Exhibition: ‘National Geographic: The Past and Future Present’ at Steven Kasher Gallery, New York

Exhibition dates: 10th January – 16th February, 2013

Curators: Steven Kasher and the gallery team, with archival selections drawn from their partnership with National Geographic

Jean-Leon Huens (Belgian, 1921-1984)
Sir Frances Drake, Unmanned British Ships with Flammables Explode Among Spanish Ships
Nd
Jean-Leon Huens / National Geographic Society / Steven Kasher Gallery

A wonderfully eclectic posting!

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

Vittorio Sella (Italian, 1859-1943)
A Cascade of Weathered Ice Spills From the 14 Square Mile Glacier
Karagom Glacier, Caucasus Mountains, Russia
1890
Vittorio Sella / National Geographic Image Collection / Steven Kasher Gallery

Vittorio Sella (28 August 1859 – 12 August 1943) was an Italian photographer and mountaineer, whose photographs of mountains are regarded as some of the finest ever made. …

The high quality of Sella’s photography was in part due to his use of 30×40 cm photographic plates, in spite of the difficulty of carrying bulky and fragile equipment into remote places. He had to invent equipment, including modified pack saddles and rucksacks, to allow these particularly large glass plates to be transported safely. His photographs were widely published and exhibited, and highly praised; Ansel Adams, who saw thirty-one that Sella had presented to the US Sierra Club, said they inspired “a definitely religious awe.” Many of the photographs he took were of mountains which had not been previously recorded and so have historical as well as artistic significance; for example by recording the retreat of glaciers in the Rwenzori mountains in Central Africa.

Text from the Wikipedia website

J. Baylor Roberts (American, 1902-1994)
The Drive-In on Route 1
Alexandria, Virginia, 1941
J. Baylor Roberts / National Geographic Image Collection / Steven Kasher Gallery

J. Baylor Roberts (1902-1994) was a prominent American photographer best known for his prolific three-decade career (1936-1967) on the photographic staff of National Geographic Magazine.

Jacques Ertaud (French, 1924-1995)
Jacques Yves Cousteau Films A Jet-propelled Submersible
Caribbean Sea, 1959
Jacques Ertaud / National Geographic Image Collection / Steven Kasher Gallery

Ned M. Seidler (American, 1922-2007)
Freshwater Pond Life
c. 1970
Gouache and watercolour on paper
12 1/2 x 28 1/2 inches

Ned Seidler (1922-2007) was a gifted illustrator and painter with a special talent for his detailed illustrations of nature. He is best known for his nearly two-decade career as staff artist for National Geographic, and later, for his designs for the U.S. Postal Service.

Born in New York in 1922, Seidler was educated at the Art Students League and Pratt Institute. He was a freelance illustrator for twenty-one years before becoming a respected staff artist for National Geographic in 1967. Seidler’s graphic representations of scientific and natural phenomena, cultures and ethnicities, exploration, and travel graced the magazine’s pages for several years until his retirement in 1985.

Text from the Illustration History website

Steven Kasher Gallery is proud to present the exhibition National Geographic: The Past and Future Present. It is the gallery’s fifth show of works from the National Geographic archives, but our first that presents vintage illustrations side by side with vintage photographs. The one hundred works presented span the entire 20th century. Photographers will include Herbert Ponting, Baron von Gloeden, Maynard Owen Williams, and Hiram Bingham. Illustrators will include Thornton Oakley, Louis Agassi Fuertes, and Tom Lovell. The exhibition will encompass works that represent National Geographic’s rich history in the fields of geography, archaeology, exploration, science, wildlife and world cultures.

Themes explored include Past Civilizations, the Age of the Dinosaur, Space Travel, Native American Cultures, American Industry, the Sea, and Flora and Fauna. National Geographic: The Past and Future Present juxtaposes photographic images taken from life, botanical studies drawn from live specimens, and depictions of the past and the future, imagined but unseen. These juxtapositions will highlight changing visions of natural and human history as they have evolved over the twelve decades of the Society’s image making.

“This exhibition represents the continuation of a four-year partnership with the Steven Kasher Gallery to put our commissioned work in the public eye. The inclusion of illustrations in this exhibition demonstrates the overall range of our archive, which spans vintage and contemporary photography, as well as drawings, paintings and other illustrations from the late 1800s to the present day.”

Maura Mulvihill, Senior Vice President for National Geographic Society and Director of the National Geographic Image Collection

Press release from the Steven Kasher Gallery website

Herbert Ponting (British, 1870-1935)
Aboard the Terra Nova on the British Antarctic Expedition 1910-1913
c. 1911
Herbert Ponting / National Geographic Image Collection / Steven Kasher Gallery

Roland Reed (American, 1864-1934)
Tribute to Dead Piegan Blackfoot
Montana, 1912
Roland Reed / National Geographic Image Collection / Steven Kasher Gallery

Roland (Royal Jr.) W. Reed (June 22, 1864 – December 14, 1934), an American artist and photographer, was part of an early 20th century group of photographers of Native Americans known as pictorialists. …

Since Reed’s death, his work has remained largely unknown. The few photos that are published are generally either unattributed or misattributed. During his life, his efforts were mostly solitary and self-funded. Other than his work with the Great Northern Railroad, he had little interest in exploiting commercial or promotional items such as calendars. At one point he turned down $15,000 for approximately 200 negatives to prevent them from being used in advertising for which he would have no input or control. In 1915 National Geographic Magazine licensed the rights to about 40 of his photographs, but fewer than eight were actually published between 1916 and 1988.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Washburn-Crosby Company (American)
The Minneapolis Milling District, The Largest U.S. Flour Producer
1915
Washburn-Crosby Company / National Geographic Image Collection / Steven Kasher Gallery

Charles Bittinger (American, 1879-1970)
Eclipse of the Sun by the Earth
1930s
Charles Bittinger / National Geographic Society / Steven Kasher Gallery

Charles Bittinger (June 27, 1879 – December 18, 1970) was an American artist who explored the use of scientific techniques for artistic purposes. During World War I, he also played a prominent role in the development of naval camouflage.

In 1937, the U.S. Navy and the National Geographic Society invited Bittinger to paint on-site a total solar eclipse on Canton Island in the Pacific Ocean.

Else Bostelmann (American born Germany, 1882-1961)
A Saber-Toothed Viperfish Attacking Young Ocean Sunfish
c. 1934
Gouache on paper
14 x 11 inches

Else Winkler von Röder (Roeder) Bostelmann (1882-1961), a German Empire-born American artist, joined the New York Zoological Society (now the Wildlife Conservation Society) in 1929 to paint marine life during William Beebe’s bathysphere oceanographic expeditions at Bermuda’s Nonsuch Island (1930-1934).

Bostelmann’s marine life paintings depicted the unbelievable sights that Beebe encountered from great depths in the ocean. “Had it not been for Mrs. Bostelmann’s deftness in rapidly sketching what she saw, much of the colour and drama would have been lost.” …

Bostelmann’s marine life art was published in several National Geographic Magazines in the 1930s, 1940s and beyond. Her depiction of the bioluminescence of unknown ocean life caused a stir in the oceanographic world.

Although she did not descend in the Bathysphere, her studies and final paintings were true to life at the time. Beebe described what he saw as he descended in the bathysphere through a direct telephone line to the ship above him. Detailed notes were taken by Gloria Hollister, a member of the research team. When Beebe exited the bathysphere, he immediately worked with Bostelmann as she put his descriptions to paper using watercolour, gouache and pencil. She did don a 16-pound copper helmet with an air hose attached to the ship above, sat on a chair on the ocean floor (20-35 feet down) with her canvas attached to an iron music stand weighted with lead and her brushes tied to the stand as she painted with oil the fish she saw around her. Due to the change in available light at that depth, the colours in her paintings were muted.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Richard Hewitt Stewart (American, 1901-2004)
Colossal Olmec Head
La Venta, Mexico, 1940
Richard Hewitt Stewart / National Geographic Image Collection / Steven Kasher Gallery

Richard Hewett Stewart (1901-2004) began working for the National Geographic Society as a photo lab technician in 1924. Ten years later, he joined Matthew Stirling’s archeological team to photograph and, to a lesser extent, film the team’s eight expeditions to Veracruz and Tabasco (1939-1946). As a result, Stewart’s photographs illustrated all of National Geographic articles about the Olmec excavations carried out by the Smithsonian. Stewart again joined Stirling for the 1948-1949 archaeological expedition to Panama, sponsored by the Smithsonian Institution and the National Geographic Society.

Text from the Smithsonian Institution website

Thorton Oakley (American, 1881-1953)
Liquid Steel Pours From an Electric Furnace
1940s
Thorton Oakley / National Geographic Society / Steven Kasher Gallery

Thornton Oakley (March 27, 1881 – April 4, 1953) was an American artist and illustrator. During World War II he did three sets of pictures of the war effort for National Geographic Magazine in 1942, 1943, and 1945.

National Geographic Magazine – a total of 48 colour plates:
~ Vol. 82, No. 6 (December, 1942), pp. 716-734, Theme: ‘American Industries Geared for War’ – 16 colour plates
~ Vol. 84, No. 6 (December, 1943), pp. 671-688, Theme: ‘American Transportation Vital to Victory’ – 16 colour plates
~ Vol. 88, No. 6 (December, 1945), pp. 737-752, Theme: ‘Science Works for Mankind’ – 16 colour plates

Steven Kasher Gallery
166 Second Ave., 3A
New York, NY 10003
Phone: 917 922 6861

Opening hours:
By appointment only

Steven Kasher Gallery website

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Review: ‘Vestige II’ Melissa Powell and ‘Darkness by Day’ Shannon McGrath at Anita Traverso Gallery, Richmond, Melbourne

Exhibition dates: 5th February – 23rd February, 2013

Curators: the gallery and the artists

Melissa Powell (Australian)
Painterly Divide No.1
2012
Pigment ink on cotton rag
50.5 x 70.6cm
edn. 1/9

ves·tige
/ˈvestij/

Noun
1/ A trace of something that is disappearing or no longer exists
2/ The smallest amount (used to emphasise the absence of something): “without a vestige of sympathy”
3/ Biology an organ or part of an organism that is a small nonfunctioning remnant of a functional organ in an ancestor
a trace suggesting that something was once present or felt or otherwise important; “the footprints of an earlier civilisation”

via French from Latin ves·tigium footprint, track

Two solid exhibitions of photography are on display at Anita Traverso in Richmond, a gallery that is showing more photography these days, to excellent affect.

Natimuk based photographer Melissa Powell documents the seasonal changes of the Wimmera environment through the use of aerial photography. She brings her skills as a forensic photographer to bear when capturing our mark on the landscape. Her photographs (full frame and never cropped), are as sharp as a tack, like the crystallisation of a thought – the surgical gaze of the artist balanced by a lyrical, abstract poetry. Powell renders (and that is the appropriate word) natural phenomena in their direct relation to humanity, pointing her camera at patterns of cropping, the patchiness of the earth and its sandy, infertile soil. She sees the world clearly and tells the story in a plain, almost scientific way… but this utopian vision of the world is balanced by a feeling in the viewer, a feeling of drifting and floating above the earth, inhabiting a liminal space, as in a daydream.

Powell’s is an expression of the land, presented in a particular way as she remembers experiencing it. For example, look at Painterly Divide No.1, (2012, below) and notice the perfect confluence of yin and yang broken by the single mutation of the furrow midway up in the centre of the image (enlarge the image to see it better!). Disorder plays off order in the mind of the viewer in an absolutely sublime way. Sure, a few things need work in the exhibition, like the framing and naming of the works, but this all comes with time and experience. What Powell evidences in her photographs is a wonderfully strong aesthetic producing some of the best aerial photography I have ever seen. Her traces, footprints and tracks are vestigial structures that links us back to our ancestors, photographs as passionate representation of the land, done with strength and depth of soul.

In the back gallery Shannon McGrath, an established architecture photographer, images stacks of wood that “are considered for both their aesthetic values and formal compositional qualities such as patterning and seriality.” The suite of five very large, unmounted black photographs printed on matt Silver Rag paper are stunning, much darker and of more luminance than seen in reproduction here (there are also two other photographs using an electric blue colour that simply did not work for me). Using a minimal composition of the thing itself (and what it can become), the photographer imbues a romantic, visual sensibility into her subject matter. The matt blacks are like velvet and the spaces that open up within the image magical. These things “breathe” like a black Rothko painting, or the plastic black of a Rembrandt.

McGrath’s photographs are “impressionistic inventories of landscapes and entropic architectural structures that connote psychologically, emotionally, and viscerally.” (Anon. “Cyprien Gaillard: The Crystal World,” on the MOMA website [Online] 12/02/2013). The object of her attention – the planks of wood – have a temporality that is characterised by repetition and predictability. The viewer tries to articulate difference through looking but that looking reduces differences to similarities unless we look very closely, are very attentive to the condition of looking. Enlarge any of the dark images below and really look at the cut ends of the wood, their inflection. What is hidden within (or beneath, for the photograph is also a physical object) the flat surface of the image are the nuances of language – the physicality of the print, the punctum of white, the band saw cuts that inhabit the end of days. There is a slippage between language and referent which makes McGrath’s photographs a beautiful deviation and productive possibility of language, one that encourages the vital movement of the subversive sign.

My only concern is “where to next?” What other surfaces which are hidden, which slowly reveal aspects and possibilities, subtleties and complexities will the photographer engage with? Excitingly, I want to see more from both photographers as they combine the ordinary and the poetic in a field of revolutionary possibilities.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

Melissa Powell (Australian)
Traces of Time
2012
Pigment ink on cotton rag
50.5 x 76cm
edn. 1/9

“Centered on documentation of the Wimmera region, Melissa Powell’s images are depicted from an aerial perspective that allows her to capture the theatre and sublimity of a landscape that is consistently eroded and replenished by both the cycles of nature, the progression of time and the agricultural impact of man.”

