Curators: committee of traditional leaders and organized by the people of the Pueblo of Isleta
Photographer unknown Albuquerque Indian School Boys with Flags c. 1900 9 x 12cm Courtesy of the National Archives and Records Center
Another glorious, eclectic posting with a couple of knockout photographs, including Sumner Matteson’s Simon Zuni (1900, below) and George Wharton James’s Selling goods along tracks (late 1880s to early 1900s, below).
The latter is a masterpiece of early modernist photography. Observe the spatial construction of the picture: open and yet closed at the same time. What do I mean by this? The image allows the eye to wander, to meander if you like among the structures while always having an escape into the sky, into the distance of the partially blocked vanishing point. The objects flow across the image plane like music; at left the dark shape and its shadow falling on the railway tracks hold in that side of the image. If the shape wasn’t there your eye would fall out of that side of the photograph, it would not be enclosed. It is this enclosure which forces your gaze into the distance. An asymmetrical balance is achieved with the train car at right, this time with the added punctum of the limply hanging flag to hold the viewer’s attention.
Most stunning of all is the composition in the centre, with changes in scale, orientation and direction – frontal, angled, away – and the commensurate shadows thrown from a setting sun. Reinforcing this flow is the chiaroscuro of the people selling goods – the white of the dress and the dark of the shawl, with the wonderfully raised arm breaking up the vanishing point / vertical composition. The shape of the dog lopping away parallel to the train tracks would normally lead us to an empty vista, the vanishing point on the horizon line of the image. Partially it still does, but the photographers skill in orientating his camera, in previsualising this tableaux (which must have been seen in a split second) is that the box car denies the eye an easy exit point. A series of telegraph poles at left hint at further human encroachment into the landscape, while at right the eye can finally leave the ground an ascend into the sky and escape into the beyond.
This is quite the most exquisite photograph I have seen in a long time.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the National Museum of the American Indian, New York for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Charles Lummis (American, 1859-1928) Cacique Bautista Chivira, with his wife and daughter Lupe Chivira and Rafaelita Chivira Charles September 21, 1892 30.5 x 48cm Courtesy of the Autry National Center/Southwest Museum, Los Angeles
Charles Lummis (American, 1859-1928) Group portrait c. 1890’s 15.425 x 24cm Courtesy of the Autry National Center/Southwest Museum, Los Angeles
(Left)
Charles Lummis (American, 1859-1928) Photograph of an Isleta girl winnowing beans, Isleta Pueblo, New Mexico 1890 Cyanotype 8 in x 5 in. Courtesy of the Braun Research Library Collection, Autry Museum of the American West
(Right)
Charles Lummis (American, 1859-1928) Photograph of three Isleta boys with bows and arrows, Isleta Pueblo, New Mexico 1894 Cyanotype 8 in x 5 in. Courtesy of the Braun Research Library Collection, Autry Museum of the American West
Charles Lummis (American, 1859-1928) Photograph of a Pueblo couple (probably Isleta or Taos), New Mexico April 27, 1896 5 in x 7 in. Courtesy of the Braun Research Library Collection, Autry Museum of the American West
Charles Lummis (American, 1859-1928) Photograph of spectators watching races, Isleta Pueblo, New Mexico April 19, 1896 5 in x 7 in. Courtesy of the Braun Research Library Collection, Autry Museum of the American West
Charles Lummis (American, 1859-1928) Cyanotype photograph album: Bits of New Mexico and Arizona, Vol. 2 Nd 5.25″ x 9.25″ Courtesy of the Autry National Center/Southwest Museum, Los Angeles
The rapid changes forced on the Native American peoples of the American southwest are documented in Time Exposures: Picturing a History of Isleta Pueblo in the 19th Century. With more than 80 images and objects that detail life on the Isleta Pueblo Reservation after the arrival of the railroads in 1881, the exhibition opens Saturday, Sept. 17, at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in New York, the George Gustav Heye Center, and continues through Sunday, June 10, 2012.
In 1881, the railroad companies forcibly took land in the centre of Isleta Pueblo in the Rio Grande Valley and the rail lines built there brought scores of tourists. Prominent non-Native artists and photographers, such as Edward Curtis and Ben Wittick, traveled there to capture everyday Pueblo life. Organised by the people of Isleta Pueblo, Time Exposures portrays their lives before the arrival of tourists and other visitors, the changes imposed over the following decades and the ways in which the people of Isleta Pueblo worked to preserve their way of life.
Time Exposures is divided into three parts. In the first section, the cycle of the Isleta traditional year as it was observed in the mid-19th century is detailed. The second section describes the arrival of the Americans and the how this disrupted the Isleta way of living. In the third section, the exhibit examines the photos themselves as products of an outside culture. While exploring the underlying ideas and values of the photos, the exhibition questions their portrayal of Isleta people and ways. “In this exhibition, Native people respond to the stereotypical images of their lives that have been circulated by outsiders for centuries,” said Kevin Gover (Pawnee), director of the museum. “It is an opportunity for us all to learn the realities behind some of these popular and enduring photographs.”
“These photographs tell such an important story,” said John Haworth (Cherokee), director of the Heye Center. “The people of Isleta Pueblo fought to maintain their traditions despite radical and dramatic disruptions.”
Included in the exhibition are images by photographers Edward Curtis, A.C. Vroman, Karl Moon, John Hillers, Charles Lummis, Carlos Vierra, Sumner Matteson, Albert Sweeney, Josef Imhof and Ben Wittick. Time Exposures: Picturing a History of Isleta Pueblo in the 19th Century was organised by the people of the Pueblo of Isleta. A committee of Isleta Pueblo traditional leaders oversaw the development, writing and design of the exhibition. Time Exposures originally appeared at the Albuquerque Museum of Art and History in New Mexico.
Press release from the National Museum of the American Indian, New York website
George Wharton James (American, 1858-1923) Selling goods along tracks Late 1880s to early 1900s 40 x 27cm Courtesy of the Autry National Center/Southwest Museum, Los Angeles
Sumner Matteson (American, 1867-1920) Simon Zuni 1900 46 x 33 cm Photograph Courtesy of the Milwaukee Public Museum, Sumner W. Sumner Matteson Collection
In Time Exposures, we the people of Isleta Pueblo, a Native American community in New Mexico, tell our own story about this time and its lasting effects on our life today. Using a selection of over 300 historic photographs and an array of artefacts, the exhibit portrays our lives before the arrival of the Americans, the changes imposed over the following decades, and the ways in which our people worked to preserve our way of life. Through this process, the exhibit explains how we came to be who we are today.
The exhibit is divided into three parts. In the first section, we describe the cycle of our traditional year as it was observed in the mid-19th century. As a community, our lives were organised according to the seasons, farming, hunting and gathering practices and a regular sequence of ceremonies and rituals. Much has changed for us, but the cycles described here still define the contours of a parallel life we live today.
The second section of the exhibition describes the arrival of the Americans and the many ways in which this influx disrupted our way of living. The new authority took our lands and waters, prohibited hunts, and severely limited our access to plants and other resources. The exhibit shows how our people fought these changes and how we learned to become members of America on our own terms.
In the third section of the show, the exhibit examines the photographs themselves as products of white culture. The exhibit explores the underlying ideas and values of the photos, and asks what kind of record they truly represent of our people and our ways.
Text from the Time Exposures exhibition catalogue
Unknown photographer Jose S. Abeita, bronco buster, in Magdalena c. 1920 25 x 40cm Courtesy of the Autry National Center/Southwest Museum, Los Angeles
Charles Lummis (American, 1859-1928) Young Isleta Girl Nd Cabinet card Courtesy of the Library of Congress
Charles Lummis (American, 1859-1928) Isleta hunter, Juan Diego 1890 Courtesy of the Autry National Center/Southwest Museum, Los Angeles
Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian The George Gustav Heye Center One Bowling Green, Battery Park, New York City Phone: (212) 514-3700
Opening hours: Every day from 10am – 5pm Thursdays until 8pm
More photographs from this fabulous retrospective, different images from the two previous postings. Further images from the retrospective can be found in these postings when the exhibition appeared at the Denver Art Museum (DAM), September 2011 – Jan 2012 and the Vancouver Art Gallery, September 2010 – January 2011.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“Over the years I have come to believe… that we live in several landscapes at once, among them the landscape of hope, and that though we must usually focus on what is characteristic of the immediate and troubled present, it is rash to say that other geographies are unimportant or even finally separate.”
Robert Adams
“Southern California was, by the reports of those who lived there at the turn of the century, beautiful; there were live oaks on the hills, orchards across the valleys, and ornamental cypress, palms, and eucalyptus lining the roads. Even now we can almost extrapolate an Eden from what has lasted – from the architecture of old eucalyptus trunks, for example, and from the astringent perfume of the trees’ flowers as it blends with the sweetness of orange blossoms.
What citrus remain today, however, are mostly abandoned, scheduled for removal, and large eucalyptus have often been vandalized, like the hundreds west of Fontana that have been struck head high with shotgun fire. Whether those trees that stand are reassuring is a question for a lifetime. All that is clear is the perfection of what we were given, the unworthiness of our response, and the certainty, in view of our current deprivation, that we are judged.”
Robert Adams 1986
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) presents Robert Adams: The Place We Live, A Retrospective Selection of Photographs, an exhibition that showcases the artistic legacy of American photographer Robert Adams (b. 1937) and his longstanding engagement with the contemporary Western landscape. Featuring nearly three hundred photographs and a key selection of the artist’s publications, the retrospective weaves together four decades of Adams’s work into an epic narrative of American experience in the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries. Adams’s work reflects his dedication to describing the changing Western landscape – the growth of its built environment and the lives of its inhabitants – contemplating the presence of trees, the open plains, the Pacific Ocean, and the deforestation of the Pacific Northwest. At LACMA, the exhibition highlights Adams’s extraordinary portrayal of the terrain of the Los Angeles region.
