthe and Annabelle Lacour, the curators of the exhibition
1- What is the origin of this exhibition project?
Christine Barthe: The origins of this exhibition can be found in a project set up for the Louvre Abu Dhabi, where a first version of the exhibition was shown in 2019. Originally, it was based on the museum’s own collection, focusing on early photographs taken in regions far removed from Europe. The museum’s collection mainly reflects the European and American point of view, and we wanted, right from the beginning, and even more so for this adaptation for the musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, to show a little more interest in local productions, which are not so well known and visible as those of Westerners. So this project quickly expanded in terms of research to try and decentralise the history of photography.
2- More precisely, what discoveries did you make during this new research?
C.B.: The project was built up over a period of several years, and so we benefited from the layering of experiences, in-depth research, new acquisitions, contacts… It’s a long-term project. Right from the beginning, we have been researching images from the museum’s collection. This work has allowed us to re-identify major artists in the history of photography, whose images were previously anonymous in the museum’s collections. Lesser-known photographers have been found in French collections such as the National Library and the Asian arts museum Guimet. We were thus able to include a lot of local photographers in the exhibition, especially from West Africa, in present-day Ghana, Sierra Leone, Iran, India, Japan…
3- How did photography spread outside Europe?
Annabelle Lacour: What is striking about the beginning is how fast things happened. As soon as the French government announced the invention of the process in 1839, there were articles in newspapers all over the world. In the weeks that followed, boats left for foreign countries carrying cameras to make daguerreotypes. Lots of people all over the world were curious to see how it worked. As early as 1842, the Shah of Iran asked Russia and the United Kingdom to send him some cameras. Photographers trained people at the Persian court. There were different examples in India, in Thailand, where we see this infatuation of sovereigns for photography. However, the speed it was taken up with also varied greatly depending on the region. In Japan, for example, photography developed a little later, in the late 1850s, when the country opened up to trade. In Europe, photography was related to the idea of a visual conquest that accompanied the colonial conquest. And of course, we should never forget the significant use of photography to design and build up one’s own image.
4- Today, the way we perceive these photographs has evolved. How does this translate into the way they are displayed?
A.L.: The idea of this exhibition, through these fascinating images, is to give visitors the opportunity to see how, right from the beginning, the production of these images is diverse and responds to different wishes, desires, and fits into various different contexts. Obviously, the intention with which they were made for was not fixed in time. Some images may have seen their meaning change completely in the course of history. So we have this whole issue of a new reading of the images, which is important. The questions they posed when they were taken, and pose again today, are very much contemporary. The end of the exhibition raises certain ethical questions: what does it mean to want to photograph everything? What do we do with the images of scenes or people that we were not allowed to see or photograph? I don’t think the choice lies in the alternative of showing or concealing everything. The interest in showing these images today is the possibility to reflect, to ask the question of meaning, to show certain contexts and historical narratives, to realise just how contemporary these issues are.
Text from the musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac
Lai Afong (Chinese: 黎芳; c. 1838 or 1839 – 1890) was a Chinese photographer who established Afong Studio, considered to be the most successful photographic studio in the late Qing Dynasty. He is widely acknowledged as the most significant Chinese photographer of the nineteenth century. …
Lai Afong was the most successful of his generation of Chinese photographers in appealing to both a Chinese and foreign cosmopolitan clientele. Lai Afong advertised in English-language newspapers – offering a “Larger, and more complete collection of Views than any other Establishment in the Empire of China” – and the artist captioned much of his work in both Chinese and English. Afong Studio photographs were sold to both Chinese patrons – both those local to Hong Kong and those visiting from other parts of China – and foreign visitors to China.
The Afong Studio became a destination and training ground for foreign photographers in the region, and photographers such as Emil Rusfeldt and D.K. Griffith began their careers under the tutelage of Lai Afong. In 1875, Griffith claimed that his mentor had “entered the arena of European art, associating his name with photography in its best form, and justly stands first of his countrymen in Hong Kong.” John Thomson, a Scottish photographer working in China at the time, praised Lai Afong’s images as “extremely well-executed, [and] remarkable for their artistic choice of position,” in his book The Straits of Malacca, Indo-China, and China.
Lai Afong seems to have been the only Chinese photographer of his generation to be embraced by his foreign contemporaries. However, his work is distinct among them, as many of Lai Afong’s photographic compositions show the technical and aesthetic influence of traditional Chinese painting, known as guóhuà. Additionally, Lai Afong favoured the panorama more than any other photographer working in China in the 19th century, earning his work a place among the giants of 19th century landscape photography such as Carleton Watkins in America and Gustave Le Gray in France. No other nineteenth-century Chinese photographer offered as extensive and diverse a view of late Qing Dynasty China.
Upon his tomb is inscribed this epitaph: “Cole – Photographer”
‘Photographer’ could have had the prefix: ethical, conscientious, brave, magnificent. But there is no need… Ernest Cole was a photographer.
Cole fled South Africa in 1966 in order to publish his seminal book about living under apartheid, House of Bondage (1967), and then lived a nomadic existence around the world until his death, never returning to the country of his birth.
I feel so sad that this legend of photography died penniless and living rough on the streets of New York in 1990.
But then I rejoice in the photographs that he left us. For (unlike so many photographs) they are memorable. They make us remember that we must respect each other – through an ability to see a person as he is, to be aware of his unique individuality.
“Respect is not fear and awe, it denotes, in accordance with the root of the word (respicere = to look at), the ability to see a person as he is, to be aware of his unique individuality. Respect means the concern that the other person should grow and unfold as he is. Respect, thus, implies the absence of exploitation … It is clear respect is possible only if I have achieved independence; if I can stand and walk without needing crutches, without having to dominate and exploit anyone else. Respect exists only on the basis of freedom … To respect a person is not possible without knowing him; care and responsibility would be blind if they were not guided by knowledge. Knowledge would be empty if it were not motivated by concern. There are many layers of knowledge; the knowledge which is an aspect of love is one which does not stay at the periphery, but penetrates to the core. It is possible only when I can transcend the concern for myself and see the other person in his own terms.”1
Respect exists only on the basis of freedom … and love.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ Erich Fromm. The Art of Loving. London: Allen and Unwin, 1957, pp. 28-29.
Many thankx to FOAM for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Many thankx to my friend and fellow artist Drager Meurtant for visiting the exhbition for me and allowing me to publish his photographs of the exhibition in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“I knew what I must do. I would show the world what the white South African had done to the black.”
Ernest Cole
“Cole was born Ernest Levi Tsoloane Kole in 1940, to a working-class Black family in a Black township outside the city of Pretoria. Growing into that society he came to know, with a depth of understanding that only belonging could bring, both its richness and the hardship and humiliation imposed by apartheid. As a boy he photographed people in the township for a shilling a time. By the age of eighteen he had begun to work as a photojournalist, and within a few years he was deeply committed to his essay on what it meant to be Black under apartheid. At age twenty-six, to escape the Security Police and to publish his seminal book, House of Bondage, he went into bitter and destructive exile. Cancer killed him in 1990. Apartheid destroyed him.”
