A photographer I knew very little about before assembling this posting. The undoubted influence of Henri Cartier-Bresson can be seen in many images (such as Vendeurs de pain, Athènes 1958 and Village moderne de pêcheurs 1954, both below), while other images are redolent of Josef Koudelka (Marriage gitan, 1953) and Paul Strand (Jeune mineur, 1955).
Weiss strikes one as a solid photographer in the humanist, Family of Man tradition who doesn’t push the boundaries of the medium or the genre, nor generate a recognisable signature style.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Jeu de Paume for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Sabine Weiss – Jeu de Paume Château de Tours
“Sabine Weiss”: exhibition at Jeu de Paume Château de Tours from 18 June 2016 until 30 October 2016.
Sabine Weiss is the last representative of the French humanist school of photography, which includes photographers like Robert Doisneau, Willy Ronis, Édouard Boubat, Brassaï and Izis.
Still active at over 90 years of age, she has accepted for the first time to present her personal archives, thereby providing a privileged insight into her life and career as a photographer. The exhibition at the Château de Tours will showcase just a few milestones from her long career.
Through almost 130 prints, as well as numerous period documents – many of which are being shown for the first time – this exhibition provides visitors with an overview of the multiple facets of this prolific artist, for whom photography was first and foremost, a fascinating occupation.
Sabine Weiss is the last representative of the French humanist school of photography, which includes photographers like Robert Doisneau, Willy Ronis, Édouard Boubat, Brassaï and Izis.
Still active at over 90 years of age, she has accepted for the first time to present her personal archives, thereby providing a privileged insight into her life and career as a photographer. The exhibition at the Château de Tours will showcase just a few milestones from her long career. Through almost 130 prints, as well as numerous period documents – many of which are being shown for the first time – this exhibition provides visitors with an overview of the multiple facets of this prolific artist, for whom photography was first and foremost, a fascinating occupation.
Sabine Weiss is the last representative of the French humanist school of photography, which includes photographers like Robert Doisneau, Willy Ronis, Édouard Boubat, Brassaï and Izis.
Still active at over 90 years of age, she has accepted for the first time to present her personal archives, thereby providing a privileged insight into her life and career as a photographer. The exhibition at the Château de Tours will showcase just a few milestones from her long career. Through almost 130 prints, as well as numerous period documents – many of which are being shown for the first time – this exhibition provides visitors with an overview of the multiple facets of this prolific artist, for whom photography was first and foremost, a fascinating occupation.
Née Weber in Switzerland in 1924, Sabine Weiss was drawn to photography from a very early age and did her apprenticeship at Paul Boissonnas’ studio, a dynasty of photographers practising in Geneva since the late nineteenth century. In 1946, she left Geneva for Paris and became the assistant of Willy Maywald, a German photographer living in the French capital, specialising in fashion photography and portraits. She married the American painter Hugh Weiss in 1950, and at this time embarked upon a career as an independent photographer. She moved into a small Parisian studio with her husband – where she continues to live today – and socialised in the artistic circles of the post-war period. This allowed her to photograph Georges Braque, Joan Miró, Alberto Giacometti, André Breton and Ossip Zadkine, and later numerous musicians, writers and actors.
Circa 1952, Sabine Weiss joined the Rapho Agency thanks to Robert Doisneau’s recommendation. Her personal work met with immediate critical acclaim in the United States with exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Walker Art Institute in Minneapolis and the Limelight Gallery, New York. Three of her photographs were shown as part of the famous exhibition “The Family of Man”, organised by Edward Steichen in 1955, and Sabine obtained long-lasting contracts with The New York Times Magazine, Life, Newsweek, Vogue, Point de vue-Images du monde, Paris Match, Esquire, and Holiday. From that time and up until the 2000s, Sabine Weiss continued to work for the international illustrated press, as well as for numerous institutions and brands, seamlessly passing from reportage to fashion features, and from advertising to portraits of celebrities or social issues.
In the late 1970s, her work returned to the spotlight thanks to a growing revival of interest in so-called humanist photography on behalf of festivals and institutions. This interest encouraged Sabine to return to black and white photography. At over sixty years of age, she began a new body of personal work, punctuated by her travels in France, Egypt, India, Reunion Island, Bulgaria and Burma, and in which a more sentimental melody may be heard, centred on the pensive and solitary moments of human existence. At the same time, Sabine became the focus of a growing number of tributes, all of which has contributed to her reputation as an independent and dynamic photographer, with a great humanist sensibility and an eye for the detail of everyday life.
Exhibition dates: 10th September – 28th October, 2016
George Tice (American, b. 1938) Jimmy’s Bar and Grill and Conmar Zipper Company, Newark, NJ, 1973 1973 Silver gelatin print
An American iconography
George Tice is a master photographer and an exceptional artist. Using a large format 8 x 10 camera this craftsman has created a “deeply-penetrating” photographic record of the American urban landscape, mainly based around the city of New Jersey where he has lived for most of his life.
Tice’s ongoing epic visual poem is at its strongest in his early period, from 1973-74. While his later 1990s work is qualified by simplified imagery and semiotic statements (for example Dorn’s Photoshop, Red Bank, NJ, 1999 and Lakewood Manor Motel, Lakewood, NJ, 1998, below) it is this early work that produces “attentive and quotidian descriptions of the everyday structures and places that define the American cultural landscape.” There seems to be a greater personal investment in these earlier images. Tice’s recognition of subject matter that mere mortals pass by is translated into beautiful, serene, tonal and dare I say, sensual images, that belie the complexity of their previsualisation. You only have to look at two images, Houses and Water Towers, Moorestown, NJ, 1973 and Hudson’s Fish Market, Atlantic City, NJ, 1973 (below) to understand that these photographs are visually complex, slightly surreal, affectionate images of places he personally knows so well. They possess a totally different feeling from the conceptual photography of the German school of Bernd and Hilla Becher. As Sanford Schwartz in The New York Times, on December 3, 1972 noted: “Tice’s pictures… show a remarkable blend of intimacy, affection and clear-sightedness.”
The almost tragic, objective renditions of a post-industrial landscape evidence a poetic intensity that has deep roots in the history of photography. Vivien Raynor, writing in The New York Times, said, “Finding precedents for Mr. Tice’s photography is easier than defining the personal qualities that make it so special. As others have remarked, his tranquil towns, usually deserted, could sometimes be those of Walker Evans updated; his industrial views are not unrelated to Charles Sheeler’s, and, for good measure, the stillness and silence of his compositions link him to Atget, the first great urban reporter.” Tice builds upon the lineage of other great artists but then, as any good artist should, he forges his own path, not reliant on the signature of others. As he himself observes, “… if you learn to see what photography is through one person’s eyes you become fixed in that one way of seeing.”
When I first started taking photographs in 1990, my heroes were Atget, Strand, Evans and Minor White. Looking at art, and looking at photographers, trained my eye. But as an artist, looking at the world is the most valuable education that you can have, for eventually you have to forge your own style, not copy someone else … and the signature that you create becomes your own. You know it’s a Mapplethorpe, just as you know it’s an Evans, or a Tice. Each piece of handwriting is unique. Nobody can teach that and it only comes with time and experience. As Paul Strand said, it takes 10 years to become an artist, 10 years to learn your craft, 10 years to drop ego away and find your own style. This is what the work of George Tice speaks to. He approaches the world with a clear mind, focused on a objective narrative that flips! exposing us (like his film), to a subjective, visceral charm all of his own making.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Joseph Bellows Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“As I progressed further with my project, it became obvious that it was really unimportant where I chose to photograph. The particular place simply provided an excuse to produce work… you can only see what you are ready to see – what mirrors your mind at that particular time.”
“Documenting the place is principally what I do. The bulk of my photographs are of New Jersey. It may have been a subject series, like ice or aquatic plants, that could have been anywhere, but it was done in New Jersey. Most of my pictures are about place. I would say the Urban Landscape work is what is most distinctive about me.”
George Tice
George Tice (American, b. 1938) Houses and Water Towers, Moorestown, NJ, 1973 1973 Silver gelatin print
George Tice (American, b. 1938) Hudson’s Fish Market, Atlantic City, NJ, 1973 1973 Silver gelatin print
George Tice (American, b. 1938) Dorn’s Photoshop, Red Bank, NJ, 1999 1999 Silver gelatin print
George Tice (American, b. 1938) Lexington Avenue, Passaic, NJ, 1973 1973 Silver gelatin print
George Tice (American, b. 1938) Palace Funhouse, Asbury Park, 1995 1995 Silver gelatin print
George Tice (American, b. 1938) Railroad Bridge, High Bridge, NJ, 1974 1974 Silver gelatin print
George Tice (American, b. 1938) Route #440 Overpass, Perth Amboy, 1973 1973 Silver gelatin print
Joseph Bellows Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of photographs by one of the medium’s master photographers, George Tice. George Tice: Urban Landscapes will open with a book signing and reception with the artist on Saturday September, 10th from 6-8pm. The exhibition will continue through October 28th, 2016.
The exhibition will present a remarkable selection of forty exceptionally rare vintage 8 x 10 inch gelatin silver contact prints from the early period (1973-1974), of Tice’s ongoing epic visual poem of his native state of New Jersey. These unique vintage prints will be punctuated with larger photographs of some of artist’s most revered and significant images, as well as selections of more recent work from his extended New Jersey portrait.
Renowned for their attentive and quotidian descriptions of the everyday structures and places that define the American cultural landscape, Tice’s exquisitely printed photographs catalog a rich and layered journey that is both personal and universal. In the photographs that comprise Urban Landscapes, Tice defines a sense of America within a tradition rooted in the work of other American masters, namely Edward Hopper and Walker Evans. Tice’s photographs of New Jersey in the early to mid 1970’s describe a particular time and place; however, as the artist states, “It takes the passage of time before an image of a commonplace subject can be assessed. The great difficulty of what I attempt is seeing beyond the moment; the everydayness of life gets in the way of the eternal.” Now, with decades past, Tice’s observations have become even more poignant depictions, everlasting a specific era and landscape, as the artist intended.
As well as being one of the 20th Century’s most prominent photographers, Tice is revered as a master printer, having printed limited-edition portfolios of some of his favourite photographers, among them Edward Steichen, Edward Weston and Frederick H. Evans, as well as other important photographers including Francis Bruguiere, Ralph Steiner and Lewis Hine.
Press release from the Joseph Bellows Gallery
George Tice (American, b. 1938) Tenement Rooftops, Hoboken, NJ, 1974 1974 Silver gelatin print
George Tice (American, b. 1938) Steve’s Diner, Route 130, North Brunswick, 1974 1974 Silver gelatin print
George Tice (American, b. 1938) Ideal Diner, Perth Amboy, NJ, 1980 1980 Silver gelatin print
George Tice (American, b. 1938) White Castle, Route #1, Rahway, NJ, 1973 1973 Silver gelatin print
George Tice (American, b. 1938) Strand Theater, Keyport, NJ, 1973 1973 Silver gelatin print
George Tice (American, b. 1938) Industrial Landscape, Kearny, NJ, 1973 1973 Silver gelatin print
George Tice in conversation with Paul Caponigro
JPC You had said, “After a time you don’t want to have any photographic influences. It’s okay to be influenced by writers, poets, people in other fields but not okay by other photographers.”
GT You don’t want to be like anyone else. Like all those people who were influenced by Ansel Adams. I don’t think any of them will do better than he did.
JPC Not until they find their own voice. It’s impossible to successfully imitate someone else’s voice.
GT Right. And the natural landscape of the west, that’s not going to be better in the future, as the population increases and much of the wilderness gets erased. Timothy O’Sullivan probably had a better chance at it than Ansel Adams did. But you don’t want anyone to be too great an influence, like an apprenticeship. If I was to begin photography, study it, I wouldn’t want one teacher. I think one teacher is too great an influence. I’d rather have an education based on workshops. You draw some knowledge through every one of them. But if you learn to see what photography is through one person’s eyes you become fixed in that one way of seeing.
George Tice Conversations on the John Paul Caponigro “Illuminating Creativity” web page 07/01/1997 [Online] Cited 09/10/2016
George Tice (American, b. 1938) Jahos Brothers Clothing Store, Trenton, NJ, 1973 1973 Silver gelatin print
George Tice (American, b. 1938) Minnie’s Go-Go, Route 130, Merchantville, 1975 1975 Silver gelatin print
George Tice (American, b. 1938) Lakewood Manor Motel, Lakewood, NJ, 1998 1998 Silver gelatin print
George Tice (American, b. 1938) Esso Station and Tenement House, Hoboken, NJ, 1972 1972 Silver gelatin print
George Tice (American, b. 1938) Telephone Booth, 3 am, Railway, NJ, 1974 1974 Silver gelatin print
Joseph Bellows Gallery 7661 Girrard Avenue La Jolla, California Phone: 858 456 5620
Opening hours: Tuesday – Saturday 11am – 5pm and by appointment
Curators: Mia Fineman, Associate Curator; and Beth Saunders, Curatorial Assistant in the Department of Photographs at The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Manuel Alvarez Bravo (Mexican, 1902-2002) La Buena Fama Durmiendo (The Good Reputation Sleeping) 1939, printed c. 1970s Gelatin silver print Mat: 16 × 20 in. (40.6 × 50.8cm) The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1973
The best fun I had with this posting was putting together the first twelve images. They seem to act as ‘strange attractors’, a feeling recognised by the curators of the exhibition if you view the first installation photograph by Anders Jones, below.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to photographer Anders Jones and the Duggal website for allowing me to publish the installation photographs in the posting.
Artists have always turned to dreams as a source of inspiration, a retreat from reason, and a space for exploring imagination and desire. In the history of photography, dreams have been most closely associated with the Surrealists, who pushed the technical limits of the medium to transform the camera’s realist documents into fantastical compositions. Whereas their modernist explorations were often bound to psychoanalytic theories, more recently contemporary photographers have pursued the world of sleep and dreams through increasingly open-ended works that succeed through evocation rather than description.
This exhibition takes a cue from the artists it features by displaying a constellation of photographs that collectively evoke the experience of a waking dream. Here, a night sky composed of pills, a fragmented rainbow, a sleeping fairy-tale princess, and an alien underwater landscape illuminate hidden impulses and longings underlying contemporary life. Drawn entirely from The Met collection, Dream States features approximately 30 photographs and video works primarily from the 1970s to the present.
Near the end of Wagner’s second opera of the Ring Cycle, Die Walküre (The Valkyrie), the Valkyrie Brünnhilde, having attempted to help the sibling lovers Siegmund and Sieglinde against their father’s wishes, is punished for her betrayal. Wotan puts her to sleep and surrounds her with a ring of fire (she will be awakened in turn by her nephew Siegfried, the incestuous son of Siegmund and Sieglinde, in the third opera of the cycle).
Kiefer portrays the dormant Brünnhilde as French actress Catherine Deneuve in François Truffaut’s film Mississippi Mermaid, using a photograph he snapped in a movie house in 1969. In the film, Deneuve plays a deceitful mail-order bride who comes to the island of Réunion to marry a plantation owner, played by Jean-Paul Belmondo. Aside from the parallels of love and betrayal in both the Ring Cycle and Truffaut’s film, Kiefer thought the choice of Deneuve for Brünnhilde both ironic and amusing: she was for him “the contrary of Brünnhilde. Very slim, very French, very cool, very sexy,” hinting that no man would go through fire to obtain Wagner’s corpulent, armoured Valkyrie.
Eugène Atget (French, Libourne 1857-1927 Paris) Versailles 1924-25 Salted paper print from glass negative Image: 17.5 x 21.9cm (6 7/8 x 8 5/8 in.) Sheet: 18 × 21.9cm (7 1/16 × 8 5/8 in.) Mat: 40.6 × 50.8cm (16 × 20 in.) Gilman Collection, Purchase, Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee Gift, 2005
From 1898 until his death in 1927, Atget exhaustively documented the remains of Old Paris: the city’s streets, monuments, interiors, and environs. Among the last entries in this self-directed preservationist effort was a series of images of landscapes and sculpture in the parks of Saint-Cloud and Versailles. Here, the photographer records a statue of a sleeping Ariadne, the mythical Cretan princess abandoned by her lover Theseus on the island of Naxos. Atget’s simultaneously realistic and otherworldly photographs inspired the Surrealist artist Man Ray, who reproduced four of them in a 1926 issue of the journal La Révolution Surréaliste, thus presenting the elder photographer as a modernist forerunner.
As he traveled around the country in 1955-1956 making the photographs that would constitute his landmark book, The Americans, Frank’s impression of America changed radically. He found less of the freedom and tolerance imagined by postwar Europeans, and more alienation and racial prejudice simmering beneath the happy surface. His disillusionment is poignantly embodied in this image of a disheveled African-American man disengaged from the crowd and asleep in a foetal position amid the debris of an Independence Day celebration on Coney Island.
This was one of the last still photographs Frank made before he devoted his creative energy to filmmaking in the early 1960s. As such, it may be interpreted as an elegy to still photography; the lone figure functions as a surrogate for Frank himself, as he turned his back on Life – like photojournalism to concentrate on the more personal, dreamlike imagery of his films.
This photogram – made without a camera by placing a collage of transparencies on a photosensitive sheet of paper and exposing it to light – is part of a series portraying psychoanalysts and their patients. Here, a patient on a Freudian couch is seen from above; the figure, sheathed in patterns of Maori origin, appears to come apart at the seams under the analyst’s scrutiny.
Following in the tradition of Robert Frank and Helen Levitt, Goldin is her generation’s greatest practitioner of the “snapshot aesthetic” in photography – the intimate, diaristic mode that yields images that, in the right hands, are both spontaneous and carefully seen, tossed off and irreducibly right. In this early work, the artist has captured her friend as a Chatterton of the Lower East Side, lying across the back of a blue convertible with shirt open, eyes closed, and an empty can of Schaeffer beer by his side instead of arsenic – a contemporary vision of glamorous surrender for our own time.
Arthur Tress (American, b. 1940) Boy in Flood Dream, Ocean City, New Jersey 1972 Gelatin silver print Mat: 18 × 18 in. (45.7 × 45.7cm) Gift of the artist, 1973
In the late 1960s, Tress began audio-recording children recounting their dreams and nightmares. He then collaborated with the young people, who acted out their tales for the camera, and published the resulting surreal images in the 1972 book The Dream Collector. Many of the children shared common nightmare scenarios such as falling, drowning, and being trapped, chased by monsters, or humiliated in the classroom. Here, a young boy clings to the roof of a home that has washed ashore as if after a flood. The desolate landscape evokes the sort of non-place characteristic of dreams and conveys feelings of loneliness and abandonment.
Installation view of the exhibition Dream States: Contemporary Photography and Video at the Metropolitan Museum of Art featuring at lower right, Nan Goldin’s French Chris on the Convertible, NYC (1979) Photo: Anders Jones
While obviously indebted to the deadpan photo-text combinations of Conceptualism, Calle’s art is as purely French at its core as the novels of Marguerite Duras and the films of Alain Resnais – an intimate exploration of memory, desire, and obsessive longing. The artist’s primary method involves a perfectly calibrated interplay between narrative and image, both of which steadily approach their object of desire only to find another blind spot-that which can never be captured through language or representation.
This work is the first segment of Calle’s first work, The Sleepers (1979), in which the artist invited twenty-nine friends and acquaintances to sleep in her bed consecutively between April 1 and April 9, during which time she photographed them once an hour and kept notes recording each encounter. All the elements of Calle’s art-from the voyeuristic inversion of the private sphere (rituals of the bedroom) and the public (the book or gallery wall) to the use of serial, repetitive structures-are present here in embryonic form.
Paul Graham (British, b. 1956) Senami, Christchurch, New Zealand 2011 Chromogenic print Image: 44 1/4 in. × 59 in. (112.4 × 149.9cm) Purchase, Vital Projects Fund Inc. Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel and Hideyuki Osawa Gift, 2015
Graham’s series, Does Yellow Run Forever?, juxtaposes three groups of photographs: rainbows arcing over the Irish countryside, the facades of pawn-and-jewellery shops in New York, and tender studies of his partner asleep. The thematic links between the images (the rainbow’s mythical pot of gold, the sparkling objects in the Harlem window display, and a sleeping dreamer) may seem obvious, even pat, but Graham’s photographs transmute those clichés into a constellation of deep feeling. These luminous vignettes evoke a sense of longing and pathos, the quest for something permanent amid the illusory and devalued.
The inevitable suggestion that the homeless, hungry man sprawled on the sidewalk might be dreaming of a finely dressed and improbably large salad links Brassaï’s photograph to the work of the Surrealists. Although he frequently depicted thugs, vagrants, and prostitutes, he did so without judgment or political motive; his were pictures meant to delight or perplex the eye and mind-not to prompt a social crusade.
Installation view of the exhibition Dream States: Contemporary Photography and Video at the Metropolitan Museum of Art showing at left, Paul Graham’s Gold Town Jewellery, East Harlem, New York (2012); and at right, Paul Graham’s Senami, Christchurch, New Zealand (2011), both from the series Does Yellow Run Forever? Photo: Anders Jones
The psychological fluidity of the medium has been noted before by the Met. In 1993, to celebrate its purchase of the Gilman Collection, the curator Maria Morris Hambourg chose to call her exhibition The Waking Dream. The title came from Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” and suggested, in Hambourg’s words, “the haunting power of photographs to commingle past and present, to suspend the world and the artist’s experience of it in unique distillations.”
