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 (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 (Camilo moving into Havana, 8.1.1959) (Camilo Cienfuegos) 1959 Gelatine-Silberprint, Vintage 40 x 50cm From the Skrein Photo Collection
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 (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
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” (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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 (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
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
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
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 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)
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.
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)
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.
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.
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 / 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.
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
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
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
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
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
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.
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.
“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.”
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
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.
“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.”
Curator: Mia Fineman, Assistant Curator in the Department of Photographs
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!
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 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
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
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) 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
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 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 (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 (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 (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 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 Nd (1960s) / published 1981 From the portfolio Women are Beautiful Silver gelatin print
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) 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 1984 From the series From the heart of the forest to the edge of the road 1982-1984 Silver gelatin print
Curators: Anne Wilkes Tucker, the Gus and Lyndall Wortham Curator of Photography; Will Michels, collections photographer and exhibition co-curator; Natalie Zelt, curatorial assistant
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!
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 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 1940-1941 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 Silver gelatin 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)
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
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) 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
Simon Norfolk (British born Nigeria, b. 1963) Victory arch built by the Northern Alliance at the entrance to alocal 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
Curator: Celina Lunsford, an independent curator and the Artistic Director for the Fotografie Forum in Frankfurt
Imogen Cunningham exhibition poster
This is the first posting on one of my favourite photographers of all time: Imogen Cunningham. The sensuality of this artist, from the early Pictorialist studies (including her ground breaking depiction of the male nude, her husband artist Roi Partridge) to the later Modernist nudes, portraits, industrial landscapes and botanical photographs is of the highest order. Cunningham reminds me of a photographic version of Georgia O’Keeffe without the undoubted darkness that inhabits some of O’Keeffe’s work.
The portrait of Frida Kahlo Rivera (1931, below) is a magnificent study of a proud woman with delicate use of natural light framing the face and gently clasped hands. Note the textures within the photograph – the dress, the shawl, the wicker chair and the wall – and also notice the reflective light falling behind the sitter upper left to balance the frontal light coming from bottom right. Masterful. Cunningham’s famous Two Callas (1929, below) is an glorious study of form, light and texture, a sensual symphony for the eyes, the background a kind of mutable black that allows the viewer’s gaze to be immersed in the subject. The viewer’s voyeuristic gaze is further engaged by the voluptuous suggestiveness of the copious hair and out of focus breast of Phoenix Recumbent (1968, below) where, “the object of the gaze is not aware of the current viewer (though they may originally have been aware of being filmed, photographed, painted etc. and may sometimes have been aware that strangers could subsequently gaze at their image).” (Daniel Chandler “Notes on ‘The Gaze'” on the Aberystwyth University website [Online] Cited 12/01/2013 no longer available online)
Finally, the photograph of Imogen Cunningham and Twinka Thiebaud by Judy Dater (1974, below) seems to me to capture the spirit of the human being Imogen Cunningham with indelible grace. Youth, beauty, age, wisdom. A constantly inquisitive mind, wanting to know, wanting to see things more clearly, taking photographs right up until her final years. There she is with her twin-lens Rollei dressed as if from another century, the quizzical nature of her left hand and the look that passes between Imogen and Twinka, the space between them seeming to shimmer with possibility. That space seems to wash away the years of Imogen’s life to when she was young, lying naked near some trees (Self-Portrait 1906, below). It is a truly memorable image. In the sensitivity of this image, Dater embodies everything that I admire in Cunningham’s work: light, texture, sensitivity to subject, an understanding of beauty and an irrepressible, joyous sensuality.
A fitting tribute to one of the world’s great photographers.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Fundación Mapfre, Madrid for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a a larger version of the image.
In this bumper posting, a big call: in my opinion, the greatest photography based image maker in the world today.
Tillmans challenges the way we think and feel about photography. As Tom Holert in his excellent catalogue essay The Unforeseen notes, Tillmans problematises and reconfigures narration and visualisation, experimenting with a sensory experiential backdrop against and within which the photographs are produced. Modes of perception and the regimes of emotion are inducted into the aesthetics of production and meaning so that, “the pictures communicate with each other in a way that is not bound to the pattern of a closed narrative or any particular line of argument. Instead they create a form of aesthetic and thematic interaction that Tillmans sees as ‘a language of personal associations and “thought-maps.”” The mobilisation and reversal of value and meaning are central strategies in Tillmans’ praxis.