Anna Briers, independent art curator and writer

Melissa Powell (Australian)
Camouflage No.2
2012
Pigment ink on cotton rag
50.5 x 70.6cm
edn. 1/9

Melissa Powell (Australian)
Droughtbreaker
2011
Pigment ink on cotton rag
50.5 x 70.6cm
edn. 8/12

Melissa Powell (Australian)
Salt Lake No.1
2011
Pigment ink on cotton rag
50.5 x 70.6cm
edn. 8/9

A forensic photographer in her former life, Melissa Powell’s new direction as an aerial photographer was endorsed by her winning first prize for aerial photography at the 2012 International Photography Awards, New York, USA. Vestige II, Powell’s debut exhibition at Anita Traverso Gallery, surveys an amalgam of three photographic series drawn from the artist’s oeuvre – Grounded, Flooded and Dry.

Centred on documentation of the Wimmera region, Powell’s images are depicted from an aerial perspective that allows her to capture the theatre and sublimity of a landscape that is consistently eroded and replenished by the cycles of nature, the progression of time and the agricultural impact of man. Shaped by droughts and bushfires, vast desertous landscapes extend into the horizon. Serpentine rivers and floodplains alternately nourish and fertilise, lacerate and scar. Fecund pastures are contained and demarcated by the rigid geometries of manmade fences and irrigation systems. These vestiges award us a sense of the indelible link between the microcosm and the macrocosm, while enabling us to perceive the constantly shifting narratives of this great southern land.

By contrast Shannon McGrath, an established architecture photographer, aspires to capture the unique spatial dynamics of a building whilst transposing a distillation of the architect’s intention into a two dimensional image. In this photographic series McGrath examines the raw building material of wood in the same way she would approach the documentation of architecture. Photographed on site at the Britton Timber sawmill, the stacks of wood are considered for both their aesthetic values and formal compositional qualities such as patterning and seriality. Simultaneously though, they are envisaged as a core resource imbued with potentiality; their future incarnation, that of the architect’s vision, lying dormant and yet to manifest.

Press release from the Anita Traverso Gallery website

Shannon McGrath (Australian)
Mark 01
2012
From the series Darkness by Day
Pigment print to cotton rag paper
100 x 128cm

Shannon McGrath (Australian)
Mark 02
2012
From the series Darkness by Day
Pigment print to cotton rag paper
100 x 128cm

“These stacks of saw-mill timber were shot in broad daylight without any artificial lighting, in situ and without any intervention in their arrangement. I was drawn to the dark element in them that survives this ‘glare’ yet reveals it in other ways – how the light naturally hits the objects and remains in an interplay with the darkness and shadows of the grain, the individual and beautiful markings the blade has left on the natural material, and the extrusions and hollows of the layering of the wood. This gave the show its title. Even in the jewel-like, cobalt image, there is this dynamic. This is a theme that runs through my creative photography: surfaces which are hidden, which slowly reveal aspects and possibilities, subtleties and complexities. I considered wood as an essential building material so I approached the stacks of timber and photographed it with the same sensitivity as architecture.”

Artist statement

Shannon McGrath (Australian)
Mark 07
2012
From the series Darkness by Day
Pigment print to cotton rag paper
100 x 128cm

Shannon McGrath (Australian)
Mark 08
2012
From the series Darkness by Day
Pigment print to cotton rag paper
100 x 128cm

Anita Traverso Gallery
PO Box 7001, Hawthorn North,
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia 3122

Anita Traverso Gallery website

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Exhibition: ‘Hiroshi Sugimoto. Revolution’ at Museum Brandhorst, Munich

Exhibition dates: 25th October, 2012 – 10th February, 2013

Curator: the artist

Installation photograph of Hiroshi Sugimoto. Revolution at Museum Brandhorst, Munich, 2012
Photo: Haydar Koyupinar
© 2012 Hiroshi Sugimoto

“Water and air. So very commonplace are these substances, they hardly attract  attention – and yet they vouchsafe our very existence.

The beginnings of life are shrouded in myth: Let there water and air. Living phenomena spontaneously generated from water and air in the presence of light, though that could just as easily suggest random coincidence as a Deity. Let’s just say that there happened to be a planet with water and air in our solar system, and moreover at precisely the right distance from the sun for the temperatures required to coax forth life. While hardly inconceivable that at least one such planet should exist in the vast reaches of universe, we search in vain for another similar example.

Mystery of mysteries, water and air are right there before us in the sea. Every time I view the sea, I feel a calming sense of security, as if visiting my ancestral home; I embark on a voyage of seeing.”

Hiroshi Sugimoto

I have always admired the work of Hiroshi Sugimoto, notably his visually poetic series Seascapes and Theaters. His large format photographs expose time through light in a single frame. Their deeply metaphysical and existential nature may be the ultimate distillation of the constructed form of the photographic landscape. “They are explorations of spiritual and physical boundary as much as an exploration of the phenomenology of the picture plane” (Anon. “Hiroshi Sugimoto – Seascapes,” on the C4 Contemporary Art website no longer available online). Like the movie theatre series (where he captures a whole movie on one single frame of film) the seascapes are about the luminosity of life, the enigmatic existence of body and earth imprinted onto film.

Unfortunately, you can only push an idea so far. Personally I feel this latest series of conceptual twiddles, Revolution (1990/2012, publicly displayed here for the first time) fall as flat as a tack. Sugimoto, in his use of the term “revolution”, refers to the “original meaning of the term in the sense of a “suspension” or “overturning of previously accepted laws or practices through new insights or methods.” The reorientation of the referent – of the world, in the world – is supposed to dissipate the Romantic image of the night, unsettling the certainty of the truth of the photograph as a visual record of the world. The photographs’ verisimilitude is supposedly turned on its head, transformed into abstract configurations of light and space through the conceptualisation of the artist. No new narratives are created. In fact the photographs could almost be called post-narrative, essential compositions that emphasise the insular loneliness of modern man’s experiences.

Perhaps they look better in the flesh, or better in a group; perhaps they have more “presence” in reality than they do in reproduction, for this self-styled “revolution” seems to be more a tinkering at the edges of an idea, not a fully realised body of inner work. This is a body of work in/evolution. Sugimoto’s legendary visualisation (his ability to transcend the photographic medium) which is used to create an iconic vision of a timeless state of consciousness, utterly fails him here. You only have to look at the two horizontal landscape photographs at the bottom of the posting to realise that something has not been (un)thought through with the rest of this work. A simple curve of the earth with attendant clouds and horizon line is all you need to suspend the ritual of photographic performance and referentiality. Another lesson from Minor White might have been in order at the time…

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japanese, b. 1948)
Revolution 001
1990
N. Atlantic Ocean, Newfoundland
Gelatin silver print
94 x 47 inches
© 2012 Hiroshi Sugimoto

Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japanese, b. 1948)
Revolution 002
1990
N. Atlantic Ocean, Newfoundland
Gelatin silver print
94 x 47 inches
© 2012 Hiroshi Sugimoto

Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japanese, b. 1948)
Revolution 003
1990
N. Atlantic Ocean, Newfoundland
Gelatin silver print
94 x 47 inches
© 2012 Hiroshi Sugimoto

Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japanese, b. 1948)
Revolution 005
1990
Irish Sea, Isle of Man
Gelatin silver print
94 x 47 inches
© 2012 Hiroshi Sugimoto

Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japanese, b. 1948)
Revolution 006
1990
Arctic Ocean, North Cape
Gelatin silver print
94 x 47 inches
© 2012 Hiroshi Sugimoto

Hiroshi Sugimoto is one of the best-known photographic artists of our time. His celebrated international reputation is based on his photography, although in recent years he has become engaged with other genres: architecture, furniture, objects, and fashion all play an increasingly important role in his work. It is primarily his photography however, that important museums from all over the world have collected and displayed.

Sugimoto’s unique accomplishments in his genre contradict the medium’s conventional tasks – to record reality as precisely as possible. In Sugimoto’s work, one is confronted with the formal reduction of conceptual images, in which he addresses fundamental questions of space and time, past and present, art and science, imagination and reality. “I was concerned,” noted the artist in 2002, “with revealing an ancient stage of human memory through the medium of photography. Whether it is individual memory or the cultural memory of mankind itself, my work is about returning to the past and remembering where we came from and how we came about.” His pictures, which leave a lasting impression through their beauty and their auratic effect, interweave Japanese traditions with Western ideas. This East-West dialogue remains characteristic of his work today, which is captivating in its exceptional craftsmanship and strong aesthetic presence, and can exercise an almost magical effect on viewers.

Sugimoto has given this suite of works – publicly displayed here for the first time – the title Revolution, but he reveals a radically different understanding of the term in the fifteen large-format works. It is not political or social unrest to which Sugimoto alludes, but rather to the original meaning of the term in the sense of a “suspension” or “overturning” of previously accepted laws or practices through new insights or methods.  From a technical perspective, the nature of the work is undeniably photographic. But in terms of how they are perceived and understood, these are pictures that would be more readily ascribed to a painterly or conceptual sphere.  This transgression of medium is characteristic of Sugimoto’s approach, and also applies to Seascapes, the largest distinct corpus of works in his oeuvre. For over thirty years Sugimoto has depicted the sea, always in the same, archetypal way. These works deal with difference within the apparently identical, with morphological visualisation, and an iconic vision of a timeless state of consciousness. Dioramas, Theaters, Chambers of Horrors, Portraits, Architecture, Conceptual Forms, etc. are without doubt very important groups of work, but Seascapes composes the broad and consistent foundation upon which all of the artist’s other series are based.

The point of departure for the fifteen works entitled Revolution is a nocturnal seascape. A 90° clockwise rotation turns the horizons into vertical lines, dissipating the Romantic image of the night. Without changing the pictures’ material substance or subject, any obvious connotations are masked, their certainties denied by the transformation. At the same time, highly original abstract configurations emerge in their place. But it is finally the presence of the aesthetic which Sugimoto so forcefully brings to light in his new work. The process derives from conventional puzzles, but reveals in this case no new narrative moments, leading instead to hermetic compositions reminiscent of the work of American painters such as Barnett Newman.

Text from the Museum Brandhorst website

Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japanese, b. 1948)
Revolution 008
1990
Caribbean Sea, Yucatan
Gelatin silver print
94 x 47 inches
© 2012 Hiroshi Sugimoto

Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japanese, b. 1948)
Revolution 009
1990
Caribbean Sea, Yucatan
Gelatin silver print
94 x 47 inches
© 2012 Hiroshi Sugimoto

Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japanese, b. 1948)
Revolution 011
1990
Red Sea, Safaga
Gelatin silver print
94 x 47 inches
© 2012 Hiroshi Sugimoto

Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japanese, b. 1948)
Revolution 012
1990
East China Sea, Amakusa
Gelatin silver print
94 x 47 inches
© 2012 Hiroshi Sugimoto

Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japanese, b. 1948)
Revolution 013
1990
N. Pacific Ocean, Ohkurosaki
Gelatin silver print
94 x 47 inches
© 2012 Hiroshi Sugimoto

Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japanese, b. 1948)
Landscape 004
1989
Gelatin silver print
47 x 83 inches
© 2012 Hiroshi Sugimoto

Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japanese, b. 1948)
Landscape 005
1989
Gelatin silver print
47 x 83 inches
© 2012 Hiroshi Sugimoto

Museum Brandhorst
cnr of Theresienstrasse and Türkenstrasse
Munich

Opening hours:
Daily except Monday 10.00 – 18.00
Thursday 10.00 – 20.00

Museum Brandhorst website

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Exhibition: ‘Che Guevara: Images of revolution. From the Skrein Photo Collection’ at Museum de Moderne Salzburg, Austria

Exhibition dates: 24th November, 2012 – 3rd February, 2013

Curator: Sabine Breitwieser, Museum Director in close collaboration with Austrian photographer and collector Christian Skrein

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

Osvaldo Salas (Cuban, 1914-1992)
Che fumano (Che smoking)
1964
Gelatine-Silberprint, Vintage
40 x 50cm
From the Skrein Photo Collection

Perfecto Romero (Cuban, b. 1936) 'Miliz Campesinos' 1961

Perfecto Romero (Cuban, b. 1936)
Miliz Campesinos (Military peasants)
1961
Gelatine-Silberprint, Vintage
30 x 40cm
From the Skrein Photo Collection

Osvaldo Salas (Cuban, 1914-1992) 'Camilo beim Einzug in Havanna 8.1.1959' 1959

Osvaldo Salas (Cuban, 1914-1992)
Camilo beim Einzug in Havanna, 8.1.1959 (Camilo moving into Havana, 8.1.1959) (Camilo Cienfuegos)
1959
Gelatine-Silberprint, Vintage
40 x 50cm
From the Skrein Photo Collection

Alberto Korda (Cuban, 1928-2001) '1. Mai 1960, Volksverteidigungsarmee' 1960

Alberto Korda (Cuban, 1928-2001)
1. Mai 1960, Volksverteidigungsarmee (1. May 1960, People’s Defence Force)
1960
s/w Fotografie
From the Skrein Photo Collection
© VBK, Wien, 2012

René Burri (Swiss, 1933-2014)
Che Guevara
1963
Kontaktbogen, Gelatine-Silberprint
22 x 34cm
From the Skrein Photo Collection

Raúl Corrales (Cuban, 1925-2006) 'La Cabelleria' 1961

Raúl Corrales (Cuban, 1925-2006)
La Cabelleria (The Cavalry)
1961

Cuban President Fulgencio Batista, who seized power in a military coup in 1952, ran a corrupt and dictatorial regime. This gave rise to the Cuban revolutionary movement that still continues today: In 1953 Fidel Castro and his loyal followers organised an armed attack on the Moncada Barracks, which was brutally quashed by the Batista regime.

