“There is little love and tenderness here, little magic or generosity of spirit. Goldin’s attitude to the world at the time seems to be one of hostility and resentment. It’s all very well portraying the underbelly of society – the depravity, violence and degradation – but if your point of departure is one of anger and animosity, this is always going to be reflected in your art. I remember going out with my friends partying in the 1980s, the drugs, the sex, the pushing it to the edge, but you know what – we cared about each other. Nothing could be further from the truth in Goldin’s hedonistic (not heuristic) approach to her aura. …”
Over six years later it was time to reevaluate my feelings towards the work by looking again. Had my feelings changed in the intervening years? Or was I just being an obtuse human at the time who couldn’t see what everyone else could see, the genius of the work?
I have reflected long and hard on my feelings in relation to these photographs. Perhaps I was too close to the subject matter, that the series cut too close to the bone: many years of partying in London taking drugs, so many friends and lovers lost to HIV/AIDS. But that is not the case.
The problem for me with this work is its rather sad detachment from life and a pervading sadness attached to each of these photographs. While Goldin announces that “For me it is not a detachment to take a picture” I feel the opposite is true: Goldin seems uber detached when taking these photographs. The artist goes “diving for pearls” hoping to create some magical, random psychological subtexts where the subconscious is made visible, but she doesn’t ever know whether it’s her or the camera’s subconscious that is revealed or who (the camera or the artist) is doing the work. So much for knowing thyself, being responsible to the world, to others, and to oneself, intellectually, morally, and practically.
While the diaristic photographs of this “seminal” body of work feature intimate moments of love and loss, moments of bohemian sex, transgression, beauty, spontaneity, and suffering captured in photographs of “unflinching candour, rich hues, and a keen sense of empathy and lyricism” where is the real Goldin in all of this observational performance (Goldin says her photographs ‘come out of relationships, not observation’.) I’ll just leave that one there…
What I would really like to see is the full 700 slide sequence, live, with the music that was supposed to go with these slides. I want to feel the context of these photographs and their intimacies in the flesh with the freshness and passion of what was happening at the time in New York:
Images and words and music
the real memory
the real experience
HIV/AIDS
death
life
bitterness
love
anger
immediacy
Mark Morrisroe
David Wojnarowicz
Peter Hujar
Cookie Mueller
Keith Haring
Kiki Smith
addiction
music with the ballad of sexual dependency = I put a spell on you
witness… to life, to the hurt
conformity and denial
rebellion
Each period reframes issues surrounding gender, sex, drug use and death … and what it means to be free. These images would feel totally different in 1980s New York but today, they feel cold, desperate and sad and I can’t identify with them or their photographic pathology, their study of suffering.
Have my feelings changed towards this work six years on. Yes they have. I more fully appreciate their photographic snapshot composition, their colour, their diaristic bravado. But I still don’t like their energy…. nor their masochistic indulgence.
Perhaps I just want to feel the real memory, the real experience (the energy and atmosphere of being in New York at the time) not viewed through the prism of this distanced, distancing monologue.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the National Gallery of Australia for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
The photographs in Nan Goldin’s The ballad of sexual dependency depict the everyday lives, often in intimate detail, of people in Goldin’s immediate community during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Please be advised that works of art in this exhibition depict explicit nudity, sexual acts, drug use, and the impacts of violence against women. Viewer discretion is advised. This exhibition is not suitable for children under the age of 15.
‘For me it is not a detachment to take a picture. It’s a way of touching somebody – it’s a caress, I think that you can actually give people access to their own soul.’
Nan Goldin
‘The people who have been photographed extensively by me feel that my camera is as much a part of their life as any other aspect of their life with me. It then becomes perfectly natural to be photographed. It ceases to be an external experience and becomes a part of the relationship, which is heightened by the camera, not distanced. The camera connects me to the experience and clarifies what is going on between me and the subject.’
Nan Goldin, wall text from the exhibition
“Since David Armstrong and I were young he always referred to photography as “diving for pearls.” If you took a million pictures you were lucky to come out with one or two gems. … I never learned control over my machines. I made every mistake in the book. But the technical mistakes allowed for magic. … Random psychological subtexts that I never would have thought to intentionally create. The subconscious made visible – though whether mine or the camera’s I don’t know …”
Nan Goldin. “Diving for Pearls,” quoted in Hilton Als. “Nan Goldin’s Life in Progress,” on The New Yorker website, July 4, 2016 [Online] Cited 18/11/2021
‘Nan Goldin’s nostalgic snapshots depict intimate moments of bohemian sex, transgression, beauty, spontaneity, and suffering. Her frames are marked by unflinching candour, rich hues, and a keen sense of empathy and lyricism. Goldin’s most famous work, ‘The Ballad of Sexual Dependency’ (1985), is a slideshow that presents nearly 700 images from her life in New York [and around the world] during the 1970s and ’80s; throughout the reel, the artist lies in bed with her lover, drag queens kiss in bars, and the AIDS epidemic ravages the photographer’s community.’
Anonymous text from the Artsy website
All The Beauty And The Bloodshed Official Trailer
Directed by Academy Award-winning filmmaker Laura Poitras, All the Beauty And The Bloodshed is an epic, emotional and interconnected story about internationally renowned artist and activist Nan Goldin told through her slideshows, intimate interviews, ground-breaking photography, and rare footage of her personal fight to hold the Sackler family accountable for the overdose crisis.
Installation views, Nan Goldin: the ballad of sexual dependency, National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri / Canberra, 2023 Photos: Karlee Holland
The ballad of sexual dependency is a defining artwork of the 1980s. Nan Goldin’s extended photographic study of her chosen family – her ‘tribe’ – began life as a slide show screened in the clubs and bars of New York where Goldin and her friends worked and played. The slide show was then distilled to a series of 126 photographs, which has recently become part of the National Gallery’s collection.
Goldin takes photographs to connect, to keep the people she loves in her memory. She is committed to the idea that photography can faithfully record a time and place, and do so in a way that has real social purpose. Using a documentary, snapshot style, she lays bare her life in the manner of a family album. We see her alongside her friends and lovers as they live their lives – hanging out, falling in and out of love, having children. But this is a community that would be decimated by HIV / AIDS and drug-related deaths. The ballad has become as much a testament to how much Goldin and her community have lost, as it is a record of the look and feel of a past time.
Goldin refers to The ballad as her ‘public diary’, stating that her photographs ‘come out of relationships, not observation’. The work’s overriding themes, she has stated, are those of love and empathy and the tension between autonomy and interdependence in relationships—relationships in which all genders struggle to find a common language.
Nan Goldin is one of the world’s most influential photographers and her iconic series of 126 photographs The ballad of sexual dependency is a defining artwork of the 1980s. The National Gallery recently acquired the last, complete edition of this cornerstone work, which will be shown at the Gallery from 8 July.
Decades in the making, Goldin’s extended photographic study of her chosen family – her ‘tribe’ – is a deeply moving portrayal of life in the 1970s and 1980s, as the artist and her loved ones navigate a time of unrelenting energy and extremes.
National Gallery Curator of Photography Anne O’Hehir said Goldin’s rich and evocative series explores themes of sexual identity, community, and love and loss against the backdrop of New York City and has shaped a generation who’ve fallen in love with the unvarnished intimacy of her storytelling.
‘Goldin takes photographs to connect, to keep the people she loves in her memory. She is committed to the idea that photography can faithfully record a time and place and do so in a way that has real social purpose,’ O’Hehir said.
‘Using a documentary, snapshot style, she lays bare her life in the manner of a family album. We see her alongside her friends and lovers as they live their lives – hanging out, falling in and out of love, having children. But this is a community that would soon be decimated by HIV / AIDS and drug-related deaths.
‘The ballad of sexual dependency has become as much a testament to how much Goldin and her community have lost, as it is a record of the look and feel of a past time.’
O’Hehir said this engaged and at times moving series urges you to empathise with stories and experiences that are rarely depicted. ‘Goldin is committed to making public that which is usually hidden and private, and to the truthful recording of her life,’ O’Hehir said.
Goldin refers to The ballad of sexual dependency as her ‘public diary’, stating that her photographs ‘come out of relationships, not observation’. The work’s overriding themes, she has stated, are those of love and empathy and the tension between autonomy and interdependence in relationships – relationships in which all genders struggle to find a common language.
The ballad of sexual dependency began its life as a slideshow presented by Goldin at parties and in clubs and bars in New York City’s downtown art scene. The slide show was then distilled to a series of 126 photographs, which are now part of the national collection.
The opening of The ballad of sexual dependency at the National Gallery coincides with the release of Goldin’s acclaimed documentary All The Beauty And The Bloodshed on DocPlay. Directed by Academy Award®-winning filmmaker Laura Poitras, All The Beauty And The Bloodshed is an epic, emotional and interconnected story about Goldin’s life, work and activism, focussing on her recent fight to hold the Sackler family accountable for the opioid crisis. The biographical film will also be screened at the National Gallery on Saturday 22 July.
Nan Goldin’s The ballad of sexual dependency is free and will be on display at the National Gallery in Kamberri / Canberra from 8 July 2023 – 28 Jan 2024. This exhibition is part of the National Gallery of Australia’s 40th Anniversary celebrations and continues the Know My Name gender equity initiative. Nan Goldin’s exhibition The ballad of sexual dependency is supported by DocPlay, the streaming home of the world’s best documentaries.
Curator: Anne O’Hehir, Curator, Photography
Press release from the National Gallery of Australia
“Mixed-up times are overflowing with both pain and joy – with vastly unjust patterns of pain and joy, with unnecessary killing of ongoingness but also with necessary resurgence. The task is to make kin in lines of inventive connection as a practice of learning to live and die well with each other in a thick present. Our task is to make trouble, to stir up potent response to devastating events, as well as to settle troubled waters and rebuild quiet places.”
Donna Haraway, 2016
“… according to one’s structure and position, each of us sees certain facets, certain parts of facets (…).”
Alberto Giacometti
It’s great to see Melbourne artist Hoda Afshar have a mid-career survey exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. With her strong bodies of work over recent years she surely deserves such an accolade.
Unfortunately I can’t make any comment on the exhibition Hoda Afshar: A Curve is a Broken Line itself – its flow from body of work to body of work, from space to space; the colours used behind the photographs; the sequencing of the work; and how the different sizes of the photographs bring the viewer forward and push them back – because I have not seen the exhibition. But, as always with the work of Afshar, it would seem her compassionate, lyrical, conceptual images are displayed with a clear seeing and focus on the stories that the artist wishes to tell.
Many words have been written by others (below) about significant aspects of Afshar’s work: the layers of displacement, difference and marginality; othering and image-making; war, statelessness, diaspora, oppression, corruption, torment, identity, place … which relate to the “relativity of reality” (the view that people are active participants in the construction of their own reality) imbued in her work. Indeed, “concepts of identity develop across the social spectrum – from within the self, within the culture, and within the political arena.”1 You can read these texts at your leisure. But from what I can see in the media images the exhibition exemplifies, as writer Celina Lei notes, “how her practice has matured while still carrying forth that visual pull – aesthetically, intellectually and emotionally.”
From what I can observe and feel the images are strongly composed, rigorously conceived and carry emotional weight when combined in sequences. Single images are ambiguous but when combined into a flow of images the narrative comes alive. People are framed against contextless backgrounds, they turn away from the camera, they shield their eyes and their identity or have their faces obscured by tree branches – so much of Afshar’s work is about absence, loss, longing, persecution, the impermanence of identity and the conflicting perceptions of a constructed, lived reality.
What I take issue with is John McDonald’s comparison of Afshar’s work with that of William Eggleston: works in her ongoing series In the exodus, I love you more (2014-) which capture diverse images of Iran “have the same mixture of ordinariness and oddity one finds in the work of a photographer such as William Eggleston.”2 Nothing could be farther from a form of reality. Eggleston’s images are never ordinary, are frequently surreal and bizarre, shot from a low or high angle (often with lurid colour ways) and possess a cutting social commentary on American culture … whereas Afshar’s photographs are poetic, sublime, lyrical emanations of ‘reality’ and if they do picture some oddity they lack the intense “bite” of an Eggleston image – something I would like to see Afshar reintroduce into her image making.