In this way Tillmans opens up spaces for research, “in which learning and unlearning, resonance and interference, a new affective solidarity and real experimentation might be possible before the onset of all sorts of methods, all forms of governance, all kinds of discipline and doxa [common belief or popular opinion].
This form of experimentation does not lead to benchmark research results; nothing is ever proved or illustrated, regardless of what is in the images or what they may purport to show. Ever engaging in experiment Tillmans roams through the reality of materials, forms, affects and gives us tangible access to these unportrayble, unreferential realities. Tillmans engages his emotions when he is working, also and specifically when he is photographing people, or plants, machines and cities. Individual emotions separate off from the representation of living beings and objects and form nodes of emotion in the viewer’s mind.”
Through these rhizomic tendencies (a la Delueze and Guittari A Thousand Plateaus) Tillmans images generate emotion and affect, “rhythmically resonating between pictures, from wall to wall, from room to room, from side to side,” so that in each instance, in each publication or exhibition, he can “modify and modulate anew the relations between picture and picture support, representation and presentation, motif and materiality.”
Nothing is ever fixed in linear time. The work is presented as an infinitely variable, spatial and emotional relationship – an orthogonal performativity where the ritual of production and meaning is never fully predetermined at any stage of production and reception.
Tom Holert’s excellent catalogue essay The Unforeseen. On the Production of the New, and Other Movements in the Work of Wolfgang Tillmans includes information on Jacques Rancière’s concept of “‘aisthesis’ for the way in which very different things have been registered as ‘art’ for the last two hundred years or so. As he points out, “this is not about the ‘reception’ of works of art, but about the sensory experiential backdrop against and within which they come about. These are completely material conditions – places of performance or exhibition, forms of circulation and reproduction – but also modes of perception and the regimes of emotion, the categories that identify them and the patterns of thought that classify and interpret them.'”
A thought provoking text (extracts below to accompany the photographs).
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Moderna Museet for allowing me to publish the photographs and the text in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Wolfgang Tillmans is one of the leading artists of his generation and is constantly in the public eye, with exhibitions all over the world. The exhibition at Moderna Museet is Tillmans’ first major show in Sweden and brings nearly twenty years of picture-making to a new audience. Moderna Museet is delighted to welcome Wolfgang Tillmans – an artist who has extended the boundaries of photography and redefined the medium of photography as an artform.
Wolfgang Tillmans (b. 1968) first attracted attention at the beginning of the 1990s, with his apparently mundane pictures of subjects taken from his own surroundings. After studying in Britain, he published photographs in prominent publications such as i-D, Spex and Interview. Today, these pictures are considered trendsetting for the young generation of the 1990s, and raise questions about subcultures and sexual identities. By turning everyday situations into almost monumental images, Tillmans very strikingly captured the spirit of the times. It soon became evident that his pictures renegotiate photographic conventions and reflect contemporary currents related to culture and identity. Since then, Tillmans has continued his in-depth investigations, expanding the the realm of photography and redefining the very medium as an artform.
“Wolfgang Tillmans moves freely between images of the club scene in Berlin, political manifestations, and skyscrapers in Hong Kong; all with the same direct tonality. At the same time, all of his pictures explore photography itself – as a medium, but also as a material, convention and process,” says Curator Jo Widoff.
Recently Tillmans’ art has taken a number of different directions, revolving around various issues, everything from still lifes and modern landscapes to his lifelong interest in astronomy and the night sky. He has also taken his in-depth exploration of abstract photography even further. Tillmans’ abstract images are more closely related to the painterly tradition and he researches photography as a self-reflexive medium. Abstract images, such as Freischwimmer and Silver, are made in the darkroom, striking a balance between the deliberate and chance. Since 1995, Tillmans has been working actively and strategically with the exhibition space, so as to reveal the possibilities and limitations of the space in interplay with the photographs. His installations display a bewildering variety of formats and sizes, ways of composing the hanging of the pictures, and contexts. The exhibition at Moderna Museet should thus be seen as a site-specific installation. In recent years, Tillmans has been travelling the world taking photographs with the general title Neue Welt. These pictures relate to the new world of markets and trade, to politics and economics, and to the hypermodern. The title also refers to the new digital camera that Wolfgang used to take these pictures, which captures and documents more detail than we can perceive with the naked eye.