M-26-7 is a reference to this failed attack which marks the beginning of the Cuban Revolution and became a symbol of the revolution for Castro’s followers. On 26th of July 1953 the protagonists of the revolution were arrested, Fidel and Raul Castro were sentenced to many years in prison and numerous combatants were executed. In 1955 Batista released Castro from prison, who went into exile in Mexico, where Che Guevara, an Argentine-born physician, joined his movement. In 1956 they returned to Cuba from Mexico with 82 fighters; they landed in the Granma Province, south of Havana which also became a synonym of the revolution, like the Sierra Maestra Mountains.

This is where the Skrein Collection begins: the preparation of the guerilla war, the recruitment of new fighters, including Camilo Cienfuegos, who formed the triumvirate of the revolution with Che Guevara and Fidel Castro, or Celia Sánchez, one of the first women of the revolutionary movement. The activities of the revolutionists attracted many followers and enjoyed strong support among the population until victory was finally achieved with the Castro‘s triumphal entry in Havanna in 1959. This was followed by a phase of consolidation, during which Castro, Guevara and other revolutionaries assumed political offices and were appointed as ministers. After the Bay of Pigs disaster in 1961, the USA imposed a total embargo on Cuba, thus contributing to the isolation of the Caribbean island and its political leadership.

The photographs from the Skrein Photo Collection cover the period from the end of the Batista-Regime to the Cuban Missile Crisis. Both Cuban and foreign photographers were involved into political events as reporters, sympathisers, journalists and adventurers and spread the revolutionary ideology. Leading European photographers travelled into this troubled country in the midst of social upheavals and turned the leaders of the revolution into icons and symbols of a dissatisfied youth on the eve of the global 1968 movement world wide.

Austrian photographer Christian Skrein (b. 1945, Vienna) began his career as an art, commercial and fashion photographer. He later became an enthusiastic and expert collector of photography and compiled comprehensive archives of snapshot photography and international press and art photography. For over 15 years now, he has focused on photographs of the Cuban Revolution and its protagonists. Today, his collection comprises more than 4,500 items, including several icons of the history of photography as well as numerous less spectacular photographs which document the political situation and social life in Cuba from the 1950s to the 1970s.

In 2011 the Getty Museum in Los Angeles selected a set of 60 photographs from the Skrein Collection for its first exhibition on the Cuban Revolution: the onslaught of visitors testified to the huge interest in this historical period and its profound and far-reaching impact on global politics and in the role of photography as mediator of pictures that create identity. The presentation of 150 photographs at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg offers visitors insights into this extensive specialised collection, but also shows the importance of photography and media for events and personalities. No other political event of this period was photographically documented as much as the Cuban Revolution; the pictures of its heroes were reproduced many thousands of times. The world famous photograph of Che Guevara by Alberto Korda is the most often reproduced photograph in the world, owing to a large-scale ideological and PR campaign initiated in 1967 by Italian publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli.

The myth of revolution – image pictures and iconic reception

Che Guevara was recognised as media star already during the revolution; his portrait adorned the walls of every government authority and factory building, every office and tobacco factory – he was omnipresent, an icon and role model and a crucial propaganda instrument of the political movement. The charismatic, eternally young revolutionary adorned public and private rooms as poster, photograph and icon, and the people identified themselves with their leader on a never-before-seen scale. Che united the revolution with the idea of social upheaval and personified a socialist future, a new man and a new country.

After the successful revolution the photographs of its heroes became a synonym of the new society; they were revered and distributed all over the country like pictures of saints. While the early iconic pictures of the revolution were made by Cuban photographers, who were part of the revolutionary movement, the Western world began to take notice of developments in Cuba in 1959. Leading European photographers travelled into this troubled country in the midst of social upheavals and turned the leaders of the revolution into icons and symbols of a dissatisfied youth on the eve of the global 1968 movement. Particularly the word famous portrait of Che Guevara as “guerrillero heroico” with beret and red star, photographed by Alberto Korda, is still regarded as an epitome of revolution and rebellion today and considered the most famous portrait of a person worldwide.

The photographic language of the revolution

Few photographs exist from the early years of the revolutionary movement against the Batista regime, and most of them were made by amateur photographers and travellers. They resemble the documentary photographic style of the 1930s which was popular in the United States and Europe at that time. Event photography, like the picture of Fidel Castro’s release from prison in 1955, retrospectively achieved iconic status and became the initial image of the revolution widely distributed in numerous reproductions, details and enlargements. The guerrilla fights in the Sierra Maestra are only documented in small incidental photographs made by sympathisers and fellow guerrillas with their own cameras.

Professional photographers discovered the “faces of the revolution” and their protagonists only in 1959. From then on countless portraits of Che Guevara, Fidel and Raúl Castro and their combatants were created. This is also the reason why so few photographs exist of Camilo Cienfuegos, who died in 1959, and of the authentic event of the triumphant entry into Havana on 8 January 1959, which were replaced by pictures of Fidel Castro’s famous speech. Photographers developed a photographic language with an epic style which was situated between documentation and homage and supported the political scope of the revolution. A photograph by Raúl Corrales became famous under the name “La Cabelleria”, even though the occasion (illegal entry into the premises of the American Fruit company) was not primarily heroic. The image created the identity of event and ideology and thus became a political statement.

The style of the photographers – from Alberto Korda to Liborio Noval and Osvaldo Salas, from Corrales to Tirso and Mayito – was characterised by a pictorial dramaturgy that was suitable for the media: strong contrasts, little internal drawing, silhouette-like figures against a discreet background – in other words the criteria of good news photography as it has been practiced since the 1940s. In addition, the photographers sympathising with and involved in the revolution had a feel and understanding for pathos and staging and paid attention to small details and scenes on the fringe of large events.

Press release from the Museum de Moderne Rupertinum website

Alberto Korda (Cuban, 1928-2001) 'Siegesfeier nach der Schlacht in der Schweinebucht, Fidel Castro mit aufgemalter Flagge' 1961

Alberto Korda (Cuban, 1928-2001)
Siegesfeier nach der Schlacht in der Schweinebucht, Fidel Castro mit aufgemalter Flagge
(Victory celebration after the Battle in the Bay of Pigs, Fidel Castro with painted flag)
1961
Gelatine-Silberprint, Vintage, Deckfarben
40 x 30cm
From the Skrein Photo Collection
© VBK, Wien, 2012

Carlos Morales. 'Siegreiche Revolution, 8.1.1959' 1959

Carlos Morales
Siegreiche Revolution, 8.1.1959 (Victorious Revolution, 8.1.1959)
1959
Gelatine-Silberprint, Vintage
28 x 20cm
From the Skrein Photo Collection

Venancio Diaz (Cuban, 1916-2003) 'Volksparade anlässlich "La Coubre“,' 1960

Venancio Diaz (Cuban, 1916-2003)
Volksparade anlässlich “La Coubre” (People’s parade dedicated to “Coubre”)
1960
Gelatine-Silberprint, Vintage
27 x 15cm
From the Skrein Photo Collection

Anonymous photographer
Fidel Castro
c. 1970
Vintage silver gelatin print
33.5 x 28cm
From the Skrein Photo Collection

Alberto Korda (Cuban, 1928-2001)
Che Guevara
1960
s/w Fotografie
From the Skrein Photo Collection
© VBK, Wien, 2012

Museum de Moderne Salzburg
Mönchsberg 32
5020 Salzburg, Austria

Opening hours:
Tuesday – Sunday: 10.00am – 6.00pm
Wednesday: 10.00am – 8.00pm
Monday: closed

Museum de Moderne Salzburg website

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Exhibition: ‘Flatlands: photography and everyday space’ at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW), Sydney

Exhibition dates: 13th September, 2012 – 3rd February, 2013

Curator: Judy Annear, Senior Curator of Photographs at the AGNSW

David Moore (Australia, 1927-2003)
Light pattern, camera in motion
c. 1948, printed 1997
Gelatin silver photograph
50.7 x 40.3cm
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney
Gift of Karen, Lisa, Michael and Matthew Moore, 2004

This posting contains one of my favourite early works by Fiona Hall, Leura, New South Wales (1974, below) which is redolent of all the themes that would be expressed in the later work – an alien landscape that examines “the relationship between humankind and nature and the symbolic role of the [fecund] garden in western iconography.” In her work the “nature” of things (plants, money, videotape, plumbing fittings, birds nests, etc…) are re/classified, re/ordered and re/labelled.

Another stunning photograph in this posting is Minor White’s Windowsill daydreaming (1958, below). It is one of my favourite images of all time: because of the power of observation (to be able to recognise, capture and present such a manifestation!); because of the images formal beauty; and because of its metaphysical nature – a poetry full of esoteric allusions, one that addresses a very profound subject matter that is usually beyond ordinary knowledge or understanding. This alien presence, like the structure of an atom, is something that lives beyond the edges of our consciousness, some presence that hovers there, that we can feel and know yet can never see. Is it our shadow, our anima or animus? This is one of those rare photographs that will always haunt me.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to the Art Gallery of New South Wales for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image. All text accompanying photographs © Art Gallery of New South Wales Photography Collection Handbook, 2007.

Olive Cotton (Australia, 1911-2003)
By my window
1930
Gelatin silver photograph
20.3 x 15.1cm
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney
Purchased with funds provided by the Photography Collection Benefactors’ Program 2006

Keast Burke (Australian born New Zealand, 1896-1974)
Untitled
1930s
Gelatin silver print
23.1 x 23.1cm
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney
Purchased with funds provided by the Photography Collection Benefactors’ Program 2003

Formwork for Sydney Harbour Bridge

Australasian Photo-Review’s cover of 15 March 1932 by Burke was the first which could be described as typically modernist with its dynamic photograph of the structures of Sydney Harbour Bridge. In December 1932 Burke had written:

The New Photography is the kind which seeks to shatter that blissful state of peace with photographs of an entirely different kind. It demands that photography shall be purely objective, shall photograph anything and everything – snap repetition and pattern wherever it is to be found.

That same year he published the Harbour Bridge photographs in a volume entitled Achievement: a collection of unusual studies of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, Sydney: Mick Simmons Ltd. His second modernist AP-R cover was for 14 January 1933 featuring a diver and diving board photographed in a similar style, emphasising form and structure and indistinguishable from images of divers and athletes being photographed by the Modernists of Europe and the USA.

Keast Burke’s determination to assimilate the new style into his work can be seen in the tug of war between the painterliness of pictorialism, in his warm-toned prints, and the boldness and geometricism of Modernism.

James McArdle. “January 16: Man,” on the On This Date In Photography website 16/01/2017 [Online] Cited 27/07/2024. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

Cecil Bostock (Australia, 1884-1939)
Phenomena
c. 1938
Gelatin silver photograph
26.3 x 30.5cm
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney
Gift of Max Dupain 1980

Bostock remains an enigmatic personality in Australian pictorial and early modernist photography. This is at least in part due to his body of work being scattered on his death in 1939 as it was auctioned to cover his debts. Fortunately Phenomena was left to his former assistant Max Dupain who had worked with him from 1930 to 1933.

Phenomena was one of 11 photographs Bostock exhibited with the Contemporary Camera Groupe and it was placed in the window at David Jones along with other photographs such as Plum blossom 1937 by Olive Cotton and Mechanisation of art by Laurence Le Guay. Phenomena is a wonderful modernist work with its plays of light and dark and disorienting shapes and curving lines. It is impossible to tell exactly how the shapes are made or where the light is coming from, nor what the objects are. It could easily be exhibited upside down where the viewer could be looking down on objects arranged on a flat surface. Phenomena is a tribute to Bostock’s restless, inventive and exacting abilities.

Fiona Hall (Australia, b. 1953)
Leura, New South Wales
1974
Gelatin silver photograph
27.8cm x 27.8cm
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney
Purchased 1981
© Fiona Hall

The rich tones and fine detail of Leura, New South Wales were made possible by Hall’s use of a large-format nineteenth-century view camera. The antiquated technology, once used by colonial photographers to document nature and the taming of the Australian landscape, here records instead the verdant foliage of a floral-patterned couch and carpet. Made at the beginning of Hall’s career, it demonstrates her burgeoning interest in the representation of nature. The relationship between humankind and nature and the symbolic role of the garden in western iconography has since been a recurrent theme in her work, which ranges across photography, sculpture and installation. Leura… differs from Hall’s other photographs in that it documents a “found” object. Hall’s later works, such as The Antipodean suite 1981 and her large-format polaroids of 1985, are of her own constructions and sculptures. Her Paradisus terrestris series 1989-1990, 1996, 1999, of aluminium repousse sculptures takes the garden of Eden as its subject and treats it as an Enlightenment florilegium, wherein nature is classified, ordered and labelled. This kind of botanical transcription, like photography, was the process through which the alien Australian landscape was ‘naturalised’ by its colonists – a process which Hall wryly comments on in this acutely observed encounter within a domestic interior.