“It is hard to envision the American West without the extraordinary achievements of Robert Adams. Adams conveys the often sharp luminosity and inky shadows of western geography like no other. Yet it is in his reckoning with man’s fraught presence that Adams’s spare and terribly beautiful photographs continue to challenge us,” said Edward Robinson, associate curator of the Wallis Annenberg Photography Department, who organised LACMA’s presentation.
Exhibition overview
With nearly three hundred gelatin silver prints, the exhibition features the photographer’s major projects, from early pictures of quiet buildings and monuments erected by settlers of his native Colorado, to his most recent images of oceans and migratory birds in the Pacific Northwest. Accompanying the photographs in the exhibition are texts drawn from
Adams’s own published writings that total more than forty books to date. The reach of Adams’s work has been felt equally through his publications, which are an indispensable element of the artist’s creative practice. A selection of these books will be displayed; copies will also be available in a reading area and digitally on iPads in the exhibition, enabling visitors to experience Adams’s masterly use of the photographic book as a poetic medium in its own right.
Kristian Laemmle-Ruff (Australian) Truck in Safi 2010 Type C print 100 x 67cm
Jeff Wall, the renowned Canadian photographer, observed recently that, “Photography is such a wide, complex art form medium that there’s no real single way of practising it. Up until 30 to 40 years ago, it was pretty much presumed that the way you practised photography seriously was in the documentary mode. It was very unilateral, other things weren’t really plausible. I never objected to documentary photography, but it’s not the whole story…”1
How true. In this post-photography world there are many spaces in the city for showing all kinds of photographic work, notably at the Centre for Contemporary Photography in Fitzroy. While the viewer does learn about different modes of photographic representation through experiential learning (making meaning from the direct experience of looking at such work), personally some contemporary photography often leaves me feeling rather underwhelmed. Rarely do I leave the CCP thinking, wow, that was a great “photography” exhibition, I have seen something amazing about the world that I had not recognised before. Interesting: possibly; inspiring / engaging / memorable: occasionally, which is perhaps why reviews of exhibitions at the CCP occur rather rarely in this archive. This is not to belittle the work that the CCP does as an establishment, far from it, but just to note that not much contemporary photography lasts long in the mind.
It was such a joy then to walk around the corner from the CCP to the Colour Factory Gallery and view the exhibition Littoral by emerging artist Kristian Laemmle-Ruff. This is one of the best, if not the best, “photography” exhibition I have seen so far this year. As soon as you walk into the simple, elegant gallery you are surrounded by fourteen large scale horizontal photographs that are suffused with colour variations bouncing across the gallery – here a blue, there a green, now a lush orange palette. The effect is much like Monet’s waterlilies at the Musée de l’Orangeriein Paris; seated in the middle of the four curved paintings you are surrounded by large daubs of paint of various hues that have an elemental effect – resonances of earth, air, water, fire – on the viewer. The same affection of colour and space can be found in Laemmle-Ruff’s photographs.
The artist’s literal rendition (the definition of littoral is that it relates to the coastal zone between the limits of high and low tides) of the interstitial spaces at the edge of urbana, the fluid spaces of a no man’s land, are beautifully visualised in the work. These entropic spaces are mainly devoid of physical human presence but filled with the detritus of humanity: concrete boxes and tangled beams of steel, satellite dishes and red-eyed chimney stacks. In Casablanca Terrace II (2010, below) satellite dishes shimmer in orange while in the distance alien lights seem to hover over the city; in Manneheim (2010, below) the whole photograph is a cold, chilly blue the only visible signs of human existence a couple of lights peeping from the flat windows (at left) while the belching smoke from numerous alien, red-eyed War of the Worlds chimney stacks blends seamlessly into the overcast sky (please enlarge the photograph to see these). When first looking at New Homes (2011, above) I thought the green lines at bottom left were trenches until I realised they were hedges. Then I noticed the empty oval in the upper right quadrant – a demolished sporting facility… a racetrack… a spaceship landing pad? In these familiar but alien landscapes (ice covered swimming pools, graveyards sitting under mountains) Laemmle-Ruff plays with colour, space and depth of field. In some photographs, such as Road to Essaouira (2010, below bottom) the depth of field is very shallow, the focus point in the photograph being the road and gravel, silver road sign and buildings falling out of focus beyond. Like the shifting of colour, this expansion and contraction of DOF from one photograph to the next adds to the body of works ethereality.
The best print in the exhibition is Truck in Safi (2010, above) which is an absolute knockout. The composition is beautifully visualised and the print is incredibly luminous and well balanced. The large white ‘M’ on the back of the earth-filled truck solidifies our gaze in the mid-foreground while, metaphorically, the letter stamps the earth as the possession of man. The road curves into the distance and upon it, as minute specks, are a bicycle and two motorbikes. The sweep of an industrial plant fills the horizon line in a sensuous entanglement of vessels and pipes. This truly is a beautiful photograph and therein lies the contradiction present in Laemmle-Ruff’s body of work.
While seeking to capture the paradoxes of urbanisation and consumerism, a vernacular world, familiar and normal (both the beauty and frailty of our times as Laemmle-Ruff puts it), the beauty of the photographs becomes the heart of the work, its strength in the presence of the viewer and perhaps its slight weakness as well.
The artist’s visual acoustics, his mythologising of the city if you like – the (dis)ease of the city as sublime photograph picturing the picturesque – has, to my mind, elements of Pictorialism in the artist’s scopophiliac looking. Nothing wrong with that, but we must acknowledge that there is a contradiction here, not between the beauty and frailty of our times, but between the frailty of the earth and the constructed beauty of the photograph seen through a desirous looking that might be at odds with Laemmle-Ruff’s intended project.
Be that as it may, it is a great pleasure to see a young, emerging artist produce such memorable photographic works. Walking into the gallery the viewer can littorally feel the pleasure that the artist has in capturing these complex, fluid spaces. The artist is at the beginning of a path of exploration where each new body of work will develop thematically out of concerns that have been evidenced here. Where this journey will take him is unknown but with courage, fortitude, knowledge, passion, a good eye and a camera he will go far. Good stuff!
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ Wall, Jeff quoted in Laurie, Victoria. “Lights, Camera,” in The Weekend Australian Review. May 19-20 2012, p. 5
Many thankx to the artist and the Colour Factory Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Kristian Laemmle-Ruff (Australian) Safi 2010-2012 Type C print 100 x 67cm
Kristian Laemmle-Ruff (Australian) New Homes 2011 Type C print 100 x 67cm
Kristian Laemmle-Ruff (Australian) Casablanca Terrace II 2010 Type C print 100 x 67cm
Kristian Laemmle-Ruff (Australian) Manneheim 2010 Type C print 100 x 67cm
Littoral examines the shifting overlap between landscape and urbanscape. As a reaction to a traditional approach where the two are consciously separated, Laemmle-Ruff focuses on the often grotesque and ever-expanding littoral zone between civilisation and nature.
“I found these undefined zones did not discriminate on place or culture. From Morocco to the post WWII suburbs of Germany, somber skies were met with stubborn and aggressive urbanisation. I was drawn to contradictions. “The World Tastes Better with Pall Mall” claimed the cigarette ad. These empty remarks of consumerism seemed to go unchallenged. My intention was to capture these paradoxes and pull them from the wallpaper of modern sensibility. Our gaze once traveled to picturesque, unspoiled horizons, forests in mist and rolling plains. Instead it stops on concrete or becomes tangled in steel beams.”
Littoral presents us with spaces anticipating themselves. Housing estates on the fringe of development yet to be occupied; North African peasants walking past the mall’s facade where the market once stood; roof top terraces lined with satellite dishes streaming immaculate reception. We are left to wonder who will fill these homes. Who is in control of where urbanisation will go next?
Ultimately, this series may appear to be a presentation of a vernacular world, familiar and normal. This, in turn alludes to a desensitisation to our changing surroundings in an age of globalisation and overpopulation. Our landscape is increasingly becoming a manifestation of ourselves. Littoral urges one to question where the present seems to be leading us.
Practicing in both documentary and conceptual photography, from warm narratives to surreal visions, Kristian Laemmle-Ruff’s photographs subtly bring to light both the beauty and frailty of our times. As we spiral up the exponential curve of ‘progress’ there are dynamic ruptures, vulnerabilities and regenerative possibilities in our human reality – this is his motivation – a truth worth capturing.
Press release from the Colour Factory Gallery website
Kristian Laemmle-Ruff (Australian) Olympic Stadium 2012 Type C print 100 x 67cm
Kristian Laemmle-Ruff (Australian) Road to Essaouira 2010 Type C print 100 x 67cm
Kristian Laemmle-Ruff (Australian) Aqua dynamics 2010-2012 Type C print 100 x 67cm
Kristian Laemmle-Ruff (Australian) Valle de Zimatlan 2010-2012 Type C print 100 x 67cm
Kristian Laemmle-Ruff (Australian) Pall Mall 2010-2012 Type C print 100 x 67cm
Colour Factory Gallery 409-429 Gore Street Fitzroy, Victoria 3056 Phone: +61 3 9419 8756
The hand of the monkey Clear on the thigh of Dayaba Usman (see photograph below) – and the look on his face – makes us wonder who is really in chains.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Hague Museum of Photography for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
The South African photographer Pieter Hugo’s (b. 1976) monumental photographs, centred around contemporary Africa, are now well known around the world. He has already won numerous awards including the KLM Paul Huf award in 2008 and was recently nominated for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2012. The Hague Museum of Photography will be the first museum to exhibit a comprehensive survey of Hugo’s work from 2002-2011. Together with many previously unseen works, the exhibition will include a curated selection of his most well-known series: The Hyena & Other Men, the bizarre Nollywood and the striking Permanent Error. His impressive portraits tell personal stories about recurring themes throughout his oeuvre, namely those people who inhabit the margins of society in Sub-Saharan Africa. The differences between the West and Africa, rich and poor, white and black are confronted in Hugo’s vivid compositions. Many of his series are prompted by newspaper articles, or radio and television pieces, which he finds compelling. He came in contact, for instance with the group of men who travel around Nigeria with hyenas and pythons, through an image sent via cell phone camera by a friend. He decided to accompany the group on their travels, and the outcome of this experience is The Hyena & Other Men (2005-2007), a series of portraits from a travelling group of street performers, who together with their – sometimes forcefully – tamed animals earn money to continue travelling.