“Wolfgang Tillmans is one of today’s most prominent artists. Despite its visual complexity, his pictorial language is immediately recognisable. He captures the explosive energy in social situations and crosses boundaries between different artforms. He is able to use photographic means to create a kind of abstract painting,” says Museum Director Daniel Birnbaum.
The Freischwimmer series – Free Swimmer is the most basic Lifesaving level in Germany and Switzerland – is an excellent example of Tillmans’s more experimental works. On one hand, the huge photographic papers were affixed to the wall with simple adhesive tape or paper clips; on the other, the images eluded all description and eschewed portraiture, landscape, still life or other subject matters he had centred on up to then.
The creative process of Freischwimmer, ongoing to the present, seems to speak to pure photography, divested of any form of intervention either in shooting or in enlargement, or indeed optical devices of any kind. We can almost imagine the artist in front of a large tray with reagents, performing some kind of alchemical ritual at the origin of these vaporous images, images containing a refinement that exceeds any human intention, just pure representations of themselves, of a unique and absolutely unrepeatable process. Of their reality.”
José Manuel Costa. “Swimming to Freedom 38,” on the CA2M Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo website [Online] Cited 12/10/2013. No longer available online. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
The Freischwimmer, which Tillmans started to produce in the early 2000s, form a group or family of images that are not made using a camera lens. As the results of gestural and chemical operations in the dark room, these originals on medium-sized photo paper, which are subsequently scanned and enlarged both as ink-jet prints and as light-jet prints on photo paper, are unrepeatable one-offs. It has been said that these images, which include ensembles such as Peaches, Blushes and Urgency, call to mind microscopically detailed images of biological processes, hirsute epidermises, highly erogenous zones, and that their aura fills the whole space – above all when they are presented in such large formats as in Warsaw or yet larger still, as in the case of the two monumental Ostgut Freischwimmer (2004) that used to grace the walls of the Panorama Bar at Berghain in Berlin. The Freischwimmer and their kin can be read as diagrams of sexualised atmospheres in private or semi-public spaces, in boudoirs or clubs, as highly non-representational images that both suspend and supplement conventional depictions of sex.
Extract from Tom Holert. The Unforeseen. On the Production of the New, and Other Movements in the Work of Wolfgang Tillmans [Online] Cited 12/10/2013 no longer available online. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968) Nanbei Hu 2009 Inkjet print 207 x 138cm Courtesy the artist and Maureen Paley, London
Extracts from Tom Holert. The Unforeseen. On the Production of the New, and Other Movements in the Work of Wolfgang Tillmans [Online] Cited 12/10/2013. No longer available online. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Parallelism – Subjectivism – Objectivism
This all means that the decorative unity of wall and image, which the hanging of the Freischwimmer initially promises, is not only thwarted by the shift in dimensions, the infringement of symmetrical order and the (supposed) discontinuity of abstraction and figuration, and by the fact that the different types of image and their configuration on this wall require the viewer to move around in the space and to continually readjust his or her gaze, bearing in mind that in the corner of one’s eye or following a slight turn of the body more pictures are constantly looming into view, mostly unframed, very small (postcard-sized), very large, hung very low down, but also very high up, portraits and still lifes, gestural abstractions, a close-up of a vagina, a picture of a modern Boy with Thorn, street scenes, an air-conditioning system. It also means that the pictures communicate with each other in a way that is not bound to the pattern of a closed narrative or any particular line of argument. Instead they create a form of aesthetic and thematic interaction that Tillmans sees as ‘a language of personal associations and “thought-maps”‘,1 as ‘… a pattern of parallelism as opposed to one linear stream of thought’,2 and which the critic Jan Verwoert has aptly described as a ‘performative experiment’ with the viewer.3
With all their variability and flexibility – underpinned by an invisible rectilinear grid yet fundamentally open in their interconnections – these installations serve Tillmans as reflections of his own way of perceiving the world, as externalisations of his thinking and feeling, and as a chance to fashion a utopian world according to his own ideas and fantasies.4 However, this Romantic subjectivism of self-expression or externalisation has to be seen in light of a radical objectivism (Tillmans attaches great importance to this) that specifically draws attention not only to the expressive potential arising from the ageing process, from evidence of wear and other precariousnesses in the materials of photography (paper, camera techniques, chemicals, developing equipment etc.) but also to the remarkable resistance and persistence of these same materials.