David Stephenson (USA/Australia, b. 1955)
Sant’ivo alla Sapienza 1645-50 Rome, Italy
1997
From the series Domes 1993-2005
Type C photograph
55 x 55cm
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney
Purchased with funds provided by Joanna Capon and the Photography Collection Benefactors Program 2002
© David Stephenson

With poetic symmetry the Domes series considers analogous ideas. It is a body of work which has been ongoing since 1993 and now numbers several hundred images of domes in countries including Italy, Spain, Portugal, Turkey, England, Germany and Russia. The typological character of the series reveals the shifting history in architectural design, geometry and space across cultures and time, demonstrating how humankind has continually sought meaning by building ornate structures which reference a sacred realm.2 Stephenson photographs the oculus – the eye in the centre of each cupola. Regardless of religion, time or place, this entry to the heavens – each with unique architectural and decorative surround – is presented as an immaculate and enduring image. Placed together, the photographs impart the infinite variations of a single obsession, while also charting the passage of history, and time immemorial.

2. Hammond, V. 2005, “The dome in European architecture,” in Stephenson, D. 2005, Visions of heaven: the dome in European architecture, Princeton Architectural Press, New York p. 190.

David Stephenson (USA/Australia, b. 1955)
Cathedral of the Assumption, Kremlin 1475-79, Moscow, Russia
2000
Type C photograph
55 x 55cm
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney
Purchased with funds provided by Graham and Mary Bierman, Josef and Jeanne Lebovic 2002
© David Stephenson

David Stephenson (USA/Australia, b. 1955)
Pantheon c. 117-138, Rome, Italy
1997, printed 2002
Type C photograph
55 x 55cm
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney
Purchased with funds provided by Graham and Mary Bierman, Josef and Jeanne Lebovic 2002
© David Stephenson

Pat Brassington (Australian, b. 1942)
In marble halls #1
2003
From the series In marble halls
Pigment print
90 x 140cm
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney
Gift of the artist 2009
© Pat Brassington

Simryn Gill (Singapore/Malaysia/Australia, b. 1959)
From A long time between drinks
2005
Portfolio of 13 offset prints
29.8cm x 29.7cm
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney
© Simryn Gill

Among Simryn Gill’s multi-disciplinary explorations of identity and belonging, investigations of suburban locations carry a particular resonance due to their often autobiographical nature. A long time between drinks 2009 is an intensely focused look at suburban Adelaide which was the artist’s first experience of Australia when she arrived in 1987 from Kuala Lumpur, and the city where she first exhibited. Gill returned to Adelaide in 2005 to revisit this early point of contact, producing an evocative series of 13 images.

The photographs impart an ostensible sense of alienation and isolation that corresponds to the artist’s position as an outsider looking in. Gill’s viewpoint of these empty streets that seem to lead nowhere is forensic and detached. But surprisingly, as repetitious compositions and details culminate across the photographs, the prosaic subject matter becomes increasingly surreal, abstract and even poetic.

As Sambrani Chaitanya has stated, “Gill’s work is an investigation of the limits of categorisation,”1 and this group of works, just as in Gill’s examination of Marrickville (where she now lives) in May 2006, emphasises the difficulty of defining an idea of place through mere description. Memory, time and pure invention are required to fill in the gaps. The eerie, yet evocative environment in these photographic prints is further enhanced by their presentation in a square box emulating those of sets of vinyl LP recordings.

1/ Sambrani, C. “Other realties, someone else’s fictions: the tangled art of Simryn Gill,” [Online], Art and Australia Vol. 42, No. 2, Summer 2004, p. 220.

Simryn Gill (Singapore/Malaysia/Australia, b. 1959)
From A long time between drinks
2005
Portfolio of 13 offset prints
29.8cm x 29.7cm
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney
© Simryn Gill

A new exhibition, Flatlands: photography and everyday space, examines photography’s role in transforming the way we perceive, organise and imagine the world. The 39 works by 23 Australian and international artists included in the exhibition have been drawn from the Gallery’s permanent collection of 20th century and contemporary photography.

Definitions of space have always depended on the scientific, social and cultural aspects of the human experience. At its birth in the 19th century, photography’s monocular vision was seen as the ultimate tool for representation and classification. Elusive phenomena such as distance, depth and emptiness seemed within grasp. Yet, limited to freezing single moments or viewpoints in time, the photograph’s ability to objectively represent the world was under question by the turn of the 20th century. Technological advancements, such as faster exposure times transformed the potential of the medium to not only show things that escaped the eye but new ways of seeing them as well.

Embracing partiality and ambivalence, modernist photography sought to capture the fragments, details and blurred boundaries in the expanses we call personal space. What the photograph began to reveal were dimensions which German cultural theorist Walter Benjamin described in 1931 as the ‘optical unconscious’ of reality. The works of photographers such as Melvin Vaniman, Frederick Evans, Harold Cazneaux, William Buckle, Franz Roh, Olive Cotton, David Moore, Josef Sudek, Minor White and Robert Rauschenberg explore the intangible in spaces which define our physical and spiritual relationship with reality. Windows, doorways, ceilings, staircases – these mundane and ordinary passageways suddenly acquire a centrality and metaphysical depth normally denied to them.

The edges between sacred and profane, public and private, natural and artificial, real and dreamed environments became further entangled in the subjective visions of late 20th century and contemporary photographic work. For Daido Moriyama, Fiona Hall, Pat Brassington, Simryn Gill, Christine Godden, Geoff Kleem, Leonie Reisberg, Ingeborg Tyssen, David Stephenson and Justine Varga, space is seen to be a product of the perception of the individual. Photographs are able to reveal realms outside of the scientific – that is those created by emotion, memory and desire.

As Fiona Hall commented in 1996, “our belief might be maintained, for at least as long as the image can hold our attention, in the possibility of inhabiting a world as illusory as the two-dimensional one of the photograph.” Collectively, these images destabilise naturalised certainties while activating the imaginary dimension and the unsettling, albeit poetic potential of photography to impact and alter our view of the world.

Press release from the AGNSW website

Frederick H. Evans (British, 1853-1943) 'A Sea of Steps - Stairs to Chapter House - Wells Cathedral' 1903

Frederick H. Evans (England, 1853-1945)
A sea of steps
1903
Platinotype photograph
23.6 x 19.2cm
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney
Gift of the Sydney Camera Circle 1977

Minor White (America, 1908-1976)
Christmas ornament, Batavia, New York, January 1958
1958
From the portfolio Sound of one hand 1960-1965
Gelatin silver photograph mounted on card
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney
Gift of Patsy Asch 2005
Reproduction with permission of the Minor White Archive
© Princeton University Art Museum

Minor White. 'Windowsill daydreaming' 1958

Minor White (America, 1908-1976)
Windowsill daydreaming
Rochester, New York, July 1958
From the portfolio Sound of one hand 1960-1965
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney
Reproduction with permission of the Minor White Archive
© Princeton University Museum of Art

Informed by the esoteric arts, eastern religion and philosophy, Minor White’s belief in the spiritual qualities of photography made him an intensely personal and enigmatic teacher, editor and curator. White’s initial experience with photography was through his botanical studies at the University of Minnesota where he learned to develop and print photomicrography images, a view of life that he saw as akin to modern art forms. White advocated Stieglitz’s concept of ‘Equivalence’ in which form directly communicated mood and meaning, that ‘darkness and light, objects and spaces, carry spiritual as well as material meanings’.1 White disseminated his photographic theories through the influential quarterly journal Aperture, which he edited and co-founded with his contemporaries Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, Beaumont Newhall and others.

Like Stieglitz, White also worked in sequences that through abstraction, expression and metaphor emphasised his mystical interpretation of the visual world. The sequences allow for a dialogue to continue through and in-between the images, engaging the viewer in a visual poem rather than any strict or formal narrative. The series, Sound of one hand, exemplifies White’s study of Zen and esoteric philosophies, reflecting his meditation of the Zen koan from which he saw rather than heard any sound. The first of the series, Metal ornament, Pultneyville, New York, October 1957 presents an abstracted form that is both sensual and elusive, slipping in and out of ocular register. The ambiguous graduated tones and reflected light pull the eye into the centre of the image before vicariously dragging it back. This broken semi-elliptical shape is mirrored in Windowsill daydreaming, Rochester, New York, July 1958 as the gently moving curtains play with the light and shadows of White’s flat, creating abstracted organic forms. Abstracted forms of nature were of great interest to White as can be seen in the rest of the series that capture the frosted window of his flat with its crystallised ice, condensation and glimpses of the outside world.

1/ Rice, S. 1998, “Beyond reality,” in Frizot, M. (ed.,). A new history of photography, Könemann, Cologne pp. 669-673

Minor White (America, 1908-1976)
Burned mirror, Rochester, New York, June 1959
1959
From the portfolio Sound of one hand 1960-1965
Gelatin silver photograph mounted on card
32.2 x 21.2cm
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney
Gift of Patsy Asch 2005
Reproduction with permission of the Minor White Archive
© Princeton University Museum of Art

Olive Cotton (Australia, 1911-2003)
Skeleton Leaf
1964
Gelatin silver photograph
24.7 × 19.6cm
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney
Purchased with funds provided by the Photography Collection Benefactors’ Program 2006
© artist’s estate

Leonie Reisberg (Australian, b. 1955)
Fragments from the bizarre theatre of my life
1980
3 gelatin silver photograph
a – empty room, 19.6 x 24.4cm
b – room with woman, 19.7 x 24.5cm
c – room with woman and ghost, 19.7 x 24.4cm
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney
Purchased 1981
© Leonie Reisberg

Deeply personal, Leonie Reisberg’s photographs delve into the ambiguities of intimate space. Like many women photographers of the 1970s-80s, such as Fiona Hall, Micky Allan, Robyn Stacey and Kate Breakey, Reisberg was interested in pushing the boundaries of the medium through techniques such as hand-painting, double exposure and collage.

Art Gallery of New South Wales
Art Gallery Road, The Domain
Sydney NSW 2000, Australia

Opening hours:
Open every day 10am – 5pm
except Christmas Day and Good Friday

Art Gallery of New South Wales website

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Exhibition: ‘WAR/PHOTOGRAPHY: Images of Armed Conflict and Its Aftermath’ at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston – Posting Part 4

Exhibition dates: 11th November, 2012 – 3rd February, 2013

Curators: Anne Wilkes Tucker, the Gus and Lyndall Wortham Curator of Photography; Will Michels, collections photographer and exhibition co-curator; Natalie Zelt, curatorial assistant

**Please be aware that there are graphic photographs in this posting.**

Anonymous photographer. 'Under blue & gray – Gettysburg' July 1913 from the exhibition 'WAR/PHOTOGRAPHY: Images of Armed Conflict and Its Aftermath' at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston - Posting Part 4, November 2012 - February 2013

Anonymous photographer
Under blue & gray – Gettysburg
July 1913
Photo shows the Gettysburg Reunion (the Great Reunion) of July 1913, which commemorated the 50th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.

Part 4 of the biggest posting on one exhibition that I have ever undertaken on Art Blart!

As befits the gravity of the subject matter this posting is so humongous that I have had to split it into 4 separate postings. This is how to research and stage a contemporary photography exhibition that fully explores its theme. The curators reviewed more than one million photographs in 17 countries, locating pictures in archives, military libraries, museums, private collections, historical societies and news agencies; in the personal files of photographers and service personnel; and at two annual photojournalism festivals producing an exhibition that features 26 sections (an inspired and thoughtful selection) that includes nearly 500 objects that illuminate all aspects of WAR / PHOTOGRAPHY.

I have spent hours researching and finding photographs on the Internet to support the posting. It has been a great learning experience and my admiration for photographers of all types has increased. I have discovered the photographs and stories of new image makers that I did not know and some enlightenment along the way. I despise war, I detest the state and the military that propagate it and I surely hate the power, the money and the ethics of big business that support such a disciplinarian structure for their own ends. I hope you meditate on the images in this monster posting, an exhibition on a subject matter that should be consigned to the history books of human evolution.

**Please be aware that there are graphic photographs in all of these postings.**Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston for allowing me to publish some of the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Memorials

25. Photographs in the “Memorials” section range from the tomb of an unknown World War I soldier in England, by Horace Nicholls; and a landscape of black German crosses throughout a World War II burial site, by Bertrand Carrière; to an anonymous photograph of a reunion scene in Gettysburg of the opposing sides in the Civil War; and Joel Sternfeld’s picture of a woman and her daughter at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC, in 1986. (8 images)

Horace Nicholls (English, 1867-1941) 'The Unknown Warrior at Westminster Abbey, London, November 1920' 1920 from the exhibition 'WAR/PHOTOGRAPHY: Images of Armed Conflict and Its Aftermath' at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston - Posting Part 4, November 2012 - February 2013

Horace Nicholls (English, 1867-1941)
The Unknown Warrior at Westminster Abbey, London, November 1920
1920
Silver gelatin print
© IWM (Q 31514)

In order to commemorate the many soldiers with no known grave, it was decided to bury an ‘Unknown Warrior’ with all due ceremony in Westminster Abbey on Armistice Day in 1920. The photograph shows the coffin resting on a cloth in the nave of Westminster Abbey before the ceremony at the Cenotaph and its final burial.

Bertrand Carrière (Canadian, b. 1957)
Untitled
2005-2009
From the series Lieux Mêmes [Same Places]

In 2005, Carrière and historian Guth Desprez started to investigate the deeper history surrounding the found photo album. They travelled to Europe, with the photo album as their guide, in order to retrace the path of the Canadian Expeditionary Force. By photographing the locations in the soldier’s images, Carrière explores the themes of memory and history through the changing landscape. They visited the long list of places marked by the horrendous battles of The Great War: the Somme in Picardy, Artois in the North Pas-de-Calais and up to the vast fields of Flanders in Belgium. Carrière’s photographs document the sites which appear in the soldier’s album along with others on the Western Front, offering a contemporary view approximately 90 years after the infamous events, which continue to stigmatise these locations to this very day. The incredible light of the regions of northern France and the flatness of the land helps Carrière build a sense of mystery. The photographs initiate dialogue about how the landscape was affected and the ways in which it has recovered. It is not only what is there or the evidence that remains, but also what is not there and the evidence of what no longer exists.