David Goldblatt
Foam x Aperture: Celebrating the Legacy of Ernest Cole
For the current exhibition House of Bondage by Ernest Cole, Foam has joined forces with Aperture to host a special online event celebrating the enduring legacy of Ernest Cole (1940-1990). During the evening, a distinguished panel of experts will share their insights and reflections on Cole’s powerful photographic work, which captured the brutal realities of apartheid-era South Africa, exposing the dehumanising effects of racial oppression in the daily life of black South Africans.
The Mines
Installation view of the exhibition Ernest Cole: House of Bondage at Foam, Amsterdam showing at left, Cole’s Pensive tribesmen, newly recruited to mine labour, awaiting processing and assignment (1960-1966, above)
Installation view of the exhibition Ernest Cole: House of Bondage at Foam, Amsterdam showing at right an Untitled image from Cole’s House of Bondage (1960-1966, below)
Installation view of the exhibition Ernest Cole: House of Bondage at Foam, Amsterdam
Foam proudly presents the first overview of the work of South African photographer Ernest Cole. The exhibition includes parts of his archive, which had long been considered lost. The overview was assembled in collaboration with the Ernest Cole Family Trust, which in 2017 secured control of Cole’s archive. Restless and tenacious, yet dedicated and empathetic. It is difficult to define the enigmatic South African photographer Ernest Cole (1940-1990). He is celebrated for his tireless documentation of Black lives in South Africa under apartheid: a regime of institutionalised racial segregation that was in effect from 1948 to the early 1990s.
As one of the first Black freelance photographers, Cole offered with his work an unprecedented view from the inside. Born in a township, Cole experienced the strains of apartheid first-hand. By having himself reclassified from ‘black’ to ‘coloured’, he managed to access places where most South Africans were banned. He risked his life exposing the grim reality of racial segregation, by documenting miners inside the mines, police controls and the demolition of townships, among others.
Cole lived a nomadic life, exiled from his native South Africa for his photographic publication House of Bondage (1967). The chapters from this book form the narrative for this exhibition. The book openly denounced the apartheid regime and was promptly banned in South Africa. In risk of arrest, Cole had gone into exile in 1966. He would never return to South Africa again.
Living between Sweden and the United States, Cole continued to document Black lives in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement. However, being Black and stateless proved debilitating there too, and a publication of his American work would never materialise. Towards the end of his life, Cole became increasingly disillusioned and reportedly started living on the streets of New York. He died at age 49 from pancreatic cancer. Much of Cole’s work had been considered lost, until the rediscovery of 60,000 negatives and contact sheets in the safety deposit boxes of a Swedish bank in 2017.
Besides (colour) images from his time in America, the archive contains unpublished photographs and contact sheets from House of Bondage. The exhibition in Foam is the first large scale overview of Cole’s work to include parts of his retrieved archive.
About the exhibition
As one of the first Black freelance photographers, Cole offered with his work an unprecedented view from the inside. Born in a township, Cole experienced the strains of apartheid first-hand. By having himself reclassified from ‘black’ to ‘coloured’, he managed to access places where most South Africans were banned. He risked his life exposing the grim reality of racial segregation, by documenting miners inside the mines, police controls and the demolition of townships, among others.
This exhibition shows the rediscovery of 60,000 negatives and contact sheets in the safety deposit boxes of a Swedish bank in 2017. Besides (colour) images from his time in America, the archive contains unpublished photographs and contact sheets from House of Bondage. The exhibition in Foam is the first large scale overview of Cole’s work to include parts of his retrieved archive.
The photographs in this exhibition were taken between 1958-1966, unless stated otherwise. All contact sheets are modern prints from scans. Original titles and text from House of Bondage are in quotation marks or italics. The exhibition pens in tandem with the launch of two volumes published by Aperture: the first a republication of House of Bondage, the second presenting US work for the first time in history.
This exhibition was made in collaboration with the Ernest Cole Family Trust and Magnum Photos.
Press release from Foam
Installation view of the exhibition Ernest Cole: House of Bondage at Foam, Amsterdam showing in the background at left the section of the exhibition entitled ‘Banishment’
Banishment
Cole secretly visited Frenchdale, a remote government detention camp. Its inhabitants were banished without trial, on account of their political views. Cole recorded the basis conditions under which they lived in exile, sometimes for decades. Cole’s presence in the camp was unauthorised, and he recalls having to hide from the police during his stay. When he left, he was relieved. “For them and infinity of unremarkable days stretched ahead. For me the frightful nothingness of Frenchdale was about to end (…) ironically, as I re-entered the restricted black life of Johannesburg, I felt free.”
Cole’s anger about apartheid education is inescapable in his chapter ‘Education for Servitude’, for which he visited various Bantu schools. His images and handwritten notes from a visit to a school in Vlakfontein in 1965 testify to overly crowded and understaffed classrooms in which children are studying to be “educated for servitude”.
Wall text from the exhibition
Installation views of the exhibition Ernest Cole: House of Bondage at Foam, Amsterdam showing photographs from the section ‘Education for Servitude’: in the bottom image at left, Cole’s Earnest boy (1960-1966, below); and at right, Teacher toward end of her day in school, South Africa (1960-1966, below)
Installation views of the exhibition Ernest Cole: House of Bondage at Foam, Amsterdam showing photographs and contact sheets from Cole’s series Black Spots from Cole’s House of Bondage (see photographs below)
Installation view of the exhibition Ernest Cole: House of Bondage at Foam, Amsterdam showing photographs and contact sheets from Cole’s series Black Spots from Cole’s House of Bondage Photo: Drager Meurtant
“African township is bulldozed out of existence to make way for white expansion. Government trucks will move residents and their few possessions to matchbox houses in new locations, usually in remote areas, perhaps not even named on the map. Even to live there, families must qualify. People at right did not, and thus have not only had their homes razed, but have nowhere to go.”
Installation view of the exhibition Ernest Cole: House of Bondage at Foam, Amsterdam showing Nightmare Rides (1960-1966, all below) from the House of Bondage Period Photo: Drager Meurtant
Encouraged by his boss Jürgen Schadeberg, and inspired by other photographers at Drum – such as Peter Magubane, Bob Gosani and Alf Kumalo – Cole became one of South Africa’s first Black freelance photojournalists. Working in Johannesburg but not being allowed to live there, he commuted to the office by train. The platforms and carriages were segregated and overcrowded leading to bizarre situations that inspired the series ‘Nightmare Rides’. The item was commissioned by the Rand Daily Mail and first published in the Netherlands in 1962 as Mensen als vee [People as Cattle] in Katholieke Illustratie.
“Twice each day, at the morning and evening rush hours, the segregated station platforms are a bizarre sight. At one end, a few white trailers stand about, surrounded by space. At the other, a dense mass of Africans is congregated, crowded and compressed.”
Installation views of the exhibition Ernest Cole: House of Bondage at Foam, Amsterdam showing in the bottom image at right, Untitled (Police and Passes) (1960-1966, below) from the House of Bondage Period Photos: Drager Meurtant
“The standard by which the police operate is cruelly simple. To them every black man is a criminal suspect. In a technical sense, the police are not far off the mark to be so suspicious. The laws of apartheid are a far-reaching tangle of restrictions, reaching so deeply into everyday life that it is a rare African who does not violate some law.”