Amongst the phenomena that inform this objectivism there are those instances of loss of control that can arise during the mechanical production processes of analogue photography or from coding errors, glitches, in digital images. Temporality, finity, brevity come into play here – a certain melancholy that activates rather than paralyses.
Over the years Tillmans has constantly found new ways to explore, to interpret and to stage this dialectic of intention and contingency. His repertoire and means of aesthetic production have multiplied. And this expansion has not been without consequences for the presentation of his work. Tillmans himself feels that the character of his installations has changed since 2006/07, in other words, when different versions of a solo exhibition of his work toured to three museums in the United States. It was during this exhibition tour that Tillmans started to see the benefit of placing greater weight on individual groups of works in the various rooms of larger exhibitions. In so doing he gave visitors the chance to engage in a different kind of concentration, without the pressure of constantly having to deal with the ‘full spectrum’ (Tillmans) of his oeuvre.5
Value Theory, Value Praxis
The visitor to an exhibition of the work of Wolfgang Tillmans in the year 2012, in this case the author of these lines, arrives in expectation of a particular, clearly defined type of art and image experience. A sense (however fragmentary) of the artist’s past exhibitions and publications is always present in any encounter with his work. And this includes the need to see the ‘abstract pictures’ in the context of an oeuvre where realistic and abstract elements have never intentionally been separated from each other. On the contrary, abstraction is always co-present with figurative and representational elements. There is no contradiction between forms and matter free of meaning – that is to say, visual moments that on the face of it neither represent nor illustrate anything – and Tillmans’ photographs of people, animals, objects and landscapes; in fact there is an unbroken connection, a continuum. This applies both to individual images as much as to the internal, dynamic relationalism of his oeuvre as a whole. And it also applies to each individual, concrete manifestation of multiplicity, as in the case of the installation in the first room of the exhibition in Warsaw.
Both aesthetic theory and the institution of art itself provide decisive grounds for discussing photography and visual art in such a way that images are not solely considered in terms of documentary functions or ornamental aspects nor are they reduced to the question as to whether their contents are stage-managed or authentic, but that attention is paid instead to the material nature of the pictures and objects in the space, to their sculptural qualities. Having decided early on against a career as a commercial photographer and in favour of a life in art, there was no need for Tillmans to seek to justify the interest he had already felt in his youth in a non-hierarchical, queer approach to various forms and genres in the visual arts. For the young Wolfgang Tillmans the cover artwork for a New Order LP, a portrait of Barbara Klemm (in-house photographer at the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung), or a screenprint collage of Robert Rauschenberg in Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen were all ‘equally important’ images’.7 The mobilisation and reversal of value and meaning are central strategies in his praxis. He questions the ‘language of importance’8 in photography and alters valencies of the visual by, for instance – in a ‘transformation of value’9 – producing C-prints from the supposedly impoverished or inadequate visuality of old black-and-white copies or wrongly developed images and thus raising them to the status of museum art. However much he may set store by refinement and precision, he avoids conventional forms of presentation, that is to say, ‘the signifiers that give immediate value to something, such as the picture frame’.10
Conditions: Subject – Work – Mediation
If we take the line proposed by the philosopher Jacques Rancière, then the ‘aesthetic regime’ of the modern era, which – following the introduction of a modern concept of art and aesthetics – abandoned the regulatory aesthetic canon of the classical age in the nineteenth century, is distinguished by the fact that under its auspices the traditional hierarchies separating the high from the popular branches of narration and visualisation were problematised and reconfigured in such a way that a new politics of aesthetics and a ‘distribution of the sensible’ in the name of art ensued. Rancière has recently proposed the term ‘aisthesis’ for the way in which very different things have been registered as ‘art’ for the last two hundred years or so. As he points out, this is not about the ‘reception’ of works of art, but about the sensory experiential backdrop against and within which they come about. ‘These are completely material conditions – places of performance or exhibition, forms of circulation and reproduction – but also modes of perception and the regimes of emotion, the categories that identify them and the patterns of thought that classify and interpret them.’12