Text from the Stephen Bulger Gallery website

Joel Sternfeld (American, b. 1944)
Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Washington, D.C.,
May 1986
Chromogenic print, ed. #1/25 (printed October 1986)
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Target Collection of American Photography, gift of the artist
© 1986 Joel Sternfeld

Remembrance

26. The last gallery in the exhibition is “Remembrance.” Most of these images were taken by artists seeking to come to terms with a conflict after fighting had ceased. Included are Richard Avedon’s picture of a Vietnamese napalm victim; a survivor of a machete attack in a Rwandan death camp, by James Nachtwey; a 1986 portrait of a hero who rescued Jews during the Holocaust, by Houston native Gay Block; and Suzanne Opton’s 2004 portrait of a soldier who survived the Iraq War and returned to the United States to work as a police officer, only to be murdered on duty by a fellow veteran. The final wall features photographs by Simon Norfolk of sunrises at the five D-Day beaches in 2004. The only reference to war is the title of the series: The Normandy Beaches: We Are Making a New World (33 images)

Richard Avedon (American, 1923-2004)
Napalm Victim #1, Saigon, South Vietnam, April 29, 1971
1971
Silver gelatin print
© Richard Avedon

Gay Block (American, b. 1942)
Zofia Baniecka, Poland
1986
From the series Rescuers: Portraits of Moral Courage in the Holocaust, a record of non-Jewish citizens from European countries who risked their lives helping to hide Jews from the Nazis
Chromogenic print, printed 1994
Courtesy of Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, gift of Clinton T. Wilour in honour of Eve France

Zofia Baniecka (born 1917 in Warsaw – 1993) was a Polish member of the Resistance during World War II. In addition to relaying guns and other materials to resistance fighters, Baniecka and her mother rescued over 50 Jews in their home between 1941 and 1944.

James Nachtwey (American, b. 1948)
A Hutu man who did not support the genocide had been imprisoned in the concentration camp, was starved and attacked with machetes. He managed to survive after he was freed and was placed in the care of the Red Cross, Rwanda, 1994
1994
Silver gelatin print
© James Nachtwey / TIME

World Press Photo of the Year, prize singles

A Hutu man at a Red Cross hospital in Nyanza, Rwanda. His face was mutilated by the Hutu ‘Interahamwe’ militia, who suspected him of sympathising with the Tutsi rebels.

Liberated from a nearby Hutu camp, where mainly Tutsis were incarcerated, starved, beaten, and killed, this man did not support the genocide and was thus subjected to the same treatment. Starved and attacked with machetes, he had managed to survive, though he was unable to speak and could barely walk or swallow when this photo was made.

Jibran Abbasi. “Mutilated By The Hutu ‘Interahamwe’ by James Nachtwey,” on the Business Recorder website April 5, 2017 [Online] Cited 27/07/2024

Simon Norfolk (British, b. Nigeria, 1963) 'Sword Beach' 2004

Simon Norfolk (British born Nigeria, b. 1963)
Sword Beach
2004
From the series The Normandy Beaches: We Are Making a New World
Chromogenic print, ed. #1/10 (printed 2006)
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
Gift of Bari and David Fishel, Brooke and Dan Feather and Hayley Herzstein in honor of Max Herzstein and a partial gift of the artist and Gallery Luisotti, Santa Monica
© Simon Norfolk / Gallery Luisotti

WAR/PHOTOGRAPHY Extended Info

Other photographs from the exhibition

Alexander Gardner (1821-1882) 'Scouts and Guides to the Army of the Potomac, Berlin, MD, October, 1862' October 1862 (detail)

Alexander Gardner (American, 1821-1882)
Scouts and Guides to the Army of the Potomac, Berlin, MD, October, 1862
October 1862
Albumen silver print
Photograph by Alexander Gardner, from “Incidents of the War. Guide to the Army of the Potomac,” from Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the War, Washington
Records of the War Department General and Special Staffs, Record Group 165, National Archives Still Picture Branch, College Park, Maryland

Alexander Gardner (American, 1821-1882) ‘The Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania’. Albumen paper print

Alexander Gardner (American, 1821-1882)
The Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter / Dead Confederate soldier in the devil’s den, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania
July 1863
Albumen paper print copied from glass, wet collodion negative
Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division

Josiah Barnes (Australian, 1858-1921)
Embarkation of HMAT Ajana, Melbourne, July 8, 1916
1916
Gelatin silver print from original glass half-plate negative (printed 2012)
On loan from the Australian War Memorial

Wesley D. Archer (American, d. 1952)
Just as he left the burning plane
1933
From the publication Death in the Air: The War Diary and Photographs of a Flying Corps Pilot

The typewritten script of a First World War pilot’s diary with a large number of photographs was submitted to the publishers William Heinemann and published by them in 1933. Heinemann stated on the book’s jacket that the diary contained no names, dates, or anything that could reveal the identity of the writer or the squadron in which he served. The publishers understood that the diarist was killed in action in 1918 and that it was in deference to the wishes of those who were close to him that his diary should be published.

So remarkable were the photographs that their veracity was immediately questioned, but no proof of their authenticity or otherwise could be ascertained. It was not until 1983 that a collection of documents, photographs and artifacts was presented to the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum. Some of the photographs were recognized as being those of the mystery diarist and the truth was soon revealed.

The author was Wesley Archer, an American with Canadian parents who served with the RFC in the First World War, and the photographs and diary had been faked.

Text from the Google Books website

For more information on the faked photographs see the article “How dramatic images of WWI dogfights in the skies of Europe were FAKED by a conman who was just looking to make some money”.

August Sander (German, 1876-1964)
Soldier
c. 1940
Gelatin silver print, printed by Gunther Sander, 1960s
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
Gift of John S. and Nancy Nolan Parsley in honour of the 65th birthday of Anne Wilkes Tucker
© Die Photographische Sammlung/SK StiftungKultur – August Sander Archiv, Cologne; DACS, London 2012

Arkady Shaikhet (Soviet, 1898-1959)
Partisan Girl
1942
Gelatin silver print
Gift of Marion Mundy
© Arkady Shaikhet Estate, Moscow

Anonymous photographer
U.S. Department of Defense
US Coast Guard crew of cutter Spencer watched as a depth charge exploded near U-175, North Atlantic, 500nm WSW of Ireland, 17 Apr 1943
17 April 1943
Public domain

W. Eugene Smith (American, 1918-1978)
Wounded, dying infant found by American soldier in Saipan Mountains
June 1944
Gelatin silver print
© W. Eugene Smith

W. Eugene Smith (American, 1918-1978)
World War II. The Pacific Campaign. The Battle of Iwo Jima (Japanese island). US Marine demolition team blasting out a cave on Hill 382. Iwo Jima. February, 1945
1945
Gelatin silver print
© W. Eugene Smith

Joseph Schwartz (American, 1913–2013)
Hold the Phone – Two Marine wiremen on Iwo Jima race across an open field, under heavy enemy fire to establish field telephone contact with the front lines
February 19, 1945, printed early 1950s
Gelatin silver print mounted on board
18 13/16 x 14 15/16 in. (47.8 x 37.9cm)
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
Museum purchase funded by Knox Nunnally at “One Great Night in November, 2009,” in honor of Houston trial lawyer Joe Reynolds, a U.S. Marine who fought on Iwo Jima

Anonymous photographer
U.S. Department of Defense / USMC Official Photograph
PLASMA WARD – Navy doctors and corpsmen administer to wounded Marines at an aid station established in a gully on Iwo Jima. The high casualty rate in this operation required the use of gallons of plasma and whole blood sent by air from the West Coast
1945
Gelatin silver print
Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic

U.S. Navy Photographic Team
U.S. and British Warships Anchored in Sagami Wan, Outside of Tokyo Bay, Japan, on the Day the Allied Ships Entered Japanese Waters
27th August 1945
Gelatin silver print
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, museum purchase funded by Laura and Tony Visage in honor and memory of William A. Visage and his fellow soldiers in Battery “E” of the 2nd Battalion, 131st Field Artillery, U.S. Army Air Corps

Matsumoto Eiichi (Japanese, 1915-2004)
Shadow of a soldier remaining on the wooden wall of the Nagasaki military headquarters (Minami-Yamate machi, 4.5km from Ground Zero)
1945
Gelatin silver print
Collection of the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography
© Matsumoto Eiichi

Unknown photographer
A pair of M-40 155mm Gun Motor Carriages of Battery B, 937th Field Artillery Battalion, providing fire support to U.S. Army 25th Infantry Division, Munema, Korea
26 November 1951
Gelatin silver print
U.S. Department of Defense

Cathy LeRoy (French, 1944-2006)
Corpsman In Anguish
1967
Gelatin silver print

Her pictures from Vietnam were stunning. Her photos from Battle of Hill 881 evoked “ghosts of Iwo Jima and Pork Chop Hill,” Time magazine wrote in May 1967. Her photos of corpsman Vernon Wike during the battle was a triptych of an all-too-familiar scene: in the first, Wike has two hands on his friend’s chest, trying to staunch the wound; in the second, he tries to find a heartbeat; in the third frame, “Corpsman In Anguish”, he realised the man is dead.

LeRoy herself came very close to death two weeks later. Her Nikon barely stopped a piece of mortar shrapnel that ripped open her chest. She said that she thought the last words she would ever hear were, “I think she’s dead, sarge.” During the Tet offensive in 1968, LeRoy was briefly captured by the North Vietnamese during the battle for Hue. LeRoy’s photos of her captivity later made the cover of Life, ‘A Remarkable Day in Hue: the Enemy Lets Me Take His Picture’. She was the first person to take photos of North Vietnamese Army Regulars behind their lines.

Anonymous. “Corpsman In Anguish | Cathy LeRoy,” on the Iconic Photos website January 13, 2014 [Online] Cited 27/07/2024. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

A licensed parachutist, Leroy jumped with the U.S. 173rd Airborne Brigade into combat during Operation Junction City in February of 1967. It was in this action, the battle for Hill 881, that Leroy photographed U.S. Navy Corpsman Vernon Wike as he rushed to the aid of a fallen comrade. “Corpsman in anguish” is the third frame of a series that Leroy shot, capturing the unimaginable grief of war. Later, in an interview for the documentary “The Hill Fights”, Wike recounted the moment that Leroy photographed.

“I know there was chaos going on around me, but there was no sound,” she says. “… I knew he didn’t have a chance, but I still got p—–d off when he died.” Leroy describes the aftermath as the corpsman “lost in this nightmare landscape” grabbed the fallen marine’s M16 and charged a Viet bunker alone in a hail of obscenities. The fallen marine was a man called “Rock”, a New Yorker from Puerto Rico. Earlier that day he had told Wike that he only had 60 days left “in country” – his deployment in Vietnam.

Anonymous. “Giving War a Face: Catherine Leroy,” on the Dismal Nitch website September 04, 2020 [Online] Cited 27/07/2024. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

Philip Jones Griffiths (Welsh, 1936-2008)
Called “Little Tiger” for killing two “Viet Cong women cadre” – his mother and teacher, it was rumored, Vietnam
1968
Gelatin silver print
The Philip Jones Griffiths Foundation, courtesy of Howard Greenberg Gallery
© Philip Jones Griffiths / Magnum Photos

Gilles Caron (French, 1939-1970)
Young Catholic demonstrator on Londonderry Wall, Northern Ireland
1969
Gelatin silver print
Courtesy of Foundation Gilles Caron and Contact Press Images
© Gilles Caron

Rafael Wollmann (Argentinian, b. 1958)
British Marines surrender to Argentinean troops in Malvinas/Falklands
April 2, 1982, printed 2012
Inkjet print
15 7/8 × 20 in. (40.4 × 50.8cm)
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
Gift of Rafael Wollmann

David Leeson (American, b. 1957)
Death of a Soldier, Iraq
March 24, 2003
Inkjet print, printed 2012
Courtesy of the artist

Ziv Koren (Israeli, b. 1970)
A sniper’s-eye view of Rafah, in the Southern Gaza strip, during an Israeli military sweep
2006
Inkjet print, printed 2012
© Ziv Koren/Polaris Images

Goran Tomasevic (Serbian, b. 1959) /Reuters
SHOOTING. Sgt. William Olas Bee, a US Marine from the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, has a close call after Taliban fighters opened fire near Garmser in Helmand Province of Afghanistan May 18, 2008. The Marine was not injured.
2008

Tomašević began photographing the war that followed the breakup of Yugoslavia from 1991 for daily newspaper Politika. In 1996 he joined the world’s largest news agency, Reuters, covering the simmering political tensions in Kosovo and the anti-Milošević demonstrations in his hometown of Belgrade since mid-1990s. During three-month NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999, Tomašević was the only photographer working for foreign press to spend the duration of the conflict in Kosovo.

Tomašević moved to Jerusalem in 2002, covering the second Palestinian intifada. During the U.S. led invasions of Iraq in 2003, his picture of a U.S. Marine watching the toppling of a Saddam Hussein statue became one of the most memorable images of the war. He often returned to Iraq as sectarian violence escalated and regularly photographed America’s other war in Afghanistan. His sequence of photographs of U.S. Marine Sergeant Bee narrowly escaping Taliban bullets became an iconic image in U.S. war history.