Many of her images are reflective, meditative, and approach the subject matter in an oblique manner which illuminates “how photography can activate new ways of thinking” … all well and good, but I long for a little more guts and directness to some of her individual images (physically, literally not intellectually). Her early series Under Western Eyes for example, contains biting, quirky creativity but for obvious reasons has not been included in this exhibition because it doesn’t fit the style of the smooth, polished, buffed, ambiguous and other worldly later work.
I also take issue with Tom Williams’ observation. “Even in her early, nominally “documentary” series, you can sense an embracing of the ambiguity of the still image, and an interest in composing a reality more vivid (and perhaps genuine) than dispassionate reportage might be capable of.”3 I disagree with the second part of this statement.
Having recently spent hours assembling a huge posting of photographs on the war in Ukraine – images which picture the ordinariness and atrocity of war – nothing, literally nothing, can be more vivid and genuine than the images of that war captured by brave Ukrainian photographers (see examples below). The same can be said of the genocide happening in Gaza and the photographs emerging from that massacre.
But as John McDonald intelligently observes, “The tragic events that have unfolded in Israel and Gaza over the past month should be enough to remind us that art is powerless in the face of real political upheaval. The most an artist can do to effect social and political change is to create a few striking images that circulate beyond the thought-absorbing walls of the art museum. Even then, any change to people’s attitudes is bound to be incremental and highly personal.”4
Most images then, have little power to change public and personal opinion… all they can do is proffer alternate visions and interpretations of the world and hope that some glimmer of recognition of injustice, difference and otherness will permeate the mind of the viewer. And while Afshar’s photographs do not effect social and political change what they do is bring to consciousness in the viewer “other” aspects of the realities of the world. Through the visibility of her images she exposes the phallocracy of the masculine, singular definition of truth. As David Smail suggests when speaking on the nature of ‘truth’,
“Though the truth is not just a matter of personal perspective, neither is it fixed and certain, objectively ‘out there’ and independent of human knowing. ‘The truth’ changes according to, among other things, developments and alterations in our values and understandings… the ‘non-finality’ of truth is not to be confused with a simple relativity of ‘truths’.”5
Afshar’s photographs address the simple relativity of many ‘truths’, the tension between “forms” … of truth and reality. Truths and reality, what is seen and not seen. So much of being alive is breaking…
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Footnotes
1/ Ari Hakkarainen. “‘The Urgency of Resistance’: Rehearsals of Death in the Photography of David Wojnarowicz” 2018
5/ David Smail. Illusion & Reality: The Meaning of Anxiety. London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1984, p. 152.
Many thankx to the Art Gallery of New South Wales for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Mstyslav Chernov (Ukrainian, b. 1985) / AP Doctors unsuccessfully try to resuscitate a girl hit by Russian shelling in Mariupol, Ukraine. February 27, 2022
2022
Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education, research, criticism and review
Alexey FurmanAlexey Furman (Ukrainian, b. 1991) / Getty Images
A young girl cries as a man bids his daughter goodbye at the railway station in Lviv, Ukraine, on March 22, 2022. Lviv has served as a stopover and shelter for the millions of Ukrainians fleeing the Russian invasion, either to the safety of nearby countries or the relative security of western Ukraine’
2022
Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education, research, criticism and review
Sergi Mykhalchuk (Ukrainian, b. 1972) Evacuation of civilians from Irpіn, Ukraine. March 4-5, 2022
2022
Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education, research, criticism and review
Mstyslav Chernov (Ukrainian, b. 1985) / AP Mariana Vishegirskaya stands outside a maternity hospital that was damaged by shelling in Mariupol, Ukraine, March 9, 2022. Vishegirskaya survived the shelling and later gave birth to a girl in another hospital in Mariupol
2022
Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education, research, criticism and review
“I see art-making as a process of “unselfing” – you can be outside of your body, less focused on what’s inside, and see yourself in relation to the broader world.”
Hoda Afshar
“In co-opting the documentary genre, Afshar harnesses its truth-telling power while simultaneously telling another story – one that is often unspoken or at odds with what we are told by those in power.”
Through her poetically constructed images, Hoda Afshar illuminates a world overshadowed by history and atrocity. Yet we never see despair: we see defiance, comradeship, reinvention and a search for how photography can activate new ways of thinking. …
What unites her materially diverse work is a concern with visibility: who is denied it, what is made visible by media, and how photography can reveal, overlook and manipulate truth.
Much of her work addresses critical humanitarian issues of our time: war, statelessness, diaspora, oppression, corruption. She challenges stereotypes. We don’t see passive victims or closed narratives: we are introduced to new perspectives that might lead us to reappraise the world we inhabit.
The title of the exhibition was inspired by lines in a poem by Kaveh Akbar:
a curve is a straight line broken at all its points so much of being alive is breaking.
Through her photographs and moving image works, Iranian-born, Melbourne-based Hoda Afshar examines the politics of image-making. Deeply researched yet emotionally sensitive, her work can be seen as a form of activism as much as an artistic inquiry.
Afshar uses the camera to give visibility to those who have been denied it, resolutely insisting on the humanity of her subjects. She makes us contend with violence and brutality, not through blunt imagery but through evocation. Her work is anchored in empathy yet also radical in the way it wrestles with injustice.
This exhibition will feature photography and film from the past decade to present a comprehensive overview of Afshar’s recent practice, including a newly commissioned series. Amassed together in dialogue for the first time in a major public institution, these works offer a poignant reminder of the power of images and their coercive potential.
An accompanying publication offers critical insight into Afshar’s work as well as creative and experimental responses from a range of writers.
Text from the Art Gallery of New South Wales website
“The tragic events that have unfolded in Israel and Gaza over the past month should be enough to remind us that art is powerless in the face of real political upheaval. The most an artist can do to effect social and political change is to create a few striking images that circulate beyond the thought-absorbing walls of the art museum. Even then, any change to people’s attitudes is bound to be incremental and highly personal. …
Like Valamanesh, Afshar has never been able to let go of her brutalised, much-maligned country. In her ongoing series, In the exodus, I love you more (2014-), which takes its title from a line by Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, she returns time and again to Iran, capturing diverse images that have the same mixture of ordinariness and oddity one finds in the work of a photographer such as William Eggleston. Landscapes, street scenes, portraits, horses, peacocks, a building draped in heavy curtains, a hose in a courtyard … nothing is disqualified from an idiosyncratic overview that digs under the skin of her birthplace. The same applies, but with added eeriness, to the series Speak to the wind (2015-22), set on the island of Hormuz, off the southern coast of Iran.”
“Through her poetically constructed images, Hoda Afshar illuminates a world overshadowed by history and atrocity. Yet we never see despair: we see defiance, comradeship, reinvention and a search for how photography can activate new ways of thinking. …
Even in her early, nominally “documentary” series, you can sense an embracing of the ambiguity of the still image, and an interest in composing a reality more vivid (and perhaps genuine) than dispassionate reportage might be capable of. …
What unites her materially diverse work is a concern with visibility: who is denied it, what is made visible by media, and how photography can reveal, overlook and manipulate truth.
Much of her work addresses critical humanitarian issues of our time: war, statelessness, diaspora, oppression, corruption. She challenges stereotypes. We don’t see passive victims or closed narratives: we are introduced to new perspectives that might lead us to reappraise the world we inhabit. …
Hoda Afshar’s work addresses conflict, injustice, mobility and the often fragile state of being alive. It reminds us that dominant powers can be challenged by exposing truth and envisioning something new.”
“Social and political commentary is a given in much of her work, but her lens remains sympathetic, never othering. This is highlighted in sections throughout Hoda Afshar: A Curve is a Broken Line. Her portraits of stateless asylum seekers on Manus Island, Papua New Guinea, taken in 2018, display power and dignity in visibility, despite lived experiences of harshness and torment.”
In the exodus, I love you more (2014-) is a portrait of her home country formed by experiences of familiarity and distance. The artist is both at home and searching, like an outsider. Images suggest at times an intimate proximity, and at others a separation akin to the one made by raising a camera to your eye.
Afshar examines her experience of migration and, she tells me, seeks to “dismantle the idea of there being one way of seeing Iran.”
The final image in this series shows the erasure of a woman’s face in a painted Persian miniature.
In September, the Art Gallery of New South Wales will present Hoda Afshar: A Curve is a Broken Line, the first major solo exhibition of one of Australia’s most innovative and unflinching photo-media artists, Iranian-born, Melbourne-based Hoda Afshar.
Featuring photographs and moving image works from the past decade, including a newly commissioned series, the comprehensive exhibition provides an overview of the artist’s recent practice and examines the politics of art making. Amassed together in dialogue for the first time by a major public institution, these works offer a poignant reminder of the power of images and their coercive potential.
Art Gallery of NSW director Michael Brand said it is a great pleasure to present Afshar’s first major solo exhibition at the Art Gallery of NSW.
‘Hoda Afshar is one of the most exciting artists working in Australia today. While her work explores themes of violence and pain, it also speaks to the transformative potential of image-making which is of profound importance to art institutions, as agents of advocacy and emotional encounter,’ said Brand.
‘Her work gives visibility to marginalised voices and serves as a powerful reminder of art’s capacity to embolden, inspire, and move. Her own voice as an artist is a defiantly international one.’
Since she first began working with photography in the early 2000s, Afshar has resolutely insisted on the humanity of her subjects. She is sensitive to the camera’s status as an imperialist tool that has long been used to define how history is told and how power is consolidated. Throughout her practice, she has involved her subjects in the act of photographing them in order to equalise the power dynamic that exists between photographer and photographed and return agency to those she depicts.
Exhibition curator, Art Gallery of NSW senior curator of contemporary Australian art Isobel Parker Philip said: ‘Hoda Afshar’s work is both deeply researched and poetically resonant and can be seen as a form of activism as much as an artistic inquiry.
‘Hoda’s approach is unique in that she makes us contend with brutality, not through blunt imagery but through evocation. Her work is anchored in compassion yet also radical in the way it wrestles with injustice.
‘Hoda’s photographs and videos are emotionally embroiled in the world they depict. It is this fact that makes a survey of her work both compelling and timely.’
Hoda Afshar: A Curve is a Broken Line includes the reveal of a new body of work commissioned for the exhibition, titled In turn 2023, which is a series of large-scale photographs depicting Iranian women who, like Afshar, live in Australia and have watched, from afar, the women-led Iranian uprising that began in September 2022. Presented one year on from when the uprising started, the portrait series is something of an elegy, speaking to their shared grief and their shared hope.
Among the most recognisable works featured in the exhibition, is Behrouz Boochani – Manus Island 2018, which was acquired by the Art Gallery in 2020 from Afshar’s pivotal series Remain 2018, which comprises a video and suite of photographs. Made on Manus Island, Papua New Guinea with a group of stateless asylum seekers, the video and photographs of Remain serve as testimony to the lived impact of Australia’s border protection policy.
The exhibition is accompanied by a publication, Hoda Afshar: A Curve is a Broken Line (RRP$65) featuring new writing by curator Isobel Parker Philip and writers including Hala Alyan, Elyas Alavi, Behrouz Boochani, Andrew Brooks and Astrid Lorange (working as the duo Snack Syndicate), Taous Dahmani, Shahram Khosravi and Sarah Sentilles.
Press release from the Art Gallery of New South Wales
The series Behold was made while the artist was travelling in the Middle East and befriended a group of young gay men who invited her to photograph them in a local male-only bathhouse.
The title Behold is alluding to the role of the viewer, the camera, in partially constructing the meaning of these images. For instance, the visible expressions of male intimacy tend to be viewed through a very narrow sexualized frame in the West, but in Iran, like elsewhere in the East, it is quite normal to see men engaged in physical contact, embracing each other and kissing cheeks, physically massaging each other in bathhouses, without it being sexualized. It is like public displays of breastfeeding and images of naked infants or adolescents – and also male intimacy – it is always interesting for me the reactions that these things engender in the West – the weird sort of prohibitions, and paranoias that surround the displaying of certain bodies or their interactions.
Picking up on something that John Berger said for example – if we were to replace the men in these images with women then of course the reaction would be very different. So returning to the idea of viewing: this work for me (now, upon reflection) is also about challenging the viewer – or different viewers – about these things. because despite the points just mentioned, the dominant reading of the work will still likely be about the censorship of bodies and identities in a particularly religious environment. But again what I am suggesting is that this has something, though not everything, to do with our own framing.
Hoda Afshar Instagram page
In Behold (2016), once more we see acts of resolute defiance by people performing for the camera. Afshar was invited by a group of gay men to observe re-enacted gestures of protection and intimacy outlawed in most of the Middle East.