In the series Permanent Error (2009-2010) he offers portraits of young men and woman who live amidst an immense waste dump of broken computers, mother boards and keyboards. To earn money these young people burn the computers dumped here as a means to extract valuable metals. The dangerous and poisonous vapours produce a hell on earth, where the quality of life is already challenging. The people who pose for Hugo stand in front of the camera with a defiant self-confidence.
From a different perspective comes his series about Nollywood (2008-2009) in Nigeria, the biggest film industry in the world after Hollywood and Bollywood. Here, stories that have for centuries been part of an oral tradition are told in dramatic films in which a central role is reserved for themes such as romance, witchcraft, bribery and prostitution. It is this world, where the everyday and the surreal exist simultaneously, that Hugo finds fascinating. In this series Hugo depicts actors and assistants posing in the role of movie characters. The result is an absurd tableau such as a photo of a half-naked woman sitting on a bed with a bloody knife stuck between her breasts. All the while she stares blankly at the camera. In another image, a woman well-dressed in Nigerian clothing sits completely unfazed by the man next to her made-up as the devil.
Press release from The Hague Museum of Photography website
Jacqui Stockdale (Australian, b. 1968) Rama-Jaara the Royal Shepherdess 2012 Type C Print 100 x 78cm
After a slow start to the season there has be a veritable feast of excellent photography exhibitions in Melbourne over the last month or so, including John Gollings and Jane Brown at Edmund Pearce Gallery, the Fred Kruger and Light Worksexhibitions (at NGVA and NGVI respectively), Littoral by Kristian Laemmle-Ruff at Colour Factory (the next local review after this one) and this exhibition, The Quiet Wild by Jacqui Stockdale at Helen Gory Galerie.
This is a very strong exhibition by Jacqui Stockdale, the metre tall colour prints (printed by the Colour Factory) displaying magnificently in the large gallery at Helen Gory. The photographs remind me of a perverse take on the ethnographic cartes de visite that were produced during the colonial Victorian era in Australia, images of native peoples taken in studios with painted backdrops together with their cultural artefacts (which, coincidentally, can be seen in great detail and sadness in the Fred Kruger exhibition at NGVA).
Drawing on personal places and stories, Mexican carnival and wrestlers masks, Indian masks, Aboriginal names and locations, Velasquez’s Las Meninas, the ghost of Frida Kahlo, rituals, gods (such as Rama) and deities, Australian scenery, performance (the process of painting the models and the outcome of this interaction), Stockdale creates a wonderful melange of archetypal characters that subvert traditional identities and narratives. Her creations “shape-shift” and frustrate attempts at categorisation and assimilation.
Stockdale’s performative tactics and multiple modes of address, her polyvocal subject if you like, may be said to be an effect of textuality: “a conscious recognition and pursuit of an altogether different set of values and historical and cultural trajectories.”1 Undeniably this performative act (this “ritual spectacle”2) has links to the Bakhtin’s idea of the carnivalesque and the carnival paradigm, which accords to certain patterns of play. Stockdale inverts cultural stereotypes (which embody elements of fixity, repetition, and ambivalence) located within the realms of the fetish, the scopic, and the Imaginary in order to subvert the collective memory of viewers that have been inscribed with a stereotypical collective vernacular: her work transgresses the fantasy that plays a formative role in colonial exercises of power.3
“Bakhtin likens the carnivalesque in literature to the type of activity that often takes place in the carnivals of popular culture. In the carnival… social hierarchies of everyday life – their solemnities and pieties and etiquettes, as well as all ready-made truths – are profaned and overturned by normally suppressed voices and energies. Thus, fools become wise, kings become beggars; opposites are mingled (fact and fantasy, heaven and hell).”4
In Stockdale’s world, a “world upside-down” (quite appropriate for Australia), “Each new identity is one of inversion; man becomes woman, child becomes adult, animals transform into humans and vice-versa.” Another example of this inversion can be seen in the “branding” of her photographs. In colonial cartes de visite the sitter is, more often than not, unknown – unless it is an important person. It is the photographer’s name which is printed on the front and back of the card. In these photographs the photographers name is an illegible signature at bottom left, while the title of the person in the photograph is stamped into the work at bottom right.
Here Stockdale again inverts traditional textual readings, the titles of her “photographic portraits that embody a world of mystical characters in masquerade” indecipherable to the uninitiated: a coded language of identity and place – Lagunta Man, El Gato, Les Jumeaux, Dogboy of Gondwanan, Infanta Shamanta and Rama Jaara, The Royal Shepherdess. ‘Lagunta’ is Aboriginal for Tasmanian Tiger and ‘Leeawuleena’ for the land around Cradle Mountain. ‘El Gato’ is the cat, ‘Jaara’ being the Aboriginal name for the Long Gully region and ‘Gondwanan’ the name for the southernmost of two supercontinents (the other being Laurasia) before the world split apart into the structure that we known today.
These are incredibly humorous, magical and symbolic photographs. A thought came into my mind when I was in the gallery surrounded by the work: for me they represented a vision of the Major Arcana of the Tarot (for example Jaguar Hombre could be seen as an inverted version of the Hanged Man with his foot in a figure four, the Hanged Man symbolising the need to just be in the world, yielding his mind and body to the Universal flow).
The Major Arcana deal with the human condition, each card representing the joys and sorrows every man and woman can experience in a lifetime. In a way Stockdale offers us her own set of subversive Major Arcana, images that transgress the boundaries of the colonial vernacular, offering the viewer a chance to explore the heart of the quiet wild.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ Fisher, Jean. “Witness for the Prosecution: The Writings of Coco Fusco,” in Fusco, Coco. The Bodies That Were Not Ours. London: Routledge, 2001, pp. 227-228
2/ Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World (trans. Helene Iswolsky). Cambridge: MIT Press, 1968, p. 5
3/ “According to Bhabha, stereotypes are located within the realms of the fetish, the scopic, and the Imaginary. He suggests that fantasy plays a formative role in colonial exercises of power. Bhabha describes the mechanism of cultural stereotypes as embodying elements of fixity, repetition, fantasy, and ambivalence, and suggests that if certain types of images are constantly presented in a range of different contexts, they will become imprinted onto the collective memory of viewers and inscribed within a collective vernacular.” Vercoe, Caroline. “Agency and Ambivalence: A Reading of Works by Coco Fusco,” in Fusco, Coco. The Bodies That Were Not Ours. London: Routledge, 2001, p. 240
4/ Anon. “Carnivalesque,” on Wikipedia. [Online] Cited 13/05/2012
Many thankx to Helen Gory Galerie for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Jacqui Stockdale (Australian, b. 1968) Les Jumeaux 2012 Type C Print 100 x 78cm
Jacqui Stockdale (Australian, b. 1968) Crudellia de Mon Botanica 2012 Type C Print 100 x 78cm
Jacqui Stockdale (Australian, b. 1968) Carnivale of the Night 2012 Type C Print 100 x 78cm
In this modern world of distractions there is a wild nature that stirs inside of us. A desire for transcendence, to become someone else, dance part naked and chant our lost songs so that they can be heard above the sounds of cities and mobile ring tones.
The Quiet Wild is a series of photographic portraits that embodies a world of mystical characters in masquerade set against hand-painted landscapes. The portraits playfully mimic the genre of exotic postcards and historical paintings where a fanciful subject is formally positioned within a make-believe landscape. The hand-painted settings in my photographs feature Australian scenery from places around Australia that have meaning to me including my mother’s property in Bendigo, the Melbourne Botanical Gardens and Lake Saint Claire in Tasmania.
I paint the models bodies and combine costumes and props including my own collection of rare masks originally used in dances of Mexican Carnival. This new work responds to established portrayals of human identity and masquerade informed by my research into different aspects of folk Carnivals where the masquerades are a fusion of clandestine voodoo, ancestral memory and personal revelation ritual and performance. Performance also plays a part in my photographic process where I interact with the models and allow the process to greatly determine the outcome. Each new identity is one of inversion; man becomes woman, child becomes adult, animals transform into humans and vice-versa.
The difference between painting the human subject and taking their portrait with a camera it is that during a photo shoot there is more of an element of performance. The subject, over a period of many hours often becomes a new character, extending a side of them that is not prevalent in daily life or invents a new identity. This is brought about by what I dress them in and how I direct them, provoking certain ideas, strengths about an animal power or super natural deity. I begin with an idea of character and a selection of costumes and them work intuitively as though in the dark or with eyes part open. I rarely end up with what I first imagined and revel in the surprise or discovery of a combined effort.
The inspiration for this series of work has come from a unique, rich and beautiful form of human expression that is found in the ritual side of folk art in the cultures around the world but mostly in Mexico. The traditional dances of Mexican Carnival provide an opportunity to revive the primeval gods from the depths of our communal memory, since dance constitutes our remotest language and most primitive sacred offering. The masks I have used in this series are from these types of ritual dance. They are recontextualised and worn in the works Lagunta Man and El Gato, Les Jumeaux, Dogboy of Gonwanan, Infanta Shamanta and Carnival of the Night. Other influences come from images of Exotic Postcards, regarding the formal presentation of the models, the constructed settings and the borders and way of labelling the image. Luchadora Botanica was influenced by a Goya Painting, Negro Returno – I wanted to bring one of my recent collages to life, See ‘to return’.
What I have done is imagined my own family as part ritualistic characters, setting in them in a landscape that I have visited.”