Conceptual latitude can benefit curators, giving them plenty of room to manoeuvre in making their selections, or it can be a detriment if a loose framework has so many sides that it won’t support an argument.
Dream States suffers from the latter, even though the leeway of the title allows splendid pictures in disparate styles to be displayed together. Organised by associate curator Mia Fineman and assistant curator Beth Saunders around a theme that isn’t notably pertinent or provocative, the show has no discernible reason for being. It isn’t stocked with recent purchases – fewer than ten of the works entered the collection in this decade – and it isn’t tightly edited. To quality for inclusion here a photograph need only depict someone lying down or with eyes closed. A “dream state” seems to be loosely defined. It can be as a starry or cloudless sky; a tree-less landscape; inverted or abstract imagery; or something blurry.
Born in the postwar baby boom, Goldstein grew up surrounded by the products of the rapidly expanding media culture-movies, television, newspapers, magazines, and advertisements of all kinds. Young artists such as Goldstein went on to be educated in the rigorous and reductive principles of Minimal and Conceptual art during the 1970s but knew from personal experience that images shape our sense of the world and who we are, rather than vice versa; they made their art reflect that secondhand relationship to reality.
In this early work, Goldstein has lifted, or “appropriated,” images of a deep sea diver, a falling figure, and a spaceman from unknown printed sources – isolating them from their original contexts and setting them at a very small scale against monochromatic backgrounds (green for sea, blue for sky, and white for space), as if the viewer were seeing them from a great distance. Because the viewer is unlikely to have seen such figures firsthand, that distance is not merely spatial but also epistemological in nature-the images trigger memories based not on original encounters but on reproductions of experience. The Pull – Goldstein’s only photographic work in a career that spanned painting, performance, film, and sound recordings – was included in “Pictures,” a seminal 1977 exhibition at Artist’s Space in New York, which also introduced the public to other young artists making use of appropriation, such as Sherrie Levine, Robert Longo, and Troy Brauntuch.
Johnson works primarily with photography but also employs a variety of other media – sculpted figurines, dioramas, paint, ink, and bursts of glitter – to amplify the emotional power of her images. Glitter Bomb belongs to a series exploring the bacchanalian culture of summer music festivals. At once ominous and ecstatic, the image evokes the blissed-out mind-set of young revellers taking part in a modern-day rite of passage.
Wasow has a long-standing fascination with science fiction, apocalyptic fantasies, and documentation of unidentified flying objects. In his many pictures of mysterious floating disks and orbs, the artist courts doubt by running found images through a battery of processes, including drawing, photocopying, and superimposition, to create distortions. The resulting photographs play with the human propensity to invest form with meaning, offering just enough detail to spur the imagination.
This “portrait” of the artist’s wife, Laura, belongs to an ongoing series he calls “chemical celestial portraits of inner and outer space.” Tomaselli creates likenesses based on each sitter’s astrological sign and the star map for his or her date of birth. Placing sugar and pills on photographic paper and exposing it to light, he produces a photogram of the corresponding constellation and names the stars after the various drugs the subject remembers consuming, from cold medicine to cocaine. The result is an unconventional map of identity that cleverly weds the mystical and the pharmacological.
Bea Nettles (American, born Gainesville, Florida, 1946) Mountain Dream Tarot: A Deck of 78 Photographic Cards 1975 Photographically illustrated tarot cards Purchase, Dorothy Levitt Beskind Gift, 1977
The idea to create a set of photographic tarot cards came to Nettles in a dream during the summer of 1970, while she was on an artist’s residency in the mountains of North Carolina. She subsequently reinterpreted the ancient symbolism of the traditional tarot deck, enlisting friends and family members as models for photographs that she augmented with hand-painted additions. In 2007 the image Nettles created for the Three of Swords card was used as the disc graphic for Bruce Springsteen’s album Magic.
Installation view of the exhibition Dream States: Contemporary Photography and Video at the Metropolitan Museum of Art showing Bea Nettles’ Mountain Dream Tarot: A Deck of 78 Photographic Cards (1975) Photo: Anders Jones
Artists often turn to dreams as a source of inspiration, a retreat from reason, and a space for exploring imagination and desire. In the history of photography, dream imagery has been most closely associated with the Surrealists, who used experimental techniques to bridge the gap between the camera’s objectivity and the internal gaze of the mind’s eye. While those modernist explorations were often bound to psychoanalytic theories, other photographers have pursued the world of sleep and dreams through deliberately open-ended works that succeed through evocation rather than description. The exhibition Dream States: Contemporary Photographs and Video presents 30 photographs and one video drawn from The Met collection, all loosely tied to the subjective yet universal experience of dreaming. The exhibition is on view at the Museum from May 16 through October 30, 2016.
Many of the works take the surrender of sleep as their subject matter. In photographs by Robert Frank, Danny Lyon, and Nan Goldin, recumbent figures appear vulnerable to the wandering gaze of onlookers, yet their inner worlds remain out of reach. Images of bodies floating and falling conjure the tumultuous world of dreams, and landscapes are made strange through the camera’s selective vision. Highlights include photographs by Paul Graham from his recent series Does Yellow Run Forever (2014); images from Sophie Calle’s earliest body of work, The Sleepers (1979), in which she invited friends and acquaintances to sleep in her own bed while she watched; and Anselm Kiefer’s Brünnhilde Sleeps (1980), a hand-painted photograph featuring French actress Catherine Deneuve recast as a Wagnerian Valkyrie. Also featured are recently acquired works by Shannon Bool, Sarah Anne Johnson, Jim Shaw, and Fred Tomaselli.
Dream States: Contemporary Photographs and Video is organised by Mia Fineman, Associate Curator; and Beth Saunders, Curatorial Assistant in the Department of Photographs at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Grete Stern (Argentinian born Germany, 1904-1999) Sueño No. 1: “Articulos eléctricos para el hogar” (Dream No. 1: “Electrical Household items”) c. 1950 Gelatin silver print Image: 26.6 x 22.9cm (10 1/2 x 9 in.) Frame: 63.5 x 76.2cm (25 x 30 in.) Twentieth-Century Photography Fund, 2012
In 1948 the Argentine women’s magazine Idilio introduced a weekly column called “Psychoanalysis Will Help You,” which invited readers to submit their dreams for analysis. Each week, one dream was illustrated with a photomontage by Stern, a Bauhaus-trained photographer and graphic designer who fled Berlin for Buenos Aires when the Nazis came to power. Over three years, Stern created 140 photomontages for the magazine, translating the unconscious fears and desires of its predominantly female readership into clever, compelling images. Here, a masculine hand swoops in to “turn on” a lamp whose base is a tiny, elegantly dressed woman. Rarely has female objectification been so erotically and electrically charged.
With his large-scale photograms, Fuss has breathed new life into the cameraless technique that became the hallmark of modernist photographers such as Man Ray and László Moholy-Nagy in the 1920s. He created this image by blowing thick clouds of smoke over a sheet of photographic paper and exposing it to a quick flash of light. Evoking the wizardry of a medieval alchemist, Fuss fixes a permanent image of evanescence.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art 1000 Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street New York, New York 10028-0198 Phone: 212-535-7710
Opening hours: Sunday – Tuesday and Thursday: 10am – 5pm Friday and Saturday: 10am – 9pm Closed Wednesday
Just look. Really look. And then think about that looking.
Minute, democratic observations produce images which nestle, and take hold, and grow in the imagination.
No words are necessary. This is a looking that comes from the soul.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the National Portrait Gallery, London for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“A lot of these pictures I take are of very ordinary, unremarkable things. Can one learn to see? I don’t know. I think probably one is born with the ability to compose an image, in the way one is born with the ability to compose music. It is vastly more important to think about the looking, though, rather than to try to talk about a picture and what it means. The graphic image and words, well, they are two very different animals.”
William Eggleston
“Eggleston is someone who has always tried to maintain emotional detachment in his work, photographing landscapes and inanimate objects with the same attention he would apply to people. He does not believe a photograph is a ‘window on the soul’ as we so often have it, nor does he think a viewer can ever truly understand a photographer’s thoughts and feelings from the pictures they make. Instead, he photographs ‘democratically’, which is to say, he gives even the smallest observations equal weight. His usual method is to capture people going about their business unawares, often performing ordinary tasks like eating in a restaurant or pumping petrol at a filling station. He photographs everyone the same, whether they are a celebrity, a member of his family, or a stranger.”
Curator Phillip Prodger
William Eggleston is a pioneering American photographer renowned for his vivid, poetic and mysterious images. This exhibition of 100 works surveys Eggleston’s full career from the 1960s to the present day and is the most comprehensive display of his portrait photography ever. Eggleston is celebrated for his experimental use of colour and his solo show at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1976 is considered a pivotal moment in the recognition of colour photography as a contemporary art form. Highlights of the exhibition will include monumental prints of two legendary photographs first seen forty years ago: the artist’s uncle Adyn Schuyler Senior with his assistant Jasper Staples in Cassidy Bayou, Mississippi, and Devoe Money in Jackson, Mississippi.
Also on display will be a selection of never-before seen vintage black and white prints from the 1960s. Featuring people in diners, petrol stations and markets in and around the artist’s home in Memphis, Tennessee, they help illustrate Eggleston’s unique view of the world.
For Eggleston this photo is highly personal. Jasper Staples, the figure on the right, had been around him for his whole life as his family’s “house man”. Here he is next to his employer, Eggleston’s uncle, at a funeral. His exact mimicking of his boss’s posture and their shared focus on an event happening off-camera gives them a moment of unity. Yet the composition of the shot, with their balance and the open car door suggesting some ongoing action, is highly theatrical and might even put us in mind of a TV detective show.
Fred Maynard. “William Eggleston, the reluctant portraitist,” on the 1843 Magazine / The Economist website July 26th, 2016 [Online] Cited 01/10/2016. No longer available online
One of Eggleston’s most famous images, this pictures shows why he is known as the man who brought colour photography into the artistic mainstream. The subject, Marcia Hare, floats on a cloud-like bed of soft-focus grass, the red buttons on her dress popping out like confectionary on a cake. The dye-transfer technique which Eggleston borrowed from commercial advertising and turned into his trademark gives such richness to the colour that we are brought out of the Seventies and into the realm of Pre-Raphaelite painting. The ghost of Millais’s “Ophelia” sits just out of reach, a connection which the inscrutable artist is happy, as ever, to neither confirm nor deny.
Fred Maynard. “William Eggleston, the reluctant portraitist,” on the 1843 Magazine / The Economist website July 26th, 2016 [Online] Cited 01/10/2016. No longer available online
“This is Devoe, a distant relative of mine (although I can’t remember exactly how), but also a friend. She is dead now, but we were very close. She was a very sweet and charming lady. I took this picture in the yard at the side of her house. I would often visit her there in Jackson. I remember I found the colour of her dress and the chair very exciting, and everything worked out instantly. I think this is the only picture I ever took of her, but I would say it sums her up. I didn’t pose her at all – I never do, usually because it all happens so quickly, but I don’t think I would have moved her in any way. I’m still very pleased with the photograph.”
“These two are strangers. I happened to be walking past and there it was, the picture. As usual I took it very rapidly and we didn’t speak. I think I was fortunate to catch that expression on the woman’s face. A lot of these pictures I take are of very ordinary, unremarkable things. Can one learn to see? I don’t know. I think probably one is born with the ability to compose an image, in the way one is born with the ability to compose music. It is vastly more important to think about the looking, though, rather than to try to talk about a picture and what it means. The graphic image and words, well, they are two very different animals.”
A previously unseen image of The Clash frontman Joe Strummer and a never-before exhibited portrait of the actor and photographer Dennis Hopper will be displayed for the first time in the National Portrait Gallery this summer. They will be included in the first museum exhibition devoted to the portraits of pioneering American photographer, William Eggleston it was announced today, Thursday 10 March 2016.
William Eggleston Portraits(21 July to 23 October) will bring together over 100 works by the American photographer, renowned for his vivid, poetic and mysterious images of people in diners, petrol stations, phone booths and supermarkets. Widely credited with increasing recognition for colour photography, following his own experimental use of dye-transfer technique, Eggleston will be celebrated by a retrospective of his full career, including a selection of never-before seen vintage black and white photographs from the 1960s taken in and around the artist’s home in Memphis, Tennessee.
The first major exhibition of Eggleston’s photographs in London since 2002 and the most comprehensive of his portraits, William Eggleston Portraits will feature family, friends, musicians and actors including rarely seen images of Eggleston’s own close relations. It will provide a unique window on the artist’s home life, allowing visitors to see how public and private portraiture came together in Eggleston’s work. It will also reveal, for the first time, the identities of many sitters who have until now remained anonymous. Other highlights include monumental, five foot wide prints of the legendary photographs of the artist’s uncle, Adyn Schuyler Senior, with his assistant Jasper Staples in Cassidy Bayou, Mississippi and Devoe Money in Jackson, Mississippi from the landmark book Eggleston’s Guide (1976).
Since first picking up a camera in 1957, Eggleston’s images have captured the ordinary world around him and his work is said to find ‘beauty in the everyday’. His portrayal of the people he encountered in towns across the American South, and in Memphis in particular, is shown in the context of semi-public spaces. Between 1960 and 1965, Eggleston worked exclusively in black and white and people were Eggleston’s primary subject, caught unawares while going about ordinary tasks. In the 1970s, Eggleston increasingly frequented the Memphis night club scene, developing friendships and getting to know musicians and artists. His fascination with club culture resulted in the experimental video ‘Stranded in Canton’, a selection of which will also be on view at the exhibition. ‘Stranded in Canton’ chronicles visits to bars in Memphis, Mississippi and New Orleans.
Eggleston’s 1976 show at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, is considered a pivotal moment in the recognition of colour photography as a contemporary art form. His work has inspired many present day photographers, artists and filmmakers, including Martin Parr, Sofia Coppola, David Lynch and Juergen Teller.
Dr Nicholas Cullinan, Director of the National Portrait Gallery, London, says: “William Eggleston makes memorable photographic portraits of individuals – including friends and family, musicians and artists – that are utterly unique and highly influential. More than this, Eggleston has an uncanny ability to find something extraordinary in the seemingly everyday. Combining well-known works with others previously unseen, this exhibition looks at one of photography’s most compelling practitioners from a new perspective.”
Curator Phillip Prodger, Head of Photographs at the National Portrait Gallery says, “Few photographers alive today have had such a profound influence on the way photographs are made and seen as William Eggleston. His pictures are as fresh and exciting as they were when they first grabbed the public’s attention in the 1970s. There is nothing quite like the colour in an Eggleston photograph – radiant in their beauty, that get deep under the skin and linger in the imagination.
Press release from the National Portrait Gallery, London
William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961-2008
This candid interview with photographer William Eggleston was conducted by film director Michael Almereyda on the occasion of the opening of Eggleston’s retrospective William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961-2008 at the Whitney Museum of American Art. A key figure in American photography, Eggleston is credited with helping to usher in the era of colour photography. Eggleston discusses his shift from black and white to colour photography in this video as, “it never was a conscious thing. I had wanted to see a lot of things in colour because the world is in colour”. Also included in this video are Eggleston’s remarks about his personal relationships with the subjects of many of his photographs.
Text from the YouTube website
According to Eggleston talking on the above video, this was his first successful colour negative.
The photo that made Eggleston’s name, this image of a grocery-store boy lining up shopping carts is a prime example of his ability to capture the humdrum reality of life in mid-century America. Yet it is also something more: the delicacy of his motion, the tension in his posture, the concentration on his brow evoke a master craftsman at work. Despite Eggleston’s presence, he seems entirely unselfconscious: caught in perfect profile and sun-dappled like a prime specimen of American youth. Eggleston, hovering between documentarian and sentimentalist, creates a semi-ironic paean to America.
Fred Maynard. “William Eggleston, the reluctant portraitist,” on the 1843 Magazine / The Economist website July 26th, 2016 [Online] Cited 01/10/2016. No longer available online
“I took this picture in front of the music school of the university in Memphis. She was waiting on an automobile to come pick her up. I remember she was studying the sheaves of music on her lap. Not one word was exchanged – I was gone before she had the chance to say anything to me and it happened so fast that she wasn’t even sure I had taken a picture. I didn’t make a point of carrying a camera, but I usually had one with me.”
The closest Eggleston came to taking traditional portraits was in a series he shot in bars in his native Memphis and the Mississippi Delta in 1973-4. The sitters in his Nightclub Portraits – anonymous figures plucked, slightly flushed, from their nights out – are not posing but instead are photographed mid-conversation, Eggleston capturing them at their most unguarded. What is remarkable about this example is the strange composure of the subject, the slightly ethereal sheen as the flash from the camera is reflected by her make-up. Eggleston’s precise focus picks out the individual threads of her cardigan. Something hyper-real and statuesque emerges from an ordinary night out.
Fred Maynard. “William Eggleston, the reluctant portraitist,” on the 1843 Magazine / The Economist website July 26th, 2016 [Online] Cited 01/10/2016. No longer available online
“I don’t know who this woman is, I simply saw her on the street. I never know what I am looking for until I see it. The images just seem to happen, wherever I happen to be. Was I attracted by the movement? I think I was attracted to the bright orange of her dress. She wasn’t raising her hand as a result of anything I did, but I think I must have been aware of the repeat made by her shadow in the frame – subconsciously at least – it needed to be in the picture.”
“Refusing to be pinned down to any viewpoint or agenda, Eggleston’s greatest strength is his almost enraging ambiguity. He is neither a sentimentalist nor a documentarian, neither subjective nor objective: he somehow captures that ephemeral moment we experience when we’re not quite sure why a memory sticks with us, why an otherwise mundane glance from a stranger seems to take on a greater significance.
His refusal to think of himself as a portraitist is what gives this exhibition such wry power. Here is a photographer who makes no distinctions, viewing every subject from cousins to coke cans with the same inscrutable gaze. When approached about the idea of a portrait show, the NPG’s Philip Prodger recalls, Eggleston expressed surprise because he didn’t “do” portraits. Prodger reframed the exhibition as a series of photos that just happened to have people in them. “That makes sense”, Eggleston deadpanned.
The unvarnished Americana for which he is so famous – brash logos and a hint of rust – can contain something uneasy, even threatening, precisely because Eggleston maintains a blithe poker-face about his feelings on his subjects. Walking through this exhibition is to meet more placards marked “Untitled” than you can handle. The names of previously anonymous sitters, revealed specially for this exhibition, are hardly likely to make things much more concrete for the viewer. Rather we are let in on an extraordinary experience, moving between the mysterious faces of a transitional moment in American history, not quite sure whether some greater revelation is bubbling under the surface.”
Extract from Fred Maynard. “William Eggleston, the reluctant portraitist,” on the 1843 Magazine / The Economist website July 26th, 2016 [Online] Cited 01/10/2016. No longer available online
Exhibition dates: 17th June – 25th September, 2016
Curator: Julian Cox
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Self-portrait, Chicago 1965/1995 Gelatin silver print montage Image: 31.2 x 27.8cm (12 1/4 x 10 15/16 in.) Mount: 50.8 x 40.6cm (20 x 16 in.) Collection of the artist
This man is a living legend. What a strong body of socially conscious work he has produced over a long period of time. Each series proposes further insight into the human condition – and adds ‘value’ to series that have gone before. It is a though the artist possesses the intuition for a good story and the imagination to photograph it to best advantage, building the story over multiple encounters and contexts to form a thematic whole.
In a press release for a currently showing parallel exhibition titled Journey at Edwynn Houk Gallery the text states, “Continuing in the tradition of Walker Evans and Robert Frank, Lyon forged a new style of realistic photography, described as “New Journalism,” where the photographer immerses himself in his subject’s world.” This reference to immersion is reinforced by the second quotation below, where “the power of Lyon’s work has often derived from his willingness of immerse himself entirely in the cultures and communities he documents.”
While the observation is correct that the artist immerses himself in the cultures and communities he documents, this is different to the tradition of Robert Frank and to a lesser extent, Walker Evans. Frank was a Swiss man who imaged his impressions of America on a road trip across the country. His “photographs were notable for their distanced view of both high and low strata of American society” which pictured the culture as both alienating and strange, “skeptical of contemporary values and evocative of ubiquitous loneliness”. This is why The Americans had so much power and caused so much consternation when it was first released in 1959 in America, for it held up a mirror to an insular society, one not used to looking at itself especially from the position of an “outsider” – where the tone of the book was perceived as derogatory to national ideals – and it didn’t like what it saw. The American Walker Evans was also an outsider photographing outsiders, journeying through disparate towns and communities documenting his impressions how I can I say, subjectively with an objective focus, at one and the same time. He never immersed himself in the culture but was an active observer and documenter, never an insider.
Lyon was one of the first “embedded” social documentary photographers of the American street photography movement of the 1960s who had the free will and the social conscience to tell it like it is. His self-proclaimed “advocacy journalism” is much more than just advocacy / journalism. It is a vitality of being, of spirit, an inquiry of the mind that allows the artist to get close, both physically and emotionally, to the problems of others through becoming one with them – and then to picture that so that others can see their story, so that he can “change history and preserve humanity.” But, we must acknowledge, that humanity is mainly (good looking) males: outlaw motorcycle clubs, mainly male prisons, mainly male civil rights, tattoo shops, and male Uptown, Chicago. Women are seemingly reduced to bit-players at best, singular portraits or standing in the background at funerals. This is a man’s world and you better not forget it…
Having said that, can you imagine living the life, spending four years as a member of the Chicago Outlaw Motorcycle Club. How exhilarating, how enmeshed with the culture you would become – the people, the travel, the ups and downs, the life, the danger – and then when you get photographs like Funny Sonny Packing with Zipco, Milwaukee (1966, below) with the manic look in Funny Sonny’s eyes, how your heart would sing. If I had to nominate one image that is for me the epitome of America in the 1960s it would be this: Crossing the Ohio River, Louisville (1966, below): all Easy Rider (an 1969 American road movie) encapsulated in one image. The structure and modernism / of the two bridges frames / the speeding / wicked bike / helmet lodged over the headlight; the man / wearing a skull and crossbones emblazoned jacket / helmet-less / head turned / behind / hair flying in the wind / not looking where / he is going / as though his destiny: unknown.