Unable to freely express their love in society, they disclose and affirm it for Afshar and her lens.
Behold was made unexpectedly, and without design. I was travelling in a city that I sometimes return to, and I got to know a group of gay men. There, where they live, these men (and many others like them) are mostly left to be. But only on the condition that they lead one part of their lives in secret. Rarely, that is, do their bodies ever meet in open honesty outside, in public. Only here, in this bathhouse, where their desire to be seen and embraced by others – just to be and to be held – is played out the partial openness of these four closed walls.
The bathhouse no longer exists. But while it still did, these men invited me to document it and a little glimpse of their lives in it. We arrived, but I was not allowed to enter. So we rented the place, and for a few hours I took pictures while these men played themselves performing their lives for my peering camera, in order that their desire to be seen might be realised, in part at least, here in the world of the images – in the act of beholding, where the bare thereness of life is transformed from mere appearing or appearance, into something more meaningful … into recognition.
Remain addresses Australia’s contentious border protection policy and the human rights of asylum seekers. The work was made in collaboration with several of the men who remained on Manus Island, Papua New Guinea, six or more years after they left their homelands to seek asylum in Australia, but instead were sent to languish in the remote offshore detention centre. The work involves these men retelling their individual and shared stories through staged images, words, and poetry, and bearing witness to life in the Manus camps: from the death of friends and dreams of freedom, to the strange air of beauty, boredom, and violence that surrounds them on the island.
Afshar believes ‘typical images of refugees only reinforce in the eyes of the viewer their inferior image and position’. Afshar, in collaboration with the people in her
portraits, attempted to create ‘an artwork – using the language of poetry, performance, and song – that defies such logic, and forces the viewer to confront their
own incomprehension, as well as the very inexplicableness of the situation that these men face.’ Collaboration, trust and empathy is an important aspect of Afshar’s art practice. She says:
One portrait shows a stateless Kurdish refugee called Emad struggling under a downpour of sand. When I asked him what natural element he wanted to use in his image, he chose soil. He said: ‘It reminds me of land; the land that I was torn from; the land that has been torn from me. From us. Soil is the most precious idea in Kurdish culture. But we are stateless. I’ve been stateless my whole life.’
Afshar’s criticism of documentary photography isn’t aimed at photographers themselves, or their intentions: ‘It’s important for all of us to look at the visual languages that we inherited, that are predominantly imperial visual languages, and ask questions about why we’re framing things in a certain way.’
Hoda Afshar’s 2018 body of work Remain is an unflinchingly political commentary on Australia’s border protection policy and serves as testimony to its assault of human rights. Encompassing a film and a suite of photographic portraits, Remain speaks the stories of a group of stateless men who remained on Manus Island, Papua New Guinea, after the immigration detention centre closed in October 2017. In the film, their experiences are recounted as episodic fragments shot through with violence in voice overs that are by turns lyrical and brutal. Some recite poetry, some sing, some remember the riots and the suicides. As their stories unfold, the camera pans over a picturesque landscape – lush foliage and crystal-clear water. A ‘green hell’ as one man describes it. It is the abrupt collision of these two registers, the haunting narrative and the idyllic imagery, that carries the emotional force of the work. It is beautiful and horrifying at the same time.
The accompanying photographic portraits of the same protagonists are insistent and powerful. They stand before us, in the foreground of the image, against a dark backdrop. In these photographs, there is nothing to distract us from the figures themselves. Nothing to detract from the simple fact of their presence. They each assert their right to be seen. The bluntness of this gesture is itself a political act. For that is what detention does; it makes individuals invisible. In these portraits, Afshar acknowledges the plight of these men metaphorically. They are beset by the elements, by fire, water and earth. But at no point is their humanity questioned.
Text from the Art Gallery of New South Wales website
Behrouz Boochani (Persian: بهروز بوچانی; born 23 July 1983) is a Kurdish-Iranian journalist, human rights defender, writer and film producer living in New Zealand. He was held in the Australian-run Manus Island detention centre in Papua New Guinea from 2013 until its closure in 2017. He remained on the island before being moved to Port Moresby along with the other detainees around September 2019. On 14 November 2019 he arrived in Christchurch on a one-month visa, to speak at a special event organised by WORD Christchurch on 29 November, as well as other speaking events. In December 2019, his one month visa to New Zealand expired and he remained on an expired visa until being granted refugee status in July 2020, at which time he became a Senior Adjunct Research Fellow at the University of Canterbury.
Boochani is the co-director, along with Iranian film maker Arash Kamali Sarvestani, of the documentary Chauka, Please Tell Us the Time, has published numerous articles in leading media internationally about the plight of refugees held by the Australian government on Manus Island, and has won several awards.
His memoir, No Friend But the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison, won the Victorian Prize for Literature and the Victorian Premier’s Prize for Nonfiction in January 2019. The book was tapped out on a mobile phone in a series of single messages over time and translated from Persian into English by Omid Tofighian.
After the November 2022 publication of his second collection of writings, Freedom, Only Freedom: The Prison Writings of Behrouz Boochani, Boochani visited Australia for the first time to promote the book in December 2022.
Hoda Afshar’s 2018 body of work Remain is an unflinchingly political commentary on Australia’s border protection policy and serves as testimony to its assault of human rights. Encompassing a film and a suite of photographic portraits, Remain speaks the stories of a group of stateless men who remained on Manus Island, Papua New Guinea, after the immigration detention centre closed in October 2017. In the film, their experiences are recounted as episodic fragments shot through with violence in voice overs that are by turns lyrical and brutal. Some recite poetry, some sing, some remember the riots and the suicides. As their stories unfold, the camera pans over a picturesque landscape – lush foliage and crystal-clear water. A ‘green hell’ as one man describes it. It is the abrupt collision of these two registers, the haunting narrative and the idyllic imagery, that carries the emotional force of the work. It is beautiful and horrifying at the same time.
The accompanying photographic portraits of the same protagonists are insistent and powerful. They stand before us, in the foreground of the image, against a dark backdrop. In these photographs, there is nothing to distract us from the figures themselves. Nothing to detract from the simple fact of their presence. They each assert their right to be seen. The bluntness of this gesture is itself a political act. For that is what detention does; it makes individuals invisible. In these portraits, Afshar acknowledges the plight of these men metaphorically. They are beset by the elements, by fire, water and earth. But at no point is their humanity questioned.
Text from the Art Gallery of New South Wales website
On the islands in the Strait of Hormuz, a belief exists that a wind, known as zār, can possess a person, and can be exorcised from them through an intense ceremony of dance and music.
On the islands of the Strait of Hormuz, near the southern coast of Iran, there is a belief that the winds – generally believed to be harmful – can possess a person, causing them to experience illness or disease. As part of a ritual placating the winds’ harmful effects, the islands’ inhabitants practice a ceremony involving incense, music and movement, in which a hereditary cult leader speaks with the wind through the afflicted patient in order to negotiate its exit.
When artist Hoda Afshar first visited the islands in 2015, she found herself drawn not only to these distinctive customs practiced by its inhabitants but also to its otherworldly landscapes – the strange valleys and statue-like mountains, themselves sculpted by the wind over many millennia. While the exact origins remain unclear, the existence of similar beliefs in many African countries suggests that the cult may have been brought to the south of Iran from southeast Africa through the Arab slave trade. This seldom spoken history became a starting point into an intriguing project for Afshar, who sought to document the story of these winds and the traces they have left on these islands and inhabitants.
With 110 cameras functioning instantaneously in a photo studio, Afshar created 3D images of her subjects and used a 3D printer to convert them into statues.
An officer and lawyer in the Australian Special Forces
While serving in Afghanistan, he raised concerns that the Australian government were covering up the corruption of Australia’s defence force for political gain, and sacrificing the lives of Australian soldiers. After his concerns were consistently ignored, he copied over a hundred secret documents and distributed them to several journalists and to the ABC. He faces trial on five charges relating to National Security. If found guilty, he will face lifetime imprisonment.
Portrait of Rod St George, who exposed atrocious conditions at the Manus Island detention centre
Agonistes (2020)
Hoda Afshar explores the experiences of people who have spoken out. The artist worked with people known as whistle-blowers, who have brought to light various transgressions perpetrated in Australian institutions today. Although whistleblowing in Australia is considered a hallmark of our democracy, whistle blowers take great personal risks when drawing attention to institutional wrongdoing.
Agonistes is based on the experiences of several men and women – former employees in the areas of immigration, youth detention, disability care, and other government agencies – who chose to speak out, and who now live with the consequences. They describe the personal and professional ruin, the breakdown of friendships and family relationships, and the physical and mental anguish that followed their decision to call out alleged abuses, and the reasons that led them to do so, despite knowing their possible fate. They explain that if they could go back, they would do it all again.
While their individual stories differ, the shared struggle of these men and women and their portraits expose the same agonizing truth: that the choice between responsibility and obligation – between morality and the law – is, in a very real sense, the essence of tragedy. Afshar produced a 3D scan of each of the whistle blowers. This was then 3D printed to create a bust. Afshar created studio photographs of the busts, which resulted in a suite of images that abstracts the identity of each subject. The eyes – a feature we usually use to identify people in photographs – become curiously blank.
“It took me 14 years to find that level of courage, or knowledge or connection to the place [Australia] to make a work like the Agonistes, to turn the lens inward, to feel like I’m authorised to talk about it as a citizen,” says Afshar.
To identify the whistleblowers to approach for the project, Afshar worked with Claire Loughnan, a lecturer in criminology at the University of Melbourne.
She flew each person to Melbourne and photographed them using a system of 110 cameras – which allowed her to essentially create a 360-degree portrait. She used this composite image to generate a 3D-printed sculpture of each whistleblower. …
Afshar was fascinated to discover that the one thing that the 110 cameras could not capture was the details of her subjects’ eyes – resulting in a glazed-over effect.
This accidental byproduct of the process had a certain poetic resonance for the photographer: it reminded her of the eyes on ancient Greek busts.
She points out that democracy and tragedy emerged in ancient Greece at the same time.
“Often in the tragic narratives, the main character is the one that is caught between two conflicting choices: responsibility and obligation, or morality and the law … [or] the public and the state.”
“The reality of Athens at the time was a system that was rooted in patriarchy, slavery, xenophobia, refugee crisis – which are still the struggles of our time. And the function of tragedy then was to give voice to the excluded voices.”
In the Agonistes video work, we hear the excluded voices of the whistleblowers while Afshar zooms in on her subjects’ eyes, mouths, hands.
In the adjoining room, the new series In turn (2023) is a suite of large, framed photographs of Iranian women based in Australia. Many images show them as they tenderly braid one another’s hair. These women are unidentifiable, apart from artist and activist Mahla Karimian, who appears airborne with a pair of flying doves.
This work was catalysed by the women-led protest movement sparked by the death of Mahsa Jina Amini, an Iranian Kurdish woman arrested in September 2022 for not following Iran’s strict female dress codes. The uprising filled the streets with women chanting “Women, Life, Freedom!” and “Say her name!” in fearless defiance of authorities, who responded with murderous retaliation.
Afshar was observing her homeland from afar. She says she wanted to “share voices the media was ignoring”. She was inspired by social media images of women plaiting each other’s hair in public: a rebellious act that echoes a practice of female Kurdish fighters preparing for battle.
But the images aren’t violent. They’re quietly peaceful, showing solidarity in grief, hope and determination. In making this “visual letter” to her Iranian sisters, Afshar has risked long-term exile from her country of birth.
Exhibition dates: 17th October 2023 – 21st January 2024
Benjamin Brecknell Turner (English, 1815-1894) North Side of Quadrangle, Arundel Castle
1852-1854
Negative photograph on paper
29.7 x 39.6cm
BnF, department of Prints and Photography, RES PHOTO EI-6-BOITE FOL B (n° 3)
Gift of André and Marie-Thérèse Jammes, 1960
What a lovely exhibition to start the year 2024 on Art Blart.
My favourite photographs in the posting: three beautiful fashion photographs by Frères Séeberger; a stunning late Atget Parc de Sceaux, Duchess Alley (between 1925 and 1927, below) in which you can feel the crispness in the air of the early winter morning; and the glorious seascapes of Gustave Le Gray, probably the best (and most atmospheric) photographer of the sea in all time.
In this posting we observe how black and white photographs are never just black and white but full of different hues and colours. These colour variations tell us a lot about the perception of the image.