Tomašević moved to Cairo in 2006 and was at the heart of Reuters’ coverage of the Arab Springs. In Libya, his image of a fireball that spewed up after an air strike on pro-Gaddafi fighters became an iconic image of the Libyan war, gracing the front pages of more than 100 newspapers around the globe. He stayed in Cairo until 2012. His raw pictures of rebel fighters battling pro-Assad forces among the ruins of Aleppo and Damascus during the Syrian Civil War have won international acclaim, as did his coverage of the bloody siege on a Nairobi shopping mall in Kenya. Tomašević worked for Reuters until 2022.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
1001 Bissonnet Street
Houston, TX 77005

Opening hours:
Wednesday 11am – 5pm
Thursday 11am – 9pm
Friday 11am – 6pm
Saturday 11am – 6pm
Sunday 12.30pm – 6pm
Closed Monday and Tuesday, except Monday holidays
Closed Thanksgiving Day and Christmas Day

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston website

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Exhibition: ‘Cartier-Bresson: A Question of Colour’ at Somerset House, London

Exhibition dates: 8th November 2012 – 27th January 2013

Curator: William E. Ewing

Henri Cartier-Bresson (French, 1908-2004)
Harlem, New York, 1947
1947
Gelatin silver print / printed 1970s
Image: 29.1 x 19.6cm
Paper: 30.4 x 25.4cm
© Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum Photos, Courtesy Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson

They may be channelling the master, but none does it like Cartier-Bresson. There is a spareness and spatial intensity to Cartier-Bresson’s work that is absolutely his own. Look at the photograph directly above (Harlem, New York, 1947). A railing leads the eye in bottom right, echoed by the bottom jamb of the window. The opening is set for the old man to perform complete with curtains, talking stage right. The jamb zig zags above a trilby-wearing, cigarette-smoking man’s head leading to a wire mesh fence that takes the eye out of the frame on the left. The two men, lower than the old man in the framed window, look in a completely different direction to him.

Counterpoise. The image pulls in two directions. Above their head a series of cantilevered staircases ascends to the heavens, thought ascending. A masterpiece.

So many of the other photographers in this posting crowd the plane with people looking in all directions, closed off foregrounds or tensionless images. Images that are too complex or too simple. There is an opposition to Cartier-Bresson’s images that is difficult for the viewer to resolve neatly, yet they appear as if in perfect balance. Look at Brooklyn, New York, 1947 towards the bottom of the posting. Nothing in this still life is out of place (from the light to the multiple, overlapping shadows and the out of focus elements of the composition) yet there is humbling agony about the whole thing. It is almost is if he is saying, “cop a load of this, this is what I can see.” And what a fabulous eye it is.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

Ernst Haas (Austrian-American, 1921-1986)
New Orleans, USA
1960
Chromogenic archival print
50 x 35cm
© Ernst Haas Estate, New York

Saul Leiter (American, 1923-2013)
Snow
1960
© Saul Leiter
Courtesy: Saul Leiter, Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009)
Cat next to red car, New York
1973
Type C prints
18 x 12 inches
© Estate of Helen Levitt

Alex Webb (American, b. 1952)
Tehuantepec, Mexico
1985
71 x 47cm
Digital Type C print
© Alex Webb

“I only know how to approach a place by walking. For what does a street photographer do but walk and watch and wait and talk, and then watch and wait some more, trying to remain confident that the unexpected, the unknown, or the secret heart of the known awaits just around the corner.”

~ Alex Webb

Jeff Mermelstein (American, b. 1957)
Untitled (Package Pile Up, New York City)
1995
Chromogenic print
© Jeff Mermelstein
Courtesy Rick Wester Fine Art, New York

Carolyn Drake (American, b. 1971)
Birthday party at Olympia, a gated community, Wellington, Florida
2005
Digital Pigment Print
© Carolyn Drake / Magnum Photos

Carolyn Drake (American, b. 1971)
Hotel room. Zhetisay, Kazakhstan. Carolyn Drake
2009
Digital Pigment Print
© Carolyn Drake/Magnum Photos

Andy Freeberg (American, b. 1958)
Sean Kelly, Art Basel Miami
2010
From the series Art Fare
Artist: Kehinde Wiley
63 x 43cm
Pigment ink print
© Andy Freeberg
Courtesy Kopeikin Gallery

Carolyn Drake (American, b. 1971)
New Kashgar. Kashgar, China
2011
30.48 x 20.32cm
Digital Light Jet print
© Carolyn Drake 2012

Positive View Foundation announces its inaugural exhibition Cartier-Bresson: A Question of Colour, to be held at Somerset House, 8 November 2012 – 27 January 2013. Curated by William A. Ewing, the exhibition will feature 10 Henri Cartier-Bresson photographs never before exhibited in the UK alongside over 75 works by 15 international contemporary photographers, including: Karl Baden (US), Carolyn Drake (US), Melanie Einzig (US), Andy Freeberg (US), Harry Gruyaert (Belgium), Ernst Haas (Austrian), Fred Herzog (Canadian), Saul Leiter (US), Helen Levitt (US), Jeff Mermelstein (US), Joel Meyerowitz (US), Trent Parke (Australian), Boris Savelev (Ukranian), Robert Walker (Canadian), and Alex Webb (US).

The extensive showcase will illustrate how photographers working in Europe and North America adopted and adapted the master’s ethos famously known as ‘the decisive moment’ to their work in colour. Though they often departed from the concept in significant ways, something of that challenge remained: how to seize something that happens and capture it in the very moment that it takes place.

It is well-known that Cartier-Bresson was disparaging towards colour photography, which in the 1950s was in its early years of development, and his reasoning was based both on the technical and aesthetic limitations of the medium at the time. Curator William E. Ewing has conceived the exhibition in terms of, as he puts it, ‘challenge and response’. “This exhibition will show how Henri Cartier-Bresson, in spite of his skeptical attitude regarding the artistic value of colour photography, nevertheless exerted a powerful influence over photographers who took up the new medium and who were determined to put a personal stamp on it. In effect, his criticisms of colour spurred on a new generation, determined to overcome the obstacles and prove him wrong. A Question of Colour simultaneously pays homage to a master who felt that black and white photography was the ideal medium, and could not be bettered, and to a group of photographers of the 20th and 21st centuries who chose the path of colour and made, and continue to make, great strides.”

Cartier-Bresson: A Question of Colour will feature a selection of photographers whose commitment to expression in colour was – or is – wholehearted and highly sophisticated, and which measured up to Cartier-Bresson’s essential requirement that content and form were in perfect balance. Some of these artists were Cartier-Bresson’s contemporaries, like Helen Levitt, or even, as with Ernst Haas, his friends; others, such as Fred Herzog in Vancouver, knew the artist’s seminal work across vast distances; others were junior colleagues, such as Harry Gruyaert, who found himself debating colour ferociously with the master; and others still, like Andy Freeberg or Carolyn Drake, never knew the man first-hand, but were deeply influenced by his example.

Press release from Somerset House website

Fred Herzog (Canadian born Germany, 1930-2019)
Man with Bandage, Vancouver, Canada
1968

Joel Meyerowitz (American, b. 1938)
Madison Avenue, New York City
1975
Archival Pigment Print
© Joel Meyerowitz 2012
Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, NYC

Joel Meyerowitz (American, b. 1938)
Camel Coats, Fifth Avenue, New York
1975
Archival Pigment Print
© Joel Meyerowitz 2012
Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, NYC

Ernst Haas (American, 1921-1986)
New York City, US
1981

Fred Herzog (Canadian born Germany, 1930-2019)
Crossing Powell 2
1984
Ink jet print

Harry Gruyaert (Belgian, b. 1941)
Morocco, town of Duarzazte
1986
© 2015 Harry Gruyaert / Magnum Photos

Harry Gruyaert (Belgian, b. 1941)
Province of Brabant, Flanders region, Belgium
1988
© 2015 Harry Gruyaert / Magnum Photos

Harry Gruyaert is known for his extraordinary photographic work with color. Born in Antwerp in 1941, he originally dreamed of becoming a film director. In the late 1970s, Pop art and a trip to Morocco inspired him to become one of the first photographers in Europe to devote his work entirely to color photography. Gruyaert’s cinematographic background instilled in him an aesthetic conception of photography. Rather than telling stories or documenting the world through his lens, he searches for beauty in everyday elements. His images are simply snapshots of magical moments in which different visual aspects, primarily color, form, light and movement, spontaneously come together in front of his lens.

Text from the Magnum website

Jeff Mermelstein (American, b. 1957)
Unitled ($10 bill in mouth) New York City, 1992
1992
Chromogenic print
20 x 16 in.
© Jeff Mermelstein
Courtesy Rick Wester Fine Art, New York

“My process is linked to everyday life. Only on rare occasions do I go out specifically to ‘shoot’. My best photographs were taken going to or from work, or some other destination. Sometimes a picture appears that helps me sum up a strange mood or thought that I’ve struggled with for weeks. Other times my work is more documentary in nature.

Photographing in public keeps me awake and aware, always looking around, in awe at what we humans are up to. In a time when staged narratives and rendered images are popular, I am excited by the fact that life itself offers situations far more strange and beautiful than anything I could set up.”

~ Jeff Mermelstein

Jeff Mermelstein (American, b. 1957)
Run #9, New York
1999-2000
© Jeff Mermelstein

Trent Parke (Australian, b. 1971)
Man Vomiting, Gerald #1
2006
Type C print
© Trent Parke
Courtesy Magnum Photos

Karl Baden (American, b. 1952)
Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts
2009
Archival Inkjet
40.64 x 54.19cm
© Karl Baden

Boris Savelev (Russian, b. 1947)
Cafe Ion, Moscow
2009
© Boris Savelev

Andy Freeberg (American, b. 1958)
Nina Menocal, Armory Show
2011
From the series Art Fare
Pigment ink print
© Andy Freeberg
Courtesy Kopeikin Gallery

Henri Cartier-Bresson (French, 1908-2004)
Brooklyn, New York, 1947
1947
Gelatin silver print / printed in 2007
Image: 19.8 x 29.8cm
Paper: 22.9 x 30.4cm
© Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum Photos, Courtesy Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson

Melanie Einzig (American, b. 1967)
September 11th, New York 2001
2001
21 x 33cm
Inkjet print
© Melanie Einzig 2012

Terrace Rooms & Courtyard Rooms, Somerset House
Strand, London, WC2R 1LA

Opening hours:
10am – 6pm daily

Somerset House website

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Exhibition: ‘Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop’ at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Exhibition dates: 11th October, 2012 – 27th January, 2013

Curator: Mia Fineman, Assistant Curator in the Department of Photographs

Unidentified American artist. 'Two-Headed Man' c. 1855 from the exhibition 'Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop' at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, October 2012 - January 2013

Unidentified American artist
Two-Headed Man
c. 1855
Daguerreotype
The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri, Gift of Hallmark Cards, Inc.

What a fascinating subject. Having completed multiple exposure work under the black and white enlarger I can attest to how difficult it was to get a print correctly exposed. I was using multiple negatives, moving the piece of photographic paper and printing in grids. Trying to get the alignment right was quite a task but the outcomes were very satisfying. Of course today these skills have mainly been lost to be replaced by other technological skills within the blancmange that is Photoshop. Somehow it’s not the same. My admiration for an artist like Jerry Uelsmann will always remain undimmed for the undiluted joy, beauty and skill of his analogue photographs.

I will post different photographs in this exhibition from the National Gallery of Art hang when I receive them!

See the second posting on this exhibition.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

George Washington Wilson (Scottish, 1823-1893) 'Aberdeen Portraits No. 1' 1857 from the exhibition 'Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop' at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, October 2012 - January 2013

George Washington Wilson (Scottish, 1823-1893)
Aberdeen Portraits No. 1
1857
Albumen silver print from glass negative
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Fund, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 2011

Henry Peach Robinson (English, 1830-1901)
Fading Away
1858
Albumen silver print from glass negatives
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the National Media Museum, Bradford, United Kingdom

Unidentified artist
De Torbechet, Allain & Cie (publisher)
Man Juggling His Own Head
c. 1880
Albumen silver print from glass negative
Collection of Christophe Goeury

Maurice Guibert (French, 1856-1913)
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec as Artist and Model
c. 1900
Gelatin silver print
Philadelphia Museum of Art

F. Holland Day (American, 1864-1933)
The Vision (Orpheus Scene)
1907
Platinum print
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the National Media Museum, Bradford, United Kingdom

Unidentified American artist
Man on Rooftop with Eleven Men in Formation on His Shoulders
c. 1930
Gelatin silver print
Collection of George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film, Rochester

Unidentified American artist
Dirigible Docked on Empire State Building, New York
1930
Gelatin silver print
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Twentieth-Century Photography Fund, 2011

While digital photography and image-editing software have brought about an increased awareness of the degree to which camera images can be manipulated, the practice of doctoring photographs has existed since the medium was invented. Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop at The Metropolitan Museum of Art is the first major exhibition devoted to the history of manipulated photography before the digital age. Featuring some 200 visually captivating photographs created between the 1840s and 1990s in the service of art, politics, news, entertainment, and commerce, the exhibition offers a provocative new perspective on the history of photography as it traces the medium’s complex and changing relationship to visual truth.   The exhibition is made possible by Adobe Systems Incorporated.   The photographs in the exhibition were altered using a variety of techniques, including multiple exposure (taking two or more pictures on a single negative), combination printing (producing a single print from elements of two or more  negatives), photomontage, overpainting, and retouching on the negative or print.   In every case, the meaning and content of the camera image was significantly transformed in the process of manipulation.