Danny Lyon IS one of the great artists working in photography today. He is a rebel with his own cause. Through his vital and engaging images his message to the future is this: everyone has their own story, their own trials and tribulations, each deserving of empathy, compassion, and non-judgemental acceptance. Prejudice has no voice here, a lesson never more pertinent than for America today as it decides who to elect – a woman who has fought every inch of the way or a narcissistic megalomaniac who preaches hate to minorities.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Whitney Museum of American Art for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“Closeness, both physical and emotional, is a recurring theme throughout the 175 works in “Message to the Future,” Lyon’s Whitney Museum retrospective, a quietly brilliant affair curated with panache by Julian Cox. (Later this year, the show will travel to the Fine Arts Museums in San Francisco, which organized it; Elisabeth Sussman oversaw the Whitney installation.) We see here a photographer who was witness to a changing America and, occasionally, other places in the world. Since the early ’60s, Lyon has been infiltrating outsider groups – talking to and photographing bikers, Texas prison inmates, and hippies, and learning from them by becoming close with them. It’s as if Lyon has no sense of personal space. That, as this revelatory show proves, is his greatest attribute…
Lyon is a deft stylist who cares deeply about his subjects, to the point of exchanging letters with them for years after taking their pictures. What results is something more intimate, more political, and, in some ways, better than traditional photojournalism – a fuller portrait of America since the ’60s.”
“Self-taught, and driven by his twin passions for social change and the medium of photography, the power of Lyon’s work has often derived from his willingness of immerse himself entirely in the cultures and communities he documents. This was evident early on in his series ‘Bikeriders’ (1968; reissued in 2003 by Chronicle Books), which evolved from four years spent as a member of the Chicago Outlaw Motorcycle Club. And ‘Conversations with the Dead’ derived from his close study of the Texas prison system; it also revealed Lyon’s novel and distinctive approach to the photobook, which often sees him splicing images with texts drawn from various sources, including interviews, letters, and even fiction.”
Text from the Edwynn Houk Gallery website [Online] Cited 21/09/2016. No longer available online
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Self-Portrait, New Orleans, 1964 1964 Gelatin silver print 18.2 x 12.2cm (7 3/16 x 4 13/16 in.) Collection of the artist
In his 1981 book, “Danny Lyon: Pictures From the New World,” he wrote of starting out in the early ’60s. “Photography then seemed new and exciting, and all America, which I regarded with mystery and reverence, lay before me.”
That sense of newness and excitement fills the show. What we’re discovering now, Lyon was discovering then – not just seeing or observing, but discovering, with the sense of revelation that brings. Mystery and reverence are here, too, but complicatedly. Framing them – debating with them? – are the clarity of precision the camera affords and a skepticism born of a forthrightly ’60s sensibility. Several photographs of the Occupy movement attest to how vigorous that sensibility remains…
He was working as a documentarian but not a photojournalist. That’s an important distinction. These images are implicitly polemical – inevitably polemical, too. Rarely in our nation’s history has the distinction between what’s right and what’s wrong been as clear cut. Yet then as now, people matter more to Lyon than any ideological stance. Outsiders attract Lyon and populate the show: civil rights demonstrators, transgender people (in Galveston, Texas, of all places), lower Manhattan demolition crews, inmates, undocumented workers, Indians, Appalachian whites transplanted to Chicago, motorcycle gangs…
Enclosure and entrapment are not for Lyon – nor, for that matter, is the absence of people (a very rare condition in his work). A larger restlessness in Lyon’s career reflects the energy so often evident within the frame – within the frame being another form of enclosure and entrapment. The South, Chicago, lower Manhattan, Texas, New Mexico, China, Haiti, Latin America share space in the show. Even so, sense of place doesn’t signify as much for Lyon as a sense of a place’s inhabitants. More likely he’d say that the two are indistinguishable. Looking at his pictures, you can see why he’d think so.”
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Arrest of Eddie Brown, Albany, Georgia 1962 Gelatin silver print Image: 22 x 31.7cm (8 5/8 x 12 1/2 in.) Sheet: 27.9 x 35.6cm (11 x 14 in.) Collection of the artist
Eddie Brown former gang leader and movement activist is arrested.
“The first sit-in arrests I see and photograph are those of Eddie Brown, a former Albany gang leader, and a visitor from the North. Both have volunteered to be arrested for the photographs. The picture of Eddie Brown, calmly being carried off by the Albany police, is widely distributed as the image of the classic non-violent arrest, Georgia.”
~ Danny Lyon
“Eddie Charles Brown, Jr., a great-souled human being committed to fighting the oppression of all people from Mississippi to South Africa, died at his home on November 23, 2011. In political circles, Ed was respected for his enduring commitment to our people. As a consequence of his tireless devotion to, and success in advancing the culture and economic progress of poor black folk, Ed Brown was widely recognised as among the most, incorruptible, responsible, resourceful and effective of the activist leaders of the Movement. As his SNCC colleagues said of him, “More than most, Ed’s life embodies and exemplifies to a remarkable degree, the principle of undying love for our people both here and in the Motherland.” …
A native of Louisiana, Ed was born on August 19, 1941, in New Orleans and raised in Baton Rouge to Thelma Warren and Eddie Charles Brown, Sr. Ed’s historical efforts to fight segregation and all forms of oppression as well as to empower Black people started in 1960 as a young student at Louisiana’s Southern University. He and 16 other classmates confronted the University and staged a sit-in protesting the racial segregation prevalent in Louisiana at the time. After he and the others were arrested, expelled and banned from enrolling in any university in Louisiana Ed began the ongoing struggle for justice, which would define his entire life. This expulsion led Ed to Howard University in Washington, D.C. in 1961, where he landed on the front line of the Civil Rights Movement. Ed was an active member of the Nonviolent Action Group, the SNCC affiliate at Howard.
As a leader and field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) he fought to win constitutional rights for Blacks and all disenfranchised people. Ed always proclaimed that he was “fighting fire with a feather,” but he knew he would prevail because he often said, ironically, he was protected by “asbestos gloves.””
The most comprehensive retrospective of the work of American photographer, filmmaker, and writer Danny Lyon in twenty-five years debuts at the Whitney on June 17, 2016. The first major photography exhibition to be presented in the Museum’s downtown home, Danny Lyon: Message to the Future is organised by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, where it will make its West Coast debut at the de Young Museum on November 5, 2016. The exhibition assembles approximately 175 photographs and is the first to assess the artist’s achievements as a filmmaker. The presentation also includes a rare look at works from Lyon’s archives, including vintage prints, unseen 16mm film footage made inside Texas prisons, and his personal photo albums. A leading figure in the American street photography movement of the 1960s, Lyon has distinguished himself by the personal intimacy he establishes with his subjects and the inventiveness of his practice.
Photographer, filmmaker, and writer Danny Lyon (b. 1942) has over the past five decades presented a charged alternative to the sanitised vision of American life presented in the mass media. Throughout, he has rejected the standard detached humanism of the traditional documentary approach in favour of a more immersive, complicated involvement with his subjects. “You put a camera in my hand,” he has explained, “I want to get close to people. Not just physically close, emotionally close, all of it.” In the process he has made several iconic bodies of work, which have not only pictured recent history but helped to shape it.
Lyon committed intensively to photography from the beginning. In 1962, while still a student at the University of Chicago, he hitchhiked to the segregated South to make a photographic record of the civil rights movement. He went on to photograph biker subcultures, explore the lives of the incarcerated, and document the architectural transformation of Lower Manhattan. He has travelled to Latin America and China, and has lived for years in New Mexico; the work he has made throughout these journeys demonstrates his respect for the people he photographs on the social and cultural margins.
Message to the Future, shaped in collaboration with the artist, incorporates seldom-exhibited materials from Lyon’s archive, including rare vintage prints, previously unseen 16mm film footage made inside the Texas prisons, his personal photo albums, and related documents and ephemera. In his roles as a photographer, filmmaker, and writer, Lyon has reinvented the expectations for how the still photographic image can be woven together with journalism, books, films, and collage to present a diverse record of social customs and human behaviour. His work, which he continues to make today, reveals a restless idealist, digging deep into his own life and those of his subjects to uncover the political in the personal and the personal in the political.
Text from the Whitney Museum of American Art
Civil rights
In the summer of 1962, Lyon hitchhiked to Cairo, Illinois, to witness demonstrations and a speech by John Lewis, chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), one of the most important organisations driving the civil rights movement of the early 1960s. Inspired to see the making of history firsthand, Lyon then headed to the South to participate in and photograph the civil rights movement. There, SNCC executive director James Forman recruited Lyon to be the organisation’s first official photographer, based out of its Atlanta headquarters. Traveling throughout the South with SNCC, Lyon documented sit-ins, marches, funerals, and violent clashes with the police, often developing his negatives quickly in makeshift darkrooms.
Lyon’s photographs were used in political posters, brochures, and leaflets produced by SNCC to raise money and recruit workers to the movement. Julian Bond, the communications director of SNCC, wrote of Lyon’s pictures, “They put faces on the movement, put courage in the fearful, shone light on darkness, and helped make the movement move.”
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) Sit-In, Atlanta 1963 Gelatin silver print Image: 16.1 x 24cm (6 3/8 x 9 1/2 in.) Sheet: 20.3 x 25.4cm (8 x 10 in.) Collection of the artist
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) The Leesburg Stockade, Leesburg, Georgia 1963 Gelatin silver print Image: 17.5 x 26cm (6 7/8 x 10 3/16 in.) Sheet: 27.9 x 35.6cm (11 x 14 in.) Collection of the artist
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Abernathy, Shuttlesworth (SCLC), King and Wilkinson (NAACP) 1963 Gelatin silver print
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Voting Rights Demonstration, Organized by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Selma, Alabama October 7, 1963 Gelatin silver print Image: 18.3 x 26.8cm (7 3/16 x 10 9/16 in.) Sheet: 27.8 x 35.4cm (10 15/16 x 13 15/16 in.) Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase with funds from the Photography Committee
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Sheriff Jim Clark Arresting Demonstrators, Selma, Alabama October 7, 1963 Gelatin silver print Image: 18.4 x 27cm (7 1/4 x 10 5/8 in.) Sheet: 27.8 x 35.4cm (10 15/16 x 13 15/16 in.) Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchased with funds from the Photography Committee
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Stokely Carmichael, Confrontation with National Guard, Cambridge, Maryland 1964 Gelatin silver print Image: 16.5 x 22.2cm (6 1/2 x 8 3/4 in.) Sheet: 20.3 x 25.4cm (8 x 10 in.) Collection of the High Museum of Art, Atlanta; purchase with funds from Joan N. Whitcomb
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Woman Holds Off a Mob, Atlanta 1963 Gelatin silver print
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Bob Dylan behind the SNCC office, Greenwood, Mississippi 1963 Gelatin silver print
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Arrest of Taylor Washington, Atlanta 1963 Gelatin silver print 24 x 16cm (9 7/16 x 6 1/4 in.) Collection of the artist
Atlanta, Georgia. High school student Taylor Washington is arrested at Lebs Delicatessen. His eighth arrest.
“One of Taylor Washington’s numerous arrests is immortalised as he yells while passing before me. The photograph became the cover of SNCC’s photo book, The Movement, and was reproduced in the former Soviet Union in Pravda, captioned “Police Brutality USA.””
~ Danny Lyon
The Civil Rights movement of the 1960’s was a widespread effort to end racial segregation and discrimination against African Americans. News coverage of sit-ins and freedom rides dominated the cultural and political landscape of the United States. At this time Danny Lyon was in his early 20s and an undergraduate student at the University of Chicago. After meeting John Lewis, the chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s (SNCC’s) in Cairo, Illinois, Lyon then traveled to Mississippi, to cover voter registrations, and soon he was present at almost all of the major SNCC events during the movement. Lyon served as SNCC’s photographer from 1962 to 1964 and later documented his experiences in his book Memories of the Southern Civil Rights Movement.
Text from the Minneapolis Institute of Art Collection website
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) The March on Washington August 28, 1963 Gelatin silver print 29.8 x 20.8cm (11 3/4 x 8 3/16 in.) Museum of Modern Art, New York; Gift of Anne Ehrenkranz
Galveston
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Pumpkin and Roberta, Galveston, Texas 1967 Gelatin silver print Image: 23.8 x 16.1cm (6 3/8 x 9 3/8 in.) Sheet: 20.3 x 25.4cm (8 x 10 in.) Collection of the artist
Prisons
In 1967, Lyon applied to the Texas Department of Corrections for access to the state prisons. Dr. George Beto, then director of the prisons, granted Lyon the right to move freely among the various prison units, which he photographed and filmed extensively over a fourteen-month period. The result is a searing record of the Texas penal system and, symbolically, of incarceration everywhere.
Lyon’s aim was to “make a picture of imprisonment as distressing as I knew it to be in reality.” This meant riding out to the fields to follow prisoners toiling in the sun, as well as visiting the Wynne Treatment Centre, which housed primarily convicts with mental disabilities. He befriended many of the prisoners, listening to their stories and finding the humanity in their experiences, and still maintains contact with some of them.
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Weight Lifters, Ramsey Unit, Texas 1968 Gelatin silver print Image: 22.4 x 33.2cm (8 7/8 x 13 1/16 in.) Sheet: 27.7 x 35.6cm (11 x 14 in.) Collection of the artist
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) New Arrivals from Corpus Christi, The Walls, Texas 1968 Gelatin silver print Image: 21.4 x 32cm (8 7/16 x 12 5/8 in.) Sheet: 27.9 x 35.6cm (11 x 14 in.) Collection of the artist
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Contents of Arriving Prisoner’s Wallet, Diagnostic Unit, The Walls, Huntsville, Texas 1968 Gelatin silver print Image: 24.3 x 17.5cm (9 9/16 x 6 3/4 in.) Sheet: 25.4 x 20.3cm (10 x 8 in.) Collection of the artist
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Six-Wing Cell Block, Ramsey Unit, Texas 1968 Gelatin silver print Image: 16 x 24cm (6 5/16 x 9 7/16 in.) Sheet: 20.3 x 25.4cm (8 x 10 in.) Collection of the artist
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Charlie Lowe, Ellis Unit, Texas 1968 Gelatin silver print Image: 16.2 x 23.8cm (6 3/8 x 9 3/8 in.) Sheet: 20.3 x 25.4cm (8 x 10 in.) Collection of the artist
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Shakedown, Ellis Unit, Texas 1968 Gelatin silver print 21.6 x 31.3cm (8 1/2 x 12 1/4 in.) Museum of Modern Art, New York; purchase
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Shakedown, Ramsey Unit, Texas 1968 Gelatin silver print Image: 17 x 24.2cm (6 5/8 x 9 9/16 in.) Sheet: 20.3 x 25.4cm (8 x 10 in.) Collection of the artist
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Convict With a Bag of Cotton, Texas 1968 Gelatin silver print
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Two Inmates, Goree Unit, Texas 1968 Gelatin silver print Image: 16.8 x 24cm (6 5/8 x 9 91/6 in.) Sheet: 20.3 x 25.4cm (8 x 10 in.) Collection of the artist
The destruction of Lower Manhattan
In late 1966 and into the summer of 1967, starting from his loft at the corner of Beekman and William Streets near City Hall Park, Lyon documented the demolition of some sixty acres of predominantly nineteenth-century buildings below Canal Street in lower Manhattan. With funding from the New York State Council on the Arts, he photographed most of the buildings that would be torn down to make way for the World Trade Center. Lyon recalled later: “I wanted to inhabit [the buildings] with feelings and give them and their demise a meaning.”
Moving from the outside of the buildings to their deserted interiors, Lyon also took pictures of the workers involved in the demolition. The photographs, together with Lyon’s journal entries, became a book, published by Macmillan in 1969 and dedicated to his close friend, sculptor Mark di Suvero. The volume’s significance lies in part in its depiction of a city – and, more broadly, a culture – cannibalising its own architectural history for the sake of development.
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) View South from 100 Gold Street, New York 1967 Gelatin silver print 18.3 x 18.2cm (7 1/4 x 7 3/16 in.) Collection of Melissa Schiff Soros and Robert Soros
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Self-Portrait in Susquehanna Hotel, Third-Floor Room with Grass, New York 1967 Gelatin silver print 18.2 x 18.2cm (7 3/16 x 7 3/16 in.) Collection of Melissa Schiff Soros and Robert Soros
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Ruins of 100 Gold Street, New York 1967 Gelatin silver print 23.6 x 23.4cm (9 5/16 x 10 7/16 in.) Collection of Melissa Schiff Soros and Robert Soros
The Bikeriders
Lyon purchased his first motorcycle – a 1953 Triumph TR6 – in 1962, after spending weekends watching college friend and motorcycle racer Frank Jenner compete at informal dirt track races across the Midwest. When he returned to Chicago in 1965 after leaving SNCC, Lyon joined the hard-riding, hard-drinking Chicago Outlaws Motorcycle Club and began making photographs with a goal to “record and glorify the life of the American bike rider.” With clubs like the Hells Angels making headlines for their criminal and vigilante activities at the time, bike riders were simultaneously feared for their anarchism and romanticised for their independence.
Riding with the Outlaws, Lyon attempted to capture their way of life from the inside out. Their unapologetic pursuit of freedom and libertine pleasures compelled him to get close to them as people. Lyon’s images are intimate and familiar, whether taken during rides or at clubhouse meetings. He also used a tape recorder to document the bikers speaking for themselves, unobtrusively capturing their collective voice. The resulting photographs were gathered into the now classic book of the same name, published in 1968, combining his pictures with an edited transcription of the interviews.
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Racer, Schererville, Indiana 1965 Gelatin silver print 13.9 x 20.3cm (5 1/2 x 8 in.) Silverman Museum Collection
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Crossing the Ohio River, Louisville 1966 Gelatin silver print 20.3 x 31.8cm (8 x 12 1/2 in.) Silverman Museum Collection
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Route 12, Wisconsin 1963 Gelatin silver print 15.6 x 23.8cm (6 1/8 x 9 1/8 in.) Silverman Museum Collection
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Sparky and Cowboy, Schererville, Indiana 1965 Gelatin silver print Image: 16.1 x 23.9cm (6 3/8 x 9 3/8 in.) Sheet: 20.3 x 25.4cm (8 x 10 in.) Collection of the artist
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Untitled (Close Up of Cal on the Road) 1966 Gelatin silver print
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Renegade’s funeral, Detroit 1966 Gelatin silver print
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Funny Sonny Packing with Zipco, Milwaukee 1966 Gelatin silver print
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Kathy, Chicago 1965 (printed 1966) Gelatin silver print 25.8 x 25.5cm (10 1/8 x 10 1/16 in.) Collection of the artist
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Cal on the Springfield Run, Illinois 1966 (printed 2003) Cibachrome print Image: 22.8 x 32.5cm (9 x 13 1/4 in.) Sheet: 27.9 x 35.6cm (11 x 14 in.) Collection of the artist
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Cowboy, Rogue’s Picnic, Chicago 1966 Gelatin silver print Image: 23.5 x 15.9cm (9 1/4 x 6 1/4 in.) Mount: 50.8 x 40.6cm (20 x 16 in.) Collection of the artist
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Benny, Grand and Division, Chicago 1965 Gelatin silver print 24.5 x 17.2cm (9 5/8 x 6 3/4 in.) Collection of the artist
New Mexico and the West
Lyon headed west from New York in 1969. Tired of the hectic pace of the big city and in search of new surroundings, he settled in Sandoval County, New Mexico. He developed a great admiration for the region’s close knit communities of Native Americans and Chicanos. Lyon’s photographs and, increasingly, his films reflected his growing understanding of the cross-cultural flow between these disparate groups and how they interacted with the geography of the Southwest.
With the help of his good friend, a migrant labourer named Eduardo Rivera Marquez, Lyon built a traditional adobe home for his family in Bernalillo, in the Rio Grande Valley just north of Albuquerque. As Lyon’s family grew, his children also became a frequent subject, often depicted against the dramatic Western landscape. Though Lyon moved back to New York in 1980, New Mexico would remain a centre of gravity for the artist, who returned every summer with his family to photograph and make films.