As the exhibition text notes: “The strength of the blacks and whites, the variations of hues influence our perception of the image: the more contrasted it is, the more readable it is for our eye saturated with absolute blacks and whites; the more nuanced it is, the more sensitive the distance of time becomes.”
As we enter a new year, another year further away from the origin of the light captured in these photographs, the sensitivity of early photographers and their ability to displace time continues to entrance the viewer.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Noir & Blanc: Une esthétique de la photographie
Black and white is inseparable from the history of photography: its developments, from the end of the 19th century to today, have revealed its plastic force. While the use of colour intensified from the 1970s, black and white reinvented itself as a means of assertive aesthetic expression emphasising graphics and material. Black and white photography remains less expensive and simpler, but its persistence to this day can be explained above all by the fact that it has come to embody the very essence of photography. It appears to carry a universal, timeless, even memorial dimension, where colour would be the sole translation of the contemporary world.
The National Library of France holds one of the richest photographic collections in the world with some six million prints, these are particularly representative of this abundant history of black and white photography.
Benjamin Brecknell Turner (English, 1815-1894) Arbre le long d’une clotûre (Tree along a fence)
1852-1854
Negative photograph on paper
23.5 x 27.3cm
BnF, department of Prints and Photography, RES PHOTO EI-6-BOITE FOL B (n° 3)
Gift of André and Marie-Thérèse Jammes, 1960
Photography on paper, with its speed and precision, revolutionised image production in the mid-19th century. The prerequisite is the production of a negative then of the same size as the print. The first negatives are on paper. Reversing the values of blacks and whites, they offer an unknown vision of the world. These oppositions, inverted or not, are the basis of the aesthetics of photography.
One of the earliest British amateur photographers, Benjamin Brecknell Turner (1815-1894) was experimenting with photography barely ten years after the invention of the medium. He exhibited widely during his lifetime and is best known for his beautiful photographs of 19th-century England, picturesque ruins and rural scenes.
A founder member of the Photographic Society of London, Turner contributed to the rapid technical and aesthetic development of photography in the 1850s. Our collection includes a unique album compiled by Turner, ‘Photographic Views from Nature’, containing some of the earliest photographs made in and around the counties of Worcestershire, Surrey, Sussex, Kent and Yorkshire, alongside the radical modern architecture of the Crystal Palace in London’s Hyde Park.
Text from the V&A website
The origins of black and white
Before the invention of colour photography by the Lumière brothers in 1903, one might believe that all photography was black and white. The reality is more complex: the early days were more those of a varied range of values where pure blacks and whites were the exception and so-called sepia tones were the most common. The negative / positive process patented by the Englishman Fox Talbot in 1841 makes it possible to multiply the prints on paper and therefore to vary the shades.
Certain subjects play on oppositions: the mountain views of the Bisson brothers, the Great Wave by Gustave Le Gray, the portraits of the prolific amateur Blancard.
Désiré Charnay (French, 1828-1915) Chichen Itza: Bas-relief des Tigres, Palais du Cirque (Chichen Itza: Bas-relief of the Tigers, Circus Palace)
1859-1861
Print on gold-toned albumen paper from a collodion glass negative
BnF, Department of Prints and Photography, RES PHOTO VZ-940-FT4
In 1861, Charnay gave Napoleon III a copy of the album American Ruins composed for the Emperor of expensive proofs on albumen paper toned with gold, in an exceptional format, the miraculous result of his Mexican epic. The shift to gold accentuates the vigour of the contrasts and brings a cold tone to the blacks.
Désiré Charnay (French, 1828-1915) Uxmal: détail de la façade dite de la couleuvre (Uxmal: detail of the so-called snake facade)
1859-1861
From the album American Ruins
Print on gold-toned albumen paper from a collodion glass negative
59 x 78.2cm
BnF, Department of Prints and Photography, RES PHOTO VZ-940-FT4
The forty-nine views of the ruins of Yucatan, Chiapas, Tabasco and the province of Oaxaca constitute the first set of photographs entered into the collections of the Geographical Society, in 1861. During the general assembly of November 29 , Charnay presents his collection of photographs exhibited in the meeting room. The same day, at the Academy of Inscriptions and Belles Lettres, Jomard returns to the quality of Charnay’s photographs, which allow us to conclude that American art – the Egyptologist’s supreme tribute – “deserves a place alongside Assyrian art, and even alongside the art of the Egyptians.”
Bisson frères. Louis-Auguste (French, 1814-1876) and Auguste-Rosalie (French, 1826-1900) La crevasse (départ) sur le chemin du grand plateau, ascension du Mont-Blanc (The crevasse (departure) on the way to the grand plateau, ascent of Mont-Blanc)
1862
Print on albumen paper from a wet collodion glass negative
BnF, Department of Prints and Photography, EO-14 (3)-FOL
In 1861, the Bisson brothers managed to hoist their photographic equipment to the summit of Mont Blanc. Mountaineering feat, photographic feat: in these extreme conditions, the plate must be sensitised just before use and developed as soon as possible. The violence of the contrasts, when the brightness of the snow juxtaposes the black of the rocks, redoubles this technical challenge. This conquest of the limit is crowned by the harmony of the print, carried by a site with spectacular aesthetic qualities.
This exhibition brings together black and white masterpieces from the photographic collections of the National Library of France. Nadar, Man Ray, Ansel Adams, Willy Ronis, Helmut Newton, Diane Arbus, Mario Giacomelli, Robert Frank, William Klein, Daido Moriyama, Valérie Belin…: the big names in French and international photography are brought together in a journey which presents approximately 300 prints and embraces 150 years of history of black and white photography, from its origins in the 19th century to contemporary creation.
Black and white is inseparable from the history of photography: its developments, from the end of the 19th century to today, have revealed its plastic force. While the use of colour intensified from the 1970s, black and white reinvented itself as a means of assertive aesthetic expression emphasising graphics and material. Black and white photography remains less expensive and simpler, but its persistence to this day can be explained above all by the fact that it has come to embody the very essence of photography. It appears to carry a universal, timeless, even memorial dimension, where colour would be the sole translation of the contemporary world.
The exhibition in brief
The exhibition addresses the question of black and white from an aesthetic, formal and sensitive angle, emphasising the modes of image creation: plastic and graphic effects of contrasts, play of shadows and lights, rendering of materials in all the palette of values from black to white. The emphasis was placed on photographers who concentrated and systematised their artistic creation in black and white, experimented with its possibilities and limits or made it the very subject of their photography such as Man Ray, Ansel Adams, Ralph Gibson, Mario Giacomelli or Valérie Belin. Particular attention was paid to the quality of the prints, the variety of techniques and photographic papers, but also to the printing of black and white, books and magazines having long been the main relay to the public for photographic creation .
The exhibition thus shows the richness and extent of the BnF’s photographic collections. Among the richest in the world with some six million prints, these are particularly representative of this abundant history of black and white photography.
Exhibition co-organised with the Réunion des Musées Nationaux – Grand Palais
Commissariat
Sylvie Aubenas, director of the Prints and Photography department, BnF Héloïse Conésa, head of the photography department, responsible for contemporary photography at the Department of Prints and Photography, BnF Flora Triebel, curator in charge of 19th century photography at the Department of Prints and Photography, BnF Dominique Versavel, curator in charge of modern photography at the Department of Prints and Photography, BnF
Text from the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF)
Hippolyte Blancard (French, 1843-1924) Mademoiselle L. Vulliemin, à mi-corps, la tête couverte d’un chapeau (Miss L. Vulliemin, half-length, head covered with a hat)
1889
Platinum print from a gelatin-silver bromide glass negative
BnF, Department of Prints and Photography, EO-508-PET FOL
Gift of print dealer Maurice Rousseau, 1944
Amateur photographer, wealthy pharmacist enriched by the sale of digestive pills, Blancard creates a prolific and picturesque work in a superb contrast of black and white thanks to the use of platinum. This expensive process, patented in 1873, ensures stable prints with marked contrasts which do not stifle the rendering of halftones.
Émile Zola (French, 1840-1902) Denise et Jacques, les enfants d’Émile Zola (Denise and Jacques, the children of Émile Zola)
1898 or 1899
Gelatin aristotype, gelatin aristotype on matte velvety paper with toning, cyanotype, silver print, gelatin aristotype toned with gold, collodion aristotype with toning
BnF, Department of Prints and Photography, NZ-214-8
Purchase at public sale, 2017
From 1894, the novelist devoted himself with passion to photography, in an intimate vein. Here he tests the effects of his shooting by varying the papers, the processes, the tones based on the same negative on a glass plate. We see that black and white is a monochromy among others (brown, orange, blue). Very few of these test prints created in the privacy of the photographer’s laboratory have reached us; the collection of these six prints is exceptional.
Frères Séeberger. Jules, Louis and Henri Séeberger (French, 1872-1932; 1874-1946; 1876-1956) Untitled
1909-1912
Silver print on baryta paper
BnF, Department of Prints and Photography, OA-38 (1)-BOITE FOL
Acquisition-donation from the family, 1976
Frères Séeberger. Jules, Louis and Henri Séeberger (French, 1872-1932; 1874-1946; 1876-1956) Untitled
1909-1912
Silver print on baryta paper
BnF, Department of Prints and Photography, OA-38 (1)-BOITE FOL
Acquisition-donation from the family, 1976
For almost half a century, the Séeberger brothers, specialising in fashion reporting, captured elegant women in their natural settings, racecourses, palaces, upscale beaches. The print on baryta paper, used here, marks a technical breakthrough. A layer of pure white barium sulfate is now interposed between the print support and the binder layer, where the image is formed. Manufactured industrially from the 1890s, chemically developed baryta papers and their characteristic cold tone would dominate silver production until the 1970s.
Frères Séeberger. Jules, Louis and Henri Séeberger (French, 1872-1932; 1874-1946; 1876-1956) Untitled
1909-1912
Silver print on baryta paper
BnF, Department of Prints and Photography, OA-38 (1)-BOITE FOL
Acquisition-donation from the family, 1976
In Black and White
Entirely designed from the Library’s rich collections, Black & White: An aesthetic of photography presents more than 300 works from the 19th century to the present day which bear witness to the use black and white from more than 200 photographers from around the world.
Considering black and white photographic creation from the 19th century to the most contemporary works, the exhibition presented at the François-Mitterrand affirms an ambition commensurate with the historical and geographical scope of the BnF’s collections and their immense variety technical and stylistic. The Department of Prints and photography has been a high place of conservation and emulation for monochrome photographic expression, under the impetus in particular of Jean-Claude Lemagny. Recently deceased, this very first curator of photography contemporary, in office from 1968 to 1996, was a fervent defender of black and white aesthetics.
In the 19th century, the powerlessness of photography to reproduce colours do not reduce it only to black and white and the tonal variations (blue, sepia, etc.) are in fact multiple. The exhibition opens with a spectacular monochrome of prints by Émile Zola, alongside luxurious prints by Gustave Le Gray, by Désiré Charnay and the Bisson brothers. It is at the turn of the 20th century that black and white became the tonality of photography par excellence, with the generalisation of the gelatin-silver bromide process.
An artistic and aesthetic approach
The rest of the journey deliberately interweaves creations of the 20th and 21st centuries, without chronological consideration. According to a primarily artistic and aesthetic approach to black and white, works of authors, decades, styles, schools and various origins interact, in order to highlight visual constants and graphics observable in use by black and white by photographers from 37 countries. That the photographers either suffered lack of colour or – from the 1950s-1970s – preferred to it, black and white is appreciated by artists for its numerous graphic, material and symbolic, which allow them to obtain certain effects features.
Write in black and white
These are these different ways of writing in black and white that the exhibition shows, starting with the contrasts: prints by Imogen Cunningham and André Kertész at the sculptural portraits of black women by Valérie Belin, in passing through the photograms of Man Ray, the books of William Klein or the fashion photographs of Helmut Newton, the contrast is deliberately sought by certain artists. By accentuating blacks and whites, or even making them disappear to any intermediate shade of grey, they bring out the essential lines of their subjects, retrace the design of the world,
gain visual and graphic expressiveness.
The play of shadows and light, at the origins of the photographic act, forms another part of the exhibition highlights. Bringing together the works of photographers as varied as Brassaï, Alexandre Rodtchenko, Henri CartierBresson, Willy Ronis, Flor Garduño, Daido Moriyama, Arthur Tress or Ann Mandelbaum, this part emphasises the dazzling effects or shadows cast, explored by these artists in their portrait practice, of the street snapshot, of the nocturnal shooting or in their laboratory experiments.