Artist statement by Jacqui Stockdale 2012
Jacqui Stockdale (Australian, b. 1968) Jaguar Hombre 2012 Type C Print 100 x 78cm
Jacqui Stockdale (Australian, b. 1968) Lagunta Man, Leeawuleena 2012 Type C Print 100 x 78cm
Jacqui Stockdale (Australian, b. 1968) El Gato, Leeawuleena 2012 Type C Print 100 x 78cm
Jacqui Stockdale (Australian, b. 1968) Araneus 2012 Type C Print 100 x 78cm
Jacqui Stockdale (Australian, b. 1968) Princess Eucalypt 2012 Type C Print 100 x 78cm
Jacqui Stockdale (Australian, b. 1968) Infanta Shamanta 2012 Type C Print 100 x 78cm
The ghost of Frida Kahlo is a haunting one that permeates many artists consciousness bringing with it not just a tragic story but intoxicating aromas of Mexican exotic, masks, Voo-Doo, bloody Mayan rituals and Catholicism gone troppo.
This is clearly evidenced in Jacqui Stockdale’s latest exhibition at Helen Gory Galerie in works such as Negro-Returno, Long Gully. The white lacy heart-shaped overlay of ghostly trees conceals a part-portrait of Frida here depicted in front of Long Gully Bendigo, the Stockdale property, after the Black Saturday bush fire three years ago. This haunting shadowy backdrop appears again in Rama Jaara, The Royal Shepherdess, ‘Jaara’ being the Aboriginal name for the Long Gully region. It is a personal aside of something that obviously touched this artist deeply, one to which she has bought her troupe of tableau vivant players to. Here, a Mauritian girl called Mimi, standing at attention, arms akimbo, dressed in remnants of regal colonial attire. The pose reminiscent of that of the Infanta Margarita in Velasquez’s Las Meninas. The dog has moved from bottom right to bottom left, here a small spotted Chinese Joss paper effigy made for the journey to the afterlife, rather than a great bounding Spanish mastiff. Our young self-possessed Mimi stares directly out of the picture space not as an Infanta, but as one of nature’s children, a shepherdess, her hairstyle resembling a ram’s head, informing that part of the title, ‘Rama’ a play on words.
Both the artists brothers are also players in this tableau: the younger as Lagunta Man, Leeawuleena and the artist’s twin as El Gato, van Diemonia. ‘Lagunta’ is Aboriginal for Tasmanian Tiger and ‘Leeawuleena’ for the land around Cradle Mountain. ‘El Gato’ is the cat, and both carrying a filmic reference to the recent movie The Hunter, filmed around Cradle Mt in Northern Tasmania. While the compositional phrasing has more than a nostalgic whiff of 19th century still studio photography, seen here such staged manners marry well to popular cinematic culture.
As this exhibition unfolds certain characterising concerns appear and reappear. Decapitation, and cross-cultural iconography make this a lavish art dining at the high table of pictorial fusion cuisine. Mexican masks, Joss paper, skulls, rites of passage tit-bits mix it with popular culture on the shag pile to produce a totally new hybrid. Folk memories merge with diaristic experiences, found objects flirt with finely painted trompe-oeil effects in an almost self-regulating metamorphosis.
In this Stockdale becomes a sort of gatekeeper, a ring master choreographer who will both mystify and amaze you with her family carnivale. Picture by picture, costume by costume, the staged imagined and the real, combine into a most fascinating enticement I find impossible to resist.
Catalogue essay by Jeff Makin, 2012
Jacqui Stockdale (Australian, b. 1968) Bala Opuntia 2012 Type C Print 100 x 78cm
Jacqui Stockdale (Australian, b. 1968) Dogboy of Gondwanan 2012 Type C Print 100 x 78cm
Jacqui Stockdale (Australian, b. 1968) Negro Returno, Long Gully 2012 Type C Print 100 x 78cm
Jacqui Stockdale (Australian, b. 1968) Luchadora Botanica 2012 Type C Print 100 x 78cm
More wonderful photographs from this magnificent photographer as featured in this touring exhibition. It is invaluable to see other images from the artist’s oeuvre (especially early work from the 1950s to observe thematic development), not just the most famous of the surreal montages. Untitled (1966, below) is an absolute ripper that I have never seen before while Untitled (1959, bottom) is as disturbing in a fantastical way as any of Joel-Peter Witkins’ theatrical tableaux vivant.
See my other posting on this exhibition from the Harn Museum of Art, Florida.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Peabody Essex Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Beautiful and surreal, funny and provocative, the photographs of Jerry Uelsmann are icons of American photo history. The Peabody Essex Museum (PEM) presents the first retrospective of Uelsmann’s work in over 30 years. The Mind’s Eye: 50 Years of Photography by Jerry Uelsmann features 90 works spanning the artist’s celebrated and wide-ranging career, with well-known works shown alongside never-before-seen recent images.
As a pioneer of contemporary photography and master of experimental darkroom technique, Uelsmann has continuously pushed the creative and technical boundaries of photography, revealing new visual possibilities and critical considerations for the medium. In the late 1950s, Uelsmann began experimenting with multiple enlargers and advanced masking, diffusing, burning and dodging techniques, to create imaginary images in the darkroom decades before the advent of Photoshop. Uelsmann’s ingenious work references Surrealists like Rene Magritte, Max Ernst, and Man Ray, as well as Modern photographers such as Edward Weston and Ansel Adams. He has spent his career advocating for the acceptance of experimental photography as an art form.
“For more than half a century, Uelsmann has challenged conventional ideas about what photography can and should do,” said Phillip Prodger, exhibition curator and PEM’s curator of photography. “Uelsmann’s pictures provide a valuable touchstone for understanding new trends in photographic art. His ideas and example have become ever more relevant as photography embraces Photoshop and other computer technologies for altering and manipulating photographs.”
The Mind’s Eye presents works drawn from the artist’s personal archive of vintage materials and, in addition to photographic prints, includes a selection of three-dimensional photographic sculptures, films, artist’s books, albums and work prints to give viewers first-hand insight into Uelsmann’s creative process and expressive range. Through experimental techniques, Uelsmann has explored universal themes of relationships, family, home and politics by creating unexpected and surprising juxtapositions.
“My visual quest is driven by a desire to create a universe capable of supporting feelings and ideas,” said Jerry Uelsmann. “I am drawn to art that challenges one’s sense of reality.”
Born in Detroit in 1934, Uelsmann received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Rochester Institute of Technology in 1957 and Master of Science and Master of Fine Arts degrees from Indiana University in 1960. He is recently retired from the faculty of the University of Florida, which he joined in 1960. Uelsmann received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 1967 he had his first solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Curator: Kurt Sundstrom, curator at Currier Museum of Art, Manchester
Minor White (American, 1908-1976) Bird Lime and Surf, Point Lobos, CA 1951 Gelatin silver print 8 1/4 in. x 10 3/8 in. (20.96 x 26.35cm) Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, New Hampshire Gift of Edith Vallarino
The conceptual idea of Modernist photography is “look at this,” look at how photography interprets the world: through light, lens, glass, film, paper, brain and eye. Early Modernist photography occurred in the first two decades of the twentieth century (through the vision of Alfred Steiglitz, Paul Strand, Edward Steichen et al) before it was even named “Modernism” and led to radically different forms of artistic expression that broke the pictorialist conventions of the era. Gritty realism was the order of the day, clean lines, repetition of form, strange viewpoints where the photographers observation of the subject is as important as the subject itself. Look at how I, and the camera, see the world: that is all there is, the indexical relation to the word of truth.
“Artists and photographers began looking at the photographs used in mass culture, to develop an aesthetic true to the intrinsic qualities of photographic materials: the accurate rendition of visible reality; framing that crops into a larger spatial and temporal context; viewpoints and perspectives generated by modern lenses and typically modern spatial organisations (for example, tall buildings); and sharp, black-and-white images. This objective, mechanised vision became art by foregrounding not its subject matter, but its formal structure as an image.”1
Steiglitz and Strand, “often abstracted reality by eliminating social or spatial context; by using viewpoints that flattened pictorial space, acknowledging the flatness of the picture plane; and by emphasising shape and tonal rendition in highlights and shadows as much as in the actual subject matter.”2 Such use of highlights and shadows can be seen in the most famous work by the photographer Helmar Lerski, Transformation Through Light (1937), a photograph of which is presented below. Have a look on Google Images to see the changes wrought on the same face just through the use of light.
It is interesting to note the inclusion of photographers such as Paul Caponigro and Brett Weston in this exhibition as later examples of artists influenced by language of Modernism. While this may be partially true by the mid-1970s the mechanised vision of early Modernism (with its link to the indexicality of the image, its documentary authority and ability to express the individuality of the artist) had dissipated with the advent of the seminal exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape (International Museum of Photography at the George Eastman House, 1975).
“The pictures were stripped of any artistic frills and reduced to an essentially topographic state, conveying substantial amounts of visual information but eschewing entirely the aspects of beauty, emotion and opinion.” These typologies, often shown in grids, “depicted urban or suburban realities under changes in an allegedly detached approach… casting a somewhat ironic or critical eye on what American society had become.” (Wikipedia)
While the photographs by Weston and Caponigro do show some allegiance to Modernist Photography they are of an altogether different order of things, one that is not predicated on what the object is or what the artist says it is (its reality), but also, what else it can be.