Curated by Alistair O’Neill, professor of Fashion History and Theory at Central Saint Martins (University of the Arts London)
Please note: This exhibition includes photographs showing nudity and sexually suggestive scenes. There is no age restriction for visitors to the exhibition. We are leaving the decision to visit to the discretion of parents, guardians and carers.
Keith Vaughan (British, 1912-1977) Highgate Men’s Pond Album 1933 Courtesy Aberystwyth University School of Art Museum and Galleries
Nothing hard to see here…
This looks to be a fascinating exhibition albeit with not a single erect penis on show and about half the exhibition showing flaccid examples. The photographs seem particularly asexual. Hardly any of them are what you would call “erotic”, except perhaps the photographs from the earliest album in this posting, Keith Vaughan’s Highgate Men’s Pond Album (1933, above and below). For me, the most sexual photographs are the “rough trade” such as the skins and carnies… an archetype which has existed for centuries.
My Phd research titled Presing the Flesh: Sex, Body Image and the Gay Male (1997-2001) examined in part the history of the male body in photography, including photos of ephebes (young men), the muscular mesomorphic body as featured in the physique magazines and gay male pornography. My history of the male body in photography can be found in the Historical Pressings chapter while the Bench Press chapter investigates the ‘Cult of Muscularity’, the development of gym culture, its ‘masculinity’, ‘lifestyle’, and the images used to represent it.
Much as gay men had to speak ‘Polari’ (gay slang language) when going to pubs such as the Salisbury on St Martin’s Lane in London in the 1970s so that those around us could not understand what we were saying, so physique or ‘beefcake’ magazines of the 1950s and 1960s relied heavily on the iconography of classical Rome and Greece to legitimise and hide from unknowing eyes (in plain sight) their homo-erotic overtones. Use was made of columns, drapery, and sets that presented the male body as the contemporary equivalent of idealised male beauty of ancient times.
While Simon in his excellent post on the exhibition notes that there was a delicate balancing act in the photographs in their subtle aesthetics of constraint and tact and a “self-imposed restraint which made ‘physique photographs’ walk such an exciting fine line between factual depiction of male anatomy and objects of lust from the 1930s to the 80s,” behind the scenes the models were getting boners and having sex all over the place. Purely for private consumption in their day, none of these photographs are ever shown (as in this exhibition) or published today and hardly anyone knows about them. The limp, flaccid penis is all that we get to see for fear of offence and/or moral outrage… for what was covert activity at the time (with a wide underground circulation) is kept impotent today.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to The Photographers’ Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“I think the interest is not so much in the images, per se, as in their variety, and also in the extraordinary density and complexity of the clandestine networks of gay photographers, subjects, printers, publishers and distributors which the wall labels describe and explain. That’s interesting social history.
And then, when you lay the complex mesh of legal and cultural and visual parameters over the images you get, as it were, another layer of complexity beyond the images themselves; you get to see them as varying visual strategies and approaches and sublimations of very powerful male urges of desire and sexuality.”
“The bodies in the ‘beefcake’ magazines of the 1950’s tend to be bigger than that of the ephebe, even when the models were quite young in some cases. As the name ‘beefcake’ implies, the muscular mesomorphic shape was the attraction of these bodies – perfectly proportioned Adonis’s with bulging pectorals, large biceps, hard as rock abdomens and small waists. The 1950’s saw the beginning of the fixation of gay men with the muscular mesomorph as the ultimate ideal image of a male body. The lithe bodies of young dancers and swimmers now gives way to muscle – a built body, large in its construction, solid and dependable, sculpted like a piece of rock. These bodies are usually smooth and it is difficult to find a hirsute body11 in any of the photographs from the physique magazines of this time. According to Alan Berube in his book, Coming Out Under Fire,
“The post-war growth and commercialization of gay male erotica in the form of mail-order 8 mm films, photographic stills, and physique magazines were developed in part by veterans and drew heavily on World War II uniforms and iconography for erotic imagery.”12
Looking through images from the 1940s in the collection at The Kinsey Institute, I did find that uniforms were used as a fetish in some of the explicitly erotic photographs as a form of sexual iconography. These photographs of male2male sex were for private consumption only. I found little evidence of the use of uniforms as sexual iconography in the published photographs of the physique magazines. Here image composition mainly featured classical themes, beach scenes, outdoor and studio settings. …
As the 1950s turned into the 1960s other stereotypes became available to the photographers – for example the imagery of the marine, the sailor, the biker, the boy on a tropical island, the wrestler, the boxer, the mechanic. The photographs become more raunchy in their depiction of male nudity.
In the 1950s, however, classical aspirations were never far from the photographers minds when composing the images as can be seen in the undated photograph Jim Stevens by Lon of New York in London taken from a book called ‘Art in Physique Photography’.14 This book, illustrated with drawings of classical warrior figures by David Angelo, is subtitled: ‘An Album of the world’s finest photographs of the male physique’.
Here we observe a link between art and the body. This connection was used to confirm the social acceptability of physique photographs of the male body while still leaving them open to other alternative readings. One alternative reading was made by gay men who could buy these socially acceptable physique magazines to gaze with desire upon the naked form of the male body. It is interesting to note that with the advent of the first openly gay pornography magazines after the ruling on obscenity by the Supreme Court in America in the late 1960s,15 classical figures were still used to justify the desiring gaze of the camera and viewer upon the bodies of men. Another reason used by early gay pornography magazines to justify photographs of men having sex together was that the images were only for educational purposes! …
As social morals relaxed in the age of ‘free love’, physique photographers such as Bob Mizer from Athletic Model Guild produced more openly homo-erotic images. In his work from the 1970s full erections are not prevalent but semi-erect penises do feature, as do revealing “moon” shots from the rear focusing on the arsehole as a site for male libidinal desires. A less closeted, more open expression of homosexual desire can be seen in the photographs of the male body in the 1970s.17 What can also be seen in the images of gay pornography magazines from the mid 1970s onwards is the continued development of the dominant stereotypical ‘ideal’ body image that is present in contemporary gay male society – that of the smooth, white, tanned, muscular mesomorphic body image.
Marcus Bunyan. “Historical Pressings,” from Presing the Flesh: Sex, Body Image and the Gay Male. PhD thesis, RMIT University, 2001
A Hard Man is Good to Find! celebrates a clandestine visual culture of men’s bodies that emerged in the post-war period, during a time when making and distributing such images was a criminal offence.
This exhibition highlights key areas of London which were a focus for men seeking out men to photograph. It maps out a territory of risk and possibility across Highgate, between Chelsea and Wellington Barracks, in Soho, Brixton, Portobello and Euston. Catalogues, print ordering sheets, personal albums, magazines and publications explore how these photographs were circulated, exchanged and shared.
While the 1955 Wolfenden Report and the 1967 Sexual Offences Act marked the partial decriminalisation of gay sexual activity, prompting gay liberation and the fight for social equality; any depiction of male nudity which suggested homosexuality remained subject to the 1857 Obscene Publications Act.
Including work by John S. Barrington, Cecil Beaton, Guy Burch, Basil Clavering, Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Bill Green, David Gwinnutt, Angus McBean, Patrick Procktor, Ajamu X and many more.