In order to understand why the work of Wolfgang Tillmans – so seemingly casual, so heterogeneous and so wide-ranging – is not only extremely successful, but has, for over twenty years, been intelligible and influential both within and outside the field of art, with the result that by now his praxis seems like a universal, subtly normative style of perception and image-making, it is essential to consider the ‘conditions’ alluded to by Rancière. For these are fundamental to the specific visibility and speakability of this oeuvre and to its legitimacy as art…
The Production of the New
Tillmans thus also makes his contribution to an answer to the question posed by the philosopher John Rajchman (in response to Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault and their deliberations on the production of the new and on the creative act in present-day, control-obsessed societies). Rajchman asked how, in and with the arts and their institutions, spaces for open searches and researches could be devised, in which learning and unlearning, resonance and interference, a new affective solidarity and real experimentation might be possible before the onset of all sorts of methods, all forms of governance, all kinds of discipline and doxa.18
This form of experimentation does not lead to benchmark research results; nothing is ever proved or illustrated, regardless of what is in the images or what they may purport to show. Ever engaging in experiment Tillmans roams through the reality of materials, forms, affects and gives us tangible access to these unportrayble, unreferential realities. Tillmans engages his emotions when he is working, also and specifically when he is photographing people, or plants, machines and cities. Individual emotions separate off from the representation of living beings and objects and form nodes of emotion in the viewer’s mind. ‘Artists are presenters of affects, the inventors and creators of affects’, as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari put it in What is Philosophy?, ‘they draw us into the compound’.19 And indeed Tillmans’ laboratories are places where emotion and affect are generated and presented, rhythmically resonating between pictures, from wall to wall, from room to room, from side to side. The dog asleep on the stones, its breathing body warmed by the sun (in the video Cuma, 2011), Susanne’s lowered gaze (in Susanne, No Bra, 2006), with the line of her hair encircling her head like an incomplete figure of eight, but also the disturbed, interrupted, lurking monochromaticism of the Lighter and Silver works – they all open up the longer you look at them, the longer you are with them, to a perceiving in terms of forces and affects. They alert us to the fact that all images are fabricated.
Assimilating Photography into the Paradox
By virtue of the portability and variability of his works, with every print, with every exhibition, with every publication Tillmans can modify and modulate anew the relations between picture and picture support, representation and presentation, motif and materiality. In the two decades that have elapsed since his entry into the art business his praxis has continuously expanded. From the outset photography was his springboard for both integrative and eccentric acts. And even though this oeuvre may create the impression that the medium of photography knows no limits, photography – as discourse, as technique, as history, as convention – has remained the constant point of reference for all of Tillmans’ complex operations. It could also be said that he is immensely faithful to his chosen medium, although – or precisely because – that medium is not always recognisable as such. To quote an older essay on photography and painting by Richard Hamilton (whom Tillmans once photographed), his work is about ‘assimilating photography into the domain of paradox, incorporating it into the philosophical contradictions of art…’30 Since Tillmans’ experiments with a laser copier in the 1980s, he has produced hundreds of images that may be beholden to the etymology of photography (light drawing) but that also constantly undermine or overuse the social and epistemological functions of photography as a means to depict reality, as proof, as an aide mémoire, as documentation or as a form of aesthetic expression. The discourse on photography, with all its ‘post-photographic’ exaggerations, the debate on the status of the photographic image – none of these have been concluded; on the contrary, Tillmans is continuously advancing them on his own terms. His praxis forms the backdrop for experimentation and adventures in perception that are closely intertwined with the past and the present of photography and theories of photography; yet the specific logic of this oeuvre creates a realm of its own in which archive and presentation interlock in such a way that photography still plays an important part as historic and discursive formation, but the problems and paradoxes of fine art have now taken over the key functions.
The contagious impact of the epistemological problems of art has opened up new options for the medium of photography, new contexts of reception. And in this connection it is apparent, as Julie Ault has put it, that ‘Tillmans enacts his right to complex mediation’.31 In other words, photography provides a means for him to engage with a whole range of interactions with the viewer. In his eyes and hands photography becomes a realm of potential, where a never-ending series of constellations and juxtapositions of materialities, dimensions and motifs of the ‘unforeseen’ can come about. Photography thus regains a dimension of experimentation, an openness that is not constrained by aesthetic formats and technical formatting but that does arise from a precise knowledge and understanding of the history of the medium.”