The exhibition continues with a chart of tests deployed in ribbon, from the blackest to the whitest. These prints signed Jun Shiraoka, Emmanuel Sougez, Edward Weston, Barbara Crane or Israel Ariño recall the ability of black and white to render effects of matter by its infinite variations of grey or, conversely, suggest the overflow or disappearance of all matter.
A sensory experience
The journey ends with a paradox with the works of photographers who, like Patrick Tosani, Marina Gadonneix or Laurent Cammal, disturbing the visitor’s perception by using colour processes to represent a black and white subject – an ultimate game with codes inherited from their art. Designed to show the historical depth and the richness of the BnF collections, this exhibition is intended to be educational and sensitive: emphasising certain technical aspects linked to printing practices, while insisting also on the irreducible material part of this art. By the high quality of prints presented, the exhibition offers to the public a sensory experience that will make them perceive the nuances hidden behind this apparently monolithic notion black and white.
Flora Triebel and Dominique Versavel. “En Noir et Blanc,” in Une saison en photographie, Chroniques No. 98, BnF, September – December 2023
Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) Parc de Sceaux, Duchess Alley
Between 1925 and 1927
Print on matte albumen paper from gelatin-bromide glass negative
BnF, Department of Prints and Photography, EO-109 (16)-BOITE FOL B
Eugène Atget claimed a humble, artisanal practice of photography. He used the same old camera and printing paper for decades. Only the disappearance of his usual supplies forced him to change. There is therefore no aesthetic research, yet these colour variations tell us a lot about the perception of the image.
The photographer artist can choose the colours of his prints by playing on the chemistry of the fixing baths or on the nature of the papers.
Gold toning, known since the 1850s, produces deep blacks but is very expensive. Baryta or platinum papers appeared at the end of the century and made it possible to further accentuate contrasts.
Gustave Le Gray (French, 1820-1884) Plage de Sainte-Adresse avec les bains Dumont (Sainte-Adresse beach with Dumont baths)
1856
Print on albumen paper from a collodion glass negative
31.3 x 41.3cm
Former Alfred Armand collection
BnF, Department of Prints and Photography, RESERVE FOL-EO-13 (3)
The strength of the blacks and whites, the variations of hues influence our perception of the image: the more contrasted it is, the more readable it is for our eye saturated with absolute blacks and whites; the more nuanced it is, the more sensitive the distance of time becomes.
Provenance
This article was designed as part of the exhibition “Black & White – An aesthetic of photography” presented at the BnF from October 17, 2023 to January 21, 2024.
The marines of Le Gray
Gustave Le Gray (1820-1884) is a central figure in 19th century photography. A contemporary of photographers like Nadar, Charles Nègre and Henri Le Secq, he began his career by training as a painter. With great mastery of photographic technique, he developed two major inventions, the collodion glass negative in 1850 and the dry wax paper negative in 1851.
Le Gray’s seascapes mark not only a milestone in the history of photography, but also its true intrusion into a pictorial genre characteristic of the English school. Fixing the movement of the waves while the snapshot is still stammering, combining two negatives, one for the sky and one for the sea, Le Gray plays like a virtuoso with a complex technique in the service of a lyrical vision, which prefigures marine studies by Courbet in the 1860s-1870s. The success was immense in France and England: these “enchanted paintings” were acquired by crowned heads, aristocrats, artists and art collectors.
Gustave Le Gray (French, 1820-1884) Vapeur (Steam)
1856-1857
Print on albumen paper from a collodion glass negative
31.3 x 37.2cm
BnF, Department of Prints and Photography, ESERVE FOL-EO-13 (3)
Gustave Le Gray (French, 1820-1884) Groupe de navires – Sète – Méditerranée – No. 10 (Group of ships – Sète – Mediterranean – No. 10)
1857
Print on albumen paper from a collodion glass negative
29.9 x 41.2cm
Former Alfred Armand collection
BnF, Department of Prints and Photography, RESERVE FOL-EO-13 (3)
Gustave Le Gray (French, 1820-1884) La Vague brisée. Mer Méditerranée No. 15 (The Broken Wave. Mediterranean Sea No. 15)
1857
Photograph, albumen paper, collodion glass negative
41.7 x 32.5cm
BnF, Department of Prints and Photography, RESERVE FOL-EO-13 (3)
Gustave Le Gray (French, 1820-1884) La Grande vague – Sète – N° 17 (The Great Wave)
1857
Photograph, albumen paper, collodion glass negative
35.7 x 41.9 cm
BnF, Department of Prints and Photography, RESERVE FOL-EO-13 (3)
Gustave Le Gray (French, 1820-1884) Flotte franco-anglaise en rade de Cherbourg (Franco-English fleet in Cherbourg harbour)
August 4-8, 1858
Print on albumen paper from a collodion glass negative
31 x 39.8cm
Former Alfred Armand collection
BnF, Department of Prints and Photography, RESERVE FOL-EO-13 (3)
Félix Nadar (French, 1820-1910) La Princesse Marie Cantacuzène (The Princesse Marie Cantacuzène)
around 1855-1860
Varnished salted paper print from a collodion glass negative
20.8 × 15.3cm
BnF, Department of Prints and Photography, EO-15 (2)-PET FOL
Nadar created two portraits of this classically beautiful young woman. It indicates on the back of one of the proofs that it is the Romanian princess, Marie Cantacuzène.
The portrait by Félix Nadar
Until the beginning of the 1880s, Félix Nadar’s portraits were distinguished by their neutral backgrounds.
The merit of Mr. Nadar’s portraits does not consist only in the skill of the pose, which is entirely artistic, there is a learned and reasoned arrangement of the light, which attenuates or increases the daylight depending on the character of the head. and the operator’s instinct. We also find in the printing of the proofs a delicate search for harmony and slightly faded tones which soften the edges of the contours with their darkness.
Félix Nadar (French, 1820-1910) Bakounine
About 1862
Silver print from the original negative on collodion glass
27.1 × 20.6cm
BnF, Department of Prints and Photography, EO-15 (4)-FOL
The revolutionary, philosopher and theoretician of socialism Mikhail Bakunin is one of the immense personalities that Nadar photographed during his career and offered to clients in his constantly enriched portrait gallery. We see here a print from 1862, contemporary with the shooting, but there is also a print made twenty years later and finally a print around 1900, brought up to date after heavy retouching. Thus until the end of the activity of the Nadar workshop, the oldest portraits of celebrities were always offered to customers.
Félix Nadar (French, 1820-1910) Jean Journet (1799-1861)
1857
Salted paper print from collodion glass negative
27.4 x 21.8cm
BnF, Department of Prints and Photography, EO-15 (9)-PET FOL
Jean Journet, nicknamed the Apostle, was a picturesque and eccentric Parisian figure, often ridiculed by his contemporaries. Former carbonaro, pharmacist in Limoux, he discovered the philosophy of Fourier and decided to spread his doctrine by abandoning his family and taking his pilgrim’s staff. His humanitarian evangelism, advocating fraternity and association, led him to write numerous pamphlets which he distributed in an untimely manner: by throwing them from “paradise” into theatres or by laying siege to famous writers and editorial offices. Interned several times in Bicêtre, Journet found upon his death a defender in Nadar who published an article in Le Figaro on October 27, 1861, concluding: “Ah my dear fools! that I love you much better than all these wise men.”
Nadar draws inspiration from Spanish painting from the Golden Age to render “this dazzling head of Saint Peter”.
Félix Nadar (French, 1820-1910) Charles Asselineau (1820-1874)
Between 1854 and 1870
Print on albumen paper from a collodion glass negative
23.8 x 18.1cm
BnF, Department of Prints and Photography, EO-15 (1)-PET FOL
Charles Asselineau is one of Nadar’s oldest friends. They became friends at the Collège Bourbon and were both close friends of Baudelaire. A fine scholar and supernumerary librarian at Mazarine, Charles Asselineau, author of, among other things, Paradis des gens de lettres and L’Enfer du Bibliophile, was close to the publisher Poulet-Malassis, nicknamed by Baudelaire “Coco-mal-perché”. He collaborated with Nadar on two short stories published in April and August 1846: “The Healed Dead” and “The Found Paradise”, reprinted in When I Was a Student. He belonged to the small circle of editors who documented the Pantheon-Nadar to which biographies of each character were originally to be annexed.
He was Nadar’s best man at his wedding… warned, however, two weeks after the ceremony. The groom explained this in a letter: “It’s quite funny that my first witness learned of my marriage 15 days after the consummation and through an announcement letter. This, my good friend, will be explained to you by me on our first trip. I will limit myself to telling you for the present that I went to your house the day before, a Sunday and that on Monday morning at noon time fixed for the ceremony I did not know at 11 o’clock if I was getting married.” (NAF 25007, fol. 8).
Alexandre Rodtchenko (Russian, 1891-1956) Jeune fille au Leica (Young girl with Leica)
1934
BnF, prints and photography
Piergiorgio Branzi (Italian, 1928-2022) Bar sur la plage, Adriatique (Beach bar, Adriatic)
1957
BnF, prints and photography
Willy Ronis (French, 1910-2009) Venise (Venice)
1959
BnF, prints and photography
A student of Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind at the Institute of Design in Chicago, Metzker sublimates the formal particularities of this school through exceptional mastery black and white: he excels at stylising reality by constructing his images in direct opposition to dark and light flat areas.
Mario Giacomelli (Italian, 1925-2000) Je n’ai pas de main qui me caresse le visage (I have no Hands caress my face)
1961-1963
BnF, prints and photography
Daido Moriyama (Japanese, b. 1938) Portrait d’acteur (Actor portrait)
1968
From the series Japanese theatre
BnF, prints and photography
André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985) 1er janvier 1972 à la Martinique (January 1, 1972 in Martinique)
1972
BnF, prints and photography
Bernard Plossu (French, b. 1945) Paris
1973
BnF, prints and photography
Mary Ellen Mark (American, 1940-2015) Immigrants, Istanbul, Turkey
c. 1977
BnF, prints and photography
Koichi Kurita (Japanese, b. 1962) Melting Snow on a Rock, Nagano, Japan
1988
BnF, prints and photography
Flor Garduño (Mexican, b. 1957) Canasta de Luz (Corbeille de lumière)(Basket of Light)
1989
BnF, prints and photography
Laurence Leblanc (French, b. 1967) Chéa, Cambodge (Chéa, Cambodia)
2000
From the series Rithy Chéa Kim Sour and the others
BnF, prints and photography
Bibliothèque François-Mitterrand
Quai François Mauriac, 75706 Paris Cedex 13 Phone: +33(0)1 53 79 59 59
Wishing all readers of Art Blart a Happy New Year … but first, a glorious posting to finish the year 2023!
What a joy it is to see a young seventeen-year-old artist spreading their wings and taking such accomplished photographs. “Her photographs of street scenes, of buildings cut by subtle lighting effects, her poetic and touching images” are remarkable for their pictorial construction – framing, understanding and use of light and shadow, perspective – and how they tell the story in a single, beautiful image.
Of particular interest is
1/ How Orkin uses the bicycle and its shadow to frame subject matter, showing an implicit understanding of modernist photography. Images such as Thru the wheels of Commerce, Frisco dockyards on the photo album page San Francisco 1939 (below) are almost Duchampian in their conceptualisation. The artist’s use of near / far, high / low and the reverse of that perspective is exceptional.
2/ How Orkin constructs the pages of the photo album, neatly gridded in either horizontal or vertical photographs (never mixed). Through collective images and text this girded visualisation formalises the journey in her mind, illuminating what a transformative experience it must have been – a rite of passage between youth and adulthood (I have no details on when or why the photo album was constructed). What adventures she must have had, shooting-the-streets at 6am in the morning before going to an Italian grocery store for breakfast!
Further, in the photo album page San Francisco 1939 No’s 33-39 (below) we can observe in the young artist an understanding of how to sequence photographs in their ebb and flow: the bicycle framing the vanishing point in 33 leads to its inversion in Orkin’s shadow in 34; this shadow is echoed in the positive in the sculpture of Voleenteer Firemen (complete with misspelling) in 35 which then leads into the thrusting Italian Church of 36 … but here it is the hanging vegetation which is of import, for the vertical drapery is then inverted in the perspective of the ground shadow in 37 Weeping willows; the opening of the light in that image is echoed in the vista between the bicycle frame in 38 Bay from Cort Tower, this negative space then itself inverted in the self-portrait in 39.