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Eddie, New Mexico 1972 Gelatin silver print Image: 23 x 34.5cm (9 x 13 5/8 in.) Sheet: 27.9 x 35.6cm (11 x 14 in.) Collection of the artist
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Navajo Boy, Gallup, New Mexico 1971 Gelatin silver print Image: 23.3 x 33.8cm (9 1/8 x 13 5/16 in.) Sheet: 27.9 x 35.6cm (11 x 14 in.) Collection of the artist
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Maricopa County, Arizona 1977 Gelatin silver print Image: 22.8 x 33.5cm (9 x 13 3/16 in.) Sheet: 27.9 x 35.6cm (11 x 14 in.) Collection of the artist
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Stephanie, Sandoval County, New Mexico 1969/1975 Gelatin silver print (decorated) Image: 16.7 x 25cm (6 9/16 x 9 3/4 in.) Sheet: 27.9 x 35.6cm (11 x 14 in.) Collection of the artist
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) El Paso, Texas 1975 (printed 2015) Pigmented inkjet print Image: 27.9 x 40.6cm (11 x 16 in.) Sheet: 33 x 45.7cm (13 x 18 in.) Collection of the artist
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) El Paso, Texas 1975
Films and montages
Lyon started making 16mm films in earnest in the 1970s, focusing on marginalised communities and injustice as he had in his photographs. His subjects included Colombian street kids in Los Niños Abandonados (1975) and undocumented workers from Mexico in El Mojado (1974) and El Otro Lado (1978). Lyon has explained that after leaving the Texas prisons he struggled to move forward, feeling that there were “no more worlds to conquer” in creating photography books. Filmmaking became the means by which he could continue to make sense of the beauty and inequality he saw in the world around him.
Lyon did not give up photography completely, however. He turned to assembling family albums and creating collaged works that he describes as montages, referencing the filmmaking practice of juxtaposing disparate images to form a continuous whole. Lyon’s montages combine multiple images and materials sourced from his archives. Initially meant as vehicles for reflection and, in the case of the albums, as family heirlooms, these deeply personal works bridge past generations of his family with his present.
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Los Niños Abandonados 1975
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) El Mojado 1974 New Mexico, colour, 14 minutes [The Wetback] English and Spanish with subtitles A portrait of a hard-working undocumented labourer from Mexico produced by J.J. Meeker
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) El Otro Lado 1978 Mexico and Arizona, colour, 60 minutes [The Other Side] Spanish with English subtitles An honest film infused with poignant beauty, without political rhetoric
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Dear Mark 1981, New York and France, colour and b&w, 15 minutes A comedy in which the artist’s voice has been replaced by Gene Autry’s Lyon’s homage to his friend, sculptor Mark di Suvero, from footage shot in 1965 and 1975.
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Soc Sci 127 1969 Houston, color and b&w, 21 minutes A comedy – Danny Lyon’s first film with the late great Bill Sanders and his “painless” tattoo shop.
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Willie 1985 New Mexico, color, b&w, 82 minutes Willie is a realistic film made in Bernalillo, home of Willie Jaramillo and filmmakers Danny and Nancy Weiss Lyon Defiantly individual and implacable in the face of authority, Willie is repeatedly thrown into jail for relatively minor offences. The filmmakers gain access to jail cells, day rooms, lunatic wards, and the worst cellblock in the penitentiary where Willie is locked up next to his childhood friend and convicted murderer, Michael Guzman.
Knoxville
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Knoxville 1967 Gelatin silver print
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Knoxville, Tennessee 1967 Gelatin silver print
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Leslie, Downtown Knoxville 1967 Gelatin silver print Image: 28.7 x 19.1cm (11 1/4 x 7 1/2 in.) Mount: 56.2 x 45.7cm (22 1/8 x 18 in.) Art Institute of Chicago; gift of Mr. Danny Lyon
Tattoo
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Bill Sanders, Tattoo Artist, Houston, Texas 1968 Gelatin silver print Image: 20.7 x 20.7cm (8 3/16 x 8 3/16 in.) Sheet: 35.6 x 27.9cm (14 x 11 in.) Collection of the artist
Chicago
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Two youths in Uptown, Chicago, Illinois, a neighborhood of poor white southerners 1974
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Children at an apartment entrance 1965 From series Uptown, Chicago Gelatin silver print
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Kathy, Uptown, Chicago 1965 Gelatin silver print Image: 24.1 x 23.9cm (9 1/2 x 9 3/8 in.) Sheet: 35.6 x 27.9cm (14 x 11 in.) Collection of the artist
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Uptown, Chicago 1965 Gelatin silver print Image: 16.4 x 16.4cm (6 1/2 x 6 1/2 in.) Mount: 50.8 x 40.6cm (20 x 16 in.) Collection of the artist
New York
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Subway, New York 1966 (printed 2015) Pigmented inkjet print Image: 23.7 x 24.1cm (9 5/16 x 9 1/2 in.) Sheet: 28.8 x 29.2cm (11 5/16 x 11 1/2 in.) Collection of the artist
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Self-Portrait in Mary Frank’s Bathroom, New York 1969 Gelatin silver print Image: 15.6 x 23.5cm (6 1/8 x 9 1/4 in.) Sheet: 20.3 x 25.2cm (8 x 9 15/16 in.) Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase with funds from Joanna Leonhardt Casullo, Niko Elmaleh, Lauren DePalo, Julia Macklowe, and Fern Kaye Tessler
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) John Lennon and Danny Seymour, The Bowery, New York 1969 (printed c. 2005) Gelatin silver print, printed later Image: 22.3 x 33.3cm (8 13/16 x 13 1/8 in.) Sheet: 27.6 x 35.4cm (11 x 14 in.) Collection of the artist
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Mark di Suvero and Danny Lyon, Hyde Park, Chicago 1965 Gelatin silver print Image: 23.9 x 16.2cm (9 3/8 x 6 3/8 in.) Sheet: 25.4 x 20.3cm (10 x 8 in.) Collection of the artist
Colombia
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Mary, Santa Marta, Colombia 1972 Gelatin silver print Image: 17.1 x 25.3cm (6 3/4 x 10 in.) Sheet: 27.9 x 35.6cm (11 x 14 in.) Collection of the artist
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Tesca, Cartagena, Colombia 1966 (printed 2008) Cibachrome print Image: 25.7 x 25.7cm (10 1/8 x 10 1/8 in.) Sheet: 35.6 x 27.9cm (14 x 11 in.) Collection of the artist
The most comprehensive retrospective of the work of American photographer, filmmaker, and writer Danny Lyon in twenty-five years debuted at the Whitney on June 17, 2016. The first major photography exhibition to be presented in the Museum’s downtown home, Danny Lyon: Message to the Future is organised by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, where it will make its West Coast debut at the de Young Museum on November 5, 2016.
The exhibition assembles approximately 175 photographs and is the first to assess the artist’s achievements as a filmmaker as well as a photographer. The presentation also includes many objects that have seldom or never been exhibited before and offers a rare look at works from Lyon’s archives, including vintage prints, unseen 16mm film footage made inside Texas prisons, and his personal photo albums.
A leading figure in the American street photography movement of the 1960s, Lyon has distinguished himself by the personal intimacy he establishes with his subjects and the inventiveness of his practice. With his ability to find beauty in the starkest reality, Lyon has presented a charged alternative to the vision of American life presented in the mass media. Throughout, he has rejected the traditional documentary approach in favour of a more immersive, complicated involvement with his subjects. “You put a camera in my hand,” he has explained, “I want to get close to people. Not just physically close, emotionally close, all of it.” In the process he has made several iconic bodies of work, which have not only pictured recent history, but helped to shape it.
“We are delighted to partner with the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco on Danny Lyon: Message to the Future,” stated Adam D. Weinberg, the Alice Pratt Brown Director of the Whitney Museum of American Art. “Since the early 1960s, Lyon’s photographs and films have upturned conventional notions of American life. The Whitney has long championed Lyon’s work and we are thrilled to present this retrospective, which encompasses more than half a century of important work.”
In 1962, while still a student at the University of Chicago, Lyon hitchhiked to the segregated South to make a photographic record of the Civil Rights movement. His other projects have included photographing biker subcultures, exploring the lives of individuals in prison, and documenting the architectural transformation of Lower Manhattan. Lyon has lived for years in New Mexico, and his commitment to personal adventure has taken him to Mexico and other countries in Latin America, China, and the less-traveled parts of the American West.
“Danny Lyon is one of the great artists working in photography today,” said Julian Cox, Founding Curator of Photography for the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and Chief Curator at the de Young Museum. “Lyon’s dedication to his art and his conviction to produce work underpinned by strong ethical and ideological motivations sets him apart from many of his peers.
Press release from the Whitney Museum of American Art
Ongoing activism
Lyon’s first encounter with Latin America was through a trip to Colombia in February 1966, during which he photographed extensively in and around Cartagena. In the 1970s and 1980s, Lyon’s self-described “advocacy journalism” took him to Bolivia, where he captured the hard lives of rural miners; Mexico, where he photographed undocumented workers moving back and forth across the U.S. – Mexico border; back to Colombia, where he made the film Los Niños Abandonados, chronicling the lives of street children; and to Haiti, where he witnessed firsthand the violent revolution overthrowing Jean-Claude Duvalier’s dictatorship.
More recently, Lyon made six trips between 2005 and 2009 to Shanxi province in northeast China. Aided by a guide, he photographed the people living in this highly polluted coal-producing region. As in his work in the civil rights movement and the Texas prisons, Lyon’s photographs from his travels are examples of his advocacy journalism, part of his effort to “change history and preserve humanity.”
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Boulevard Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Port-au-Prince, Haiti February 7, 1986 Gelatin silver print Image: 21.3 x 32.1cm (8 3/8 x 12 5/8 in.) Sheet: 27.9 x 35.6cm (11 x 14 in.) Collection of the artist
Occupy
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Occupy Demonstration on Broadway, Los Angeles 2011 Inkjet print Image: 24.5 x 32.9cm (9 5/8 x 12 15/16 in.) Sheet: 32.7 x 40cm (13 x 15 3/4 in.) Collection of the artist
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Occupy Oakland, City Hall, Oakland 2011 Pigmented inkjet print Image: 24.6 x 33cm (9 3/4 x 13 in.) Sheet: 27.3 x 38cm (10 3/4 x 15 in.) Collection of the artist
Whitney Museum of American Art 99 Gansevoort Street New York, NY 10014 Phone: (212) 570-3600
Josef Sudek (Czech, 1896-1976) St. Vitus cathedral, Prague, Czech Republic c. 1926 Silver gelatin print
A poetry of the everyday
Josef Sudek, a one-armed man lugging around a large format camera, is one of my top ten photographers of all time.
His photographs, sometimes surreal, always sensitive, have a profound sensibility that affect the soul. Melancholy and mysterious by turns, they investigate the inner life of objects which stand as metaphors for the inner life of the artist. A form of healing after his horrific injuries and the loss of his arm during the First World War, the photographs purportedly look outwards upon the world but are actually interior meditations on life, death and the nature of being. Light emerges from the darkness; understanding from tribulation; and Sudek, in Jungian terms, integrates his ego into his soul through the process of (photographic) individuation – whereby the personal and collective unconscious (his hurt and damage) are brought into consciousness (eg. by means of dreams, active imagination, or free association) to be assimilated into the whole personality. It is a completely natural process necessary for the integration of the psyche and, in Sudek’s life, was integral to his healing from the vicissitudes of war.
Using Pictorialism as the starting point for his exploration of the world, Sudek never abandons the creation of “atmosphere” in his photographs, even as the images become modernist, surrealist and offer a new way of seeing the world. Having myself photographed extensively at night, and from the interior of my flat, I can understand Sudek’s fascination with both locations: the quiet of night, the stillness, the clarity of vision and thought; the interior as exterior, the projection of interior thoughts onto an external surface reflected back into the camera lens. “Nature, architecture, streets and objects are magnified by his sensitivity and mastery of the effects of light, contrasting with the impenetrable cloak of darkness.” Except the cloak of darkness is not impenetrable, as light cannot exist without darkness.
Pace, his photographs are breath / taking. They are exhalations of the spirit.
Sudek’s ability to transcend the literal, his ability to transform the objectal quality of photography ranks him as one of the top photographers of all time. He synthesises a poetry of objects, a poetry of the everyday, and projects the folds of his mind onto the visual field (through “tears” of condensation on the window, through labyrinths of paper and glass, such as in Labyrinth on my table, 1967, below). As a form of self-actualisation – the desire to become everything that one is capable of becoming – Sudek’s photographs interrogate that chthonic darkness that lurks in the heart of everyone of us, our dark night of the soul.
In that process of discovery (who am I, what kind of human being am I, how can I heal myself), he finds redemption.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Jeu de Paume for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“I like to tell stories about the life of inanimate objects, to relate something mysterious: the seventh side of a dice. Everything around us, dead or alive, in the eyes of a crazy photographer mysteriously takes on many variations, so that a seemingly dead object comes to life through light or by its surroundings.”
Josef Sudek
Josef Sudek at Jeu de Paume
“The Intimate World of Josef Sudek”, exhibition at Jeu de Paume Paris, from 07 June 2016 until 25 September 2016
Entitled “The Intimate World of Josef Sudek”, this exhibition is the first of this scale to revisit the life and work of Josef Sudek (Kolin, 1896 – Prague, 1976) within its socio-geographical and historical context: Prague during the first half of the twentieth century, at a time when the Czech capital was a veritable hub of artistic activity.
The exhibition features a selection of 130 works spanning the totality of Sudek’s career, from 1920 to 1976, and allows the public to examine the extent to which his photography was a reflection of his personal relationship to the surrounding world. On display are works that are the result of Sudek’s photographic experiments carried out within the privacy of his own studio, images of the garden seen from his window, and photographs of adventures further afield. The artist enjoyed meandering through the streets of Prague and its surrounding suburbs, and made frequent excursions to the nearby countryside.
Sudek’s enduring fascination with light, and its absence, is at the root of some of the most haunting photographs of the twentieth century. Nature, architecture, streets and objects are magnified by his sensitivity and mastery of the effects of light, contrasting with the impenetrable cloak of darkness.
Text from the Jeu de Paume Vimeo website
On display are works that are the result of Sudek’s photographic experiments carried out within the privacy of his own studio, images of the garden seen from his window, and photographs of adventures further afield. The artist enjoyed meandering through the streets of Prague and its surrounding suburbs, and made frequent excursions to the nearby countryside. Sudek’s enduring fascination with light, and its absence, is at the root of some of the most haunting photographs of the twentieth century. Nature, architecture, streets and objects are magnified by his sensitivity and mastery of the effects of light, contrasting with the impenetrable cloak of darkness.
As a photographer, Sudek was particularly concerned with the quality of the photographic print, an essential component in terms of the expressive potential of an image. His mastery of the pigment printing process enabled him to produce highly atmospheric and evocative images, thereby reaping all of the reflective and descriptive power of the gelatin silver print. The exhibition presents work from Sudek’s early career, but also features photographs from a pivotal period of experimentation and innovation, beginning in the 1940s. Focusing on the technical and formal aspects of the medium of photography, Sudek created pigment prints, halftone prints, puridlos (photographs between two windows) and veteše (photographs inserted into old frames), techniques which allowed him to transform the objectal quality of photography.
The loss of his right arm during the First World War and the difficulties he now encountered in transporting his view camera did not dampen his passion for photography. Sudek’s studio window became an object of abiding fascination – rather like the surface of a canvas – reflecting moments of exquisite tenderness and hope when a flowering branch brushed against its pane, or of poignant melancholy when he observed the world beyond his window transformed by the playful infinity of mist. His room with a view allowed him to capture, on film, his love of Prague. His photographs demonstrate both a precision and a depth of feeling, fitting odes to the rich history and architectural complexity of the Czech capital.
Like many artists of his generation marked by their experience of war, Sudek expresses a particularly acute awareness of the dark and tormented aspects of human existence – feelings that would inspire some of his most melancholy and most moving pictures. A photograph taken at night, through the glass pane of his window, shows a city plunged into darkness during the Occupation of the Second World War, and communicates a sentiment of unspeakable despair – a dramatic illustration of Sudek’s technical ability to transcend the literal.
The first part of the exhibition features images that herald the photographer’s later work, showing his early landscapes, portraits of fellow patients at Invalidovna, the Prague hospice for war invalids like Sudek, his hesitant foray into modernism, and his interior shots of St. Vitus Cathedral. Through images that recount the narrative of his life, the viewer gains access to Sudek’s inner world, and an insight into his immediate environment, the views and objects he loved, his studio and garden. His endless walks in Prague found expression in the views of the city and its surroundings, as well as in photographs of its more sordid “suburbs”, a subject explored by other Prague artists. The eastern and northern areas of Bohemia, the Beskid Mountains and the Mionší forest were other destinations close to the photographer’s heart. The exhibition “The Intimate World of Josef Sudek” provides a fascinating panorama of the work of this unique artist.
Text from the Jeu de Paume website
Beginnings
Sudek’s first photographic prints – small and largely assembled in albums – were mainly views of the countryside taken along the Elbe River when he travelled from Prague to Kolín to visit his mother between 1916 and 1922.
Using processes such as gelatin silver and bromoil he showed a talent for printing his pictures in a style that favoured soft edges and broad swathes of tone. Here Sudek was not so much studying the effects of light as he was observing the conventions of Pictorialism, a photography movement that straddled the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century, and was based on a strong Romantic ethos. Pictorialist photographers enhanced atmospheric effects with such processes as carbon and gum bichromate. Sudek began using the carbon process regularly and in a personally expressive manner in the late 1940s.
His Invalidovna and St. Vitus Cathedral series in Prague, begun in the first half of the 1920s, show him exploring interior spaces where light emphasises both the profane and the sacred. The play of bands of sunlight and darkness is a central feature of the composition and, indeed, of the life of the photograph.
“… [Sudek] referred to photography as meteorology to describe the significance of the atmosphere, and how a photographer must predict the right conditions for photographing and enlarging prints. His work became sharper with richer tones, and his compositions became more illusive. The foregrounds and backgrounds of his photographs, particularly in his “Window” series began to oscillate. These achievements were perhaps made more attainable by his focus on inanimate objects over which he had more control than living things. Most of his cityscapes became deserted, as he directed his camera at statues or replaced what would have been a living subject with such emulative sculptures.
In effect, Sudek’s substitution of the inanimate for the animate brought the objects he photographed to life in his mind. He called the enormous decaying trees in the woods of Bohemia “sleeping giants” and would take portraits of masks and statuary heads, transforming them into frozen, worn grotesqueries. His personification of objects is even more vivid in his studio photography, particularly after 1939, the oncoming of World War II and the Nazi occupation of Prague. As the city was oppressed by German troops, the artist retreated into his studio and insulated himself sentimentally with still lifes. To an interviewer, he explained, “I love the life of objects. When the children go to bed, the objects come to life. I like to tell stories about the life of inanimate objects.” He devoted endless hours to arranging and photographing the everyday – apples, eggs, bread, and shells – and special objects given to him by friends, such as feathers, spectacles, and watches, which he called “remembrances” of that person. A photograph from his series “Remembrances of Architect Rothmayer, Mr. Magician,” for example, portrays objects respectfully placed in a row on a desk, as if artifacts from an archeological site, from which the history of a life or character of a man could be divined.
“Everything around us, dead or alive, in the eyes of a crazy photographer mysteriously takes on many variations,” Sudek said, “so that a seemingly dead object comes to life through light or by its surroundings.” This statement is perhaps telling of Sudek’s relationship to death and life, as a result of the loss of his arm and the manner in which he suffered the loss. In the 1963 film, “Zit Svuj Zivot” (Living Your Life), a documentary portrait of Sudek by Evald Strom, we see a sensitive man describing his efforts to photograph the reality of the objects around him, not as if he were bringing the objects to life, but as if it was his purpose to represent the lives of objects as they truly are. Of the image of a vase of wildflowers, he says “This is a photograph of wildflowers, my attempt to photograph wildflowers,” and of an old lamp, “This is a celebrated lamp; it holds a lot of memories.””
Ashley Booth Klein, “Josef Sudek and The Life of Objects,” in Obelisk Vol. 2 Issue 1, Winter 2015 [Online] Cited 18/09/2016. No longer available online
“Josef Sudek: The World at My Window” is the first exhibition in France since 1988 to cover Sudek’s entire career and spotlight the different phases of his work. Coming in the wake of several exhibitions at the Jeu de Paume devoted to Eastern European photographers of the early twentieth century, among them André Kertész and Francois Kollar, this one comprises some 130 vintage prints by the Czech artist. Bringing to bear a vision at once subjective and timeless, Sudek captures the ongoing changes in Prague’s natural world and landscapes.
His early profession as a bookbinder came to an abrupt halt when he was conscripted into the Austro-Hungarian army in Bohemia and sent to the Italian front. After the First World War he came back to Prague wounded; the loss of his right arm meant abandoning bookbinding, and he turned to photography. After revisiting the battlefield in Italy once more he returned, in despair, to Prague: “I found the place,” he recounted, “but my arm wasn’t there. Since then I’ve never gone anywhere. I didn’t find what I was looking for.”
A study grant enabled him to train at the state-run school of graphic arts in Prague, where he mixed with practitioners of Pictorialism, a photographic movement aiming at achieving colour and texture effects similar to those of painting. He started concentrating on architectural details, always waiting until the light was absolutely perfect. Little by little he gave up the Pictorialist ambiences of his views of St Vitus’s cathedral, opting for a pure, straightforward approach which the American photographer Alfred Stieglitz summed up as “maximum detail for maximum simplification”.
During the Second World War Sudek began photographing the window giving onto his garden, the result being the celebrated Window of My Studio series. He then shifted his focus to the accumulated jumble of objects in the studio, producing a further series titled Labyrinths. Light was an inexhaustible theme in his work, orchestrating the seasons, making the invisible visible and transporting us into another world. As if to escape the leaden context of the War and then of Communism, Sudek took refuge in music, especially that of his compatriot Leoš Janáček. A true music lover, he gradually built up a substantial collection of recordings which he played to his friends during improvised concerts in his studio.