Of course, this leads into more critical readings on the meaning of photographs that emerged in the late 1970s-80s. As Patrizia di Bello has insightfully written,
“John Tagg, in The Burden of Representation (1988), argues that the indexical nature of the photograph does not explain its meanings. “What makes the link between the pre-photographic referent and the sign is a discriminatory technical, cultural and historical process in which particular optical and chemical devices are set to work to organise experience and desire and produce a new reality – the paper image which, through further processes, may become meaningful in all sorts of ways.” Rather than being a guarantor of realism, the camera is itself an ideological construct, producing an all-seeing spectator and effacing the means of its production. Analyses of who has possessed the means to represent and who has been represented reveal that photography has been profoundly implicated in issues of political, cultural, and sexual domination. This area of investigation has especially drawn upon Michel Foucault’s (1926-84) reflections on the emergence of forms of knowledge; on the modern notion of the subject; and on practices of power which produce subjects actively participating in the dominant disciplinary order. Particularly influential have been his rejection of the notion of a pre-given self or human nature, and his insistence that every system of power and knowledge also creates possibilities of resistance. The role of critics then becomes the deconstruction of dominant assumptions within and about representations, to identify works embodying the possibility of resistance.”3
The camera as ideological construct. Photography as profoundly implicated in issues of political, cultural, and sexual domination. In other words who is looking, at what, what is being pictured or excluded, who has control over that image (and access to it), who understands the language of that representation and controls its meaning (this picturing of a version of reality), and who resists the dominant assumptions within and about its representations.
Modernist Photography does indeed have a lot to answer for.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ Patrizia di Bello. “Modernsim and Photography,” on Answers.com website [Online] Cited 03/08/2012 no longer available online 2/ Ibid., 3/ Ibid.,
Many thankx to the Currier Museum of Art for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Paul Caponigro (American, 1932-2024) Two Pears, Cushing, ME 1999 Gelatin silver print 7 9/16 x 9 11/16 in Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, New Hampshire Gift of Paul Caponigro, photographer
Captured from above, the still-life Two Pears, Cushing, ME by Paul Caponigro is composed of two pieces of fruit nestled in a wooden bowl. The oval bowl is centrally located in the horizontal composition and is surrounded by a black background. The composition is roughly symmetrical, except for the stems of the pears, which break the central axis and create a diagonal frame. The pears hold a complementary position with relation to each other, reminiscent of a yin-yang symbol.
The pears glow a brilliant white in stark contrast to the black background. The fruit seems impossibly smooth, as though carved from marble, with the subtlest of grays suggesting vaguely corporeal curves. The smooth texture is juxtaposed with the rough natural bark that lines the edge of the wooden bowl. The interior of the bowl shows the subtle patterns, striations and concentric rings, of the tree from which the bowl was carved. …
Context and Analysis
Though primarily known as a landscape photographer, Caponigro also focuses on still-life. One of his favourite subjects is fruit. Caponigro began producing dramatic, black-and-white images of apples and pears in the 1960s. Devoid of their characteristic colour, the close-up images become abstract studies in form and, more important, pattern.
Many of Caponigro’s fruit still-lifes from the 1960s focus on the marks and patterns on the skin of the fruit. This is particularly true in Galaxy Apple, New York (1964), a high-contrast image that highlights the natural white markings on the dark surface of an apple, creating an effect reminiscent of stars in the night sky. Documenting decay in fruit still-life pictures is a tradition dating back hundreds of years, as seen in such works as Balthasar Van der Ast’s 1617 oil painting Still Life with Fruit on a Kraak Porcelain Dish (Currier, 2004.15 ). Still-life compositions are often about the passage of time. In the late-career photograph Two Pears, Cushing, ME, Caponigro instead presents the fruit as near-perfect and timeless.
Connections
Caponigro studied with pioneering photographer Minor White, whose work is also represented in the Currier’s collection. White and Caponigro shared an interest in modernist techniques and in ways of conveying the passage of time by using the natural world as subject matter. White’s 1963 photograph Bird Lime and Surf, Point Lobos, CA (Currier, 1992.15.13, above) shows a rock spotted with bright white bird droppings, traces of the birds gathering and flying along the shoreline.
Jane Seney. “Two Pears, Cushing, ME,” on the Currier Museum of Art website Nd [Online] Cited 17/10/2024. No longer available online. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Paul Caponigro (American, 1932-2024) San Sebastian, New Mexico 1980 Gelatin silver print 9 3/4 in. x 13 11/16 in. (24.77 x 34.77cm) Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, New Hampshire Henry Melville Fuller Fund
Helmar Lerski (Swiss, 1871-1956) Metamorphosis through Light #587 1935-1936 Vintage gelatin silver print 11 1/2 x 9 1/4 in Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, New Hampshire
Helmar Lerski (18 February 1871, Strasbourg – 19 September 1956, Zürich) was a photographer who laid some of the important foundations of modern photography. He focused mainly on portraits and the technique of photography with mirrors. Lerski concentrated on archetypal characteristics rather than on individual features, favouring extreme close-ups and tight cropping, and he became renowned for his experiments with multiple light sources.
Lerski was involved concurrently in the two major, emergent mediums of his time: film and photography. Born in Alsace in the then German city of Strausburg, he became involved in the theatre and, in 1896, moved to New York to pursue a career in acting, eventually working at the Irving Place Theater and later the German Pabst Theater. It was in this setting that Lerski first became aware of the unique visual effects achievable with stage lighting. Drawing from his acting experience, he began investigating photography as an artistic medium after meeting his wife, also a photographer. While photographing their colleagues, Lerski experimented with a series of portraits that severely manipulated the lighting effects. The resulting images formed a base for his later success in both commercial and art photography… This body of work upholds the artist’s declaration that “in every human being there is everything; the question is only what the light falls on.”
In 1937 he created his masterpiece, Transformation Through Light, on a rooftop terrace in Tel Aviv, in which he projected 175 different images of a single model, altered using multiple mirrors to direct intense sunlight towards his face at various angles and intensities. Siegfried Kracauer wrote about this series in his Theory of Film (Oxford University Press, 1960, p. 162):
“His model, he [Lerski] told me in Paris, was a young man with a nondescript face who posed on the roof of a house. Lerski took over a hundred pictures of that face from a very short distance, each time subtly changing the light with the aid of screens. Big close-ups, these pictures detailed the texture of the skin so that cheeks and brows turned into a maze of inscrutable runes reminiscent of soil formations, as they appear from an airplane. The result was amazing. None of the photographs recalled the model; and all of them differed from each other…
Out of the original face there arose, evoked by the varying lights, a hundred different faces, among them those of a hero, a prophet, a peasant, a dying soldier, an old woman, a monk. Did these portraits, if portraits they were, anticipate the metamorphoses which the young man would undergo in the future? Or were they just plays of light whimsically projecting on his face dreams and experiences forever alien to him? Proust would have been delighted in Lerski’s experiment with its unfathomable implications.”
The Currier Museum of Art’s latest special exhibition traces the development of the modernist movement from the 1920s to its impact on artists today. Featuring more than 150 works displayed in three expansive galleries, A New Vision: Modernist Photography reflects the international nature of modernism, and includes American photographers such as Ansel Adams, Edward and Brett Weston, Margaret Bourke-White, Man Ray and Charles Sheeler, as well as European artists including Lotte Jacobi, László Moholy-Nagy, Helmar Lerski and Imre Kinszki…
[Marcus: Imre Kinszki (1901-1944) was a pioneer of modernist photography in Hungary, and a founder member of the group called Modern Hungarian Photographers. His son died in Buchenwald while he died on a death march to Sachsenhausen in 1944. See a moving video on YouTube where his daughter, who survived the ghetto, Judit Kinszki Talks About Her Father. The heartbreaking quotation below comes from the Articles and Texticles website which is no longer available online. It makes me very angry and very sad.
“In the ghetto we didn’t know anything about Auschwitz and what happened to those in forced labor service. It didn’t even occur to us that my father might not be alive. My mother and I went every day to the Keleti railroad station and went up to everybody who got off and asked them. Once my mother found a man who had been in the same group, and he remembered my father. He said that their car had been unhooked and the train went on towards Germany. They got off somewhere and went on foot towards Sachsenhausen – this was a death march. They spent the night on a German farm, in a barn on straw, and the man [who came back] said his legs had been so full of injuries that he couldn’t go on, and had decided that he would take his chances: he wormed himself into the straw. He did it, they didn’t find him, and that’s how he survived. He didn’t know about the others. We never found anyone else but this single man. So it’s clear that somewhere between this farm and Sachsenhausen everyone had been shot. But we interpreted this news in such a way that all we knew about him was that he would arrive sometime soon. We didn’t have news of my brother for a long time, then my mother found a young man who had worked with my brother. He told us that when they arrived in Buchenwald in winter, they were driven out of the wagon, and asked them what kind of qualifications they had. My brother told them that he was a student. This young man told us that the Germans immediately tied him up, it was a December morning, and they hosed him down with water just to watch him freeze to death. Those who didn’t have a trade were stripped of their clothes and hosed with cold water until they froze. I think that at that moment something broke in my mother. She was always waiting for my father, she refused to declare him dead even though she would have been eligible for a widow’s pension. But she waited for my father until the day she died. She couldn’t wait for my brother, because she had to believe what she had heard. Why would that young man have said otherwise?”]
Boris Ignatovich’s 1930s Tramway Handles and Margaret Bourke-White’s 1928 photo Turbine, Niagara Falls Power Co. [see below] showcase modernist images of isolated elements from the manmade world. While close-ups of nature, such as Brett Weston’s 1980 (Untitled) Tide Pool and Kelp, reveal striking abstract compositions that emphasise the repetition of patterns and dramatic contrast of light and shade. This new vision shared by modernist photographers makes form and composition as important as subject matter in their photographs.
“This exhibition illustrates the diversity of the modernist movement and its important contribution to the art of the 20th and 21st centuries,” said Kurt Sundstrom, curator of the exhibition. Adding, “Modernist photographers expanded the visual vocabulary of art – making everyday objects – from grass, drying laundry, machinery and lumber to details of the human body – subjects worthy of artistic interest.”
Contemporary New England photographers are still building upon the artistic language that their predecessors developed. Paul Caponigro, who lives in Cushing, Maine, Carl Hyatt of Portsmouth, New Hampshire and Arno Minkkinen of Andover, MA all clearly connect to modernism and are part of A New Vision.