3/ How the addition of text can provide a different interpretation to the images for the viewer. The media images were shorn of the text from the photo album pages (being cropped without text) – lack of con/text which to my eyes denudes them of Orkin’s interpretation and feelings about her images.
For example, the photograph captioned in the press images These people are standing in the middle of Washington St & reading the blackboard wall bulletins, on a newspaper office, Boston, 1939 (below) – reminiscent of Atget’s photograph Pendant l’éclipse (During the eclipse) 1912 (below) – is actually inscribed, These people are standing in the middle of Washington St & reading the blackboard wall bulletins, on a newspaper office. Sept 1.
Some may wonder why the deletion of “Sept 1” is so important… until you realise that Sept 1, 1939 was the day that Hitler’s Nazi Germany invaded Poland leading to the official start of World War 2 (although war had been raging in Manchuria between China and Japan since 1931). Without that word and number all we have in that photograph is a varied group of people looking up at news bulletins. But with their addition, and Orkin knew this only too well, the photograph assimilates the significance of world events into its very being … and then reflects back to the viewer an understanding of how those events will subsequently affect every person in that photograph. If that word and number is not there (as in the press images title) we would have never known the import of the moment that Orkin captured.
Finally, I would acknowledge the precocious talent of Ruth Orkin and her perspicacious (from Latin perspicax, perspicac– ‘seeing clearly’) nature. On this road trip she was young and full of joys of taking photographs, perceptive and aware of the world around her. For me the photographs are more than sketches that map out the beginnings of her photographic style – they are her style, fully formed and eloquent in their subtle, formal beauty. What an accomplishment for any artist no matter their age.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
L’exposition Ruth Orkin – Bike Trip, USA, 1939
Curator: Clément Chéroux
In 1939, at the age of 17, Ruth Orkin crossed the United States alone with her bike, her camera and only $25 in her pocket. This “bike trip” across the United States took her from Los Angeles to New York, where she planned to visit the World’s Fair. Her journey and her audacity, exceptional for the time, aroused the curiosity of the local press, which devoted numerous reports to her while she was there. It was during this epic bicycle trip that Ruth Orkin sketched out the beginnings of her photographic style. Her photographs of street scenes, of buildings cut by subtle lighting effects, her poetic and touching images, in which she doesn’t hesitate to stage her metal steed, will be shown for the first time in France at an exhibition at the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation. In 1951, having become a professional photographer (after working as a courier for MGM studios), Ruth Orkin produced her most famous image, American Girl in Italy, showing a woman travelling alone, under the gaze of the men who surround her and occupy public space, as a nod to her personal experience.
Text from the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson website
Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) Pendant l’éclipse (During the eclipse) 1912 Albumen print
Although the moon is not visible in this photograph by Eugène Atget, its presence and appeal are implied. The crowd gathered in Paris’s Place de la Bastille on April 17, 1912, was observing a solar eclipse through viewing apparatuses. Atget, rather than recording the astronomical event itself, turned his attention to its spectators. Though Atget made more than 8,500 pictures of Paris and its environs in a career that spanned over thirty years – most documenting the built environment – this photograph is an unusual example that focuses on a crowd of people.
For the first time in France, the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson presents a solo exhibition on American photographer Ruth Orkin (1921-1985), internationally known for her photograph American Girl in Italy (1951), an iconic image of a women travelling alone. While still a teenager, Orkin undertook a pioneering journey across the United States from West to East.
In 1939, at 17 and still living with her parents in Los Angeles, Ruth Orkin decided to cross the United States solo, from the Pacific to the Atlantic. She travelled less by bicycle than with a bicycle, crossing long distances by car, train, and bus, using her bicycle to explore big cities: Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington, New York, Boston and San Francisco.
Over a four-month period, she took 350 photographs: urban scenes, numerous self-portraits and striking compositions framed by her bicycle. In each city she visited, local newspapers covered her story, interviewing and photographing her. With the unexpected publicity, she was invited everywhere, given tickets to shows, and even received a new two-wheeler.
Orkin’s stated aim upon departure was to visit the New York World’s Fair, but the transcontinental adventure proved far more decisive. It was a defining moment in her personal and artistic development, confirming the old adage: it’s not the destination, it’s the journey.
The exhibition brings together around forty photographs and archival documents, including Ruth Orkin’s manuscript on this adventure.
Biography
Born in Boston in 1921, Ruth Orkin grew up in Hollywood. At the age of 10, she received her first camera and began photographing her friends and teachers at school. In 1938, at 17 years old, she took a monumental bicycle trip across the United States from Los Angeles to New York City to see the 1939 World’s Fair, and she photographed along the way.
In 1943, the photographer moved to New York where worked for all the major magazines, including LIFE, which sent her to Israel in 1951. She then went to Italy, where she met Jinx Allen, an art student and fellow American, who became the subject of American Girl in Italy. The photograph was part of a series titled When You Travel Alone, about what they encountered as women traveling alone in Europe after the war.
On her return to New York, Orkin married the photographer and filmmaker Morris Engel. Together they produced two feature films, including Little Fugitive, which was nominated at the Oscar in 1953. From their New York apartment overlooking Central Park, Orkin photographed numerous events (marathons, parades, concerts) and the beauty of the changing seasons. Ruth Orkin passed away in 1985.
Text from the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson website
Long Island Sound is a marine sound and tidal estuary of the Atlantic Ocean. It lies predominantly between the U.S. state of Connecticut to the north and Long Island in New York to the south. From west to east, the sound stretches 110 mi (180 km) from the East River in New York City, along the North Shore of Long Island, to Block Island Sound. A mix of freshwater from tributaries, and saltwater from the Atlantic Ocean, Long Island Sound is 21 mi (34 km) at its widest point and varies in depth from 65 to 230 feet (20 to 70 m).
Exhibition dates: 11th October 2023 - 7th January 2024
Curators:Hiroshi Sugimoto: Time Machine is curated by Hayward Gallery Director Ralph Rugoff with Assistant Curators Thomas Sutton and Gilly Fox, and Curatorial Assistant Suzanna Petot.
Rachael Smith Hiroshi Sugimoto in the Hayward Gallery with his ‘Seascapes’ series 2023
The world is a reality, not because of the way it is, but because of the possibilities it presents
Frederick Sommer
Almost real
I have an ambivalent relationship with the work of Hiroshi Sugimoto.
On the one hand I truly admire the beauty and presence of Sugimoto’s photographs; how his images “contradict the medium’s conventional tasks – to record reality as precisely as possible”; and how his work, through an investigation of “fundamental questions of space and time, past and present, art and science, imagination and reality” push at the boundaries of what a photograph is and can be through an exploration of the very nature of photography.
Through this erudite, conceptual, scientific and creative investigation, Sugimoto’s staged images proffer a reorientation of the referent – of the world, in the world – unsettling the certainty of the truth of the photograph as a visual record of the world.
In my favourite series – such as the movie in a moment Theaters (1976 – ), the stuffed animal Dioramas (1974 – ), some of the wax works dead pan Portraits (1999 -) (particularly Oscar Wilde, Queen Victoria and Princess Diana), and the Seascapes (1980 -) – I feel released from the bounds of reality as we perceive it. The artist takes me out of myself and into a new plane of existence. He has reanimated the in/animate through an alchemical process, a mystery of mysteries, to create new life – a transubstantiation of the elements earth, air, water, fire.
On the other hand I am less impressed with bodies of work that simply do not work for me… that leave me feeling cold, lifeless. Series such as Revolution (1990/2012), Lightning Fields (2009), Photogenic Drawings (2009), Architecture (1997 – below) and the recent Opticks (2018 – below), while not derivative, owe a great debt to other artists that have already strode that golden path… and have done it better.
As I have observed in another review of Sugimoto’s work: “I’m not saying Sugimoto is derivative but because of these other works, they don’t have much room to move. Indeed, they hardly move at all. They are so frozen in attitude that all the daring transcendence of light, the light! of space time travel, the transition from one state to another, has been lost. The Flame of Recognition (Edward Weston) – has gone.”
Taking his work as a whole, we observe in Sugimoto’s work a slightly malevolent aura – follow my argument here – not in the sense of the work “showing a wish to do evil to others” but through the photographs unsettling ability to confound the reality of others. The artist’s work is very male/volent, very masculine and in the Latin etymology of the word “volent” (present participle of velle to will, wish) very much (reality) constructed at the will and wish of the artist.
While Sugimoto’s volition (from Latin volo ‘I wish’) creates beautiful and subversive images of true presence and power, it is the artist’s ability to will into existence images that engage with mystical forces beyond the apparent and the factual but which live as completely real and part of the total world of man and nature … that is his most impressive attribute as an artist. Through his photographs he brings to consciousness things only a small portion of which most of us experience directly.1
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ Adapted from Ansel Adams’ essay for The Flame of Recognition 1964 in “Edward Weston’s The Flame of Recognition” on the Aperture website August 12, 2015 [Online] Cited 22/12/2023
Many thankx to the Hayward Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“All my life I have made a habit of never believing my eyes.”
Hiroshi Sugimoto
“Sugimoto’s unique accomplishments in his genre contradict the medium’s conventional tasks – to record reality as precisely as possible. In Sugimoto’s work, one is confronted with the formal reduction of conceptual images, in which he addresses fundamental questions of space and time, past and present, art and science, imagination and reality. “I was concerned,” noted the artist in 2002, “with revealing an ancient stage of human memory through the medium of photography. Whether it is individual memory or the cultural memory of mankind itself, my work is about returning to the past and remembering where we came from and how we came about.” His pictures, which leave a lasting impression through their beauty and their auratic effect, interweave Japanese traditions with Western ideas. This East-West dialogue remains characteristic of his work today, which is captivating in its exceptional craftsmanship and strong aesthetic presence, and can exercise an almost magical effect on viewers.”
Anonymous. “Hiroshi Sugimoto. Revolution,” on the Museum Brandhorst website February 8, 2013
Hiroshi Sugimoto | curator tour with Ralph Rugoff | Hayward Gallery
Hiroshi Sugimoto: ‘My camera works as a time machine’ | Hayward Gallery
‘A camera can be able to stop the world, in that we stop the world and then investigate what is there, carefully.’
~ Hiroshi Sugimoto
Ahead of the opening of Hiroshi Sugimoto: Time Machine at the Hayward Gallery – the largest survey to date of the Sugimoto’s works – we travelled to meet the photographer at the Enoura Observatory in Japan. Situated against the outer rim of the country’s Hakone Mountains, the observatory was designed by Sugimoto as a forum for disseminating art and culture.
In this short video interview Sugimoto considers the impact of the invention of the camera – with this new ability to pause the world around us – and explains how his own photography, such as his Seascapes series, draws on this idea of the camera’s ability to distort linear time.
Dioramas (1974 – )
Installation view of Hiroshi Sugimoto, Dioramas (1974 – ) Silver gelatin prints Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery
‘My life as an artist began the moment I saw that I had succeeded in bringing the bear back to life on film,’ said Sugimoto about his 1976 work Polar Bear. The image is of an Arctic diorama in the American Museum of Natural History in New York, but through clever use of framing and exposure, Sugimoto was able to make the scene appear real. As well as revisiting the museum, and others across the US, to expand his Dioramas series, Sugimoto later took a similar approach to the waxworks of Madame Tussauds in his Portraits. By removing the figures from their staged displays, and photographing them against a black backdrop with sympathetic lighting, the artist gave the impression that these famous faces had themselves modelled for his portraiture.
Installation view of Hiroshi Sugimoto, Polar Bear, 1976. Silver gelatin print Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery
“Polar Bear” (1976) shows the majestic white animal roaring over a fresh kill: the bloodied body of a seal whose inert form is bulky and dark against an Arctic white background that stretches into the distance. Look closely and behind the bear – with its luscious coat of fur, its big paws so heavy in the snow you can almost hear it crunch – the line between two and three dimensions is just visible: a jagged crevasse in the ice floe beneath the two animals merges almost seamlessly with a painted backdrop of receding icy peaks.
The eye judders between these realities. The dead bear, momentarily brought to life by the vividness of the photograph, dies again, and is preserved again, a copy of a copy, frozen between past and present. Similar fates await a pair of ostriches defending their new hatchlings against a family of wart hogs (“Ostrich-Wart Hog,” 1980) and a placidly floating mother manatee and her calf (“Manatee,” 1994).