The second half of his career saw Sudek abandon photography’s traditional subjects as he explored the outskirts of Prague with his black view camera on his shoulder. Known as “the poet of Prague”, he became an emblematic figure in the Czech capital. Discreet and solitary, he gradually withdrew from the city’s art scene, leaving his studio only to prowl the streets at night with his imagination as his guide.
Sudek’s photographs rarely include people; his focus was more on empty urban and rural spaces. Fascinated by the streets of Prague, the city’s deserted parks and public gardens, and the wooded Bohemian landscapes his mastery of light rendered sublime, he preferred the un-enlarged contact print as a means of preserving all the detail and authenticity of the places he roamed through. His work moved towards experiments with light. In photographs shot through with simplicity and sensitivity, Sudek foregrounds a kind of poetry of the everyday, using the interplay of light and shade to achieve a kind of fluctuation between interior and exterior.
Sudek was not content with making single, unrelated images. He generally worked in projects or series, creating extended visual explorations of the phenomena and scenes he viewed – often from the closed window of his studio, which separated his private studio-home from the exterior world. In the series From My Window it was the endlessly varying states of transformation of droplets of water that he watched streaming down his windowpane. His images invite us to contemplate, with great fascination, the physical cycles of water and the phenomenon of rivulets coursing down a surface – like human tears. Reminding us even of [Paul] Verlaine’s “There is weeping in my heart like the rain upon the city…” Sometimes the melancholy mood of these images is leavened by a rose in a vase on the windowsill or tendrils of leaves announcing the arrival of spring.
There is weeping in my heart like the rain falling on the town. What is this languor that pervades my heart?
Oh the patter of the rain on the ground and the roofs! For a heart growing weary oh the song of the rain!
There is weeping without cause in this disheartened heart. What! No betrayal? There’s no reason for this grief.
Truly the worst pain is not knowing why, without love or hatred, my heart feels so much pain.
Sudek’s preoccupation with darkness dates to the Nazi Occupation of Prague from March 1939 until the end of the war. Experiencing his city plunged into nights of enforced darkness Sudek explored the absence of light in his pictures. We know that this was more than a technical exercise, for he wrote “Memories” and “Restless Night” on the verso of one nocturnal photograph dated 1943.
The curfews imposed on citizens at the time made it unlikely that Sudek ventured out into the city after dark during wartime. Neither agile nor inconspicuous with his large-format camera slung over his increasingly hunched back, Sudek would have risked his life had he done so. The small courtyard of his studio on Ujezd street was hidden from the road, however, and one or two lights in neighbouring apartments served as beacons. Well after sundown he would photograph the syncopated play of blurs of light against the wall of impenetrable blackness.
The spirit of place
Sudek visited and photographed places that held either personal or spiritual significance for him: the landscape along the Elbe River, Invalidovna, St. Vitus Cathedral, his studio, Prague’s complex streets and open squares, the majestic Prague Castle, the city’s surrounds, and Frenštát pod Radhoštĕm where he spent summers with friends. Hukvaldy, home of Leoš Janaček, the composer whose music he loved, was a particularly favoured haunt. This was true also of the ancient Mionší Forest where he navigated his way through dense brush and forests by way of shortcuts that he created and playfully named. The Beskid Mountains also served as spiritual retreat. Although he was an urbanite in many respects, Sudek’s love of nature and sense of despair for its desecration is strongly expressed in Sad Landscapes, his series of images made in the Most region where industrialisation ravaged the countryside in the 1950s.
The life of objects
Sudek collected everything. Today he would be known as a hoarder. But his obsession served him well, for out of the chaos of his small studio and living spaces he carefully selected a variety of these objects to photograph. From delicate feathers to crumpled paper and tinfoil, multi-faceted drinking glasses, flowers, fruit, seashells, envelopes, flasks, frames, prisms, candelabras, string and shoe moulds, the subjects ranged from the mundane to the exotic. Once chosen, the set-up was lovingly composed – often in subtly changed configurations with other objects – and carefully lit before being memorialised in either pigment or gelatin silver prints.
Entitled “The Intimate World of Josef Sudek”, this exhibition is the first of this scale to revisit the life and work of Josef Sudek (Kolín, 1896 – Prague, 1976) within its socio-geographical and historical context: Prague during the first half of the twentieth century, at a time when the Czech capital was a veritable hub of artistic activity. The exhibition features a selection of 130 works spanning the totality of Sudek’s career, from 1920 to 1976, and allows the public to examine the extent to which his photography was a reflection of his personal relationship to the surrounding world. On display are works that are the result of Sudek’s photographic experiments carried out within the privacy of his own studio, images of the garden seen from his window, and photographs of adventures further afield. The artist enjoyed meandering through the streets of Prague and its surrounding suburbs, and made frequent excursions to the nearby countryside. Sudek’s enduring fascination with light, and its absence, is at the root of some of the most haunting photographs of the twentieth century. Nature, architecture, streets and objects are magnified by his sensitivity and mastery of the effects of light, contrasting with the impenetrable cloak of darkness.
As a photographer, Sudek was particularly concerned with the quality of the photographic print, an essential component in terms of the expressive potential of an image. His mastery of the pigment printing process enabled him to produce highly atmospheric and evocative images, thereby reaping all of the reflective and descriptive power of the gelatin silver print.
The exhibition presents work from Sudek’s early career, but also features photographs from a pivotal period of experimentation and innovation, beginning in the 1940s. Focusing on the technical and formal aspects of the medium of photography, Sudek created pigment prints, halftone prints, puridlos (photographs between two windows) and veteše (photographs inserted into old frames), techniques which allowed him to transform the objectal quality of photography. The loss of his right arm during the First World War and the difficulties he now encountered in transporting his view camera did not dampen his passion for photography.
Sudek’s studio window became an object of abiding fascination – rather like the surface of a canvas – reflecting moments of exquisite tenderness and hope when a flowering branch brushed against its pane, or of poignant melancholy when he observed the world beyond his window transformed by the playful infinity of mist. His room with a view allowed him to capture, on film, his love of Prague. His photographs demonstrate both a precision and a depth of feeling, fitting odes to the rich history and architectural complexity of the Czech capital.
Like many artists of his generation marked by their experience of war, Sudek expresses a particularly acute awareness of the dark and tormented aspects of human existence – feelings that would inspire some of his most melancholy and most moving pictures. A photograph taken at night, through the glass pane of his window, shows a city plunged into darkness during the Occupation of the Second World War, and communicates a sentiment of unspeakable despair – a dramatic illustration of Sudek’s technical ability to transcend the literal.
Through images that recount the narrative of his life, the viewer gains access to Sudek’s inner world, and an insight into his immediate environment, the views and objects he loved, his studio and garden. His endless walks in Prague found expression in the views of the city and its surroundings, as well as in photographs of its more sordid “suburbs”, a subject explored by other Prague artists. The eastern and northern areas of Bohemia, the Beskid Mountains and the Mionší forest were other destinations close to the photographer’s heart.
Text from Jeu de Paume
New ways of seeing
Although more influenced by prevailing photographic conventions in the beginning, Sudek came to show an openness to experimenting with new ways of composing and printing his images. In the late 1920s, Sudek photographed objects designed by modernist Ladislav Sutnar, thus creating angled views of furniture with reflective surfaces and ceramics of pure form.
Sudek’s most successful foray into modernism is his experimentation with grotesque (surreal) subjects such as mannequins, decaying sculptures and the accoutrements of the architect Otto Rothmayer’s garden. There is little doubt that in the fragmented figurative sculptures Sudek was recalling some of the human devastation that he witnessed on the battlefields of the First World War.
Curators: Rossella Menegazzo, Professor of East Asian Art History at the University of Milan and Takeshi Fujimori, Japanese photographer and Artistic Director of the Ken Domon Museum of Photography
Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) Allenamento degli allievi del corpo della Marina [Students of the Navy training] 1936 Yokosuka 535 x 748mm Ken Domon Museum of Photography
Social Realism
I love most Japanese photography of the post-war period (1950s-1970s) and this artist’s work is no exception. What an absolute master of photography, not just of Japanese photography, he was.
Direct, focused, gritty, unflinching, the work of this initiator of social realist photography lays bare “the direct connection between the camera and the subject” in the most forthright way. While professing that the photographs are “an absolutely non-dramatic snapshot” (just like the Bechers professed that their gridded, ordered photographs were just about form and nothing else), this artist produced quality work that narrates a transcendent story of life in Japan. His images are music, and visions, from the heart of a nation. You only have to look at the photograph Gemella non vedente (1957, below) from the series Hiroshima to understand what I mean. There is just this feeling in your synapses about his pictures, as though you yourself were holding the camera …
In his portrait photographs there is quietness and contemplation; in his other work anger, sadness, joy, humour. A direct connection to reality is at the forefront of his understanding. This connection is miraculously (as in, something that apparently contravenes known laws governing the universe) transformed into other spaces and feelings – the twirling of umbrellas, the lizard on the head, the raised arms and white gloves of the traffic policeman (shot from a crouching position).
While he is not an artist who creates change he certainly documents the results of change in a magnificent way. I love them all.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Museo dell’Ara Pacis for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) Esercitazioni delle crocerossine [Red Cross exercises] 1938 Azabu, Tokyo 535 x 748mm Ken Domon Museum of Photography
For the first time ever outside Japan, an exhibition of work by Ken Domon (1909-1990), recognised as a master of realism and one of the most important figures in the history of modern Japanese photography, is being held in Rome at the Museo dell’Ara Pacis. It features about 150 photographs taken in black and white as well as colour between the 1920s and the 1970s, which illustrate the author’s path towards social realism. From the first shots of the period before and during World War II, which display a vision linked to photojournalism and propaganda, through photography of the social sphere, the exhibit follows Ken Domon’s production up to the crucial work documenting the tragedy of Hiroshima, which the photographer undertook as though in response to a call and a humanitarian duty.
Regarded as an absolute master of Japanese photography and initiator of the realistic movement, Ken Domon marked a pivotal chapter in the history of post-war Japanese photography, laying the foundations for contemporary photographic production and remaining a constant point of reference for Japanese enthusiasts. According to Domon, “The fundamental gift of quality work lies in the direct connection between the camera and the subject.” The master’s aim was indeed always to capture a wholly realistic image devoid of drama. Against the background of the renewed spirit of the post-war period, he focused on society in general and everyday life: “I am immersed in the social reality of today but at the same time in the classical culture and traditions of Nara and Kyoto. This twofold involvement has the common denominator of a search for the point at which the two realities are linked to the destinies of people, the anger, sorrow and joy of the Japanese people.”
The realistic photograph, described as “an absolutely non-dramatic snapshot”, therefore plays the leading part in an exhibition thematically laid out to illustrate the master’s vast production, transversally encompassing the whole of Japanese culture. From the early work of a photojournalistic nature and at the service of pre-war propaganda and the cultural promotion of Japan overseas (Photojournalism and Pre-War Propaganda; The Post-War Period: Towards Social Realism) to a focus on recording everyday life and the city’s transformation and westernisation with ever-greater attention to social themes. His social realismis expressed in particular through two series emblematic of this period, namely Hiroshima (1958), regarded by the Nobel laureate Kenzaburō Ōe as the first great modern work of Japan, and The Children of Chikuhō, a series on poverty in the mining villages of southern Japan with a broad range of lively portraits of children encountered in the streets.
This is followed by Portraits, comprising photographs of famous figures in the worlds of art, literature, culture and science such as Yukio Mishima, Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, Tarō Okamoto and Yusaku Kamekura. The final section is devoted to his most important series, Pilgrimage to Ancient Temples, photographs of Buddhist sculptures, buildings and treasures as well as views of landscapes taken on journeys throughout Japan in search of the beauty of the sacred places of the past. Landscapes that conjure up the fascination of cultural diversity and the exotic.
Ken Domon’s work can be described as autobiographical, documentation that is private rather social, always selected on personal criteria that transform the shot into a moment of dialogue with the subject. His vision of the subject, be it a landscape, a sculpture, a person or an object, is a vehicle of the universal beauty seen through the lens, which does not omit the physical characteristics of the form captured. A multifaceted figure whose photography embraces the whole of Japanese culture before and after the war, Ken Domon is also the first photographer to have a personal museum devoted entirely to his vast work in his hometown of Sakata, inaugurated in 2003. Together with friends and other leading figures in the Japanese world of art, he initiated the cultural renewal that enabled Japan to emerge definitively from the defeat in war and led to the contemporary aesthetic that is still a point of reference for the entire world.
The show is part of a vast programme of eventsthat will represent the cultural and technological world of Japan in Italy all through 2016: major exhibitions of art, productions from the great tradition of Noh and puppet theatre (bunraku), concerts, performances of modern and traditional dance, film festivals, exhibits of architecture, design, comics, literature, sport and so much else. The occasion is the celebration of the 150th anniversary of the first treaty of friendship and trade between Italy and Japan, signed on 25 August 1866, which initiated diplomatic relations between the two countries.
Press release from the Museo dell’Ara Pacis
Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) Pesca all’ayu 1936 Izu, Prefettura di Shizuoka 457 x 560mm Ken Domon Museum of Photography
Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) Bambini che fanno roteare gli ombrelli [Kids twirling umbrellas] c. 1937 Dalla serie Bambini (Kodomotachi) From the series Children (Kodomotachi) Ogōchimura 535 x 748mm Ken Domon Museum of Photography
The pre-war period
From photojournalism to propaganda photography
Domon began to work in photography in 1933 at the age of 24, carrying out the humble duties of an apprentice at Miyauchi Kōtarō’s studio in Ueno. Right from the start he won prizes and began to write for photography magazines and journals, publishing his first photo in Asahi Camera in August 1935. The 10th of October of the same year marked an important turning point in his career. He replied to an advertisement published by the Nippon Kōbō studio in Ginza, which was looking for a photo technician. Founded by Natori Yōnosuke (1910-1962) when he returned from his experience in Berlin at the Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung, the studio spread in Japan for the first time concepts such as editing and reporting and a new system of production based on the collaboration between photographer and graphic designer under the supervision of an art director, which led to the large-scale diffusion of photojournalism.
Domon began his first reportage for the magazine Nippon, published in English in order to promote Japanese culture abroad with a mix of information and propaganda. The first photographic reportage was on the traditional Shichigosan Festival on the occasion of the presentation of children in the Meiji Jingu shrine, realised with his model C Leica. This was followed by services that presented handicrafts, traditions, industrial and military progress and the progressive aspects of Japan, which in the 1930s had become increasingly nationalistic.
The war years and the bunraku puppet theatre
During the years of maximum Japanese expansion in the Pacific, immediately prior to the Second World War, even photography had to comply with the strict rules of military policy. Only few selected professional photographers could obtain photographic materials for assignments deemed to be “essential”, and naturally the “essential” photographic services were subject to the requirements of government propaganda, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the International Tourism Agency and the International Cultural Relations Company.
Thus many photographic publications were discontinued, with economic repercussions for photographers. In fact, Domon had difficulty maintaining a family of seven. He also had the added anxiety of the probable arrival of a “red card” that would have called him to arms and probably to the front in a group of photo-reporters. In response to this critical situation, Domon decided to retire from the public scene, dedicating himself to culture, in particular to Buddhist temples and the bunraku puppet theatre.
On the 8th of December, 1941 he was in the backstage of the Yotsubashi Bunraku Theatre in Osaka when he read the special edition of a newspaper announcing the declaration of war to the United States. It was not easy to gain the respect and collaboration of the master puppeteers – national living treasures such as Yoshida Bungorō, Yoshida Eiza and Kiritake Monjūrō – in the key moment of taking the shot with a camera that did not go unnoticed due to its size and long exposure times. However, by 1943 he had shot about 7,000 negatives, which were collected in the book entitled Bunraku published in 1972.
Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) Esercitazioni delle crocerossine [Red Cross exercises] 1938 Azabu, Tokyo 535 x 748mm Ken Domon Museum of Photography
Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) Foto commemorativa della cerimonia di diploma del corpo della Marina [Commemorative photo of the Marine Corp graduation ceremony] 1944 Tsuchiura, Ibaragi 1047 x 747mm Ken Domon Museum of Photography
Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) Vigile urbano a Ginza 4-chōme [Traffic policeman in Ginza 4-chōme] 1946 Tokyo 457 x 560mm Ken Domon Museum of Photography
The postwar period
The affirmation of realism in photography
The tragic events related to the Second World War and to the defeat of Japan, marked by the atrocities of the atomic bomb, revealed the great deception of the war propaganda. Defeat led to the collapse of the imperial myth and state Shintoism, which had been the basis of military ideology.
If on the one hand, by the end of the 1940s there had been considerable intellectual rebirth leading to a rapid resumption of the diffusion of magazines, publications, exhibitions and artistic circles, on the other hand there was no language that seemed suitable for expressing such a tragic reality. There was a need to document a society undergoing profound change and in this sense Domon became the promoter of realistic photography, becoming a landmark for amateur photographers. He embraced the western trends that had taken over the city, but also the alleys and the poorest sectors of the population.
The high point of the realist tendency was reached around 1953, thanks to the exhibition, Photography Today: Japan and France, held in 1951 at the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, provided the opportunity to make comparisons with names such as Cartier Bresson, Brassai, Doisneau. Domon’s last word on realism appeared in the magazine Photo Art in 1957 with an article that debated the two fundamental concepts of photography: jijitsu, reality, and shinjitsu, truth.
Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) Pescatrici di perle (ama san) [Pearl fisherwomen] 1948 457 x 559mm Ken Domon Museum of Photography
Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) Donne a passeggio [Women walking] 1950 Sendai 457 x 560mm Ken Domon Museum of Photography
Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) L’attrice Yamaguchi Yoshiko [The actress Yoshiko Yamaguchi] 1952 535 x 748mm Ken Domon Museum of Photography
Yoshiko Yamaguchi (Japanese, 1920-2014)
Yoshiko Yamaguchi (山口 淑子, Yamaguchi Yoshiko, February 12, 1920 – September 7, 2014) was a Japanese singer, actress, journalist, and politician. Born in China, she made an international career in film in China, Hong Kong, Japan and the United States.
Early in her career, the Manchukuo Film Association concealed her Japanese origin and she went by the Chinese name Li Hsiang-lan (李香蘭), rendered in Japanese as Ri Kōran. This allowed her to represent China in Japanese propaganda movies. After the war, she appeared in Japanese movies under her real name, as well as in several English language movies under the stage name, Shirley Yamaguchi.
After becoming a journalist in the 1950s under the name Yoshiko Ōtaka (大鷹 淑子, Ōtaka Yoshiko), she was elected as a member of the Japanese parliament in 1974, and served for 18 years. After retiring from politics, she served as vice president of the Asian Women’s Fund.
Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) Sit-in studentesco a Tachikawa contro l’ampliamento della base americana [Student sit-in in Tachikawa against the expansion of US base] 1955 Tokyo 457 x 560mm Ken Domon Museum of Photography
Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) Sorelline orfane, Rumie e Sayuri [Orphan sisters, Rumie and Sayuri] 1959 Dalla serie I bambini di Chikuhō (Chikuhō no kodomotachi) From the series Children of Chikuhō 457 x 560mm Ken Domon Museum of Photography
Children and miners’ villages
Domon adored children. His first services for Nippon were focused on the Shichigosan Festival and then on children fishing in Izu. But in 1952 he began to photographing children all over Japan, capturing the vitality of the streets and of the poorer neighbourhoods in Tokyo, Ginza, Shinbashi, Nagoya and Osaka and in particular in the Kōtō area where he lived. Probably due to the loss of his second child in 1946 in an accident, Domon moved increasingly toward a realist if not a socialist approach, which allowed him to deal with current themes in an indirect way through the innocent eyes of children.
Several books were dedicated to this theme: The Children of Kōtō (Kōtō no kodomotachi), whose publication was stopped by Domon himself, dissatisfied with his work in 1956; The Children of Chikuhō (Chikuhō no kodomotachi), published in January 1960, and its continuation which followed in November, The Father of Little Rumie is Dead (Rumie chan has otōsan ga shinda), which showed the miserable conditions of children in the villages of the mining area on the island of Kyūshū, and in particular the story of two orphan sisters, whose story moved Japan becoming a best seller. Lastly, the collection Children (Kodomotachi), published in 1976 by master of graphics and friend, Yūsaku Kamekura, and published by Nikkor Club, the amateur photographers’ association linked to Nikon and Domon.
Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) Rumie 1959 Dalla serie I bambini di Chikuhō (Chikuhō no kodomotachi) From the series Children of Chikuhō 457 x 560mm Ken Domon Museum of Photography
Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) Lucertola [Lizard] 1955 Dalla serie I bambini di Kōtō (Kōtō no kodomotachi) From the series Children of Chikuhō Tokyo 457 x 560mm Ken Domon Museum of Photography
Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) Pioggerella [Drizzle] 1952-1954 Dalla serie Bambini (Kodomotachi) From the series Children (Kodomotachi) Atami 457 x 560mm Ken Domon Museum of Photography
Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) Bagno presso il fiume davanti allo Hiroshima Dome [Bath at the river in front of the Hiroshima Dome] 1957 From the series Hiroshima 535 x 748mm Ken Domon Museum of Photography
Hiroshima
Published in March 1958, the year prior to the first brain haemorrhage to strike Domon Ken, the Hiroshima collection presents 180 photographs introduced by a short explanatory essay. The work, completed thirteen years after the dropping of an atomic bomb on Hiroshima and then on Nagasaki, focused the attention of the world once again on the still open but almost forgotten wounds of Hiroshima, with a strong social impact.