Faking It is divided into seven sections, each focusing on a different set of motivations for manipulating the camera image. “Picture Perfect” explores 19th-century photographers’ efforts to compensate for the new medium’s technical limitations – specifically, its inability to depict the world the way it looks to the naked eye. To augment photography’s monochrome palette, pigments were applied to portraits to make them more vivid and lifelike. Landscape photographers faced a different obstacle: the uneven sensitivity of early emulsions often resulted in blotchy, overexposed skies. To overcome this, many photographers, such as Gustave Le Gray and Carleton E. Watkins, created spectacular landscapes by printing two negatives on a single sheet of paper – one exposed for the land, the other for the sky. This section also explores the challenges involved in the creation of large group portraits, which were often cobbled together from dozens of photographs of individuals.   For early art photographers, the ultimate creativity lay not in the act of taking a photograph but in the subsequent transformation of the camera image into a hand-crafted picture.

“Artifice in the Name of Art” begins in the 1850s with elaborate combination prints of narrative and allegorical subjects by Oscar Gustave Rejlander and Henry Peach Robinson. It continues with the revival of Pictorialism at the dawn of the twentieth century in the work of artist-photographers such as Edward Steichen, Anne W. Brigman, and F. Holland Day.   “Politics and Persuasion” presents photographs that were manipulated for explicitly political or ideological ends. It begins with Ernest Eugene Appert’s faked photographs of the 1871 Paris Commune massacres, and continues with images used to foster patriotism, advance racial ideologies, and support or protest totalitarian regimes. Sequences of photographs published in Stalin-era Soviet Russia from which purged Party officials were erased demonstrate the chilling ease with which the historical record could be falsified. Also featured are composite portraits of criminals by Francis Galton and original paste-ups of John Heartfield’s anti-Nazi photomontages of the 1930s.

“Novelties and Amusements” brings together a broad variety of amateur and commercial photographs intended to astonish, amuse, and entertain. Here, we find popular images of figures holding their own severed heads or appearing doubled or tripled. Also included in this light-hearted section are ghostly images by the spirit photographer William Mumler, “tall-tale” postcards produced in Midwestern farming communities in the 1910s, trick photographs by amateurs, and Weegee’s experimental distortions of the 1940s.   ”Pictures in Print” reveals the ways in which newspapers, magazines, and advertisers have altered, improved, and sometimes fabricated images in their entirety to depict events that never occurred – such as the docking of a zeppelin on the tip of the Empire State Building. Highlights include Erwin Blumenfeld’s famous “Doe Eye” Vogue cover from 1950 and Richard Avedon’s multiple portrait of Audrey Hepburn from 1967.

“Mind’s Eye” features works from the 1920s through 1940s by such artists as Herbert Bayer, Maurice Tabard, Dora Maar, Clarence John Laughlin, and Grete Stern, who have used photography to evoke subjective states of mind, conjuring dreamlike scenarios and surreal imaginary worlds.   The final section, “Protoshop,” presents photographs from the second half of the 20th century by Yves Klein, John Baldessari, Duane Michals, Jerry Uelsmann, and other artists who have adapted earlier techniques of image manipulation – such as spirit photography or news photo retouching – to create works that self-consciously and often humorously question photography’s presumed objectivity.

Press release from The Metropolitan Museum of Art website

William Mortensen (American, 1897-1965)
Obsession
c. 1930
Gelatin silver print
18.4 x 14.5cm
The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1975

Maurice Tabard (French, 1897-1984)
Room with Eye
1930
Gelatin silver print
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1962

Wanda Wulz (Italian, 1903-1984)
Io + gatto (Cat + I)
1932
Gelatin silver print
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Ford Motor Company Collection, Gift of Ford Motor Company and John C. Waddell, 1987
Alinari / Art Resource © Wanda Wulz

John Paul Pennebaker (American, 1903-1953)
Sealed Power Piston Rings
1933
Gelatin silver print
1934 Art and Industry Exhibition Photograph Collection, Baker Library Historical Collections, Harvard Business School, Boston, Mass.
© John Paul Pennebaker

George Platt Lynes (American, 1907-1955)
The Sleepwalker
1935
Gelatin silver print with applied media
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Ford Motor Company Collection, Gift of Ford Motor Company and John C. Waddell, 1987
© The Estate of George Platt Lynes

Barbara Morgan (American, 1900-1992)
Hearst over the People
1939
Collage of gelatin silver prints with applied media
The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri, Gift of Hallmark Cards, Inc.

Grete Stern (Argentinian born Germany, 1904-1999)
Dream No. 1: Electrical Appliances for the Home
1948
Gelatin silver print
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Twentieth-Century Photography Fund, 2012
Courtesy of Galería Jorge Mara – La Ruche, Buenos Aires

Erwin Blumenfeld (American born Germany, 1897-1969)
“Doe Eye” Vogue cover
1950

Yves Klein (French, 1928-1962)
Photographed by Harry Shunk (German, 1924-2006) and János (Jean) Kender (Hungarian, 1937-2009)
Leap into the Void
1960
Gelatin silver print
Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 1992
© Yves Klein / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris
Photograph Shunk-Kender © Roy Lichtenstein Foundation

Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American, 1899-1968)
Judy Garland
1960
Silver gelatin photograph
Copyright Weegee/International Center of Photography/Getty Images

Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American, 1899-1968) 'American, 1899-1968 Draft Johnson for President' c. 1968

Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American, 1899-1968)
Draft Johnson for President
c. 1968
Gelatin silver print
International Center of Photography, Bequest of Wilma Wilcox, 1993
Copyright Weegee/International Center of Photography/Getty Images.

Richard Avedon (American, 1923-2004)
Audrey Hepburn, New York, January 1967
1967
Collage of gelatin silver prints, with applied media, mylar overlay with applied media

Jerry N. Uelsmann (American, 1934-2022)
Untitled
1969
Gelatin silver print
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Twentieth-Century Photography Fund, 2011
© Jerry N. Uelsmann

Martha Rosler (American, b. 1943) 'Red Stripe Kitchen', from the series "House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home" 1967-72

Martha Rosler (American, b. 1943)
Red Stripe Kitchen
1967-1972, printed early 1990s
From the series “House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home”
Chromogenic print
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Anonymous Gift, 2002
© Martha Rosler

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Phone: 212-535-7710

Opening hours:
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Closed Wednesdays

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Review: ‘Ingeborg Tyssen: photographs’ at Monash Gallery of Art, Melbourne

Exhibition dates: 23rd November, 2012 – 3rd February, 2013

Curator: Sandra Byron

Ingeborg Tyssen (Netherlands, Australia 1945-2002) 'Untitled' from the series 'People' 1977 from the exhibition Ingeborg Tyssen: photographs' at Monash Gallery of Art, Melbourne, November 2012 - February 2013

Ingeborg Tyssen (Netherlands, Australia 1945-2002)
Untitled
1977
From the People series
Gelatin silver print
Image: 20.1 x 25.2cm
Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection
Donated by Janice Hinderaker through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program 2003

“Ingeborg Tyssen was one of the great Australian photographers of her generation.” (Press release)

“Ingeborg Tysenn was one of Australia’s most important post war artists.”
(Essay “Remembering Ingeborg” by Sandra Byron)

This is a disappointing exhibition of the work of Australian photographer Ingeborg Tyssen at Monash Gallery of Art, Melbourne encumbered as it is by the above two statements. On the evidence of the work presented neither statement is true. Whoever is pushing this barrow (and it is a large barrow to push) should really stop and have a damn good look at the work to see whether it is worthy of such claims and what they hope to achieve by promoting such statements. If they really looked objectively they would see that the art just is, and nothing more.

Being a cultural commentator means that you have to form an opinion on the work presented. For me this involves the eye (what the work looks like), the head (undertaking research into the artist) and the heart (how I feel about the work). Then and only then can you make an informed decision on the merits of the work. With Tyssen’s work there were four standout photographs in the exhibition (people in a swimming pool taken in the Modernist style, part of the 1981 Ryde Pool, Sydney series, none of which I can show you in this posting) and the rest of the photographs exist in the world.

Tyssen was born in The Netherlands and arrived here when she was 12 years old. Her photographs show a European and Australian sensibility, a dislocation from but also an attraction toward both her native country and her adopted country Australia. Her photographs can be divided into various styles: early documentary street photography (the People series, 1977), Modernist photography (Ryde Pool, Sydney series, 1981 and From the heart of the forest to the edge of the road series, 1982-1984), New Topographics photography (Billboards and Trees series, 1981-1982) and Romantic photography (The voice of silence series 1991-1992). In this regard, Tyssen never seems to have developed a voice of her own, a signature style that you could say was unique to her own art practice. So many of these photographs are derivative of other photographers who have already invented and mastered that style that nothing seems to belong to Tyssen herself. She seems to have been enamoured of style after style.

In the high contrast, small scale People series (1977, above) the animals are particularly unapproachable. While exhibiting a sense of Australian light and an intimation of Australia’s white only policy – there is a specific Australian-ness in the people she has chosen and the atmosphere of Whitlam / post Whitlam remaking of the Australian identity; even the lady with the European aura knows she is in Australia, perhaps she even knows she is in the Australian light – these are hard images to engage with emotionally, unlike the psychological works of Harry Callahan and Garry Winogrand. Problematically, the Billboards and Trees series (both 1981-1982, below) are so redolent of American photography (both in physical dis/location and surface remarks) that I felt I had seen it all before. In both these series Australia morphs into America and not in a good way.

In the panoramic series From the heart of the forest to the edge of the road (1982-1984, below) Tyssen comes closest to capturing the intensity of the Australian landscape only to be let down by a) the quality of the prints and b) the fact that the title is a coat hanger, allowing the artist to hang disparate images together that really have no relationship to each other. The prints themselves do little to support the work, being sometimes too pale and insignificant to hold the image, too flat. Playing with the print and its tonal range and surface qualities does little to help an overall vision of the work or help the viewer engage with the content.

In my notes I wrote in capital letters: THEY DON’T ENGAGE ME! In other words, there was little in these photographs that held my attention for any length of time.

Tyssen seems to have known her limitations as well. She just wanted to be a photographer and kept persevering at her art … keep at it, keep going, keep creating. That’s all you can do as an artist.

At their best Tyssen’s photographs lie somewhere between Kertesz and Cartier-Bresson without the decisive moment (look at the photograph Taronga Zoo, Sydney, 1974 below and you will understand what I mean). But the deference of some of her images was really brought home to me when, in a small gallery off to the side of the main space, there in all its glory was one of the iconic images of a generation – Vale Street (1975) by Carol Jerrems.

People really do need to stop making grandiose statements about the work of artists and let the viewer just look clearly at the art. That way there is little expectation, the work will be taken on its merits, and everyone may be quietly surprised at the outcome.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

“Tysenn clearly felt a deep sense of dislocation from her country of birth, its national identity and cultural conventions. It was apparent in her ongoing explorations of the Australian landscape that on her arrival she had met with more than just an initial linguistic barrier, and there were also barriers to understanding the Australian landscape which was so far and different to European forests and Dutch tales and legends about them that she grew up with.”

Essay “Remembering Ingeborg” by Sandra Byron

“Tyssen’s people are not known to her, rather are studies of anonymous people: in action, in the city, at a fairground. The People series – City Light 1977 images reveal a sense of isolation in a crowd. People emerging from the dark shadows of the same station / mall and march into the sunlight. They are expressionless, uncommunicative, isolated, yet display a keen sense of self and appearance. Mostly minding their own business, doing their own thing, they seem undisturbed by the female photographer standing nearby. She must not have been intrusive or demanding, just there with her camera at the ready.”

Fiona McIntosh. “Two women photographers,” on the art out there blog Friday, 18 May 2012 [Online] Cited 08/09/2022

Ingeborg Tyssen (Netherlands, Australia 1945-2002) 'Untitled' from the series 'People' 1977

Ingeborg Tyssen
Untitled
1977
From the People series
Gelatin silver print
Image: 20.1 x 25.2cm
Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection
Donated by Janice Hinderaker through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program 2003

Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984) 'Untitled' from Women are Beautiful' Nd/1981

Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984)
Untitled
Nd (1960s) / published 1981
From the portfolio Women are Beautiful
Silver gelatin print

Harry Callahan (American, 1912-1999)
Chicago
1961
Gelatin silver print
Overall (image): 40.6 x 27.1cm (16 x 10 11/16 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of the Callahan Family
© Estate of Harry Callahan, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York

Ingeborg Tyssen (Netherlands, Australia 1945-2002)
Taronga Zoo, Sydney
1974
Gelatin silver print
Collection of the Estate of Ingeborg Tyssen

Ingeborg Tyssen (Netherlands, Australia 1945-2002)
Royal Easter Show, Sydney
1979
Silver gelatin print
Collection of the Estate of Ingeborg Tyssen

Ingeborg Tyssen (Netherlands, Australia 1945-2002) 'Ryde Pool, Sydney' 1981

Ingeborg Tyssen (Netherlands, Australia 1945-2002)
Untitled
1981
From the series Ryde Pool, Sydney
Ink-jet print
Collection of the Estate of Ingeborg Tyssen

Ingeborg Tyssen (Netherlands, Australia 1945-2002)
Annandale, Sydney
1981
From the series Trees 1981-82
Silver gelatin print

Ingeborg Tyssen (Netherlands, Australia 1945-2002)
Pyrmont, Sydney
1982
From the series Billboards 1981-82
Silver gelatin print

Ingeborg Tyssen (1945-2002) was one of the great Australian photographers of her generation. Although generally overlooked by critics during her lifetime in favour of many of her male counterparts, Tyssen left us a remarkable body of work. Ingeborg Tyssen: photographs is the first museum retrospective of her work in Victoria, and the first major exhibition since her memorial show was held at the Art Gallery of NSW in 2002.

This exhibition provides a great opportunity for audiences to view the work of this major figure. Spanning 20 years of creative output from 1974-94, Ingeborg Tyssen: photographs shows Tyssen as a highly original observer of modern life. Her candid photographs of pedestrians in city streets, young kids playing in suburban swimming pools, and images of the Australian and American landscape reveal an artist whose concerns were at the forefront of Australian photographic practice.