Installation view of Hiroshi Sugimoto, Theaters series (1976 – ) Gelatin silver prints Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery
Installation view of Hiroshi Sugimoto, Goshen Indiana, 1980. Gelatin silver print Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery
Installation view of Hiroshi Sugimoto, Cabot Street Cinema, Beverly, Massachusetts 1978. Gelatin silver print
Installation view of Hiroshi Sugimoto, Abandoned Theaters series (2015 – ). Gelatin silver prints Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery
Installation view of Hiroshi Sugimoto, Union City Drive-in, Union City, 1993. Gelatin silver print Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery
The largest survey to date of Hiroshi Sugimoto, an artist renowned for creating some of the most alluringly enigmatic photographs of our time. Over the past 50 years, Sugimoto has created pictures which are meticulously crafted, deeply thought-provoking and quietly subversive.
Featuring key works from all of the artist’s major photographic series, this survey highlights Sugimoto’s philosophical yet playful inquiry into our understanding of time and memory, and photography’s ability to both document and invent.
The exhibition also includes lesser-known works that reveal the artist’s interest in the history of photography, as well as in mathematics and optical sciences.
Often employing a large-format wooden camera and mixing his own darkroom chemicals, Sugimoto has repeatedly re-explored ideas and practices from 19th century photography while capturing subjects including dioramas, wax figures and architecture. His work has stretched and rearranged concepts of time, space and light that are integral to the medium.
Born and raised in Tokyo, Japan, Hiroshi Sugimoto divides his time between Tokyo and New York City. Over the past five decades, his photographs have received international acclaim and have been presented in major institutions across the globe.
While best known as a photographer, Sugimoto has more recently added architecture and sculpture to his multidisciplinary practice, as well as being artistic director on performing arts productions.
Text from the Hayward Gallery website
Seascapes (1980 -)
Installation view of Hiroshi Sugimoto, Seascapes series. Gelatin silver prints Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery
Installation view of Hiroshi Sugimoto, Seascapes series. Gelatin silver prints Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery
Over the past 50 years, Hiroshi Sugimoto has created some of the most alluringly enigmatic photographs of our time: pictures that are precisely crafted and deeply thought-provoking, familiar yet tantalisingly ambiguous. Featuring key works from all of the artist’s major photographic series, this survey highlights the artist’s philosophical yet playful inquiry into our understanding of time and memory, and the ambiguous character of photography as a medium suited to both documentation and invention.
The exhibition also includes lesser-known works that illuminate the artist’s interest in the history of photography as well as in mathematics and optical sciences. Often employing a large-format wooden camera, mixing his own darkroom chemicals and developing his black-and-white prints by hand, Sugimoto has repeatedly re-explored ideas and practices from 19th century photography, including subjects such as dioramas, wax figures and architecture. In the process, his work has stretched and rearranged concepts of time, space and light that are integral to the medium.
Hiroshi Sugimoto says: “The camera is a time machine capable of representing the sense of time… The camera can capture more than a single moment, it can capture history, geological time, the concept of eternity, the essence of time itself… The more I think about that sense of time, the more I think this is probably one of the key factors of how humans became humans.”
Ralph Rugoff, Director of the Hayward Gallery, says: “Hiroshi Sugimoto is a brilliant visual poet of paradox, a polymath postmodern who embraces meticulous old school craftsmanship to produce exquisite, uncanny pictures that reference science and maths as well as abstract art and Renaissance portraits. Juggling different conceptions of time, and evoking visions ranging from primordial prehistory to the end of civilisation, his photographs ingeniously recalibrate our basic assumptions about the medium, and alter our sense of history, time and existence itself. Amidst all his peers, his work stands apart for its depth and striking originality of thought.”
Time Machine commences with a selection of Sugimoto’s black-and-white photographs of natural history dioramas, a series he began in the mid-1970s. The Dioramas photos draw attention less to the natural world than to its theatrical representation in museums, whilst at the same time conjuring what the artist has called the ‘fragility of existence’.
The subject of time is also explored in two subsequent bodies of work featured in the exhibition: shot in movie palaces as well as drive-ins, Sugimoto’s Theaters (1976 – ) capture entire films with a single long exposure, thus compressing all the dramatic action that appeared on screen into a single image of radiant whiteness. His renowned Seascapes (1980 -), which depict evenly divided expanses of sea and sky unmarked by any trace of human existence, are equally beguiling in their temporal reference, evoking the immediacy of abstract painting even as they speak to Sugimoto’s interest in focusing on vistas that, as he remarks, “are before human beings and after human beings.”
For Architecture (1997 – ), a series of deliberately out-of-focus studies of iconic modernist buildings – ranging from the Eiffel Tower to the Twin Towers – Sugimoto displays the expansive ambiguity that informs his art, at the same time conveying a sense of the visual germ of an idea in an architect’s imagination, as well as fashioning ghostly images of what he has described as “architecture after the end of the world.” For his subsequent Portraits (1999) series, meanwhile, the artist focused his camera on wax models of famous historical figures from Madame Tussauds; rendered more life-like in black-and-white, figures ranging from Queen Elizabeth II to Oscar Wilde and Salvador Dali take on a disarmingly lively appearance, underscoring the camera’s potential for altering our perception. As the artist has noted, “However fake the subject, once photographed, it’s as good as real.”
A final section of Hiroshi Sugimoto: Time Machine focuses on photographs that evoke different notions of timelessness, including his Sea of Buddha (1995) series, which portrays an installation in a 12th century Kyoto temple featuring 1001 gilded wooden statues of Buddha; and Lightning Fields (2006 – ), spectacular camera-less photographs created by exposing sensitised paper to electrical impulses produced by a Van der Graaf generator.
The exhibition comes to a stunning conclusion with a gallery dedicated to Sugimoto’s Opticks (2018 – ), intensely coloured photographs of prism-refracted light. Taking inspiration from Newton’s research into the properties of light whilst calling to mind colour field painting and artists like Mark Rothko, Opticks presents deeply immersive fields of subtly varying hues.
Alongside his photographs, two of Sugimoto’s elegantly contoured and polished aluminium sculptural models are presented, alluding to both mathematical equations and the abstract forms favoured by modernists such as Constantin Brâncuși.
The exhibition is accompanied by a fully-illustrated, 216pp catalogue with newly commissioned essays and an illustrated chronology, co-published with Hatje Cantz. Texts by Ralph Rugoff (on Dioramas), James Attlee (on Theaters), Mami Kataoka (on Seascapes), Lara Strongman (on Portraits), Geoffrey Batchen (on Lightning Fields), Edmund de Waal (on Sea of Buddha), Margaret Wertheim (on Conceptual Forms), Allie Biswas (on Opticks) and David Chipperfield (in conversation, on Architecture).
The show is set to tour internationally in 2024, at the UCCA Center for Contemporary Art (23 March – 23 June 2024) and The Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (2 August – 27 October 2024).
Press release from the Hayward Gallery
Sea of Buddha (1995)
Installation views of Hiroshi Sugimoto, Sea of Buddha series. Gelatin silver prints Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery
Installation view of Hiroshi Sugimoto, Sea of Buddha 049 (Triptych) 1995. Gelatin silver print Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery
Chamber of Horrors (1994 – ) and Portraits (1999 -)
Installation view of Hiroshi Sugimoto, Chamber of Horrors series. Gelatin silver prints Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery
Installation view of Hiroshi Sugimoto, The Garrote 1994. Gelatin silver print Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery
Installation view of Hiroshi Sugimoto, The Electric Chair 1994. Gelatin silver print Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery
Installation views of Hiroshi Sugimoto, Diana, Princess of Wales 1999. Gelatin silver print Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery
Hiroshi Sugimoto: formative years and significant works
For five decades the work of photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto has received international acclaim, whilst being presented in major galleries and institutions the world over.
Sugimoto’s photographs are meticulously crafted, often stretching and rearranging the concept of time, and our understanding of the world around us, and he has often re-explored ideas and practices from photography’s earliest exponents. Over the past 50 years, he has often revisited and expanded upon his own ideas, and series, which we take a closer look at, along with the artist’s formative years, here.
Hiroshi Sugimito: early years
Hiroshi Sugimoto was born in Tokyo in 1948 to a family of merchants. Among the young Sugimoto’s interests were trains, electronics, carpentry and photography, with his early fascination with the latter further enhanced by one of his elementary school science teachers, who showed Sugimoto and his classmates how to use photosensitive paper to make photograms. ‘He used spoons and forks and other items and he exposed the paper under the light for five or six minutes.’ explained Sugimoto, looking back. ‘When he removed it, the shapes of the spoons and forks remained on the paper. It was an amazing experience for me that left a lasting impression’.
At the age of 12 Sugimoto was given his first camera, a Mamiya 6 medium-format, by his father, which he would use to take photographs of trains and gather reference material for model-making. When he moved on to high school, Sugimoto joined the photography club and also began developing an interest in the cinema, which he would visit regularly. It wasn’t long before his love of film and photography combined, as he recalls, ‘Audrey Hepburn was beautiful and I fell in love with her on the screen. I wanted her portrait so I brought my Minolta SR7 camera into a movie theatre, and I studied how to stop the image on the screen. I found that one-fifteenth and one-thirteenth of a second stops the image’.
In 1970, after graduating in Economics from Tokyo’s Rikkyo University, Sugimoto backpacked across Russia and Europe. Influenced by communist ideology, and the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels as a student, he had wanted to experience Russian society, but disillusioned by what he found, he duly continued on to Europe. ‘I kept moving westwards. I stayed in Moscow for a few weeks and took another train to Poland, and then to Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and other Eastern European countries. After several weeks I arrived in Vienna for my first taste of Western civilization’.
Hiroshi Sugimoto in America
Later in 1970 Sugimoto would get another taste of Western civilisation as he travelled to the US, and California. Here he studied at Los Angeles’ ArtCentre College of Design, specialising in photography. Speaking of his studies here, Sugimoto has said ‘ArtCenter College was more like a training school for technicians: car design and advertising. For photography you trained to be a commercial photographer, which is what I wanted. I wasn’t interested in academic study at all’.
After completing his study in Los Angeles Sugimoto moved to New York in 1974 in order to pursue a full-time career in photography. Here, Sugimoto soon became part of the city’s hippy counter-culture. ‘I got serious about using photography as a tool in my art after I moved to New York’, says Sugimoto. ‘I saw many good shows, mainly minimalist shows: Sol LeWitt, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd. When I moved to the East Coast I found so many interesting people that I decided to stay. I’d just finished my photographic studies and was hungry to work. Since photography was considered a second-class citizen in the art world then why not use photography? It was more interesting for me to start with something a step down and bring it up’.
Dioramas
In 1974, Sugimoto made his first visit to the American Museum of Natural History in New York, it was a visit that would inspire his first major breakthrough in photography. ‘I made a curious discovery while at the exhibition of animal dioramas,’ the artist explains. ‘The stuffed animals positioned before painted backdrops looked utterly fake, yet by taking a quick peek with one eye closed, all perspective vanished, and suddenly they looked very real. I had found a way to see the world as a camera does. However fake the subject, once photographed, it’s as good as real’.
Inspired by these taxidermy dioramas, he went on to commence his Dioramas series, which among its initial works included Polar Bear (1976) and Hyena – Jackal – Vulture (1976). Sugimoto would return to this idea two decades on, adding more works to Dioramas in the 1990s including 1994’s Earliest Human Relatives. In 1978 Polar Bear was acquired by The Museum of Modern Art, representing Sugimoto’s first photographic sale. The work was also exhibited in the museum’s Recent Acquisitions show, that same year.
Theaters
It was whilst working on his Dioramas series, that Sugimoto also found the inspiration for his next series, Theaters, as he would later detail. ‘I am a habitual self-interlocutor. One evening while taking photographs at the American Museum of Natural History, I had a near-hallucinatory vision. My internal question-and-answer session leading up to this vision went something like this: ‘Suppose you shoot a whole movie in a single frame?’ The answer: ‘You get a shining screen.’ Immediately I began experimenting in order to realise this vision’.
He began this series in 1976, by photographing St. Marks Cinema in Manhattan’s East Village, and the first group of works would also see Sugimoto capture other movie theatres and cinemas in the Northeast and Midwest of the US. It was an approach that the photographer has returned to again and again over the course of his career, firstly in 1993 when he broadened the Theaters series to include depictions of Drive-Ins across the US. The photographer later travelled to Europe, primarily Italy, to replicate the approach with Opera Houses in 2014, and then in 2015 began photographing Abandoned Theaters.