The importance of this event in the life of the photographer is also evidenced by Domon’s recording in his notebook in the day and time of his arrival: July 23rd, 1957, 2.40 pm. From then until November he went there six times, for thirty-six days, producing more than 7,800 negatives, of which Hiroshima is only the synthesis. Domon realised that until then he had ignored and been afraid of what Hiroshima had actually meant. With his 35mm camera he revealed the places and people directly and indirectly affected by the atomic bomb, coldly recording with tears in his eyes the material damage, physical injuries, scars, deformations, and the plastic surgery and transplants undergone by the victims of the bomb, dedicating 14 pages at the beginning of the book to the progress made in the field of plastic surgery, which became a real photographic dossier.
The public shock that followed the publication of the dossier made him the object of harsh criticism that, however, failed to undermine his determination to represent reality. In an article published in the magazine Shinchō in 1977 the Nobel Prize winner Ōe Kenzaburō defined Hiroshima as the first work of modern art that dealt with the theme of the atomic bomb, talking about the living instead of the dead.
Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) La morte di Keiji [The death of Keiji] 1957 From the series Hiroshima 457 x 560mm Ken Domon Museum of Photography
Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) Paziente in ospedale [Hospital patient] 1957 From the series Hiroshima 457 x 560mm Ken Domon Museum of Photography
Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) Donna in cura per le lesioni da bomba atomica [Women being treated for injuries from atomic bomb] 1957 From the series Hiroshima 457 x 560 mm Ken Domon Museum of Photography
Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) Gemella non vedente [Blind twin (female)] 1957 From the series Hiroshima 457 x 560mm Ken Domon Museum of Photography
Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) Autoritratto [Self-portrait] Published in the November issue of the magazine Sankei Camera 457 x 560mm Ken Domon Museum of Photography
Portraits (Fūbō)
In 1953 the publication of the Portraits (Fūbō) collection of photographs, which came out in paperback the following year, concluded fifteen years of work dedicated to the portrait that had begun with the first photograph in May 1936 portraying the writer Takeda Rintarō, continuing during the war and until the year in which the collection was published. Domon gathered in a single volume 83 portraits of friends and acquaintances, personalities from the world of entertainment, literature, theatre and politics, stressing in the introduction that they were ” […] people I respect and like and am close to […] The choice of people was surprisingly subjective and random and no claim to any strictly historical or cultural meaning can be made.”
It seems that the initial choice of the faces to be included in the collection was made by Domon with a list written in ink on a sliding door on the second floor of his house in 1948. This list was subjected to the comments and opinions of friends and publishers who went to his house and subsequently underwent substitutions and changes. Through familiar faces and less well-known personalities, Domon bears witness to a crucial era in Japan, one of great writers such as Mishima, Kawabata and Tanizaki, of actors and directors of the caliber of Mifune and Ozu, of great artists who were often his friends and gave rise to a new important artistic trends in the country, such as the sculptor Noguchi, the graph artist Kamekura, the founder of the Ikebana School, Sōgetsu Teshigahara, or painters like Fujita, Umehara, Okamoto. Each picture is accompanied by the name of the subject, their occupation and the date it was taken. There are also short texts describing the relationship between Domon and the person depicted, in addition to the atmosphere created during the shooting.
Sometimes subjects were exasperated by the professional stubbornness of Domon, as is clear in the portrait of Umehara that reveals an air of irritation close to intolerance. Outrightness and instantaneousness, which were always Domon’s objectives, became easier to achieve thanks to technological developments. He passed from a camera assembled for cabinet card portraits – with a dry plate and flash that worked with magnesium powder, used before the war – to a small Leica in the post-war period.
Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) Shiga Naoya (scrittore/writer) 1951 457 x 560mm Ken Domon Museum of Photography
Naoya Shiga (志賀直哉, Shiga Naoya, February 20, 1883 – October 21, 1971) was a Japanese writer active during the Taishō and Shōwa periods of Japan, whose work was distinguished by its lucid, straightforward style and strong autobiographical overtones.
Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) Shiga Kiyoshi (medico ricercatore/medical researcher) 1949 457 x 560mm Ken Domon Museum of Photography
Kiyoshi Shiga (志賀 潔, Shiga Kiyoshi, February 7, 1871 – January 25, 1957) was a Japanese physician and bacteriologist. He had a well-rounded education and career that led to many scientific discoveries. In 1897, Shiga was credited with the discovery and identification of the Shigella dysenteriae microorganism which causes dysentery, and the Shiga toxin which is produced by the bacteria. He conducted research on other diseases such as tuberculosis and trypanosomiasis, and made many advancements in bacteriology and immunology.
Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) Takami Jun (scrittore/writer) 1948 457 x 560mm Ken Domon Museum of Photography
Jun Takami (Japanese, 1907-1965)
Jun Takami (高見 順, Takami Jun, 30 January 1907 – 17 August 1965) was the pen-name of a Japanese novelist and poet active in Shōwa period Japan. His real name was Takami Yoshio.
Takami was interested in literature from youth, and was particularly attracted to the humanism expressed by the Shirakaba writers. On entering Tokyo Imperial University he joined a leftist student arts group, and contributed to their literary journal (Sayoku Geijutsu). After graduation, he went to work for Columbia Records, and continued his activities as a Marxist writer, as part of the proletarian literature movement.
In 1932, he was arrested with other communists and suspected members of the Japan Communist Party under the Peace Preservation Laws, and was released six months later after being coerced into recanting his leftist ideology. An auto-biographical account of his experience appeared in Kokyu Wasureubeki (“Should Auld Acquaintance Be Forgot”, 1935), which, although considered wordy, was nominated for the first Akutagawa Prize. The theme of ironic self-pity over the weakness that led to his “conversion” and his subsequent intellectual confusion were recurring themes in his future works.
He gained a popular following in the pre-war years with Ikanaru Hoshi no Moto ni (“Under Whatever Star”, 1939-1940)., a story set in the Asakusa entertainment district of Tokyo.
During and immediately after World War II, Takami served as Director of the Investigation Bureau of the Japanese Literature Patriotic Association. After the war, he suffered from poor health, but continued to write poetry from his sickbed.
In 1962, Takami helped establish the Museum of Modern Japanese Literature. In 1964, his poetry collection Shi no Fuchi yori (“From the Abyss of Death”, 1964) won the Noma Prize. The same year, he also published, Takami Jun Nikki, (“The Diaries of Takami Jun”), an extremely detailed account of over 3000 pages, in which he described his experiences during the war and immediately afterwards.
Takami Jun lived in Kamakura, Kanagawa prefecture from 1943 until his death of esophageal cancer. His grave is at the temple of Tōkei-ji in Kamakura.
Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) Kuga Yoshiko (attrice/actress) and Ozu Yasujirō (regista/director) 1958 457 x 560mm Ken Domon Museum of Photography
Yoshiko Kuga (Japanese, 1931-2024)
Yoshiko Kuga (久我 美子, Kuga Yoshiko, 1931-2024) is a Japanese actress. Kuga was born in Tokyo, Japan. Her father, Michiaki Koga (久我通顕), was a marquis and a member of the House of Peers.
In 1946, while still attending Gakushuin Junior High School, she became an actress for Toho studios. In June 1946, Toho had sponsored a search for “new faces”, choosing Kuga as one of 48 new actresses and actors from 4,000 applicants. In 1947, she made her debut as one of the lead actresses in the omnibus movie Four Love Stories (四つの恋の物語, Yottsu no Koi no Monogatari). She was one of the actors active in the 1948 union strike at Toho studios. In the 1950s, she started working independently and starred in many productions of the Shochiku studios under the direction of Keisuke Kinoshita. Other important directors include Kenji Mizoguchi (The Woman in the Rumor), Yasujirō Ozu (Equinox Flower), and Tadashi Imai (An Inlet of Muddy Water). In 1954, she co-founded the film production company Ninjin Club (Bungei purodakushon ninjin kurabu) with actresses Keiko Kishi and Ineko Arima to enable better working conditions for actors within the studio system. Since the 1970s, she appeared mainly on television and on stage.
Kuga was married to actor Akihiko Hirata from 1961 until his death in 1984.
Yasujirō Ozu (小津 安二郎, Ozu Yasujirō, 12 December 1903 – 12 December 1963) was a Japanese film director and screenwriter. He began his career during the era of silent films, and his last films were made in colour in the early 1960s. Ozu first made a number of short comedies, before turning to more serious themes in the 1930s. The most prominent themes of Ozu’s work are family and marriage, and especially the relationships between generations. His most widely beloved films include Late Spring (1949), Tokyo Story (1953), and An Autumn Afternoon (1962).
Widely regarded as one of the world’s greatest and most influential filmmakers, Ozu’s work has continued to receive acclaim since his death. In the 2012 Sight & Sound poll, Ozu’s Tokyo Story was voted the third-greatest film of all time by critics world-wide. In the same poll, Tokyo Story was voted the greatest film of all time by 358 directors and film-makers world-wide.
Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) Ushi (Bue), dai dodici guardiani (jūnishinshō) del Murōji [Ushi (Ox), one of the twelve guardians (jūnishinshō) of Muroji] 1941-1943 Murōji, Nara 535 x 748mm Ken Domon Museum of Photography
Pilgrimage to the ancient temples (Kojijunrei)
Murōji
The Murōji temple, small and immersed in the greenery of the Nara mountains, was for Domon the first stage of a “pilgrimage to the ancient temples”, a sort of journey of the soul that accompanied him throughout his life and from which came the encyclopaedic work Kojijunrei (Pilgrimage to the Ancient Temples). It all began in 1939 with a simple excursion, suggested by friend and art historian Mizusawa Sumio (1905-1975): an experience that changed his life. In the first year alone he returned more than forty times and on many more occasions over the course of the following years.
At first Domon focused his photographic work on buildings, from the five-story pagoda – the smallest in Japan – to the architectural details, focusing on the sculptures inside, but also on the imposing profile of the Miroku Buddha of Ōnodera, excavated on the rocky wall facing the river along the road that leads to Murōji. Later he concentrated on wooden statues (kōninbutsu) of the Heian era (794-1185) inside the temple and starting with wide, overall shots he then moved on to capture the most minute details of the wood, so as to emphasize the folds and hems of the vestments and the gestures of the hands and eyes. His favourite statue was of Buddha Shaka, enthroned Mirokudō, who with his “beautiful and compassionate face” was, he claimed, the “most beautiful man on earth.”
For this particular job he used a basic Konishiroku (now Konika) camera made of wood, especially suitable for cabinet card portraits that he had purchased in 1941, but also an Eyemo with a tripod, often carried by his assistants. Evidence of Domon’s numerous pilgrimages and countless photographs can be found in the 1954 Murōji collection. The expanded, definitive edition of this work, Nyonin Takano Murōji, was published in 1978 and includes photographs taken subsequently with the new post-war techniques.
Around the temples
The thousands of shots that Domon took in 39 temples from 1939 to the seventies made up the Pilgrimage to the Ancient Temples (Kojijunrei), the masterpiece of his career for which, even today, he is known worldwide. It consists of five volumes published over a number of years (the first in 1963, the second in 1965, the third in 1968, the fourth in 1971 and the fifth in 1975) which put together 462 colour pictures and 325 photogravures of temples and statues built between the seventh and the sixteenth century, following a subjective criterion and not expecting such large proportions. It is first and foremost a work that documents the beauty of architecture, sculpture, gardens and landscapes around the temples and shrines selected by Domon. And yet it is also a testimony of the progression of photographic technique in those years, such as the transition to colour film of 1958, and of Domon’s health problems that influenced his choices.
In December 1959 he suffered a brain haemorrhage that paralysed the right part of his body, thus making it impossible to hold the camera, even after a long period of rehabilitation. Therefore, he resolved to use a tripod. He suffered a second haemorrhage on the June 22nd, 1968, which this time confined him to a wheelchair. And even with this umpteenth misfortune he did not stop taking photographs. With the help of assistants and by moving his point of view further down, he continued to work. He had a third haemorrhage in 1979, followed by a long stay in hospital and his death on the September 15th, 1990.
Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) Hitsuji (Pecora), dai dodici guardiani (jūnishinshō) del Murōji [Hitsuji (Sheep), one of the twelve guardians (jūnishinshō) of Muroji] 1941-1943 Murōji, Nara 535 x 748mm Ken Domon Museum of Photography
Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) Buddha Shaka ligneo a figura intera presso il Mirokudō del Murōji [Buddha Shaka wooden full-length at the Mirokudō Muroji] c. 1943 Nara 457 x 560mm Ken Domon Museum of Photography
Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) Ōnodera, campana e ciliegi [Onodera, bell and cherry trees] 1977 Nara 535 x 748mm Ken Domon Museum of Photography
Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) Pagoda del Murōji con la neve [Pagoda Muroji with snow] 1978 Nara 535 x 748mm Ken Domon Museum of Photography
A magnificent exhibition of the work of Edgar Degas at NGV International. So nice to see a blockbuster without papered walls or patterned floors, an exhibition that just allows the work to speak for itself.
“Il y a quelque chose plus terrible encore que le bourgeois – c’est l’homme qui nous singe [There’s something even more awful than the bourgeois – it’s the man who apes us]”
Edgar Degas as noted down by Oscar Wilde when he met him in 1883.
At the start of the 1860s Degas’s family still acted as his primary models for portraiture. In early 1863 he painted this engagement portrait of his sister Thérèse. He shows her as a young woman all dressed up to go out; in fact, to go abroad. Timidly she show off her engagement ring before a view of Naples, her face serene, the sky blue with future happiness. She was to move to Naples after her marriage in Paris on 11 April 1863 to her first cousin Edmondo Morbilli, the son of Rose Morbilli, the sister of Degas’s father.
While studying in Rome as a young man degas became increasingly interested in printmaking and also in the portraits of Rembrandt, which he first saw in publication by the French art writer Charles Blanc. The effects of light and shadow in Rembrandt’s portraits inspired Degas to undertake a series of self-portraits including this, his only self-portrait etching, which he produced in four separate states. He experimented with altering the appearance of these etchings through leaving varying amounts of ink on the plate before printing. Degas was very pleased with this exercise, and gave away examples of these trials to his friends.
Traces of Ingres’s influence on the young Degas are clearly visible here in the clean, firm contours delineating the face of his hen fifteen-year-old sister Thérèse De Gas. Offsetting the crisp edge drawn along her cheek is a subtle modelling of the chin and cheeks produced with smudged pencil, recalling the sfumato (soft or blurred) effects of Leonardo da Vinci.
Degas’s family members were his principal models in the early years of his career. His first art lessons were undertaken with Louis Lamothe, a loyal follower of the Neoclassical master Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. This portrait of his younger brother René, the family darling, betrays Degas’s resolve to follow in the footsteps of his mentor Ingres, whose work was exhibited at the Exposition Universelle in September 1854. Degas visited the elderly master of Neoclassical portraiture in 1855, the year the he undertook this portrait. Preparatory drawings show that degas radically simplified his composition, eliminating a complex interior setting in favour of a dramatic dark background reminiscent of the Mannerist Old Master, Angolo Bronzino.
This work is both a portrait and a genre scene, but it leans towards the former in that there is little trace of narrative, local colour or exotic reference. Degas details the marks of old age, fatigue and poverty – wrinkled skin, gnarled hands, the motley garments of a pauper – along with the faded colours that he recorded in a contemporary notebook: ‘figure of an old woman / very tanned skin, white veil / cloak thrown over / shoulder faded brown / faded free dress / a little like the back wall / of my room / yellow apron’
In 1858-1859, during an Italian sojourn, Degas stayed in Florence for nine months with his aunt Laure and her husband, Baron Gennaro Bellelli. There he embarked on the largest painting he would ever create – a monumental portrait of Laure, Gennaro and their daughters, Giovanna and Giulia. A study of marital discontent presented on the scale of a history painting, Family portrait, also called The Bellelli family, reflected Degas’ recent study of the dignified sitters in the Flemish master Anthony van Dyck’s early seventeenth-century portraits, which he had seen in Genoa. He worked on this painting continuously after his return to Paris, completing a final version of it for the Paris Salon of 1867. Alive to the unhappy marital dynamics between Laure and her husband, a political exile from Naples, Degas showed his morose relatives in their rented apartment, physically separated from one another by items of furniture and Giovanna (on the left) and Giulia. Although expecting her third child, Laure Bellelli (la Baronne) stands proud and aloof, in full mourning for her recently deceased father (Degas’ grandfather) Hilaire Degas, whose portrait hangs on the wall behind her. Meanwhile, her husband, conspicuously not in mourning, sits in comfort by the fire. Adults and children are compressed into a shallow plane, an airless, static vacuum. The uneasy ambience is accentuated by Giulia’s absent leg and the family dog, shown without its head, in the right foreground.
In this portrait of Monsieur Ruelle, Degas shows his father’s former bank cashier as a man of seriousness and restrained sophistication, dressed in a dinner suit and black bow tie as if preparing to go the opera. In its combination of informality and masculine severity the portrait conforms to a convention among nineteenth-century Realist artists of portraying each other and their friends as modern men of leisure and the metropolis.
On returning to Paris from Italy in 1860 Degas began work on scenes from the Bible and ancient history, including this preparatory oil sketch for a vignette from an ancient greek subject. In the foreground two groups of adolescents are seen confronting each other on the plains of Sparta, watched over by the white-haired law-giver Lycurgus and the teenagers’ mothers. The subject has conventionally been read as the exercises traditionally undertaken by Spartans in preparation for war, but it has also been suggested that it represents Spartan courtship rites. In the Life of Lycurgus it was noted that display of physical prowess by girls assisted young men in choosing strong mothers, who would produce strong children.
An exhibition of one of the world’s most beloved artists, Edgar Degas, opens to the public from tomorrow at NGV International showcasing significant works never-before-seen in Australia.
In its world premiere, Degas: A New Vision presents the largest display of Degas’ works to ever come to Australia, and forms the most comprehensive retrospective of the artist’s oeuvre in decades. Featuring more than 200 works, Degas: A New Vision reveals Degas’ talent in a new light; not only as a great master of painting, but also as a master of drawing, printmaking, sculpture and photography. The works travel to Melbourne from 65 lenders in more than 40 cities across the globe.
The Premier of Victoria, the Hon. Daniel Andrews MP, said, “Degas: A New Vision is a coup for the NGV and for Victoria. Local audiences will be the first in the world to experience this incredible exhibition – another example of how we are leading the way as the creative state. Part of the Melbourne Winter Masterpieces series, this exhibition continues the tradition of creating drawcard cultural events for locals and visitors and bringing must-see art to our city each year.”
Some of Degas’ most famous masterworks are presented including the bronze sculpture The little fourteen-year-old dancer, 1879-1881, and In a café (The Absinthe drinker), c. 1875-1876. World-renowned paintings, never-before-seen in Australia, are also exhibited such as the celebrated ballet paintings The rehearsal, c. 1874, and Finishing the arabesque, 1877, and Degas’ monumental portrait The Bellelli family, 1867.
Tony Ellwood, Director, NGV, said, “Presenting Edgar Degas’ magnificent oeuvre in a fresh and reinvigorated light showcases him as one of the defining artists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Considered one of the world’s most celebrated and significant artists, his influence upon modern and contemporary art is undeniable. Degas: A New Vision provides audiences with a rare experience to truly be immersed in the creativity and originality of his art, giving visitors a deeper and richer understanding of his brilliance.”
Degas: A New Vision is presented thematically, grouping together the subjects which Degas continually returned to throughout his career, including not only his famous ballet scenes but also arresting portraits, the nude, horse-racing, the social world of Parisian nightlife, and women at work and leisure. The exhibition also explores the great technical, conceptual and expressive freedoms that Degas achieved in his later years, and reveals his experiments with a range of mediums including sculpture and photography. This approach emphasises Degas’ obsessive and highly creative working methods, and allows visitors to enjoy the development of Degas’ art from its beginnings.
Degas was fascinated by aspects of modern life – voraciously painting Paris’ dance halls and cabarets, cafés, racetracks, opera and ballet stages. He also studied the simple, everyday gestures of working women: milliners, dressmakers and laundresses. He was drawn to explore movement that was precise and disciplined, such as that of racehorses and ballet dancers, and absorbed a diverse range of influences from Japanese prints to Italian Mannerism.
The National Gallery of Victoria is pleased to be working with the world’s pre-eminent expert on Edgar Degas, Henri Loyrette, former Director of the Musée du Louvre (2001-2013) and Musée d’Orsay (1994-2001), who is principal curator of the exhibition. The National Gallery of Victoria and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, are both staging this major retrospective, which has been developed by both institutions in association with Art Exhibitions Australia. Degas: A New Vision travels to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, in October 2016.
Press release from the National Gallery of Victoria
Edgar Degas (French, 1834-1917) Portrait of Mademoiselle Eugénie Fiocre in the ballet The Spring 1867-1868 Oil on canvas 130.8 x 145.1cm Brooklyn Museum, New York Gift of James H. Post, A. Augustus Healy, and John T. Underwood, 1921
Among Degas’s circle of Realist painters were some outstanding practitioners of still life, a genre that enjoyed a resurgence of popularity following the revival of interest in the French eighteenth-century painter Jean-Baptiste Siméon Chardin. The identity of the man in this portrait is unknown, although he seems to be a still-life artist. He is depicted by Degas in his studio, informal seated with hands clasped, surrounded by the standard props of his trade: hunks of meat, white cloths, glassware and sketches of past still lives displayed on a wall as aides-mémoire – a masculine counterpart to the portrait of Victoria Dubourg that is also displayed here.