Extracts from Tom Holert. The Unforeseen. On the Production of the New, and Other Movements in the Work of Wolfgang Tillmans [Online] Cited 12/10/2013 no longer available online
Footnotes from extracts
1/ “Peter Halley in Conversation with Wolfgang Tillmans,” in Jan Verwoert, Peter Halley and Midori Matsui, Wolfgang Tillmans (London: Phaidon, 2002), 8-33 at 29
2/ Steve Slocombe, “Wolfgang Tillmans – The All-Seeing Eye,” in Flash Art, vol. 32, no. 209, November – December 1999, 92-95 at 95
3/ Jan Verwoert, “Survey: Picture Possible Lives: The Work of Wolfgang Tillmans,” in Verwoert et. al., Wolfgang Tillmans, 36-89 at 72
4/ See Slocombe, “Wolfgang Tillmans – The All-Seeing Eye” (see note 2), 95
5/ See Julia Peyton-Jones and Hans Ulrich Obrist, “Interview with Wolfgang Tillmans,” in Wolfgang Tillmans (London: Serpentine Gallery / Koenig Books, 2010), 21-27 at 24
7/ Wolfgang Tillmans, email of 12 May 2012.
8/ Julie Ault, “Das Thema lautet Ausstellen Installations as Possibility in the Practice of Wolfgang Tillmans,” in Wolfgang Tillmans. Lighter (Stuttgart/Berlin: Hatje Cantz/SMB), Nationalgalerie Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, 2008, 27
9/ See Hans Ulrich Obrist, Wolfgang Tillmans (Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2007 = The Conversation Series, 6), 41
10/ Gil Blank, “The Portraiture of Wolfgang Tillmans,” in Influence, 2, autumn 2004, 110-21 at 117
12/ Jacques Rancière, Aisthesis. Scènes du régime esthétique de l’art (Paris: Galilée, 2011), 10
18/ Zepke (ed.), Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New (London: Continuum, 2008), 80-90 at 89
19/ See Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 175
30/ Richard Hamilton, “Photography and Painting,” in Studio International, vol. 177, no. 909, March 1969, 120-25 at 125
31/ Julie Ault, “The Subject Is Exhibition” (see note 8), 15
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968) Lutz & Alex sitting in the trees 1992 Inkjet print on paper, clips 208 x 138 cm
Moderna Museet, Stockholm
Moderna Museet is ten minutes away from Kungsträdgården, and twenty minutes from T-Centralen or Gamla Stan. Walk past Grand Hotel and Nationalmuseum on Blasieholmen, opposite the Royal Palace. After crossing the bridge to Skeppsholmen, continue up the hill. The entrance to Moderna Museet and Arkitekturmuseet is on the left-hand side.
What a dazzling, sensual, realist Manuel Álvarez Bravo was, one of my favourite photographers of all time. What an eye, what an artist!
The beauty of some of his images simply takes my breath away – such as The daughter of the dancers (La hija de los danzantes / La Fille des danseurs) (1933, below). Álvarez Bravo was one of a triumvirate of photographers that greatly influenced me when I started to study photography, along with Eugene Atget and Minor White. I feel a special affinity to him as we share the same initials.
The posting also includes two colour photographs, the first I have ever seen of Manuel Álvarez Bravo. Unfortunately the quality of some of the media photographs was again incredibly poor and I had to spend an inordinate amount of time repairing damage to the scans in order to bring them to you in this posting. Enjoy.
Many thankx to the Jeu de Paume, Paris for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Manuel Álvarez Bravo au Jeu de Paume
Developed over eight decades, the photographic work of Manuel Álvarez Bravo (Mexico City, 1902-2002) constitutes an essential milestone in 20th-century Mexican culture. Both strange and fascinating, his photography has often been perceived as the imaginary product of an exotic country, or as an eccentric drift of the surrealist avant-garde.