A New Vision also explores the reciprocal influences among all media that shaped the modern art movement. Artists in the varied media shared a common vision; to illustrate this interconnectedness, paintings by Marsden Hartley, Georgia O’Keeffe, Charles Sheeler and Childe Hassam are paired with photographs in this exhibition.
Press release from the Currier Museum of Art website
Boris Ignatovich, born in Lutsk, Ukraine in 1899, was a Soviet photographer and a member of the Russian avant-garde movement. Ignatovich began his career in 1918, first working as a journalist and a newspaper editor before taking up photography in 1923. In the early 1920s he worked for a number of publications, most notably, Bednota (Poverty), Krasnaya Niva (Red Field) and Ogonyok. Ignatovich’s first photographic success was a documentary series about villagers in the Ramenskoe’s Workers’ settlement, which coincided with the first 5-year plan after Stalin’s victory. Ignatovich tried to alter the traditional format of documentary photography by using very low and very high unconventional angles, developing new perspectives, and including birds-eye constructions, which rendered the landscape as an abstract composition. In 1926 Ignatovich participated at the exhibition of the Association of Moscow Photo-Correspondents, and later became one of its leaders. In 1927, he photographed power plants and factories for Bednota and developed close association with Alexander Rodchenko, as they photographed for Dajosch together. Ignatovich’s famous photo stories also included the first American tractors in the USSR and aerial photographs of Leningrad and Moscow. In 1928, Ignatovich participated in the exhibition 10 Years of Soviet Photography, in Moscow and Leningrad, which was organized by the State Academy of Artistic Sciences. Due to his companionship with Rodchenko, Ignatovich was greatly influenced by his style and unconventional techniques. Both became members of the distinguished Oktiabr, the October group, which was a union of artists, architects, film directors, and photographers. In February of 1930, a photographic section of the October group was organised. Rodchenko was the head of the section and wrote its program. Other members include Dmitrii Debabov; Boris, Ol’ga, and Elizaveta Ignatovich; Vladimir Griuntal’; Roman Karmen; Eleazar Langman; Moriakin; Abram Shterenberg; and Vitalii Zhemchuzhnyi. The October group, whose styles favored fragmentary techniques and the distortion of images in an avant-garde manner, captured the idea of a world in dynamic form and rhythms.
First general October exhibition opened at Gorky Park, a park of culture and rest named after Gorky in Moscow. The photography section, organised by Rodchenko and Stepanova, includes the magazine Radioslushatel, designed by Stepanova and illustrated with photographs by Griuntal, Ignatovich, and Rodchenko. When Rodchenko was expelled from the October group for his formalist photography, Ignatovich took over as head of the photographic section of the group until the group was dissolved in 1932 by governmental decree. Apart from October, Ignatovich worked on documentary films from 1930 to 1932. As a movie cameraman, Ignatovich worked on the first sound film, Olympiada of the Arts. After 1932 he began to pioneer ideas such as the theory of collectivism in photojournalism at the Soyuzfoto agency where he developed specific rules and laws of photography, so much so that the photographers working under him were obliged to follow and jointly credit their work to Ignatovich by signing their photographs “Ignatovich Brigade.” Ignatovich participated in 1935 Exhibition of the Work of the Masters of Soviet Photography as well as the All-Union Exhibition of Soviet photography at the State Pushkin Museum in 1937. During the 1930s, Ignatovich also contributed photographs to the USSR In Construction, and in 1941, worked as a war photo correspondent on the front. After the War, Ignatovich concentrated on landscape and portraiture, experimenting with the use of symbols, picture captions, and ideas of collectivism, particularly at the Soyuzfoto agency where he continued to work as a photojournalist until he died in 1976.
Text from the Nailya Alexander Gallery website
Man Ray (American, 1890-1976) Mr. and Mrs. Woodman c. 1930 Rayograph Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, New Hampshire
Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976) Akeley Motion Picture Camera 1923, printed 1976 Gelatin silver print 9 1/2 in. x 7 5/8 in. (24.13 x 19.37cm) Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, New Hampshire Gift of Edith Vallarino
The Currier’s Akeley Motion Picture Camera is one of the machine-inspired photographs that distinguished Strand early in his career. In the summer of 1922 Strand purchased an Akeley motion picture camera for the purpose of making freelance newsreel and documentary films. Fascinated by the camera’s complex construction, he made it the subject of a series of close-up photographs. In these works, Strand explored the expressive possibilities of abstract form and composition while simultaneously celebrating the technological achievement of the dawning machine age.
Avoiding anecdotal associations that might arise from showing the motion picture camera within a larger pictorial context, Strand adopts a close-up view that makes it difficult to identify the machine or its purpose. The resulting composition is a nearly abstract presentation that expresses the spirit of all machinery rather than the facts of a particular model of motion picture camera. Here the viewer is presented with an assemblage of interlocking parts, each polished and gleaming. Although it is unclear as to each part’s specific function, one cannot help but admire the precision with which each is made and fitted together. Taking the viewer’s gaze past an array of complex shapes and forms -disks, cylinders, spiral springs, and others more organic in nature- Strand points to the ingenuity of the engineers, draftsmen, and manufacturers behind their making. Like the Precisionist paintings of Strand’s friend Charles Sheeler, the image is one of newness, cleanliness, and logical rigor. Epitomizing the efficiency and purity of the modern machine, Akeley Motion Picture Camera becomes a metaphor for modernism itself, and a key to understanding Strand’s own philosophy as an artist.
Anonymous. “Akeley Motion Picture Camera,” on the Currier Museum of Art website Nd [Online] Cited 17/10/2024. No longer available online. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Lotte Jacobi (American, 1896-1990) Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, Berlin 1932 Gelatin silver print 9 1/2 in. x 7 1/2 in. (24.13 x 19.05cm) Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, New Hampshire Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Richard Thorner in honor of Kurt Sundstrom
Emerging out of the enveloping darkness, a large church stands out from the background with a sense of imposing volume. The burned-in whites of the street lamps, the lights of the cars, and the bright reflections on the rain-streaked streets are all emphasised by the photographer’s use of a long exposure. Looking carefully, one can notice the trail of light left by a moving car, which also suggests a long exposure.
Photographer Lotte Jacobi chose to angle her camera slightly downward. In doing so, she enlarged the foreground space and enhanced the scale of the church by lowering the horizon line and emphasising the leading lines of the streetcar tracks. The massive medieval shapes of the church contrast in form and theme with the modernity of the lamps, cars, and streetcar tracks.
Context and Analysis
Jacobi is best known for her expressive portraits and also for her abstract “photogenic” series, but she photographed other subjects as well. Her body of work includes cityscapes of Berlin, Germany, her native city, and photographs documenting her trip to the Soviet Union in 1932-33.
Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, Berlin is a modernist experiment with the expressive power of nighttime photography. Jacobi’s use of dramatic light and shadows recalls Brassaï’s nocturnal photographs of Paris from the same era. Jacobi would later explain: “I am involved in seeing.” In this photograph she created a dramatic record of her vision.
Although its architecture appears to be from the Middle Ages, with stone towers, arches, and stained-glass windows, Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church was actually built in the late 1800s in the Romanesque Revival architectural style. Designed by architect Franz Schwechten, it was constructed between 1891 and 1906. The church was dedicated to Kaiser Wilhelm I by his grandson, Kaiser Wilhelm II. Wilhelm I had achieved the unification of Germany, becoming the first German emperor. After Germany’s loss in World War I, Wilhelm II abdicated, and the German Empire was replaced by the Weimar Republic.
Eleven years after Jacobi made this photograph, the church was irreparably damaged by Allied bombing in World War II, one of many culturally significant buildings destroyed in that war. In the early 1960s a modern church was built around the site, preserving the ruins of the old structure.
Martin Fox. “Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, Berlin,” on the Currier Museum of Art website Nd [Online] Cited 17/10/2024. No longer available online. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
“These images unsettle our idea of Oztraliana, our perceived sense of Self and our place in the world.” Dr Marcus Bunyan
Exhibition dates: 25th April – 12th May, 2012
Curator: the artist
Jane Brown (Kuwait, Australia, b. 1967) Big Trout, New South Wales 2010 Museo silver rag print 59 x 46cm
As you should know by now, this archive tries to promote the work of less well known artists and subject matter. So instead of concentrating on the wonderful aerial bushfire photographs of the well-known artist John Gollings (showing in the same gallery in different spaces with the work of Michael Norton) I have decided to do a posting on the exhibition Australian Gothic by Jane Brown.
This is a good exhibition of small, darkly hewn, traditionally printed silver gelatin photographs, beautifully hung in the small gallery at Edmund Pearce and lit in the requisite, ambient manner. There are some outstanding photographs in the exhibition.
The strongest works are the surrealist tinged, film noir-ish mise-en-scènes, the ones that emphasise the metaphorical darkness of the elements gathered upon the stage. Photographs such as Big Trout, The Female Factory, Adelong, New South Wales and Captain’s Flat Hotel, New South Wales really invoke a feeling of unhomely (or unheimlich), where nature is out of kilter.
These images unsettle our idea of Oztraliana, our perceived sense of Self and our place in the world. They disrupt normal transmission; they transmutate the seen environment, transforming appearance, nature and form.
Less successful in this quest are the bushfire landscapes. I feel these add little to the narrative thread of the exhibition and could have easily been left out in a judicious cull of the photographs. This would have made the overarching story line stronger still.
One of the best photographs in the exhibition is Lathamstowe (2011, below). This dark, brooding, intense photograph is a beautifully realised visualisation, one that balances scale, tone, light, form and darkness to create a haunting image that stays with you a long time after you have seen it. This one images says it all: the artist has talent. More please!