Wall text from the exhibition
Edgar Degas (French, 1834-1917) Victoria Dubourg c. 1868-1869 Oil on canvas 81.3 x 64.8cm Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, Ohio Gift of Mr. and Mrs. William E. Levis
Berthe Marie Jeantaud was the wife of Charles Jeantaud, with whom Degas served in the artillery company under the command of Henri Rouart in 1870-1871, during the chaos of the Franco-Prussian War and Paris Commune. Following Berthe Marie’s marriage to Jeantaud in 1872, Degas produced this as well as a second portrait of her. Her cousin was Vicomte Ludovic Lepic, a landscape painter and etcher who taught degas methods of manipulating plate tones in his monotypes. In this remarkable candid and economical oil sketch, Degas depicts Madame Jeantaud at home with her two small dogs at 24 rue de Téhéran.
So cordial were Degas’s relations with Henri Rouart and his brother Alexis, who was also an art collector, that he dined with Alexis on Tuesdays and Henri on Fridays. In 1906 Degas wrote to his sister Thérèse that the Rouarts were his only remaining family in France. This portrait of Henri with his daughter Hélène was the first of many portraits. Henri is seen here as a paterfamilias, head of his household (a role that Degas esteemed) and in front of one of his landscapes, which degas also admired enough to invite Henri to exhibit with the ‘impressionists’.
While his colleagues exhibition plein-air landscapes as ‘Impressionists’, degas adhered to his position as a ‘Realist’ during the 1860s and 70s, with at times awkward results. Dead fox in the undergrowth displays the powerful sense of physical presence that can be achieved by studying a dead fox in the studio under artificial light, and by using a brush to render the fox’s luscious pelt. Less convincing is the forest setting, which is invited and only roughly blocked out. Here Degas applied thin slashes of green and brown paint to suggest trees and forest floor, emulating, some have suggested, the Realist technique of Gustave Courbet.
Edgar Degas (French, 1834-1917) The little fourteen-year-old dancer 1879-1881, cast 1922-1937 Bronze with cotton skirt and satin ribbon 99.0 x 35.2 x 24.5cm Czestochowski/Pingeot 73 (cast unlettered) Museu de Arte de São Paulo, Assis Chateaubriand Donated by Alberto José Alves, Alberto Alves Filho and Alcino Ribeiro de Lima
At the 1881 ‘impressionist’ group exhibition Degas unveiled a large wax sculpture of an immature ballerina (of which this is a bronze version), which he provocatively clad in real clothing. Critics were scandalised, accusing him of having dredged ‘the lower depths of dance’, choosing his dancer from among the ‘most hatefully ugly’. Degas’ model, ballet student Marie Van Goethem, the daughter of a tailor and a laundress and part-time prostitute, was later to abandon her dance studies and disappear into Paris’ underworld.
Degas produced sculptures in his studio from the 1860s until the 1910s. He modelled them in wax, over steel wire and cork armatures. Never satisfied, he made, destroyed and remade them repeatedly, his primary subjects being thoroughbred racehorses, female dancers and women at their toilette. As Degas’ eyesight deteriorated in his later years, making three-dimensional figures fulfilled a physical and emotional need that transcended any desire to perfect a finished object; he allegedly said that sculpture was ‘a blind man’s trade’.
After Degas’ death in 1917, some 150 wax sculptures were found in his studio, some broken but many intact. His heirs subsequently authorised the casting in bronze, by the Adrien-A. Hébrard Foundry, Paris, and their Milanese master craftsman Albino Palazzolo, of seventy four of the most intact of Degas’ sculptures. While many of Degas’ original wax sculptures still survive, they are too fragile to travel. These bronzes allow wider audiences today to engage with some of the most beautiful sculptures of the nineteenth century.
Wall text from the exhibition
Edgar Degas (French, 1834-1917) The song rehearsal c. 1872-1873 Oil on canvas 81.0 x 64.9cm House Collection, Dumbarton Oaks, Washington D.C.
In October 1872 Degas travelled to New Orleans in the United States, where he stayed for five months with his late mother’s brother Michel Musson and the extended Musson family. The artist’s younger brothers René and Achille had already relocated there, and had opened a wine import business financed by the Parisian Degas family bank. During his stay in Louisiana, Degas painted A cotton office in New Orleans, 1873, which reflected his observations of the industry that was central to that city. This now celebrated painting, which became the first work by Degas to enter a public collection when acquired by Pau’s Musée des Beaux-Arts in 1878, depicts Michel Musson in the foreground sampling cotton fibre in the office of his cotton export business.
René and Achille De Gas appear as relaxed visitors – René reading a newspaper and Achille casually observing the other men at work – in this complex group portrait of fourteen men, which has echoes of the artist’s love of seventeenth-century Dutch guild portraits. A cotton office in New Orleans was the prototype for many of Degas’ works of the 1870s and 1880s: framing that cuts to the heart of the subject and slices through men and objects alike; a de-centred composition viewed from slightly overhead, with a steep, diagonal perspective; a depth of field that creates close-ups while miniaturising anything farther off; and contrasts provided by light sources and, more particularly, by the frequently reproduced backlighting effect.
The partially finished state of Courtyard of a house (New Orleans, sketch) reflects Degas’s experiences in the city, as he struggled to fulfil social obligations with his American relatives. The view here looking out from a shaded interior also indicates that Degas was already experiencing problems with his eyesight, which was affected by the harsh Louisiana sunlight.
The young girl being attended to by a chiropodist in this painting is believed to be Joe Balfour, daughter of Degas’s widowed cousin Estelle Musson, whose husband had been killed in 1862 during the American Civil War. Degas here uses a technique he invented, peinture à l’essence (which entailed using oil pigments with most of the oil blotted away, thinned out with turpentine). Applied like watercolour, it dried with a soft matt finish that Degas preferred to the glossy sheen of traditional oil paintings.
Degas ironically referred to this painting as ‘my genre picture’, by which he understated the gravitas of this domestic scene. This drama of seeming violation perpetrated on a young working-class woman b a man displaying the clothing and posture of a young bourgeois acquired in Degas’s hands the breadth and intensity of history painting. The muted colours and dim light accentuate the unspoken violence, anguish and simmering tension between the two people. The open box on the round table at the centre of the painting is a telling symbol of lost virginity. The rosy interior of the gaping jewel-case is brutally expired by the lamp standing next to it.
Exhibition dates: 15th April – 4th September, 2016
Curator: Keith F. Davis, Senior Curator, Photography at The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art
Unknown maker (American) Group at pond c. 1910s Gelatin silver print 3 × 4 inches The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri Gift of Peter J. Cohen
Dis/membering the snapshot
To say that I dislike the term “snapshot” is an understatement. The term snap/shot implies a lack of consideration in the physical act of taking the photograph. In a snap it was shot – like a snap of the fingers or a bolt out of the blue. But if we think about the photographs in this posting … and we then think about the photographs of Henri Lartigue, or Robert Frank and his travels across 1950s America, I would argue that the only difference between Lartigue, Frank and the former “Unknown makers” is that they were embarked upon a photographic project, and, latterly, were decreed artists.
I believe, and I have always believed, that the taking of photographs is a matter of intention on the part of the photographer.
If you look at these photographs from Unknown makers was it their intention to take this photograph, did they think about what they were doing before they pressed the shutter. And the answer is unequivocally, yes they did. Their aim, their purpose, was that they had the intention to take the photograph they did, they determined of their own free will how to frame these photos and at what split second to press the shutter so as to suit their aim, their thought about what they wanted to capture in the image. This is not a “snap” shot in contemporary parlance, but a considered action and intention.
To say, as Keith F. Davis, Senior Curator, Photography does in the press release, that “Snapshots represent a collective visual unconsciousness of 20th-century American culture,” could not be farther from the truth. They may represent a form of collective subconscious, where these images hover in collective memories and dreams waiting to be visualised, but a collective visual unconsciousness? I don’t think so.
Vernacular photography is about a conscious decision to take a photograph and, at its most poignant, it is about a collective movement that emerges from the subconscious of people all the way around the world – in order (a taxonomic state) to document the world around them.
The joy of the women on the bed, the man and women in the cornfield, the couple in love with the Christmas tree, the man riding the bucking horse bareback, even the close-up of child’s mouth – all of the photographs were taken with an inquiring mind, with an intention to look and see, to feel the memory of that event, that time and space – not as a snap/shot but as an expression of (everlasting) life.
“To see a world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower Hold infinity in the palms of your hand and eternity in an hour.“
William Blake
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Unknown maker (American) Man and woman in corn c. 1930s Gelatin silver print 3 × 4 1/8 inches The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri Gift of Peter J. Cohen
Unknown maker (American) Couple with Christmas tree c. 1940s Gelatin silver print 3 × 3 inches The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri Gift of Peter J. Cohen
Unknown maker (American) Woman with drink on bed 1950s Gelatin silver print 3 1/8 x 4 inches Gift of Peter J. Cohen
Unknown maker (American) Close-up of child’s mouth 1956 Gelatin silver print 3 × 3 inches The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri Gift of Peter J. Cohen
Unknown maker (American) Superman with dumbbell 1972 Ektacolor print 3 1/8 × 3 1/8 inches The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri Gift of Peter J. Cohen
When photography was introduced in 1839, the making of even a single picture was difficult and painstaking. The medium was transformed in the 1880s with the introduction of easier processes and the simple Kodak camera. Amateur photography was born: images became casual and spontaneous, and they were called “snapshots.”
Amateur snapshots are highlighted in An Anonymous Art: American Snapshots from the Peter J. Cohen Gift, which opens at The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City April 15. The Chicago-born Cohen, an investment manager who now lives in New York, bought his first snapshots at a flea market in 1991. Within 20 years he had amassed more than 50,000 of them, and has given away as many as 12,000 snapshots. Cohen gifted the Nelson-Atkins with 350 photos.
“This incredible exhibition of amateur snapshots depicts broadly shared aspects of everyday life,” said Julián Zugazagoitia, Menefee D. and Mary Louise Blackwell CEO and Director of the Nelson-Atkins. “It highlights the deep cultural importance of photography, a visual tradition that flourishes today in images that are made and shared in a variety of ways.”
There are snapshots of pets, baseball games, Christmas trees, amateur plays, vacation fun – and even subjects snapping themselves in mirrors, which could be considered the original selfies.
“The large themes of this exhibition have tremendous continuity,” said Keith F. Davis, Senior Curator, Photography. “Snapshots represent a collective visual unconsciousness of 20th-century American culture – a connection to basic human concerns that is both direct and mysterious.”
Each of the 238 snapshots in An Anonymous Art was hand-selected by Davis himself from an extensive survey of the Cohen collection. The exhibition suggests the medium’s profound social importance as well as its quirky and surprising nature. It features groupings of works illustrating key visual traits and cultural motifs, ranging from accidental multiple exposures to comic and play-acting images. An Anonymous Art runs through Sept 4.
Press release from The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art
Unknown maker (American) Flying bi-plane c. 1920s Gelatin silver print 5 3/8 × 3 3/16 inches The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri Gift of Peter J. Cohen
Unknown maker (American) Whoa! 1928 Gelatin silver print 3 3/16 × 2 1/8 inches The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri Gift of Peter J. Cohen
“Especially poignant are the images captioned “Me,” depicting both adults and children. We may imagine a grown woman writing “me” at the bottom of her childhood photograph as a reminder that she was once a small, vulnerable girl. In Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, French theoretician Roland Barthes writes, “In front of the photograph of my mother as a child, I tell myself: she is going to die: I shudder … over a catastrophe which has already occurred. Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe.”
And yet, despite Barthes’ melancholy, or our own sadness over images of loved ones who have died, each photograph exclaims and reclaims existence – that we have been here. The snapshot embodies an emotion that existed at the time as an agreement between the photographer and the photographed, and that experience bridges time’s distance. And while that may sound simplistic, it is part of the deeper social meaning of the photographic image as a souvenir of experience – a small, visual (auto)biography.
Barthes goes on to discuss his mother’s photograph, writing, “… [the] photograph was indeed essential, it achieved for me, utopically, the impossible science of the unique being.” The image of his mother as a child evinced for Barthes his mother’s true nature – kindness. Similarly, these anonymous photos perhaps reveal the essence of the subjects depicted … daredevil brothers, goofy friends and sisters, sedate parents, and so on.”
Unknown maker (American) Allen and Gladys c. 1930s Gelatin silver print 3 1/8 × 2 1/8 inches The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri Gift of Peter J. Cohen
Unknown maker (American) Dog being held by neck c. 1940 Gelatin silver print 3 1/2 × 2 1/2 inches The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri Gift of Peter J. Cohen
Unknown maker (American) Doris 1949 Gelatin silver print 3 1/8 × 2 1/8 inches The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri Gift of Peter J. Cohen
Unknown maker (American) Boy with bat c. 1950s Gelatin silver print 3 × 3 1/16 inches The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri Gift of Peter J. Cohen
The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art 4525 Oak Street Kansas City, MO 64111
I have found a hidden gem in Roberto Donetta. He has become one of my favourite photographers, this seed salesman from Bleniotal, who died in obscurity and poverty in 1932.
His photographs are like no other that I have seen. There is a directness to his photographs that is deceptively disarming, and humour as well. His theatre is the the theatre of life: the archaic life of his compatriots in the Blenio Valley. If you look at his work on the Roberto Donetta Archive website the landscapes and ambiguous object photographs are interesting, but it is in the genre of portrait photography that he really excels. This was his passion, photographing people.
Somehow, it seems as if the person being photographed has forgotten that the camera was there, as though it has disappeared from view. As the press release observes, “the people did not dissimulate [to disguise or conceal under a false appearance], indeed it’s almost as if they forgot that someone with a camera was watching, so self-engrossed do they look, serious, at one with themselves.” At one with themselves but also at one with being photographed, which is very unusual. There is little affectation here.
The details of the photographs are fascinating. The placement of the figures in Female Workers in Front of the Chocolate Factory Cima Norma for example, where the left two sitting figures have their legs crossed in the opposite direction while both rest their face in their hands, a central figure, and then two figures interlocked as in an infinity symbol looking at each other. The ‘line’ of the photograph changes from one height to another. We observe that Donetta stages his photographs with infinite care, even when there is a blank wall behind the sitter. In Family Portrait, Bleniotal there is a gorgeous touch, as the mother holds the arm of the boy on the left hand side and gently rests two fingers on his other hand. Donetta’s photographs are full of these familial and human observations.
In Group of musicians in front of a building all the men have cigarettes hanging from their mouths, even as they stare directly, unflinchingly into the camera lens. In Humoristic scene, Bleniotal the man holding the tongs can hardly suppress laughing as the theatrical photograph is being taken. Kittens or toys are held in hands while protective arms wrap around shoulders. Here are the precursors to the work of Diane Arbus, in their honesty and straight forwardness: in its modernity Children with Toys, Bleniotal even reminds me a little of Arbus’ Identical Twins, Roselle, New Jersey, 1967. And then there is the use of temporary backdrops, to imitate the upmarket studios of larger towns: “Donetta did imitate the decorative aesthetic of the late 19th century professional studios: he transformed interior or outdoor spaces into improvised studios by, for example, hanging up fabrics or carpets as backdrops and placing objects like chairs or tables with vases of flowers in the foreground. His portraits are carefully composed and arranged, look uncontrived, calm and archaic.”
Despite their deceptively simple nature, there is a mysterious quality to Donetta’s photographs which is enhanced through the use of these portable backdrops. The fabric backdrop and sheet to the left in A wedding couple staged in front of a cloth obscures a rock wall; the idyllic scene behind the boy in Portrait of a Boy, Bleniotal hides an earthy, rudimentary stone wall (and note the figure at the top of the image, holding the backdrop up); in Family Portrait, Bleniotal the hastily hung sheet has been decorated with leaves and branches; and in Untitled [Portrait of a women] a plain concrete wall acts as the backdrop even as a) the women looks out of the image not towards the camera; b) the eye can escape down the left hand side of the image and c) there is a ghost-like figure at the very right hand side of the image standing in what I presume is a doorway. The frontality of his photographs is also very powerful: in Untitled [Portrait of a man] the man looks like he is wearing his Sunday best jacket replete with bow tie. His legs are spread on the chair, the jacket looks to big for him, is stiff and unforgiving, his workers hands rest in his lap and he stares quizzically out of the image: calm, accepting, himself. In Portrait of Cesarina Andreazzi Lazzari, Bleniotal we (again) notice the textures in the image – the stipple, the concrete, the rocks – and then Cesarina’s stubby, dark hands clutching a bunch of flowers and a book, reminiscent of the dirt under the finger nails and dark features of the peasant boys that appear in the work of Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden.
Above all these are honest, direct and engaging photographs. You can think of Lewis Hine, Jacob Riis, Eugène Atget, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange and all the FSA photographers, Diane Arbus and others, and yet they don’t come close to the modern/archaic aesthetic of this man. These photographs are a pilgrimage into a past that has long disappeared. But these faces, these people and their lives, still resonate long after they have passed. I was so moved by these photographs I was in tears the other night when I was constructing this posting, studying the intimate details of these images. That means a lot to me.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
PS. I usually don’t publish photographs without title and date but in this instance, to gather together as many Donetta images as possible, I have published them when I have found good quality images on the internet. I believe that in this instance it is very worth while.
Many thankx to Fotostiftung Schweiz for allowing me to publish some of the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Roberto Donetta (1865-1932) from Ticino is one of Swiss photography’s great outsiders. He managed to survive as a travelling photographer and seed salesman, and upon his death left almost 5,000 glass plates which were preserved merely by chance. These capture the archaic life of his compatriots in the Blenio Valley, which at the time was totally isolated, and the gradual advent of modern times in a precise and sensitive way. Over a period of 30 years and in an era of great change, Donetta became a unique chronicler. At the same time, he saw himself as an artist who – self-taught – experimented freely and knew how to master his medium. His pictures are penetrating and humorous, cheerful and deadly serious – be they of children, families, wedding couples, professional people, the harsh everyday-life of women and men, or of the photographer himself. The Blenio Valley as a microcosm: with Donetta the mountain valley becomes the stage for a great Theater of the World. The exhibition will display about 120 works from the Donetta Archive, many of them on show to the public for the first time ever.
Roberto Donetta was born in Biasca on 6 June 1865. It is not known where he spent his youth. Towards the late 1870s his family most probably moved to Castro in the Blenio Valley, as his father had got a job there as a military functionary. An official register entry on the occasion of his marriage to Teodolinda Tinetti indicates that Roberto Donetta certainly lived in the valley as of 1886. He is registered there as “contadino”, a farmer, which he most likely never was. In 1892 he opened a small grocery shop in Corzoneso, but he had it for only six months. In 1894 he went to London to work as a waiter, returning just 15 months later, sick and exhausted. He then became a hawker and travelled into the most remote corners of the whole valley selling vegetable and flower seeds. As of 1900 he lived in the “Casa Rotonda” in Casserio, part of the Corzoneso municipality. He and Teodolinda meantime had seven children, one of whom died at the age of one. It was around that time that Donetta began to be involved with photography. Apparently Dionigi Sorgesa, a sculptor from Corzoneso, introduced him to the profession and also rented him a camera. Now Donetta was not only a seed merchant but also the valley’s photographer.
A Constant traveller
After turbulent quarrels about the use of their sparse income, he and his family separated in 1912: his wife and children left him in the direction of Bellinzona in search of more lucrative work. Only the youngest son, Saul, remained with his father. On 6 June 1913, his 48th birthday, some of Donetta’s belongings were seized and, for a couple of months, he had no camera, which was a great worry to him: “Not to be able to work for a period of nine months – that severed my connection with my art and made me totally destitute.” Donetta spent the years after the First World War in great solitude, constantly on the road throughout the valley. From 1927 onwards, some of his photographs were published in one of Switzerland’s first illustrated journals, L’Illustré, issued by Ringier.
On the morning of 6 September 1932, Roberto Donetta was found dead in his home. All his photographic equipment was confiscated and auctioned so as to pay off his debts to the municipality. The glass plates, however, were all left untouched. In the mid-1980s Mariarosa Bozzini rediscovered them in Corzoneso.
Between tradition and modernity
Donetta’s personality was full of contradictions. On the one hand, he expressed considerable interest in all the phenomena associated with the advent of modern achievements, such as photography. On the other hand, he was decidedly conservative when it came to the cohesion of the family or his close links with nature. The latter prevented him from leaving the valley to look for more secure work in town. He lamented the constant changes associated with road building and new railway lines, which he did not see as a blessing for the valley. In his capacity as a photographer he succumbed to the fascination of the modern, yet at the same time he expressed a deep respect for long-standing traditions and rituals.
Roberto Donetta’s passion was undoubtedly for portrait photography. The self-taught photographer not only exhibited an astonishing technical mastery in portraying people, but was also able to give free rein to his creativity – despite the fact that this particular field of photography was strongly influenced by the conventions and expectations of his clients. His numerous portraits of children are remarkable. With children he was well able to live out his delight in composing, his talent in staging small scenes. He took the young people seriously, and they in turn were his accomplices, becoming involved in his idiosyncratic ideas.