MGA Gallery Director Shaune Lakin states, “Tyssen’s story is one of the great stories of Australian photography. Her arrival in Australia at the age of 12 as an immigrant from her native Holland and her struggle with displacement and new language and landscape is one that many Australians are familiar with. Being one of Australia’s first street photographers, she made a significant contribution to the history of Australian photography. Her experience of migration gave Tyssen a rare ability to observe people in their environment. Her earliest photographs, taken in the city streets, fun parks, and suburbs of 1970s were acute depictions of the urban isolation she felt in her new homeland. Her experience and pictures certainly remain relevant to contemporary Australia.”

In 1995 the Art Gallery of New South Wales presented a mid-career survey of her work and she continued to exhibit in commercial galleries and museums in Australia and abroad until she died as a result of a motor accident in 2002. In her obituary, critic Robert McFarlane wrote: “With Tyssen’s death, Australia has lost one of the most talented photographers from the postwar generation… The originality and lack of ego in these images will ensure their enduring place in the history of the medium.”

Tyssen studied photography under John Williams, who became her husband. She was a co-founder of the Photographers Gallery in South Yarra in 1975.

Press release from the Monash Gallery of Art website

Ingeborg Tyssen (Netherlands, Australia 1945-2002) 'Perisher Valley, NSW' from the series 'From the heart of the forest to the edge of the road' series 1984

Ingeborg Tyssen (Netherlands, Australia 1945-2002)
Perisher Valley, NSW
1984
From the series From the heart of the forest to the edge of the road 1982-1984
Silver gelatin print

Ingeborg Tyssen (Netherlands, Australia 1945-2002)
Perisher Valley No 6, NSW
1984
From the series From the heart of the forest to the edge of the road 1982-1984
Gelatin silver print
14.5 x 35.7cm
Hallmark Cards Australian Photography Collection Fund 1989
© Ingeborg Tyssen, 1984. Licensed by Viscopy, Sydney
Collection of the Estate of Ingeborg Tyssen
Courtesy John Williams & Sandra Byron Gallery

Ingeborg Tyssen (Netherlands, Australia 1945-2002)
Royal Easter Show, Sydney
1982
Gelatin silver print
Collection of the Estate of Ingeborg Tyssen

Ingeborg Tyssen (Netherlands, Australia 1945-2002) 'Untitled' from 'The voice of silence' series 1991-1992

Ingeborg Tyssen (Netherlands, Australia 1945-2002)
Untitled
1991-1992
From The voice of silence series 1991-92
Gelatin silver print

Monash Gallery of Art
860 Ferntree Gully Road, Wheelers Hill
Victoria 3150 Australia
Phone: + 61 3 8544 0500

Opening hours:
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Sat – Sun: 10pm – 4pm
Mon/public holidays: closed

Monash Gallery of Art website

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Exhibition: ‘WAR/PHOTOGRAPHY: Images of Armed Conflict and Its Aftermath’ at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston – Posting Part 3

Exhibition dates: 11th November, 2012 – 3rd February, 2013

Curators: Anne Wilkes Tucker, the Gus and Lyndall Wortham Curator of Photography; Will Michels, collections photographer and exhibition co-curator; Natalie Zelt, curatorial assistant

Walter Astrada, (Argentinean, b. 1974) 'Congolese women fleeing to Goma' 2008 from the exhibition 'WAR/PHOTOGRAPHY: Images of Armed Conflict and Its Aftermath' at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, November 2012 - February 2013

Walter Astrada (Argentinean, b. 1974)
Congolese women fleeing to Goma
2008
From the series Violence against women in Congo, Rape as weapon of war in DRC
Chromogenic print (printed 2010)
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, museum purchase with funds provided by Photo Forum 2010
© Walter Astrada

“War is, above all, grief.”

Dmitri Baltermants

“Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent”

Salvor Hardin in Isaac Asimov’s ‘Foundation’ series

Part three of the biggest posting on one exhibition that I have ever undertaken on Art Blart!

**Please be aware that there are graphic photographs in all of these postings.** Part 1, Part 2, Part 4

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston for allowing me to publish some of the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Civilians

21. Civilians spans World War II through 2008. The subsection “Dead and Wounded” includes Grief, Kerch, Crimea, by Dmitri Baltermants, of civilians in 1942 searching the bodies of Russian Jewish family members who had been executed by Germans soldiers as they retreated. A 2003 photograph, taken by Ahmed Jadallah for the news agency Reuters while he lay wounded from shrapnel, shows bodies in the street in the largest refugee camp in the Gaza Strip. “Daily Life” shows a Congolese woman breastfeeding as a tank rolls by, in a 2008 image by Walter Astrada; Londoners sleeping in an underground train station in 1940, by Bill Brandt; a woman eating bread in Amsterdam during the Hongerwinter famine of 1944, by Cas Oorthuys; a 1940/1941 meeting in New York of members of the Bund, an American Nazi party, by Otto Hagel; a monk burning himself in Saigon in 1963, in protest against alleged religious persecution by the South Vietnamese government, by Malcolm Browne; and a man uncovering an anti-personnel land mine in Angola in 2004, by Sean Sutton. Pictures of civilian “Grief” are common, and the images here include a woman in Tehran inspecting photographs of the missing, by Gilles Peress; a man at an airport, grieving alone and holding a folded American flag, by Harry Benson; a father digging a grave for his daughter in a soccer field in Somalia, by Howard Castleberry; and a woman mourning in Afghanistan in 1996, at the grave of her brother who was killed by a Taliban rocket, by James Nachtwey. (46 images)

Otto Hagel (American born Germany, 1909-1973) 'German-Americans at a meeting in New Jersey of the Deutsche Bund' 1940-41

Otto Hagel (American born Germany, 1909-1973)
German-Americans at a meeting in New Jersey of the Deutsche Bund
1940-1941
Silver gelatin print

Dmitri Baltermants (Russian born Poland, 1912-1990)
Grief, Kerch, Crimea
Spring 1942
Silver gelatin print

“War, is, above all, grief. I photographed non-stop for years and I know that in all that time I produced only five or six real photographs. War is not for photography. If, heaven forbid, I had to photograph war again, I would do it quite differently. I agonise now at the thought of all the things that I did not photograph.”

Dmitri Baltermants quoted in “The Russian War, 1941-1945” (J. Cape, London, 1978)

Cas Oorthuys (Dutch, 1908-1975) 'Portrait of starving woman in the hunger winter, Amsterdam' 1944-1945 from the exhibition 'WAR/PHOTOGRAPHY: Images of Armed Conflict and Its Aftermath' at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, November 2012 - February 2013

Cas Oorthuys (Dutch, 1908-1975)
Portrait of starving woman in the hunger winter, Amsterdam
1944-1945
Silver gelatin print

Malcolm Browne (American, 1931-2012)
Burning Monk – The Self-Immolation
1963
Gelatin silver print

Harry Benson (Scottish, b. 1929)
Grieving man, holding flag
1971
Gelatin silver print

Children

22. Children have been consistently photographed during wartime as both victims and soldiers. Images in this section include Sir Cecil Beaton’s Three-year-old Eileen Dunne in Hospital for Sick Children, England (1940); children viewing the bodies of other children who were hanged as collaborators in Russia in the 1940s, by Mark Redkin; Philip Jones Griffiths’ image of a young boy, Called “Little Tiger” for killing two “Vietcong women cadre” – his mother and teacher, it was rumored (1968); children playing “execution” in Italy, by Enzo Sellerio; two orphaned boys smoking cigarettes in post-World War II Japan, by Hayashi Tadahiko; a father home on leave reading the newspaper with his son, who wears his dad’s helmet, by Andrea Bruce; and the 2005 photograph, by Chris Hondros, of a blood-splattered Iraqi girl whose family was mistakenly ambushed by U.S. troops. (13 images)

Cecil Beaton (British, 1904-1980)
Eileen Dunne, aged three, sits in bed with her doll at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children, after being injured during an air raid on London in September 1940
1940
Gelatin silver print
© IWM (MH 26395)

Philip Jones Griffiths (Welsh, 1936-2008)
Called “Little Tiger” for killing two “Vietcong women cadre” – his mother and teacher, it was rumored, Vietnam
1968
Gelatin silver print
The Philip Jones Griffiths Foundation, courtesy of Howard Greenberg Gallery
© Philip Jones Griffiths / Magnum Photos

Andrea Bruce (American, b. 1973)
Untitled [A father home on leave reading the newspaper with his son, who wears his dad’s helmet]
2006
From the series When the War Comes Home
Gelatin silver print

Portraits

23. Portraits are the most common type of photograph made during conflicts. Dispersed throughout the exhibition, lining the main walkway through the galleries, are the faces of leaders, the enlisted, heroes and war criminals, as well as group portraits. One of the earliest prints in the exhibition is a daguerreotype from the Mexican-American War of a high-ranking officer. Matthew Brady, one of the most famous photographers of the 19th century, was renowned for coverage of the Civil War; his Major‑General Joseph Hooker, c. 1863, is on view. Among the most recent is a self-portrait by American Cpl. Reynaldo Leal USMC. Leal – who was born and grew up in Edinburg, Texas, and now lives in El Paso – served in Iraq conducting combat patrols through the villages along the Euphrates. (40 images)

Matthew B. Brady (American, 1823-1896)
Colonel William Gates, believed to have been taken upon his return from the Mexican War
c. 1848
Half plate daguerreotype, gold toned
Library of Congress

Mathew B. Brady (American, 1823-1896)
Major-General Joseph Hooker
c. 1863
Salted paper print, hand coloured
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, museum purchase with funds provided by the S. I. Morris Photography Endowment

Corporal Reynaldo Leal USMC (American, b. 1983)
Self‑portrait after a Patrol
c. 2004-2006
Inkjet print
13 1/2 × 9 in. (34.3 × 22.9cm)
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
Museum purchase with funds provided by Will Michels and Clinton T. Willour
© Reynaldo Leal

War’s End

24. War’s End is identifiable at the moment a photograph is taken. The subsection “Victory/Defeat” is the visual manifest of the outcome of war, from the Japanese signing peace documents on board the USS Missouri, by Carl Mydans; to German generals discussing terms of surrender in the woods just four days after Adolf Hitler committed suicide in 1945, by E. G. Malindine; and the raising of the Hammer and Sickle over the Reichstag in Berlin in 1945, by Evgeny Khaldey. Also included is Simon Norfolk’s Victory arch built by the Northern Alliance at the entrance to a local commander’s headquarters in Bamiyan. The empty niche housed the smaller of the two Buddhas, destroyed by the Taliban in 2001, from the series Afghanistan: Chronotopia. “Retribution” contains a 1945 image, by Lee Miller, of a concentration-camp guard who was beaten by prisoners after their liberation; and a photograph by Robert Capa of a Frenchwoman who had been impregnated by a German soldier, as she walks through a jeering crowd with her head shaved in punishment and carrying her baby. The photographs in “Homecoming” establish an emotive connection: a family reunion on the tarmac at an Air Force base in California in 1973, by Sal Veder; a mother and son embracing at the Ben-Gurion Airport in Israel in 1976, by Micha Bar-Am; and a man who has returned from duty in Bosnia in 1995 to discover that his home and everyone in it is gone, by Ron Haviv. (23 images)

Robert Capa (Hungarian-American, 1913-1954)
Collaborator woman who had a German soldier’s child, Chartres, 18 August 1944
1944
Gelatin silver print
33 x 49cm

Evgeny Khaldey (Russian, 1917-1997)
The Flag of Victory
1945
Gelatin silver print

E. G. Malindine (British, 1906-1970) 'German Military Forces Seek Surrender Terms, May 1945'

E. G. Malindine (British, 1906-1970)
No 5 Army Film & Photographic Unit, Malindine E G (Capt), Morris (Sgt)
German Military Forces Seek Surrender Terms, May 1945
1945
Gelatin silver print
Public domain

Field Marshal Sir Bernard Montgomery with the German delegates outside his headquarters at 21st Army Group

Carl Mydans (American, 1907-2004)
Japanese signing peace documents on board the ‘USS Missouri’
1945
Gelatin silver print

Sal Velder (American, b. 1926)
Released prisoner of war Lt. Col. Robert L. Stirm is greeted by his family at Travis Air Force Base in Fairfield, California on March 17, 1973, as he returns home from the Vietnam War
1973
Silver gelatin print
© Sal Velder

Micha Bar-Am (Israeli born Germany, 1930-2022) 'The return from Entebbe, Ben-Gurion Airport, Israel' 1976

Micha Bar-Am (Israeli born Germany, 1930)
The return from Entebbe, Ben-Gurion Airport, Israel
1976
From the series Promised Land
Inkjet print
Courtesy of the artist and Andrea Meislin Gallery, New York
© Micha Bar-Am / Magnum Photos

Ron Haviv (American, b. 1965)
A Bosnian soldier stands on what is believed to be a mass grave outside his destroyed home. He was the sole survivor of 69 people
1995
Inkjet print
Courtesy of Ron Haviv/VII
© Ron Haviv

Simon Norfolk (British born Nigeria, b. 1963)
Victory arch built by the Northern Alliance at the entrance to a local commander’s headquarters in Bamiyan. The empty niche housed the smaller of the two Buddhas, destroyed by the Taliban in 2001
2001
From the series Afghanistan: Chronotopia

Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
1001 Bissonnet Street
Houston, TX 77005

Opening hours:
Wednesday 11am – 5pm
Thursday 11am – 9pm
Friday 11am – 6pm
Saturday 11am – 6pm
Sunday 12.30pm – 6pm
Monday Closed
Tuesday Closed

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston website

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