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Edmund Pearce Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Jane Brown (Kuwait, Australia, b. 1967) Bushfire Landscape I 2011 Fibre based, silver gelatin print 16.5 x 20.5cm
Jane Brown (Kuwait, Australia, b. 1967) Bushfire Landscape II, Lake Mountain, Victoria 2010 Fibre based, silver gelatin print 16.5 x 19.5cm
Jane Brown (Kuwait, Australia, b. 1967) The Female Factory (convict women’s prison), Ross, Tasmania 2009 Fibre based, silver gelatin print 15.8 x 19.5cm
Jane Brown (Kuwait, Australia, b. 1967) Front Bar, Wonthaggi Hotel, Victoria 2012 Fibre based, selenium toned, gelatin silver print
Jane Brown (Kuwait, Australia, b. 1967) Bush Christmas, Victoria 2011 Fibre based, selenium toned, gelatin silver print
Jane Brown (Kuwait, Australia, b. 1967) Lathamstowe 2011 Fibre based, silver gelatin print 16.5 x 16.5cm
“I find it interesting how monochrome is used to differentiate the living and the dead, the past and the present. It has an ability to transcend the constraints of time, memory and death. I examine this a lot in my work – landscapes seem to have vestiges or traces of past life and memorials become otherworldly.”
Jane Brown. ‘Weekend Australian Review’, August 2011
“The antipodes was seen as a world of reversals, the dark subconscious of Britain. It was for all intents and purposes Gothic par excellence.”
Gary Turcotte. “Australian Gothic,” in Marie Mulvey-Roberts (ed.). The Handbook to Gothic Literature. 1998
Comprising photographs taken in rural New South Wales, the ACT, Victoria and Tasmania, this exhibition takes its cue from the gothic imaginings of colonial Australia. We see images of a convict past, the bush Christmas, unforgiving landscapes and melancholic hotels. It carries echoes of the cinema of Wake in Fright (1971) and the Cars that Ate Paris (1974). Rendering visible the themes of the melancholic and the uncanny, Australian Gothic manifests itself in rural isolation – where the homely becomes unhomely (or unheimlich) and where nature is out of kilter.
Jane Brown (Kuwait, Australia, b. 1967) Adelong, New South Wales 2011 Fibre based, silver gelatin print 16.5 x 20.5cm
Jane Brown (Kuwait, Australia, b. 1967) Tumbarumba, New South Wales 2012 Fibre based, silver gelatin print 16.5 x 19.5cm
Jane Brown (Kuwait, Australia, b. 1967) One Way, Hobart, Tasmania 2009 Fibre based, silver gelatin print 16.5 x 19.5cm
Jane Brown (Kuwait, Australia, b. 1967) Unheimlich, French Island, Victoria 2010 Fibre based, silver gelatin print 19 x 16cm
Jane Brown (Kuwait, Australia, b. 1967) Captain’s Flat Hotel, New South Wales 2012 Fibre based, silver gelatin print 21.5 x 17.5cm
While Anthony Friedkin has documented subjects as diverse as the marginalised gay community of San Francisco, convicts at Folsom Prison, and brothels in New York, it is the Southern California coastline that has remained a recurrent theme throughout his forty-five-year career. The Los Angeles native took up photography about the same time he learned to surf. His images of waves deftly communicate the primordial power and elusive mysteries that he ascribes to the ocean. This photograph of surfer Rick Dano on an early morning drive up the coast conveys a mood of quiet, anticipatory harmony.
Text from Pacific Standard Time at the Getty
I have never particularly liked Los Angeles as a city. There seems to be something unappealing about the place, some energy lurking just beneath the surface that you can’t quite put your finger on. Maybe it is the comparison with the vivacious San Francisco just up the coast, the awful public transport or, more spookily, the lack of people on the street. People never walk anywhere in LA, it’s a car town. When I did walk on the street I felt vulnerable and surveyed with suspicion by people in cars, like a rabbit caught in the headlights.
These photographs confirm this feeling. Unlike the visual acoustics of the architectural photographs of Julius Shulman (photographs that mythologised this urban metropolis and then exported that idealised presence and Californian mid-century design to the rest of the world) these photographs have an unbelievably desolatory nature to them. They seem to be joyless and sorrowful, devoid of warmth, comfort, or hope – as though the human and the city were separated, as if we are separated from a loved one.
The row after row of tinderbox houses, the ubiquitous cars, the sense of emptiness, hopelessness and menace (see Gary Winogrand Los Angeles 1964, below – if looks could kill this would be it, the bandaged broken nose just perfect for the photograph) all paint a picture of despair. Even the supposedly quiet, anticipatory harmony of the photograph of surfer Rick Dano by Anthony Friedkin (1978, below top) is, to me, full of unresolved tension. The mist in the background hanging over the rocks, blocking out the view, the filthy hands and the bandaged little finger of the right hand, the downcast eyes, the impossibly long cigarette handing from his lips and most importantly the empty distance between the figure and the safety of the automobile. The tension in that distance and the downcast eyes says nothing to me of harmony but of isolation, sadness and regret.
Los Angeles is not my favourite city but it is a fascinating place none the less, as these photographs attest.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the J. Paul Getty Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Hernandez started photographing what he refers to as “automotive landscapes” in 1977, using a 35mm camera until he realised that a large-format camera loaded with 5 x 7-inch negative film would provide the detail he desired. Taken from a slightly elevated vantage point, Hernandez’s image of an immobilised truck and its lone mechanic in front of a repair shop presents a sobering view of Los Angeles’s car-dominant culture.
This image of a couple seated in a parked convertible in front of a nightclub on Sunset Boulevard simultaneously captures the glamour and seediness associated with Hollywood. Evoking a 1940s or ’50s film noir crime drama, a seeming tough guy and femme fatale continue their heated conversation, apparently oblivious to the traffic around them – and to the photographer observing them. A native of New York City, Winogrand studied painting at Columbia University and photography at the New School for Social Research before doing freelance commercial work. He photographed incessantly, using a 35mm camera to create wide-angled or tilted shots that are densely composed and layered with meaning. More than 2,500 rolls of film remained undeveloped at the time of his death in 1984.
Text from Pacific Standard Time at the Getty
As part of the region-wide Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A., 1945-1980 initiative, The J. Paul Getty Museum presents In Focus: Los Angeles, 1945-1980, an exhibition of photographs from the permanent collection made by artists whose time in Los Angeles inspired them to create memorable images of the city, on view at the Getty Center from December 20, 2011 – May 6, 2012.
This exhibition features both iconic and relatively unknown work by artists whose careers are defined by their association with Los Angeles, who may have lived in the city for a few influential years, or who might have visited only briefly,” said Virginia Heckert, curator, Department of Photographs, the J. Paul Getty Museum, and curator of the exhibition.
The photographs are loosely grouped around the themes of experimentation, street photography, architectural depictions, and the film and entertainment industry. Works featured in the exhibition are from artists such as Jo Ann Callis, Robert Cumming, Joe Deal, Judy Fiskin, Anthony Friedkin, Robert Heinecken, Anthony Hernandez, Man Ray, Edmund Teske, William Wegman, Garry Winogrand, and Max Yavno. Two of the works in the exhibition by Anthony Hernandez and Henry Wessel Jr. were acquired with funds from the Getty Museum Photographs Council. Drawn from the Museum’s permanent collection, including several recent acquisitions inspired by the Pacific Standard Time initiative, the exhibition offers visitors the opportunity to familiarise themselves with a broad range of approaches to the city of Los Angeles as a subject and to the photographic medium itself.
One of the most well-known works in the exhibition is Garry Winogrand’s photograph of two women walking towards the landmark theme building designed by Charles Luckman and William Pereira that has come to symbolise both Los Angeles International Airport and mid-century modern architecture in popular culture. Though a quintessential New Yorker, Winogrand made some of his most memorable photographs in Los Angeles, where he chose to settle in the final years of his life. Also included in the exhibition is Diane Arbus’ dreamily lit photograph of Sleeping Beauty Castle at Disneyland park in Anaheim. Although technically not located in either the city or the county of Los Angeles, Disneyland – and Arbus’ photograph – continues to capture the notion of entertainment and fantasy that has come to be so intrinsically associated with the city.
Other photographers in the In Focus: Los Angeles exhibition who produced the majority of their most creative work in the city include Edmund Teske, with his experimentation in the darkroom and his complex double solarisation process; Robert Heinecken, with images that are equally complex but often incorporate existing printed materials, such as negatives; Anthony Hernandez, whose portraits of Angelenos on the street emphasise the isolation of the individual in an urban environment; and Anthony Friedkin, who combines his passions for surfing and the Southland beaches in his photographs. The inclusion of three photographs from Judy Fiskin’s earliest photographic series, Stucco (1973-1976), provided the impetus for a monographic presentation of the artist’s complete photographic work by Getty Publications. Entitled Some Aesthetic Decisions: The Photographs of Judy Fiskin and featuring an introductory essay by curator Virginia Heckert, the book will be published concurrently with this exhibition.
Press release from the J. Paul Getty Museum website
The reduced scale and regular spacing of shapes lend a toy-like quality to Garnett’s suite of prints depicting construction phases of tract housing in the Los Angeles County suburb of Lakewood. The deep shadows, overall patterning, and dramatic diagonals that slice through each composition introduce a sophisticated sense of design and abstraction. After studying photography at Art Center College of Design and military service during World War II, William Garnett learned to fly so that he could photograph his subjects from his Cessna 170-B airplane. Although he was hired by developers to document the construction of 17,500 affordable single-family residences in Lakewood, the majority of his aerial photographs depict the beauty of America’s landscape.
After working for ten years as a commercial photographer, Sydney native Grant Mudford received funding from the Australia Council for the Arts, enabling him to travel throughout the United States to pursue personal work. Mudford’s love of architecture – particularly the vernacular, often anonymous structures of urban America – is evident in the photographs he produced. His head-on depictions of the façades of simple commercial buildings are enlivened by signage, the play of light and shade, the placement of doors and windows, or, as in this image, the rich variety of textures.