Whilst this is an exhibition of queer pictures, it is important to note that not all the photographers or models can be claimed as queer subjects. It also acknowledges that language evolves and while queer is employed today for its inclusivity, the reclaiming of the derogatory term can sit uneasily for the generation subjected to it; the term homosexual can be similarly problematic for a younger generation.
As a number of the works are historical documents, it has not been possible to identify all individuals represented in the exhibition. We welcome any amendments or additions.
Text from The Photographers’ Gallery website
A Hard Man is Good to Find! Interview with exhibition curator Alistair O’Neill
Alistair O’Neill, professor of Fashion History and Theory at Central Saint Martins (University of the Arts London) talks about curating the exhibition A Hard Man is Good to Find! – a bold new exhibition charting over 60 years of queer photography of the male physique.
Keith Vaughan (British, 1912-1977) Highgate Men’s Pond Album (detail) 1933 Courtesy Aberystwyth University School of Art Museum and Galleries
Keith Vaughan (British, 1912-1977) Highgate Men’s Pond Album (detail) 1933 Courtesy Aberystwyth University School of Art Museum and Galleries
Keith Vaughan (British, 1912-1977) Highgate Men’s Pond Album 1933 Courtesy Aberystwyth University School of Art Museum and Galleries
Keith Vaughan (British, 1912-1977) Highgate Men’s Pond Album, front cover 1933 Courtesy Aberystwyth University School of Art Museum and Galleries
Highgate men’s pond has a history of accommodating physical culturists and queer men as swimmers and sunbathers. At the age of 21, artist Keith Vaughan purchased a Leica camera and set up a darkroom in his bedroom. One of his first projects was a photobook he designed and made charting the climbing temperature of a summer’s day at the pond. This is the first time the album has been exhibited.
Keith Vaughan (British, 1912-1977) Highgate Men’s Pond Album 1933 Courtesy Aberystwyth University School of Art Museum and Galleries
Keith Vaughan (British, 1912-1977) Highgate Men’s Pond Album (detail) 1933 Courtesy Aberystwyth University School of Art Museum and Galleries
Angus McBean (Welsh, 1904-1990) David Dulak 1946 Courtesy Rupert Smith Collection
In a study of Dulak taken in Angus McBean’s Covent Garden studio, an idealised diptych of the naked dancer is created from controlled lighting and double exposure. It was taken after McBean was released from prison, having served two years’ hard labour for gross indecency. During the Blitz, McBean relocated his studio to Bath and it was raided by police in 1941.
Between Chelsea and Wellington Barracks
I.e. Pimlico, an area of boarding houses and rented rooms, an enclave of queer life. Angus McBean opened his photographic studio on Belgrave Road in 1935.
Montague Glover had served in the First World War where he was awarded a medal. He went on to practice as an architect with photography on the side. His military career gave him easy access to the barracks where he recruited like-minded Guards to return to his studio or rented rooms and pose in less than full uniform. Squaddies available for gay sex were known as ‘a bit of scarlet’.
Angus McBean (Welsh, 1904-1990) David Dulak (detail) 1946 Courtesy Rupert Smith Collection
“… by the time of the 1939 National Register he was 35 and living in a Hertfordshire cottage with three other men; his 19 year old photographer’s assistant, a 21 year old theatre clerk, and a 26 year old builder’s carpenter. Because of the London Blitz McBean moved to Bath where he set up a studio in his ground floor flat in Kingston House, Pierrepont Street, which soon became a meeting place for gay men, including servicemen who were stationed nearby.
On 13 November 1941 Bath police raided the flat and arrested McBean and a 16 year old youth. This began a chain of arrests using evidence from letters, diaries and statements to the police. It also resulted in one, and possibly two, suicides.
McBean and five other men were tried “on grave charges” at Winchester Assizes in March 1942 in front of Bristol born and former Clifton College pupil Lord Chief Justice Thomas Inskip, 1st Viscount Caldecote. All six men were found guilty and sent to prison with McBean receiving a 4 year sentence of hard labour for three charges of gross indecency. On hearing the sentence McBean collapsed in the dock. Others convicted were: 25 year old Lt. Tom Gill, in civilian life an actor, who received 15 months in prison; 18 year old Theodore Parker who was found in possession of 36 love letters from Gill and was sent to borstal for three years; 28 year old Arthur Sigmund Politzer, a well known artist and glass designer serving with the Field Security Police who received a 20 month prison sentence; 21 year old Eric Hughes, a civil servant sentenced to three years Borstal; and 22 year old Brian Ball, a soldier stationed in Surrey and sentenced to 15 months imprisonment.
Two other lives were ended by the case, though neither was charged. Alan Farr, a 30 year old Admiralty electrical fitter and draughtsman had been interviewed twice by police in the week after the raid about connections with McBean. On 16 December 1941 a Detective Inspector called at Farr’s office to escort him to the police station, probably to be charged. On the pretext of visiting the cloakroom before leaving, Farr shot himself and died instantly. Also mentioned during the trial was 18 year old Allan Patrick Nottingham, already on probation for indecency charges in Portsmouth, who may have been the catalyst for the initial discovery of Bean’s circle. A week after the trial, the Bath Chronicle of 21 March 1942 reported that Nottingham had been found in a crashed car on the Wiltshire Downs and had died shortly after in Swindon Hospital.
Jonathan Rowe. “Angus McBean,” on the Out Stories Bristol website 2021 [Online] Cited 29/05/2023
Angus McBean (Welsh, 1904-1990) David Dulak Ballet, January 1946 Courtesy Rupert Smith Collection
Dulak was a dancer, found by physique photographer John S Barrington in 1938 on Charing Cross Road. Barrington introduced him to theatre photographer Angus McBean; this study featured on the cover of Richard Buckle’s progressive dance journal, Ballet.
The Photographers’ Gallery presents A Hard Man is Good to Find! – a bold new exhibition charting over 60 years of queer photography of the male physique, on display from 2 March to 11 June 2023.
Bringing together more than 100 works, the exhibition centres on queer photographs of men’s bodies, produced in London in the twentieth century. While the 1955 Wolfenden Report and the 1967 Sexual Offences Act marked the partial decriminalisation of gay sexual activity, prompting gay liberation and the fight for social equality; any depiction of male nudity which suggested homosexuality remained subject to the 1857 Obscene Publications Act, which made making or distributing such images a criminal offence.
A clandestine visual culture emerged, regulated by laws which enforced homosexuality as invisible. In turn, it directly fed the defiant, overt visuality of gay men’s bodies that emerged in the post-war period. The tension between invisibility and visibility was negotiated through ideas about the male body drawn from art, physical culturists, and pornography – both home-grown and imported.
Taking a novel approach, the exhibition highlights key areas of London which were a focus for men seeking out men to photograph. It maps out a territory of risk and possibility across Highgate, between Chelsea and Wellington Barracks, in Soho, Brixton, Portobello and Euston. Within each site it is possible to locate artists of all persuasions, creating work about queer sensibilities and men’s bodies in radical ways. Catalogues, print ordering sheets, personal albums, magazines and publications are also included in the exhibition to explore how these photographs were circulated, exchanged and shared. Drawing together photographs produced for commercial, as well as creative and personal purposes, A Hard Man is Good to Find! dissolves hierarchies, creates non-linear historical narratives and brokers unlikely adjacencies.