“When will we have sleeping logicians, sleeping philosophers? I would like to sleep, in order to surrender myself to the dreamers….,” wrote André Breton in the first Surrealist manifesto of 1924. Alvarez Bravo, a compatriot of Breton and the Surrealists in Mexico City during the 1920s and ’30s (although he was not an official member of the movement), made photographs that consistently seem to conjure Breton’s wish. His deep appreciation for the folklore and popular history of his native country-in which common objects were often imbued with a mystical symbolism of life and death and daily situations could easily assume political significance-produced moving images that seem to bask in sensuality while maintaining a connection to the intellectual process of metaphor. In this photograph, these seemingly paradoxical elements are solidly in evidence. Alvarez Bravo wrote of it: “There at number 20 Calle de Guatemala, I saw many things that marked me forever. I walked a lot through the adjoining streets; I especially liked to watch the customs porters in Santiago Tlatelolco station, who after work would fall asleep exhausted on the sidewalk. I felt great compassion for them. … I am happy to have lived in those streets. There everything was food for my camera, everything had an inherent social content; in life everything has social content.” His ability to render in this image Mexican life’s visceral confluence of pleasure, exhaustion, vulnerability, and reverie at the intersection of everyday life and the world of dreams is exceptional.
Getting away from the stereotypes about exotic Surrealism and the folkloric vision of Mexican culture, this exhibition of work by Manuel Álvarez Bravo at Jeu de Paume offers a boldly contemporary view of this Mexican photographer.
The photographic work done by Manuel Álvarez Bravo (Mexico City, 1902-2002) over his eight decades of activity represent an essential contribution to Mexican culture in the 20th century. His strange and fascinating images have often been seen as the product of an exotic imagination or an eccentric version of the Surrealist avant-garde. This exhibition will go beyond such readings. While not denying the links with Surrealism and the clichés relating to Mexican culture, the selection of 150 photographs is designed to bring out a specific set of iconographic themes running through Álvarez Bravo’s practice: reflections and trompe-l’œil effects in the big city; prone bodies reduced to simple masses; volumes of fabric affording glimpses of bodies; minimalist, geometrically harmonious settings; ambiguous objects, etc.
The exhibition thus takes a fresh look at the work, without reducing it to a set of emblematic images and the stereotyped interpretations that go with them. This approach brings out little-known aspects of his art that turn out to be remarkably topical and immediate. Images become symbols, words turn into images, objects act as signs and reflections become objects: these recurring phenomena are like visual syllables repeated all through his œuvre, from the late 1920s to the early 1980s. They give his images a structure and intentional quality that goes well beyond the fortuitous encounter with the raw magical realism of the Mexican scene. Indeed, Álvarez Bravo’s work constitutes an autonomous and coherent poetic discourse in its own right, one that he patiently built up over the years. For it is indeed time that bestows unity on the imaginary fabric of Álvarez Bravo’s photographs. Behind these disturbing and poetic images, which are like hieroglyphs, there is a cinematic intention which explains their formal quality and also their sequential nature. Arguably, Álvarez Bravo’s photographs could be viewed as images from a film. The exhibition explores this hypothesis by juxtaposing some of his most famous pictures with short experimental films made in the 1960s, taken from the family archives. The show also features some late, highly cinematic images, and a selection of colour prints and Polaroids. By revealing the photographer’s experiments, this presentation shows how the poetic quality of Álvarez Bravo’s images is grounded in a constant concern with modernity and language. Subject to semantic ambiguity, but underpinned by a strong visual syntax, his photography is a unique synthesis of Mexican localism and the modernist project, and shows how modernism was a multifaceted phenomenon, constructed around a plurality of visions, poetics and cultural backgrounds, and not built on one central practice.
Manuel Alvarez Bravo’s photograph of a long lock of wavy hair lying on a geometrically patterned floor juxtaposes texture and materials, dreams and taboos, and invokes questions about the drama taking place outside the photograph. Was this hair placed on the floor intentionally, or did it fall accidentally? The natural presumption is that the hair belonged to a woman, but could it have belonged to a man? Stripped of a luxurious mane, so symbolic of power and passion, is its one-time “owner” now weak and indifferent? This complex image has led one writer to assert that “in theme and form, the photograph is divided between the hint of seduction and that of punishment.”
![Osvaldo Salas (Cuban, 1914-1992) 'Che fumano' [Che smoking] 1964](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/mdm-rupertinum_bilder-revolution_salas_che-fumano-web.jpg "Osvaldo Salas (Cuban, 1914-1992) 'Che fumano' [Che smoking] 1964")
![Andrea Bruce (American, b. 1973) 'Untitled [A father home on leave reading the newspaper with his son, who wears his dad’s helmet]' 2006](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/andrea-bruce.jpg "Andrea Bruce (American, b. 1973) 'Untitled [A father home on leave reading the newspaper with his son, who wears his dad’s helmet]' 2006")
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