Joe Deal rose to prominence in the mid-1970s when work he made as a graduate student at the University of New Mexico was included in the exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape (1975). From 1976 to 1989, he taught photography at the University of California, Riverside, where he was instrumental in establishing a photography program and developing the university-affiliated California Museum of Photography. His photographs of Diamond Bar feature backyards of this primarily residential suburb located at the junction of the Pomona and Orange freeways in eastern Los Angeles County. Deal’s implementation of a slightly elevated perspective that eliminates the horizon line and provides a view into neighbouring yards effectively conveys the close quarters of life in a master-planned community.
“It is immediately apparent that no city has ever been produced by such an extraordinary mixture of geography, climate, economics, demography, mechanics and culture; nor is it likely that an even remotely similar mixture will ever occur again.” ~ Reyner Banham, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, 1971
This exhibition features photographs – made between 1945 and 1980 – from the Museum’s collection that represent diverse responses to the city of Los Angeles as a subject and to photography as a medium for documentary and creative expression. It is loosely grouped around the themes of experimental photography, vernacular architecture, car culture, and fantasy and the film industry.
Both iconic and relatively unknown works are included. One of the best known is Garry Winogrand’s image of two women walking towards the Theme Building at L.A. International Airport (see image above). Though a quintessential New Yorker, Winogrand settled in Los Angeles near the end of his life.
Experimental Photography
With its reclining figure set against a patterned background, Robert Heineken’s image recalls the odalisques of French painter Henri Matisse (see image above). To Heineken, however, traditional subjects and techniques were of little interest. He created this camera-less photograph by using a page torn from a magazine as the negative. This allowed light to pass through and merge depictions on both sides of the page into a single image with reversed tones.
In 1963, Heineken founded the photography program at the University of California, Los Angeles. He forged new directions in photography, utilising strategies of manipulation and appropriation to address themes of consumer culture and sexual politics.
Vernacular Architecture
Judy Fiskin’s propensity to backlight her subjects makes it difficult to read the details in the modest examples of vernacular architecture found in Westside neighbourhoods of Los Angeles that she photographed for her Stucco series. Viewers may be inclined to squint against the harsh light of Southern California that Fiskin makes so palpable. Nevertheless, the small scale of her images, contained by the black edges of the negative, encourages close viewing.
After completing graduate studies in art history at UCLA, Fiskin joined the faculty of the California Institute of Arts in 1977.
Car Culture
A native of Los Angeles, following two years of study at East Los Angeles College and two years of service in the U.S. Army, Anthony Hernandez took up photography in earnest around 1970.
For this image, Hernandez preset his 35mm camera so that objects within a specific range would be in focus. Then, while walking the streets of downtown Los Angeles, he swung the camera to his eye for a fraction of a second to capture fellow pedestrians as well as the ambient mood of a city more typically experienced from the driver’s seat (see image below).
Fantasy and the Film Industry
Los Angeles native Anthony Friedkin took up photography about the same time he learned to surf, and was already an accomplished photographer by age 16. He then studied at Art Center College of Design and the University of California, Los Angeles.
Friedkin began working as a still photographer for motion pictures in 1975. His depiction of row after row of film cans might be viewed as a historical document of a medium that has been replaced by new technology (see image below).
Following two years of study at East Los Angeles College and two years of service in the U.S. Army, Anthony Hernandez took up photography in earnest around 1970. For this image, he preset his 35mm camera so that objects within a specific range would be in focus. Then, while walking the streets of downtown Los Angeles, he swung the camera to his eye for a fraction of a second to capture fellow pedestrians as well as the ambient mood of a city more typically experienced from the driver’s seat. A native of Los Angeles, Hernandez has continued to photograph the city, addressing issues of community, shelter, and survival in his work.
Anthony Friedkin began taking photographs at a young age and had already published his work by the time he was 16. He nonetheless found it important to study photography seriously and did so at Art Center College of Design and the University of California, Los Angeles. Employment as a still photographer for motion pictures beginning in 1975 undoubtedly prepared him to create a portfolio of images of Universal Studios a few years later. His depiction of row after row of film cans might be viewed as a historical document of a medium that has been replaced by new technology. Friedkin’s continued commitment to shooting black-and-white film that he develops and prints in his own darkroom has become increasingly rare.
After completing his undergraduate degree in design at the University of California, Los Angeles, Darryl Curran entered the school’s newly established photography program, studying with Robert Heinecken, who is positioned toward the center of this image in a black turtleneck. The repeated printing of two frames is typical of Curran’s approach to the photographic medium and the ease with which he employs techniques and strategies derived from his background in printmaking and design. Another form of “mirroring” occurs in the placement of a Heineken beer bottle opposite Heinecken the artist. Curran founded the Department of Photography at California State University, Fullerton, where he taught from 1967 to 2001.
Henry Wessel began taking photographs while majoring in psychology at Pennsylvania State University in the mid-1960s. Travel throughout the United States in subsequent years led him to direct his gaze increasingly to details of human interaction with the natural and man-made environment. Wessel’s move to the West Coast in the early 1970s inspired him to incorporate light and climate into his work. His inclusion in the seminal exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape, organised in 1975 by the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, solidified his reputation as a keen observer of the American topography. In this image, electrical and telephone lines tether a row of modest residences to a single utility pole.
Text from Pacific Standard Time at the Getty
The J. Paul Getty Museum 1200 Getty Center Drive Los Angeles, California 90049
Exhibition dates: 3rd September, 2011 – 13th May, 2012
Curator: Frauke Eigen
Many thankx to the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Henri Cartier-Bresson was one of the most accomplished and influential photographers of the 20th century; he was the acknowledged ‘master of the moment’, and many of his images are veritable masterpieces of photographic history. With this exhibition, the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg is featuring another pioneering figure in its series of shows on great modernist photographers, which has to date included Brassaï (2004), Lee Miller (2006) and Edward Steichen (2008). The around 100 exhibits included in this very personal exhibition were originally compiled by Henri Cartier-Bresson, who died in 2004, under the heading of Paysages (Landscapes). His widow, the photographer Martine Franck, has also agreed to lend a rare group of seven lithographs from her private collection exclusively for this presentation.
Born in 1908 in Chanteloup, near Paris, Henri Cartier-Bresson’s original ambition was to be a painter, but he abandoned his art studies after only a short time. In 1930 he decided to concentrate on photography. He later worked as second assistant to the film director Jean Renoir and also directed a number of his own documentary films. After escaping from a German prisoner-of-war camp on his third attempt in 1943 he joined the French Resistance, and in 1947 he founded the now world-famous Magnum photo agency with four colleagues.
During his photographic career Henri Cartier-Bresson travelled widely through Europe, Mexico, India, China, Indonesia, the United States of America and the former Soviet Union. He always used an inconspicuous Leica rangefinder camera, and it was on these travels between 1933 and 1999 that the black-and-white landscape photographs were created. The impressive simplicity and precise composition of these images give them a meditative quality, and also show how strongly Cartier-Bresson’s photographic practice was influenced and inspired by Far Eastern philosophical concepts. In the mid-1960s Georges Braque had given him the book Zen in the Art of Archery by Eugen Herrigel; for Cartier-Bresson, this short monograph contained all the fundamental elements upon which his photographic aesthetic was based, above all because it described actual experience and dealt with every aspect of human life. It was the chronicle of a learning process, a questioning of the self, the pursuit of inner perfection and the achievement of harmony with the world.
All of Cartier-Bresson’s photographs have a black border around them [Marcus: not all!]. This characteristic feature is an explicit reference to the extreme precision of the photographer’s method, as it tells the viewer that the final image is exactly the same as the negative and has therefore not been cropped. The image was mentally ‘edited’ by the photographer as he took the picture – at the very moment when the shutter opened. His photographs contain all the key components: light and shadow, rigorous composition, the golden section, the element of chance. Using this ‘geometry of the moment’, he combined planes and lines, people and situations into a perfect arrangement.
The exhibition is arranged and constructed according to the principle of geometric composition. The Kunstmuseum commissioned the photo artist Frauke Eigen to design a concept for the presentation of the works. Past Cartier-Bresson exhibitions have always been arranged chronologically, thematically and geographically. Frauke Eigen has developed an innovative installation concept that shows the inner connection between the pictures through formal correspondences for the first time. Over and above the individual picture, the visitor becomes aware of how a design principles returns in the next picture in a modified fashion. The viewer can thus trace an abstract story of vivid forms from the first to last photograph, experiencing in the process something about the unique language of Henri Cartier-Bresson.
As a photographer, Cartier-Bresson’s style was marked by discretion and extreme sensitivity. He was also an incredibly self-effacing person: he rarely gave interviews and hated being photographed. In 1947, the Museum of Modern Art in New York even planned a large posthumous retrospective of his work, as they believed that he had been killed in the war. When Cartier-Bresson heard about this he decided to travel to the United States, and the exhibition was subsequently held with the artist present. The Frenchman loved stories like this.
Around 1973, at the height of his fame, Henri Cartier-Bresson abandoned photography and from then on only picked up his camera on rare occasions. Returning to his artistic roots, he devoted his time and energy to drawing, concentrating mainly on landscapes. He regarded this as merely a change in terms of ‘technique’, as his drawings were created with the same eye, the same sense of form and geometry as his photographs. For him, photography was an immediate action, whereas drawing was a form of meditation.
Sam Szafran, a painter and friend of Cartier-Bresson’s, once said to him: “In order to go fast you have to proceed very slowly. You have to observe, see how things occur, understand them, feel them, otherwise you will run into danger…”
In this sense, the exhibition The Geometry of the Moment,which has been organised in cooperation with the photo agency Magnum Photos, Paris and with the foundation HCB, Paris, forms the perfect complement to the large-scale thematic display The Art of Deceleration. Motion and Rest in Art from Caspar David Friedrich to Ai Weiwei, which will be shown in a parallel presentation at the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg from 12 November 2011 onwards.
Press release from the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg website
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