Covering the 1930s to early 1990s, many works are exhibited here for the firsttime including Keith Vaughan’s Highgate Men’s Pond album, a modernist photo collage made in 1933; ‘The Portobello Boys’, an anonymous and striking portfolio of young men taken in the late 1950s and early 1960s in North Kensington. A set of archetypes, ‘The Londoners’, documented in the late 1960s by Anthony C Burls (trading as Cain of London) and Martin Spenceley’s street portraits of subcultural men photographed in Euston in the 1980s.
The hinge of this history is the posing pouch, a modest fabric covering for the male genitals developed by gay physique photographers to show as much of the male body as possible. Its origins lie in the US, in the Athletic Model Guild established by Bob Mizer in 1945, although there is evidence of it being worn for sunbathing in London in the early 1930s. An original 1950s posing pouch will on display in the exhibition. Employed to circumvent the ban on full nudity (which included the postal system), the pouch was also painted on mail order reproductions so that customers could rub them off once received in the post. The sighting and dematerialising of the posing pouch is key to thinking through how such images were consumed, and how queer erotics were discursively constructed from imaginative forms of resistance to power and oppression.
The exhibition includes works by: John S Barrington, Cecil Beaton, Guy Burch, Basil Clavering (trading as Royale), Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Bill Green (trading as Vince), David Gwinnutt, Paul Hawker, Angus McBean and Ajamu X.
Press release from the Photographers’ Gallery
Installation view of the exhibition A Hard Man is Good to Find! at The Photographers’ Gallery, London
Mrs Mizer Tangerine Posing Strap 1955 Miles Chapman Collection
In 1945 Bob Mizer started the Athletic Model Guild, a model agency for bodybuilders for the film industry. In 1951 he launched a quarterly magazine, Physique Pictorial. For his photoshoots Mizer developed the skimpiest possible garment which dwindled down to the posing pouch. The exhibition explains that the earliest versions were sewn for him by his mother who, nonetheless, strongly disapproved of his sexuality. …
Slightly spoiling the effect, there is a small mention of the photographic evidence that this kind of super-minimalist covering was, in fact, being worn by sunbathing men in London in the early 1930s. Still. American has to be shoehorned in somehow. [see photographs by Keith Vaughan at the top of the posting]
Bill Green (Vince) catalogue sheet 31949 June 1949
Bill Green set up Vince Studio at 46 Manchester Street, Marylebone in 1946, specialising in photographs of bodybuilders. Prints could be ordered from catalogue sheets advertised in the classifieds of Health and Strength magazine. His catalogue sheets always had a gutter in the middle so they could be folded for discreet posting without creasing any image.
“Vince” had originally been the pseudonym of Bill Green, a photographer for men’s magazines, who shot wrestlers and bodybuilders naked but for nifty briefs he had cut down from chainstore trunks. These were so unlike available mens’ underwear that models and readers wanted to buy them. Green obliged by mail order, later adding to his catalogue the black sweater get-up of intellectual Paris and unshrunk Levis; in 1954 he set up in the Soho premises – described by Richard Benson of the Face magazine as “a CS Lewis of a wardrobe for young men” – they passed through its door into somewhere far out.
Vince and his boys supplied flagrant colour, untweedy texture, tight fit and low cut to a theatrical and artistic clientele, and many followers of camp. But these were not the only customers for that “certain ambiguity”: pink hipsters walked out of the shop on heteros, too.
Veronica Horwell. “John Stephen,” on The Guardian website Mon 9 Feb 2004 [Online] Cited 29/05/2023
Bill Green (Vince) Monotosh Roy c. 1950s Courtesy Rupert Smith Collection
Bill Green – ‘Vince Man’s Shop’
In the 1940s, Bill Green was a local photographer who specialised in artistic images of ‘muscle men’ and male wrestlers. His models wore fairly revealing (for the time) homo-erotic garments that were mainly designed by himself due to the lack of availability of commercial items. He decided to develop this business and by 1950 was selling them through mail-order catalogues appealing mainly to the gay community. Following European trips in the early Fifties he expanded his portfolio to include the ‘existentialist’ look that was popular in France and Italy and was the first to introduce British men to ‘Beatnik’-style fashions.
With the continued success of his mail-order business, and aware of its popularity with the gay community, he opened Vince Man’s Shop in 1954. The establishment was located in Newburgh Street, an intelligent business decision as this was right at the heart of London’s gay community and very close to Marshall Street Public Baths which was a well-known and popular meeting area for gay men. One of the earliest advertisements featured a muscular Sean Connery in a ‘matelot’ vest and skin-tight jeans.
His colourful and unconventional designs, which included velvet and silk materials and pre-faded denim, quickly widened its appeal by attracting younger members of the Bohemian and Thespian fraternities who frequented the West End of London. The window displays were provocative for the time, often featuring mannequins wearing outrageous fashions including briefs and pink hipster-style slacks, and his wide range of clientele included the likes of George Melly, Peter Sellers, Sean Connery, Pablo Picasso and even the King of Denmark!
The fashions in the establishment were not cheap, and were generally out of the normal price range of ordinary teenagers, but this brought a certain ‘respectability’ to the informality and flamboyance of new styles and were certainly one of the catalysts in the major changes that were to take place in the fashions appealing to young males in the Sixties. As the decade progressed, and ’boutiques’ started providing a progressively fast-moving outlet for cheap fashion clothing, Vince’s came under increasing financial pressure and the establishment was forced to move to a less expensive location in North London. Bill Green closed the shop for good in 1969, subsequently becoming the manager of a Soho restaurant.
Anonymous. “Carnaby Street,” on the Sixties City website Nd [Online] Cited 29/05/2023
Montosh Roy (1916-2014)
Monotosh Roy (1916-2014) was an Indian bodybuilder, who held the Mr. Universe title in Group III Amateur Division in 1951. Roy was the first Indian and Asian to be awarded the Mr. Universe title. …
In 1939, he competed in his first bodybuilding competition, but did not fare well. He resolved for success and engaged himself in further practice. In 1939, he won the East Indian Bodybuilding Championship. In 1947, he won the All India Bodybuilding Championship.
In 1951, Roy travelled to the United Kingdom and participated in the Mr. Universe competition. He won the Mr. Universe title in Group III Amateur Division category. The audience at the competition were mesmerised by his muscle display. They queued up for his autograph and even waited up to two and half hours for his autograph. Following his victory at the Mr. Universe competition, he was felicitated at the India House by the Indian High Commissioner.
After his return to India he acted as a trainer in many physical culture clubs. He used to train fitness and yoga to celebrities. He founded the Indian Bodybuilding Federation in 1958. He was also the founding member of Asian Bodybuilding Federation. He also taught at the Calcutta University and the Law College. He became a featured columnist in periodicals on health and fitness. He also wrote a few books on Yoga. He conducted bodybuilding programmes that were telecast in the Doordarshan. He set up several bodybuilding and yoga centres in Kolkata.