The chronicler and his style
Throughout his life Donetta accompanied life in the valley, taking commissioned photographs of the inhabitants and the representatives of the different professions, as well as of various events: a visit by a bishop, the arrival of a carousel, a flood, a fire, the construction of a railway line or a bell tower. He was also present at life’s rituals, the transitions from one age group to another, from one social group to the next, or else the prominent fixed points in the year’s cycle, be they secular or ecclesiastical: festivals, weddings, funerals, processions, outdoor church services, these were inconceivable without “il fotografo”. Donetta made photography an important part of those rituals, and over the course of time the photographer was as much a part of the valley as the parson was of the church. This is surely the source of the quality of his photographs: the people did not dissimulate, indeed it’s almost as if they forgot that someone with a camera was watching, so self-engrossed do they look, serious, at one with themselves.
The improvised studio
As Donetta did not have a studio of his own, he travelled the whole valley to take his portraits and produced only small modest prints in postcard format (ie. 7 x 11 cm), which he occasionally stamped with his initials. Often the only ornamentation was an oval vignetting or rounded edges. He regularly delivered the commissioned photographs late because, in order to save chemicals, he only developed his films infrequently. After his rounds as a seed merchant, he then struggled with his business correspondence late into the evening. His works differ greatly from the elegant, classic, gold-edged cards that people could have done those days in the city studios without long waiting periods.
Yet in his own way Donetta did imitate the decorative aesthetic of the late 19th century professional studios: he transformed interior or outdoor spaces into improvised studios by, for example, hanging up fabrics or carpets as backdrops and placing objects like chairs or tables with vases of flowers in the foreground. His portraits are carefully composed and arranged, look uncontrived, calm and archaic. Because of the long exposure times, he was concerned to eliminate chance and spontaneity as far as possible.
In addition to this, he also experimented, or simply took photographs for himself: still life, stormy scenes, cloud formations, strangely shaped cliff or tree outlines. These photographs impress us by their modernity and originality and testify to an inquisitive man with an interest in aesthetic issues.
![Sabine Weiss (Swiss-French, 1924-2021) 'Enfants jouant, rue Edmond-Flamand' [Children playing, rue Edmond-Flamand] Paris, 1952](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/weiss-children-playing-web.jpg "Sabine Weiss (Swiss-French, 1924-2021) 'Enfants jouant, rue Edmond-Flamand' [Children playing, rue Edmond-Flamand] Paris, 1952")
![Sabine Weiss (Swiss-French, 1924-2021) 'Anna Karina pour la marque Korrigan' [Anna Karina for the brand Korrigan] 1958](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/weiss-karina-web.jpg "Sabine Weiss (Swiss-French, 1924-2021) 'Anna Karina pour la marque Korrigan' [Anna Karina for the brand Korrigan] 1958")
![Josef Sudek (Czech, 1896-1976) 'Dimanche après-midi à l'île Kolín' [Sunday afternoon at Kolín island] c. 1922–1926](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/sudek-dimanche-aprc3a8s-midi-c3a0-l_c3aele-kolc3adn-vers-1922e280931926-web1.jpg "Josef Sudek (Czech, 1896-1976) 'Dimanche après-midi à l'île Kolín' [Sunday afternoon at Kolín island] c. 1922–1926")
![Josef Sudek (Czech, 1896-1976) 'Portrait de mon ami Funke' [Portrait of my friend Funke] 1924](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/sudek-portrait-de-mon-ami-funke-1924-web1.jpg "Josef Sudek (Czech, 1896-1976) 'Portrait de mon ami Funke' [Portrait of my friend Funke] 1924")
![Josef Sudek (Czech, 1896-1976) 'La Fenêtre de mon atelier' [The window of my studio] c. 1940-1948](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/sudek-la-fenc3aatre-de-mon-atelier-vers-1940e280931948-web1.jpg "Josef Sudek (Czech, 1896-1976) 'La Fenêtre de mon atelier' [The window of my studio] c. 1940-1948")
![Josef Sudek (Czech, 1896-1976) 'La Fenêtre de mon atelier' [The window of my studio] c. 1940–1954](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/josef-sudek-la-fenc3aatre-de-mon-atelier-vers-1940e280931954-web1.jpg "Josef Sudek (Czech, 1896-1976) 'La Fenêtre de mon atelier' [The window of my studio] c. 1940–1954")
![Josef Sudek (Czech, 1896-1976) 'La Fenêtre de mon atelier' [The window of my studio] c. 1940-1950](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/josef-sudek-la-fenc3aatre-de-mon-atelier-vers-1940e280931950-web1.jpg "Josef Sudek (Czech, 1896-1976) 'La Fenêtre de mon atelier' [The window of my studio] c. 1940-1950")
![Josef Sudek (Czech, 1896-1976) 'Quatre saisons: l'été' [Four seasons: summer] c. 1940-1954](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/josef-sudek-quatre-saisons-l_c3a9tc3a9-vers-1940e280931954-web1.jpg "Josef Sudek (Czech, 1896-1976) 'Quatre saisons: l'été' [Four seasons: summer] c. 1940-1954")
![Josef Sudek (Czech, 1896-1976) 'La Dernière Rose' [The Last Rose] 1956](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/sudek-la-dernic3a8re-rose-1956-web1.jpg "Josef Sudek (Czech, 1896-1976) 'La Dernière Rose' [The Last Rose] 1956")
![Josef Sudek (Czech, 1896-1976) 'Le Jardin Royal' [The Royal Garden] c. 1940-1946](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/sudek-le-jardin-royal-vers-1940e280931946-web1.jpg "Josef Sudek (Czech, 1896-1976) 'Le Jardin Royal' [The Royal Garden] c. 1940-1946")
![Josef Sudek (Czech, 1896-1976) 'Prague pendant la nuit' [Prague at night] 1950](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/sudek-prague-pendant-la-nuit-1950-web1.jpg "Josef Sudek (Czech, 1896-1976) 'Prague pendant la nuit' [Prague at night] 1950")
![Josef Sudek (Czech, 1896-1976) 'Prague pendant la nuit' [Prague at night] c. 1950-1959](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/sudek-prague-pendant-la-nuit-vers-1950e280931959-web1.jpg "Josef Sudek (Czech, 1896-1976) 'Prague pendant la nuit' [Prague at night] c. 1950-1959")
![Josef Sudek (Czech, 1896-1976) 'Prague pendant la nuit' [Prague at night] c. 1950-1959](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/josef-sudek-prague-pendant-la-nuit-vers-1950e280931959-web1.jpg "Josef Sudek (Czech, 1896-1976) 'Prague pendant la nuit' [Prague at night] c. 1950-1959")
![Josef Sudek (Czech, 1896-1976) 'Le Jardin de Rothmayer' [The Rothmayer Garden] 1954-1959](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/sudek-le-jardin-de-rothmayer-1954e280931959-web1.jpg "Josef Sudek (Czech, 1896-1976) 'Le Jardin de Rothmayer' [The Rothmayer Garden] 1954-1959")
![Josef Sudek (Czech, 1896-1976) 'Dans le jardin' [In the garden] 1954-1959](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/sudek-dans-le-jardin-1954e280931959-web1.jpg "Josef Sudek (Czech, 1896-1976) 'Dans le jardin' [In the garden] 1954-1959")
![Josef Sudek (Czech, 1896-1976) 'Labyrinthe sur ma table' [Labyrinth on my table] 1967](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/sudek-labyrinthe-sur-ma-table-1967-web1.jpg "Josef Sudek (Czech, 1896-1976) 'Labyrinthe sur ma table' [Labyrinth on my table] 1967")
![Josef Sudek (Czech, 1896-1976) 'Labyrinthe de verre' [Glass Maze] around 1968-1972](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/sudek-labyrinthe-de-verre-vers-1968e280931972-web1.jpg "Josef Sudek (Czech, 1896-1976) 'Labyrinthe de verre' [Glass Maze] around 1968-1972")
![Josef Sudek (Czech, 1896-1976) 'Sans titre (Nature morte sur le rebord de la fenêtre)' [Untitled (Still life on the windowsill)] 1951](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/josef-sudek-sans-titre-nature-morte-sur-le-rebord-de-la-fenc3aatre-1951-web1.jpg "Josef Sudek (Czech, 1896-1976) 'Sans titre (Nature morte sur le rebord de la fenêtre)' [Untitled (Still life on the windowsill)] 1951")
![Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) 'Allenamento degli allievi del corpo della Marina [Students of the Navy training]' 1936 from the exhibition 'Ken Domon: Master of Japanese Realism' at the Museo dell'Ara Pacis, Rome, May - Sept, 2016](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/2-domon-ken-web.jpg "Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) 'Allenamento degli allievi del corpo della Marina [Students of the Navy training]' 1936 from the exhibition 'Ken Domon: Master of Japanese Realism' at the Museo dell'Ara Pacis, Rome, May - Sept, 2016")
![Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) 'Esercitazioni delle crocerossine' [Red Cross exercises] 1938 from the exhibition 'Ken Domon: Master of Japanese Realism' at the Museo dell'Ara Pacis, Rome, May - Sept, 2016](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/3-domon-ken-web.jpg "Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) 'Esercitazioni delle crocerossine' [Red Cross exercises] 1938 from the exhibition 'Ken Domon: Master of Japanese Realism' at the Museo dell'Ara Pacis, Rome, May - Sept, 2016")
![Ken Domon. 'Bambini che fanno roteare gli ombrelli [Kids twirling umbrellas]' c. 1937](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/15-domon-ken-web.jpg "Ken Domon. 'Bambini che fanno roteare gli ombrelli [Kids twirling umbrellas]' c. 1937")
![Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) 'Esercitazioni delle crocerossine [Red Cross exercises]' 1938](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/4-domon-ken-web.jpg "Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) 'Esercitazioni delle crocerossine [Red Cross exercises]' 1938")
![Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-199 'Foto commemorativa della cerimonia di diploma del corpo della Marina' [Commemorative photo of the Marine Corp graduation ceremony] 1944](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/5-domon-ken-web.jpg "Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-199 'Foto commemorativa della cerimonia di diploma del corpo della Marina' [Commemorative photo of the Marine Corp graduation ceremony] 1944")
![Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) 'Vigile urbano a Ginza 4-chōme' [Traffic policeman in Ginza 4-chōme] 1946](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/6-domon-ken-web.jpg "Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) 'Vigile urbano a Ginza 4-chōme' [Traffic policeman in Ginza 4-chōme] 1946")
![Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) 'Pescatrici di perle (ama san)' [Pearl fisherwomen] 1948](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/9-domon-ken-web.jpg "Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) 'Pescatrici di perle (ama san)' [Pearl fisherwomen] 1948")
![Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) 'Donne a passeggio' [Women walking] 1950](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/7-domon-ken-web.jpg "Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) 'Donne a passeggio' [Women walking] 1950")
![Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) 'L'attrice Yamaguchi Yoshiko' [The actress Yoshiko Yamaguchi] 1952](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/8-domon-ken-web.jpg "Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) 'L'attrice Yamaguchi Yoshiko' [The actress Yoshiko Yamaguchi] 1952")
![Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) 'Sit-in studentesco a Tachikawa contro l'ampliamento della base americana' [Student sit-in in Tachikawa against the expansion of US base] 1955](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/10-domon-ken-web.jpg "Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) 'Sit-in studentesco a Tachikawa contro l'ampliamento della base americana' [Student sit-in in Tachikawa against the expansion of US base] 1955")
![Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) 'Sorelline orfane, Rumie e Sayuri' [Orphan sisters, Rumie and Sayuri] 1959](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/12-domon-ken-web.jpg "Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) 'Sorelline orfane, Rumie e Sayuri' [Orphan sisters, Rumie and Sayuri] 1959")
![Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) 'Lucertola [Lizard]' 1955](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/13-domon-ken-web.jpg "Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) 'Lucertola [Lizard]' 1955")
![Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) 'Pioggerella' [Drizzle] 1952-1954](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/14-domon-ken-web.jpg "Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) 'Pioggerella' [Drizzle] 1952-1954")
![Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) 'Bagno presso il fiume davanti allo Hiroshima Dome' [Bath at the river in front of the Hiroshima Dome] 1957](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/16-domon-ken-web.jpg "Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) 'Bagno presso il fiume davanti allo Hiroshima Dome' [Bath at the river in front of the Hiroshima Dome] 1957")
![Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) 'La morte di Keiji' [The death of Keiji] 1957](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/20-domon-ken-web.jpg "Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) 'La morte di Keiji' [The death of Keiji] 1957")
![Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) 'Paziente in ospedale' [Hospital patient] 1957](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/17-domon-ken-web.jpg "Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) 'Paziente in ospedale' [Hospital patient] 1957")
![Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) 'Donna in cura per le lesioni da bomba atomica' [Women being treated for injuries from atomic bomb] 1957](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/18-domon-ken-web.jpg "Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) 'Donna in cura per le lesioni da bomba atomica' [Women being treated for injuries from atomic bomb] 1957")
![Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) 'Gemella non vedente' [Blind twin (female)] 1957](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/19-domon-ken-web.jpg "Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) 'Gemella non vedente' [Blind twin (female)] 1957")
![Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) 'Autoritratto' [Self-portrait] 1958](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/21-domon-ken-web.jpg "Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) 'Autoritratto' [Self-portrait] 1958")
![Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) 'Ushi (Bue), dai dodici guardiani (jūnishinshō) del Murōji' [Ushi (Ox), one of the twelve guardians (jūnishinshō) of Muroji] 1941-1943](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/26-domon-ken-web.jpg "Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) 'Ushi (Bue), dai dodici guardiani (jūnishinshō) del Murōji' [Ushi (Ox), one of the twelve guardians (jūnishinshō) of Muroji] 1941-1943")
![Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) 'Hitsuji (Pecora), dai dodici guardiani (jūnishinshō) del Murōji' [Hitsuji (Sheep), one of the twelve guardians (jūnishinshō) of Muroji] 1941-1943](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/27-domon-ken-web.jpg "Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) 'Hitsuji (Pecora), dai dodici guardiani (jūnishinshō) del Murōji' [Hitsuji (Sheep), one of the twelve guardians (jūnishinshō) of Muroji] 1941-1943")
![Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) 'Buddha Shaka ligneo a figura intera presso il Mirokudō del Murōji [Buddha Shaka wooden full-length at the Mirokudō Muroji]' c. 1943](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/30-domon-ken-web.jpg "Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) 'Buddha Shaka ligneo a figura intera presso il Mirokudō del Murōji [Buddha Shaka wooden full-length at the Mirokudō Muroji]' c. 1943")
![Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) 'Ōnodera, campana e ciliegi [Onodera, bell and cherry trees]' 1977](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/28-domon-ken-web.jpg "Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) 'Ōnodera, campana e ciliegi [Onodera, bell and cherry trees]' 1977")
![Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) 'Pagoda del Murōji con la neve [Pagoda Muroji with snow]' 1978](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/29-domon-ken-web.jpg "Ken Domon (Japanese, 1909-1990) 'Pagoda del Murōji con la neve [Pagoda Muroji with snow]' 1978")
![Installation view of the exhibition 'Degas: A New Vision' at the National Gallery of Victoria International, Melbourne showing at left, 'Mendiante romaine' [Roman beggar women] (1857)](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/installation-l.jpg "Installation view of the exhibition 'Degas: A New Vision' at the National Gallery of Victoria International, Melbourne showing at left, 'Mendiante romaine' [Roman beggar women] (1857)")
![Edgar Degas (French, 1834-1917) 'Mendiante romaine' [Roman beggar women] 1857 (installation view)](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/installation-m.jpg "Edgar Degas (French, 1834-1917) 'Mendiante romaine' [Roman beggar women] 1857 (installation view)")
![Installation view of the exhibition 'Degas: A New Vision' at the National Gallery of Victoria International, Melbourne showing at left, 'Monsieur Reulle' (1861); and at right, 'Portrait de jeune femme' [Portrait of a young woman] (1867)](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/installation-q.jpg "Installation view of the exhibition 'Degas: A New Vision' at the National Gallery of Victoria International, Melbourne showing at left, 'Monsieur Reulle' (1861); and at right, 'Portrait de jeune femme' [Portrait of a young woman] (1867)")
![Edgar Degas (French, 1834-1917) 'Étude pour Jeunes Spartiates s'exerçant à la lutte' [Study for The young Spartans exercising] c. 1860-1861 (installation view)](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/installation-o.jpg "Edgar Degas (French, 1834-1917) 'Étude pour Jeunes Spartiates s'exerçant à la lutte' [Study for The young Spartans exercising] c. 1860-1861 (installation view)")
![Edgar Degas (French, 1834-1917) 'Petites filles spartiates provoquant des garçons' [Young Spartan girls challenging boys] c. 1860 (installation view)](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/installation-n.jpg "Edgar Degas (French, 1834-1917) 'Petites filles spartiates provoquant des garçons' [Young Spartan girls challenging boys] c. 1860 (installation view)")
![Edgar Degas (French, 1834-1917) 'Petites filles spartiates provoquant des garçons' [Young Spartan girls challenging boys] c. 1860 (installation view)](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/installation-p.jpg "Edgar Degas (French, 1834-1917) 'Petites filles spartiates provoquant des garçons' [Young Spartan girls challenging boys] c. 1860 (installation view)")
![Edgar Degas (French, 1834-1917) 'Etude de nus: Mlle Fiocre dans le ballet La Source' [Nude study: Mademoiselle Fiocre in the ballet 'The Spring'] 1867-1868 (installation view)](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/installation-aa.jpg "Edgar Degas (French, 1834-1917) 'Etude de nus: Mlle Fiocre dans le ballet La Source' [Nude study: Mademoiselle Fiocre in the ballet 'The Spring'] 1867-1868 (installation view)")
![Installation view of the exhibition 'Degas: A New Vision' at the National Gallery of Victoria International, Melbourne showing at left, 'Portrait d'homme' [Portrait of a man] (c. 1866) and at right, 'Victoria Dubourg' (1868-1869)](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/installation-z.jpg "Installation view of the exhibition 'Degas: A New Vision' at the National Gallery of Victoria International, Melbourne showing at left, 'Portrait d'homme' [Portrait of a man] (c. 1866) and at right, 'Victoria Dubourg' (1868-1869)")
![Installation view of the exhibition 'Degas: A New Vision' at the National Gallery of Victoria International, Melbourne Installation view of the exhibition 'Degas: A New Vision' at the National Gallery of Victoria International, Melbourne showing at left, 'Portrait d'homme' [Portrait of a man] (c. 1866) and at right, 'Victoria Dubourg' (1868-1869)](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/installation-v.jpg "Installation view of the exhibition 'Degas: A New Vision' at the National Gallery of Victoria International, Melbourne Installation view of the exhibition 'Degas: A New Vision' at the National Gallery of Victoria International, Melbourne showing at left, 'Portrait d'homme' [Portrait of a man] (c. 1866) and at right, 'Victoria Dubourg' (1868-1869)")
![Edgar Degas (French, 1834-1917) 'Mme Jeantaud sur sa chaise longue, avec deux chiens' [Madame Jeantaud on her chaise longue, with two dogs] 1877 (installation view)](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/installation-x.jpg "Edgar Degas (French, 1834-1917) 'Mme Jeantaud sur sa chaise longue, avec deux chiens' [Madame Jeantaud on her chaise longue, with two dogs] 1877 (installation view)")
![Edgar Degas (French, 1834-1917) 'Mme Jeantaud sur sa chaise longue, avec deux chiens' [Madame Jeantaud on her chaise longue, with two dogs] 1877 (installation view detail)](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/installation-x-detail.jpg "Edgar Degas (French, 1834-1917) 'Mme Jeantaud sur sa chaise longue, avec deux chiens' [Madame Jeantaud on her chaise longue, with two dogs] 1877 (installation view detail)")
![Edgar Degas (French, 1834-1917) 'Un bureau de coton à la Nouvelle-Orléans' [A cotton office in New Orleans] 1873 (installation view)](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/installation-af.jpg "Edgar Degas (French, 1834-1917) 'Un bureau de coton à la Nouvelle-Orléans' [A cotton office in New Orleans] 1873 (installation view)")
![Edgar Degas (French, 1834-1917) 'Un bureau de coton à la Nouvelle-Orléans' [A cotton office in New Orleans] 1873 (installation view)](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/exhi040021_web.jpg "Edgar Degas (French, 1834-1917) 'Un bureau de coton à la Nouvelle-Orléans' [A cotton office in New Orleans] 1873 (installation view)")
![Roberto Donetta (Swiss, 1865-1932) 'Untitled [Basket maker], Bleniotal' Nd](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/donetta-l-web.jpg "Roberto Donetta (Swiss, 1865-1932) 'Untitled [Basket maker], Bleniotal' Nd")
![Roberto Donetta (Swiss, 1865-1932) 'Untitled [Group Portrait], Bleniotal' Nd](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/donetta-j-web.jpg "Roberto Donetta (Swiss, 1865-1932) 'Untitled [Group Portrait], Bleniotal' Nd")
![Roberto Donetta (Swiss, 1865-1932) 'Untitled [Group of men], Bleniotal' Nd](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/donetta-i-web.jpg "Roberto Donetta (Swiss, 1865-1932) 'Untitled [Group of men], Bleniotal' Nd")
![Roberto Donetta (Swiss, 1865-1932) 'Untitled [Boy and girl]' Nd](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/donetta-r-web.jpg "Roberto Donetta (Swiss, 1865-1932) 'Untitled [Boy and girl]' Nd")
![Roberto Donetta (Swiss, 1865-1932) 'Untitled [Portrait of a women]' Nd](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/donetta-p-web.jpg "Roberto Donetta (Swiss, 1865-1932) 'Untitled [Portrait of a women]' Nd")
![Roberto Donetta (Swiss, 1865-1932) 'Untitled [Portrait of a man]' Nd](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/donetta-o-web.jpg "Roberto Donetta (Swiss, 1865-1932) 'Untitled [Portrait of a man]' Nd")
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