Bill Green (Vince) Vince advertisement Health and Strength, 29 May 1952
In 1951, Green was advertising posing briefs in the Daily Mirror. They were made by shortening and over-dyeing Marks & Spencer underwear. This advertisement was shot at the Serpentine Lido. In 1954, Green opened the first men’s fashion boutique, Vince Man’s Shop, on Fouberts Place, Soho; it was the start of the peacock revolution and Carnaby Street as a fashionable retail destination.
Bill Green (Vince) Vince Man’s Shop catalogue, model Sean Connery Spring/Summer 1957 Courtesy Alistair O’Neill Collection
Vince Man’s Shop was the first boutique to sell imported men’s fashion such as American workwear jeans and Italian suiting and shirting. It catered to homosexual men and benefited from its proximity to the Marshall Street gym, Soho’s coffee bars and Piccadilly Circus. The cover model here is aspiring actor Sean Connery, better known at the time as a bodybuilder and artist’s model
Cecil Beaton (British, 1904-1980) ‘Narcissus of 1967’ (Gervase Griffiths) c. 1967 Gelatin silver print
Marylebone
‘The City of Quebec’ pub in Marylebone is supposed to be London’s oldest gay pub. It opened in 1946 and was popular with gay RAF men. Bill Green learned photography and wrestling in the RAF and in 1946 set up Vince Studio at 46 Manchester Street, soon establishing a name for ‘physique photography’. He advised beginners to use a little oil to help highlight the contours of male musculature.
In 1954 Green opened a men’s fashion boutique in Foubert’s Place, Soho. In 1956 his assistant, John Stephen, opened another fashion store. According to the exhibition’s curator, Alistair O’Neill, Professor of Fashion History and Theory at Central Saint Martins, these sparked ‘the peacock revolution’ in men’s fashion. They helped turn Carnaby Street into the centre of modern fashion.
Artist Patrick Prockter also had a studio on Manchester Street. He took photos as preparatory studies for paintings, especially of his boyfriend Gervase Griffiths. He cultivated an artistic circle which included painter David Hockney, fashion designer Ossie Clark, and physique model Peter Hinwood. The veteran photographer Cecil Beaton was attracted to this young group of openly queer men. The exhibition includes sets of colour photos of Griffiths on a beach, and two by Beaton which are among my favourites, not because they’re nude, camp or gay – simply because they’re beautiful.
Basil Clavering (British, 1910-1973) (Royale, Hussar, Dolphin) Mail order Storyette print late 1950s Courtesy Rupert Smith Collection
Basil Clavering ran the Cameo Royal cinema on the Charing Cross Road, and the Cameo Poly (now Regent Street Cinema). He built a studio in the basement of his home on Denbigh Street, Pimlico, with his friend, John Charles Pankhurst, both of whom had served in the navy. In their studio Basil & John recruited military men to model in authentic uniforms, and Clavering innovated the ‘storyette’ where the catalogue sheet of photos available to order would set out a narrative drama like film stills from a motion picture.
Basil Clavering (British, 1910-1973) (Royale, Hussar, Dolphin) Photograph from Storyette EX FJSS 1950s Courtesy Rupert Smith Collection
“Clavering and Parkhurst’s work reflects in both imagery and subject matter the drawings of Tom of Finland (Touko Laaksonen, 1920-1991). Laaksonen met Clavering during a visit to London and Studio Hussar commissioned a series of 17 panel drawings from him entitled The Thieving Cowboy (1957). No other photographers of the time were extracting so much visual drama from the clothed male figure. Other physique photographers were viewing the legal restrictions of the time as a challenge, whereas Royale and Hussar embraced them as an opportunity to produce magnificent risqué images.
Clavering and Parkhurst both served in the Navy, and their experience and connection to their subject matter is evident in the way clothing and partial undress was depicted, reflecting an insider’s comprehension and understanding.
Many of the models were also active military personnel, who Clavering met in public houses close to Hyde Park and the Chelsea barracks. Consequently, the images are not simply of men dressing up in uniforms, but rather men fully aware of both the purpose and symbolism of the uniform.”
Basil Clavering (British, 1910-1973) (Royale, Hussar, Dolphin) Photograph from Storyette EX FJSS 1950s Courtesy Rupert Smith Collection
Clavering was a successful businessman, and owned the Gala-Royale cinema chain. More as a hobby than anything else, he established a photographic studio in the basement of his Pimlico home, with his friend John Charles Parkhurst (1927-2000). Both men had served in the Navy, and they were drawn to the military men around the Hyde Park and Chelsea barracks, whom they paid to model for them.
The studio operated under two names, Royale and Hussar, and Clavering sold the photographs by mail order. The images are profoundly erotic, despite there being no frontal nudity. Models are occasionally depicted solo, but more often in groups, and scenarios involve uniform, military and naval discipline, wrestling, light bondage and spanking – somehow always in a mood of levity and playfulness. Clavering met Tom of Finland, and several images from a biker series echo the Finn’s work; in 1957 Studio Hussar even commissioned a series of drawings from him.
As far as I know this photograph is not in the exhibition but I like it!
Paul Hawker Spencer Churchill 1951 Courtesy Rupert Smith Collection
The Serpentine
In the 1950s British bodybuilding magazines catered for two audiences, straight bodybuilders and a gay readership. As well as the obvious photos and articles, in their back pages these magazines offered discreet mail order services for ‘original physique studies’. This section features the work of mail order publisher William Domenique (trading as Lon of New York) and gay erotic artist Bill Ward.
Paul Hawker came from Bristol, moved to London, and took photos of young men preening and parading at the Serpentine Open Air swimming pool, another well-known gay haunt. He is represented by some of the photos he took of his friend, body builder Spencer Churchill. Apparently Churchill was one of the first to adopt the American fashion for denim workware jeans as regular casual clothing.
And once you knew, you could purchase. Lots of the images here skirt around the legality of the male nude by being available in bodybuilding magazines, or as a catalogue of physiques for fitness buffs to emulate at home. One amazing image shows Spencer Churchill tensed and glistening while wearing a posing pouch that you could scratch off to reveal the goods beneath. It’s a fascinating portrait of hidden mid-century male desire in London.
But there are ethical questions here too. John S Barrington pretended to be a Vogue photographer to persuade men to pose for him. That’s uncomfortable, exploitative and not really dealt with in the show. Also, lots of the subjects in the exhibition wouldn’t have considered themselves gay or queer either, so framing them anonymously in a queer context totally removes the sitters’ agency.
Then there’s the group of photos of young men lounging around in west London bedrooms and living rooms. They’re amazing images, totally unguarded and joyful, but they were purchased as a box of anonymous negatives from Portobello Antiques Market by Emmanuel Cooper. These men have had no say in their private nude moments being plastered across The Photographers’ Gallery decades after they were taken. This was a time when privacy not only mattered, but had a tangible impact on people’s lives, and this has taken the choice away from them.
So there are issues here and some tricky ethical moments, but there’s still a lot to like. At its best, this show is a celebration of the male form in London from a time when that was an incredibly dangerous thing to celebrate. The thing is, men are hot, always have been, and we should be very grateful that these days we can say that without getting put in prison.
Anonymous photogapher The Portobello Boys Early 1960s Courtesy Emmanuel Cooper Archive The Bishopsgate Institute Special Collections and Archives
Emmanuel Cooper purchased a set of negatives from Portobello Antiques Market in the early 1980s. Cooper was a ceramicist, writer, art critic and gay rights activist. He called this anonymous body of work The Portobello Boys, as he believed they were taken in the north Kensington area in the late 1950s to mid-60s. Taken in an era before gay liberation, they document young men posing, in turns uncertainly and assertively, in states of undress.
Notting Hill
Became known after the war for its combination of bachelor housing and growing immigrant community. In the early 1980s ceramics artist Emmanuel Cooper picked up a set of negatives at Portobello Market. It turned out to be a set of studies of nude or partially clothed young men with an obvious queer vibe taken in the late 1950s and early 1960s in North Kensington. Cooper titled it ‘The Portobello Boys’ and arranged for its publication. They are surprisingly homely, unguarded, intimate studies of everyday life.
Anthony C Burls (Cain of London) Catalogue sheet c. 1968-1970 Guy Burch collection
Anthony C Burls was a photographer who engaged young men to model through street casting. He also ran a coffee shop at World’s End in Chelsea in the 1960s, took casual work at Battersea Funfair and regularly attended a gym in Brixton. He used these contexts to find working-class men to photograph.
White Brixton
Anthony C. Burls was an interesting character. In the 1960s he ran a coffee shop at the World’s End in Chelsea, got odd jobs working at funfairs, and attended a gym in Brixton. In all these settings he asked working class men if he could photograph them and the result is a series of full length, mostly fully clothed studies which I think I liked most out of the exhibition. He named the series ‘The Londoners: Official reports’, including not just the photos but the man’s job description and a pen profile. His first business address was Studio 200 on Railton Road, also home to the South London Gay Community Centre. …
I liked Anthony C. Burls’ set of photos of the rough, dirty, tough-looking young men you get working at funfairs and such, swaggering among the dodgems in tight jeans, unbuttoned shirts and rocker brylcreemed hair. [see photograph at bottom of posting]
John S Barrington (British, 1920-1990) John Hamill c. 1966 Courtesy Rupert Smith Collection
John S. Barrington (1920-1991) was a British physique photographer and publisher. Barrington’s photos of nude or semi-nude men appeared widely in British and American physique magazines, sometimes under the pseudonym John Paignton. Barrington published many of his own physique magazines, including Male Model Monthly, the first in Britain. He also published a number of books related to photography and anthropometry. Barrington was a prolific artist and publisher, and by 1984 was said to have published more nude titles than any other individual in Europe or the United States.
Barrington had frequent sexual encounters with men throughout his life, particularly with the men who modeled for him, though he identified as heterosexual.
Barrington began photographing men in 1938 at the men’s bathing pond at Hampstead Heath. He studied at St Martin’s School of Art and L’Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris. In addition to photography, Barrington was also a visual artist and sculptor.
Barrington began working as a physique photographer in 1948. In 1954, he began publishing Male Model Monthly, the first physique magazine in Britain. From 1954 until 1979, he would go on to publish many more physique magazines in Britain and the US, among the best-known being MAN-ifique, FORMosus, Superb Youth, and Youth in the Sun.
Barrington was known to select models in the “boy next door” mold, with average body types. His photographs were mostly taken outdoors, with models appearing in relaxed, natural poses.
In the 1950s and 1960s Barrington published books on anatomy and anthropometry, ostensibly for the benefit of artists.
John S Barrington (British, 1920-1990) Catalogue sheet c. 1970s Courtesy Rupert Smith Collection
John S Barrington (British, 1920-1990) Catalogue sheet (details) c. 1970s Courtesy Rupert Smith Collection
John S Barrington (British, 1920-1990) Catalogue sheet c. 1970s Courtesy Rupert Smith Collection
John S Barrington (British, 1920-1990) Catalogue sheet (details) c. 1970s Courtesy Rupert Smith Collection
Martin Spenceley Untitled 1980s Courtesy of the Michael Carnes Collection
Martin Spenceley photographed young men in Euston in the 1980s, scouting for Teds, punks and skinheads, persuading them to pose by cheekily lying that he worked for Vogue America.
Martin Spenceley Untitled 1980s Courtesy of the Michael Carnes Collection
Rough trade!
The show is split into different geographical areas of London, each of which had a slightly different character, lending themselves to different types of man and images. We start in the bedsit land of Pimlico. In the 1950s this was home to many single young queer men as well as soldiers living in the two nearby army barracks. We see pictures of many of the young fit soldiers who liked being photographed to earn a little extra money.
We then move on to Hampstead Heath the famous cruising area and home to the men-only Highgate Men’s Swimming Pond. A good collection of sunbathing men from the 1930s is included here. Other areas of London shown include a selection of 1950s male physique photography shot in Marylebone and in Hyde Park and ‘The Portobello Boys,’ an interesting selection of men shot at home in Notting Hill and Portobello in the 1960s. This area of West London was very queer back then.
Then we head south of the river to Battersea and Brixton where pictures range from 1960s fairground and other workers through to queer artists and activists in the 70s and 80s.
Anthony C Burls (Cain of London) The Young Londoners late 1960s – early 1970s
“The show is structured through areas of London that were known for attracting queer communities and related imagemaking practices,” he explains.
“This might be open air sites where men could see and be seen, such as Highgate Men’s Pond or the Serpentine Lido, but it also includes areas that offered furnished rooms for rent that were popular with single gay men, such as Pimlico or Notting Hill.”
Interesting adjacencies are revealed, such as the fact that artist Patrick Procktor had a studio in Marylebone in the same street as physique photographer Bill Green (who traded under the name Vince).
Many of the works in the show are being exhibited at the gallery for the first time, including a set of archetypes, ‘The Londoners’, documented in the late 60s by Anthony C Burls (who traded as Cain of London) and Martin Spenceley’s street portraits, photographed in Euston in the 80s.
It also highlights fascinating historical objects such as an original 1950s posing pouch, which has its origins in the US Athletic Model Guild established by Bob Mizer in 1945, but was widely used by gay physique photographers to show as much of the male body as possible.
In bringing the show to life, O’Neill hopes to demonstrate how this fascinating pocket of queer history has gone on to influence visual culture more broadly. “The movement certainly informed the body consciousness of queer visual culture,” he says, “but I would argue that it’s intertwined history with the emergence of men’s fashion in the 1950s and 60s has played a significant role in contemporary queer style positions, both naked and dressed.”
Anthony C Burls (Cain of London) Untitled (Carnie) 1960s
As far as I know this photograph is not in the exhibition but I like it!
A secret history
All this explains why, as the tools of photography became cheaper and more widely available, from the 1920s and 30s onwards a clandestine visual culture emerged. During the 1930s stunning images of athletic male physiques could be associated with the general social trend towards hiking and healthy outdoor activities. During the Second World War photographers were encouraged to take photos of our brave boys looking butch and manly. After the war publishers gained more confidence but were still liable for arrest and confiscation of stock. It was only really in the later 1960s that, along with so many other social movement, gay men felt increasing confidence in depicting their lifestyles and objects of desire openly.
Throughout the period there is a continual interplay and overlap between licit and illicit ways of visualising the male body: the naked athlete trope ultimately derived from statues of ancient Greek and Roman men. Images of tough soldiers could walk a narrow line between being heterosexual propaganda and gay adoration. Young men sunbathing could be following European models of health and fitness. Models and precedents from heterosexual art and culture were continually being subtly reworked, the borderline between legal art and illegal ‘obscenity’ shimmered and wavered within individual images, different definitions of desire fight in single photographs.
Anyway, the repression gay photos were liable to be subject to at any moment explains why a good deal of this visual culture was underground or hidden. Some gay publications were subscription only, others were available as a sideline in otherwise ‘respectable’ book and art shops. In the 60s and 70s more magazines and specialist shops came out of the closet.
![Louis Stettner (American, 1922-2016) 'Boulevard de Clichy, Paris' [Boulevard de Clichy, París] 1951 from the exhibition 'Louis Stettner' at Fundación MAPFRE Recoletos Room (Madrid), June - August, 2023](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/03.-id40_p.jpg "Louis Stettner (American, 1922-2016) 'Boulevard de Clichy, Paris' [Boulevard de Clichy, París] 1951 from the exhibition 'Louis Stettner' at Fundación MAPFRE Recoletos Room (Madrid), June - August, 2023")
![Louis Stettner (American, 1922-2016) 'Aubervilliers, France' [Aubervilliers, Francia] 1947 from the exhibition 'Louis Stettner' at Fundación MAPFRE Recoletos Room (Madrid), June - August, 2023](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/02.-id37_p.jpg "Louis Stettner (American, 1922-2016) 'Aubervilliers, France' [Aubervilliers, Francia] 1947 from the exhibition 'Louis Stettner' at Fundación MAPFRE Recoletos Room (Madrid), June - August, 2023")
![Louis Stettner (American, 1922-2016) 'Concentric Circles, Construction Site, New York' [Círculos concéntricos, obra, Nueva York] 1952 from the exhibition 'Louis Stettner' at Fundación MAPFRE Recoletos Room (Madrid), June - August, 2023](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/11.-id737_p.jpg "Louis Stettner (American, 1922-2016) 'Concentric Circles, Construction Site, New York' [Círculos concéntricos, obra, Nueva York] 1952 from the exhibition 'Louis Stettner' at Fundación MAPFRE Recoletos Room (Madrid), June - August, 2023")
![Louis Stettner (American, 1922-2016) 'Manhole, Times Square, New York' [Tapa de alcantarilla, Times Square, Nueva York] 1954 from the exhibition 'Louis Stettner' at Fundación MAPFRE Recoletos Room (Madrid), June - August, 2023](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/08.-id68_p-b.jpg "Louis Stettner (American, 1922-2016) 'Manhole, Times Square, New York' [Tapa de alcantarilla, Times Square, Nueva York] 1954 from the exhibition 'Louis Stettner' at Fundación MAPFRE Recoletos Room (Madrid), June - August, 2023")
![Louis Stettner (American, 1922-2016) 'Brooklyn Promenade, Brooklyn, New York' [Brooklyn Promenade, Brooklyn, Nueva York] 1954](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/09.-id1_p.jpg "Louis Stettner (American, 1922-2016) 'Brooklyn Promenade, Brooklyn, New York' [Brooklyn Promenade, Brooklyn, Nueva York] 1954")
![Louis Stettner (American, 1922-2016) 'Nancy Listening to Jazz, Greenwich Village, New York' [Nancy escuchando jazz, Greenwich Village, Nueva York] 1958](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/10.-id4211_p.jpg "Louis Stettner (American, 1922-2016) 'Nancy Listening to Jazz, Greenwich Village, New York' [Nancy escuchando jazz, Greenwich Village, Nueva York] 1958")
![Louis Stettner (American, 1922-2016) 'Woman Holding Newspaper, New York' [Mujer sujetando un periódico, Nueva York] 1946](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/01.-id1732_p.jpg "Louis Stettner (American, 1922-2016) 'Woman Holding Newspaper, New York' [Mujer sujetando un periódico, Nueva York] 1946")
![Louis Stettner (American, 1922-2016) 'Train Station Near Málaga, Spain' [Estación de tren cerca de Málaga, España] 1951](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/05.-id74_p.jpg "Louis Stettner (American, 1922-2016) 'Train Station Near Málaga, Spain' [Estación de tren cerca de Málaga, España] 1951")
![Louis Stettner (American, 1922-2016) 'Tony, "Pepe and Tony, Spanish Fishermen", Ibiza, Spain' [Tony, "Pepe y Tony, pescadores españoles", Ibiza, España] 1956](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/04.-id4569_p.jpg "Louis Stettner (American, 1922-2016) 'Tony, \"Pepe and Tony, Spanish Fishermen\", Ibiza, Spain' [Tony, \"Pepe y Tony, pescadores españoles\", Ibiza, España] 1956")
![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](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/06.-id179_p.jpg "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")
![Louis Stettner (American, 1922-2016) 'Woman with White Glove, Penn Station, New York' [Mujer con guante blanco, Penn Station, Nueva York] 1958](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/07.-id461_p.jpg "Louis Stettner (American, 1922-2016) 'Woman with White Glove, Penn Station, New York' [Mujer con guante blanco, Penn Station, Nueva York] 1958")
![Louis Stettner (American, 1922-2016) 'Aluminum Foundry, Soviet Union' [Fundición de aluminio, Unión Soviética] 1975](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/13.-id648_p.jpg "Louis Stettner (American, 1922-2016) 'Aluminum Foundry, Soviet Union' [Fundición de aluminio, Unión Soviética] 1975")
![Louis Stettner (American, 1922-2016) 'Assembly Line Worker, Long Island City, New York' [Trabajadora en cadena de montaje, Nueva York] 1972-1974](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/12.-id96_p-1.jpg "Louis Stettner (American, 1922-2016) 'Assembly Line Worker, Long Island City, New York' [Trabajadora en cadena de montaje, Nueva York] 1972-1974")
![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](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/14.-id1307_p.jpg "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")
![Louis Stettner (American, 1922-2016) 'Self-Portrait, Santiago, Chile' [Autorretrato, Santiago de Chile] 2000-2001](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/16.-id1627_p.jpg "Louis Stettner (American, 1922-2016) 'Self-Portrait, Santiago, Chile' [Autorretrato, Santiago de Chile] 2000-2001")
![Louis Stettner (American, 1922-2016) 'Women from Texas, Fifth Avenue, New York' [Mujeres de Texas, Fifth Avenue, Nueva York] 1975](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/15.-id145_p.jpg "Louis Stettner (American, 1922-2016) 'Women from Texas, Fifth Avenue, New York' [Mujeres de Texas, Fifth Avenue, Nueva York] 1975")
![Louis Stettner (American, 1922-2016) 'Jardin du Luxembourg, Paris' [Jardin du Luxembourg, París] 1997](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/17.-id2978_p.jpg "Louis Stettner (American, 1922-2016) 'Jardin du Luxembourg, Paris' [Jardin du Luxembourg, París] 1997")
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