Seascapes
The seeds for Sugimoto’s Seascapes series were sown in 1980. ‘One New York night, during another of my internal question-and-answer sessions I pictured two great mountains’, the photographer has explained. ‘One, today’s Mount Fuji, and the other, Mount Hakone in the days before its summit collapsed, creating the Ashinoko crater lake. When hiking up from the foothills of Hakone, one would see a second freestanding peak as tall as Mount Fuji. Two rivals in height – what a magnificent sight that must have been! Unfortunately, the topography has changed. Although the land is forever changing its form, the sea, I thought, is immutable. Thus began my travels back through time to the ancient seas of the world’.
Sugimoto began the series that same year with a photograph of the Caribbean Sea, taken from a bluff in Jamaica while on a family holiday to the island. Seascapes would subsequently lead Sugimoto across the globe, photographing bodies of water from the Ligurian Sea viewed from Italy to the North Pacific Ocean viewed from Japan.
Chamber of Horrors and Portraits
In 1994 Sugimoto made his first visit to Madame Tussaud’s in London, where he photographed his Chamber of Horrors series on location. ‘I saw the blade that guillotined Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, and the electric chair that executed the Lindbergh baby’s kidnapper, among other exhibits. They all looked very real to me’, Sugimoto said. ‘To corroborate these various murderous instruments invented by civilised men, I took the requisite eye-witness photographs: thus did people in times past face death head on’.
Sugimoto would return to the wax museum five years later to photograph his Portraits series, for which he was given special permission to remove selected figures from the display to photograph individually, among them Diana, Princess of Wales (1999), Fidel Castro (1999) and Anne of Cleeves (1999). However, he found that the exhibits he had previously captured for Chamber of Horrors had now been removed from the museum. ‘When I asked why,’ he said ‘I was told they’d been removed in a gesture to political correctness. Must we moderns be so sheltered from death?’
Opticks
In 2018 Sugimoto began printing his Opticks series, which was inspired by an 1704 work of the same name by Isaac Newton, in which Newton, through his experiments with prisms presented proof that natural light was not purely white. Drawing on Newton’s approach, Sugimoto used a batch of Polaroid film he had been gifted – one of the last batches of film Polaroid ever produced – along with a glass prism and a mirror to create condensed vivid compositions of pure colour. Sugimoto then enlarged these works into chromogenic prints. Opticks was presented for the first time in 2020 at the Kyoto City KYOCERA Museum of Art in Japan, and received its first UK presentation here at the Hayward Gallery.
Installation views of Hiroshi Sugimoto, Opticks series. Chromogenic prints Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery
Opticks isn’t the only series in which Sugimoto has experimented with historic techniques. In his 2006 series Lightning Fields, informed by the work of 19th century photography pioneer Henry Fox Talbot, Sugimoto captured the lightning-like shapes of electrical currents as they passed across a negatively-charged metal plate.
In his commitment to historic approaches the artist had initially attempted to supply the current to the plates using a hand-operated 18th century Wimshurst Electrostatic Machine, before switching to a more consistent Van de Graaff Generator.
In 2009, Sugimoto was gifted a batch of colour Polaroid film to see how a photographer who worked primarily in black and white might use it. This proved to be one of the last batches of the film ever produced (Polaroid went out of business in that same year) and would eventually find use in Sugimoto’s 2018 series, Opticks.
The images in Opticks – Sugimoto’s newest series, which has yet to be featured in any surveys of the artist’s work – are inspired by Isaac Newton’s seminal 1704 work of the same name, in which he presented proof that natural light was not purely white. Taking his cue from Newton’s experiments with prisms, Sugimoto used the Polaroid, along with glass and a mirror, to create condensed yet vivid compositions of colour in its purest form, before later enlarging these works into chromogenic prints.
Installation views of Hiroshi Sugimoto, Opticks series. Chromogenic print Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery
Installation views of Hiroshi Sugimoto, Opticks series. Chromogenic print Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery
Installation view of Hiroshi Sugimoto, Opticks series. Chromogenic print Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery
Installation view of Hiroshi Sugimoto, Opticks series. Chromogenic print Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery
Rachael Smith Hiroshi Sugimoto in the Hayward Gallery with his ‘Opticks’ series 2023
Installation view of Hiroshi Sugimoto, Conceptual Forms 0003 and Mathematical Model 002. Gelatin silver print, aluminium and steel Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery
Installation view of Hiroshi Sugimoto, Conceptual Forms 0003 2004. Gelatin silver print Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery
Installation view of Hiroshi Sugimoto, Conceptual Forms and Mathematical Model 006. Gelatin silver print, aluminium and steel Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery
Installation view of Hiroshi Sugimoto, Conceptual Form Surface 0001 Helicoid: Minimal Surface 2004. Gelatin silver print Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery
Larry Fink (American, 1941-2023) John Sabatine and Molly 1980 Gelatin silver print
“To try to see more and better is not a matter of whim or curiosity or self-indulgence. To see or to perish is the very condition laid upon everything that makes up the universe, by reason of the mysterious gift of existence.”
Teilhard de Chardin, “Seeing” 1947
Being human
Another master photographer has died. We are losing so many important visionaries who were born pre-Second World War, during the war and post-war period.
While I have sequenced this posting to highlight the dichotomy in Fink’s exploration of social class in America, that is, between the haves and the have-nots, between the hedonistic party people of Studio 54, the urban New Yorkers of “high society” and rural, working-class Pennsylvanians1 – as ever in life, Fink’s work is much more complex and nuanced than that.
Fink acknowledged that the photographs in his series “Social Graces” of New York “high society” at play were hard of heart. “I used to judge people out of the hardness of my heart. So, I went into these very voluptuous and elegant bourgeois circumstances, and I would judge these people as if they were the enemy.” That does not make these photographs any less valuable as a record of that brief moment of encounter between photographer and subject. For he observed, “The moment that we have is the only moment we will ever have, insofar as it is fleeting. Every breath counts. So does every moment and perception.”
Thus, in any of his photographs you have to admire his skill at capturing that fleeting moment: marvel at the flying pigtail in Studio 54 (1977, below) and feel the immediacy of hand gesture in Pat Sabatine’s 8th Birthday Party (1977, below) or the contemptuous look on the woman’s face in Pat Sabatine’s 11th Birthday Party (1980, below) to understand that.
In later life Fink – an empathetic human with an inquiring mind who obviously worked on his inner growth, who had acquired knowledge and a little wisdom – was aware how he had wronged himself and others during the taking of the photographs for “Social Graces”.
“When age had given me entry into life’s harder organic experiences – my back, my heart, my prostate, my hip – I started to look at my own face in the mirror and see the results of pain. I would see that many of the judgments I had made in the early days, based on an ideal sense of a physical equilibrium, were absolutely and horrendously bigoted. I was not at all sensitive to either the inner or external trappings of what it means to just be alive and all its various, vulnerable complexities.”2
With every breath he understood that when he took photographs he was attempting to touch the eternal, an expression of admiration and gratitude at being alive.
“I am involved with the idea of reaching deeply into the pulsing matter of what it means to be alive and being vulnerable and seeing if I can cast an emotional legacy about being human.”
The emotional legacy of his photographs attests to his enduring spirit.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ “He paired the tales of these two worlds – the chilly anomie of the haute monde and the lively, messy domesticity of the Sabatines – in a collection of photographs he called “Social Graces,” which was first shown in an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1979 and then published in a book of the same title in 1984, now considered a collector’s item.”
2/ Larry Fink quoted in Adriana Teresa. “A Moment With Larry Fink,” on The New York Times website Jan. 6, 2011 [Online] Cited 02/12/2023
Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“The goal, I suspect, through harmonies and edges and everything that we have in our command, is to take a dumb two-dimensional picture and make it something that a viewer enters and doesn’t want to leave.”
Larry Fink
“It’s about empathy. But the necessary methodology is conventionally in-your-face. Not like other practitioners, who are in your face for the sake of being in your face, I am in your face because I want to be your face. I like to say that if I was not a photographer, I would be in jail. I want to touch everything. My life is profoundly physical. Photography for me is the transformation of desire. …
I don’t like to hurt people. I go after something and I start pointing the camera at somebody, looking for those hard, edgy things I know I am going to find. My pictures will be out of bounds in terms of the convention of how this person wants to be represented. It gives me pause. I don’t feel I have the right to do that. But I do it nevertheless. After all, a picture is not a murder. It is simply a moment which suggests so many things. …
I was severely analytical when I was young, like when I was doing “Social Graces.” I was a good-looking kid. My mother was very vain, competitive and judgmental, and I took on the same characteristics as a younger person. I used to judge people out of the hardness of my heart. So, I went into these very voluptuous and elegant bourgeois circumstances, and I would judge these people as if they were the enemy. I believed the work to be analytical, in a political fashion.
When age had given me entry into life’s harder organic experiences – my back, my heart, my prostate, my hip – I started to look at my own face in the mirror and see the results of pain. I would see that many of the judgments I had made in the early days, based on an ideal sense of a physical equilibrium, were absolutely and horrendously bigoted. I was not at all sensitive to either the inner or external trappings of what it means to just be alive and all its various, vulnerable complexities. …
The moment that we have is the only moment we will ever have, insofar as it is fleeting. Every breath counts. So does every moment and perception. It’s a way to be alive. I am involved with the idea of reaching deeply into the pulsing matter of what it means to be alive and being vulnerable and seeing if I can cast an emotional legacy about being human.”
Larry Fink quoted in Adriana Teresa. “A Moment With Larry Fink,” on The New York Times website Jan. 6, 2011 [Online] Cited 02/12/2023
Larry Fink (American, 1941-2023) Studio 54 1977 Gelatin silver print
Larry Fink was born in Brooklyn in 1941. In the 1960s, he studied with noted photographer Lisette Model. This photograph from Studio 54, made in 1977 in the hedonistic heyday of the disco era, is a well know image from Fink’s series “Social Graces,” which explored social class in America by comparing two different worlds: that of urban New Yorkers of “high society” and that of rural, working-class Pennsylvanians through social events like birthday parties. Fink has described his approach to his subject in a straightforward, non-judgmental manner, “The one thing I was trained in being was non-hierarchical. I don’t have an internal class system. Who you are is who is in front of me and who I am in the same, and that’s how we have to relate to each other.”
Larry Fink (American, 1941-2023) Pat Sabatine’s 8th Birthday Party 1977 Gelatin silver print
Larry Fink (American, 1941-2023) Russian Ball, New York City 1976 Gelatin silver print
Larry Fink (American, 1941-2023) Pat Sabatine’s 11th Birthday Party 1980 Gelatin silver print
Larry Fink (American, 1941-2023) Benefit, MoMA, New York 1977 Gelatin silver print
Larry Fink, a kinetic photographer whose intimate black-and-white on-the-fly portraits of rural Pennsylvanians, Manhattan society figures, Hollywood royalty, boxers, musicians, fashion models and many others were both social commentary on class and privilege and an exuberant document of the human condition, died on Saturday at his home in Martins Creek, Pa. He was 82. …
… in the early 1970s he turned to overt social commentary, infiltrating the society benefits, debutante parties and watering holes of Manhattan’s privileged tribes and their hangers-on. He was fueled, he once wrote, both by curiosity and by his own rage at the privileged class – “its abuses, voluptuous folds, and unfulfilled lives.”
A few years later, he and his wife at the time, the painter Joan Snyder, moved to a farm in Pennsylvania, where he began photographing his rural neighbors, a charismatic family called the Sabatines who embraced him as one of their own. He went on to capture years’ worth of the family’s baptisms, birthdays and graduations.
He paired the tales of these two worlds — the chilly anomie of the haute monde and the lively, messy domesticity of the Sabatines – in a collection of photographs he called “Social Graces,” which was first shown in an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1979 and then published in a book of the same title in 1984, now considered a collector’s item.
“Social Graces” placed Mr. Fink firmly in the photographic canon. It drew comparisons to the street photos of Weegee and Diane Arbus and even to the paintings of Caravaggio. (Mr. Fink was a master of shadow and light.) When the pictures were shown in 2001 at the Yancey Richardson gallery in Manhattan’s Chelsea section, Ken Johnson, writing in The New York Times, described them as “wonderfully absorbing, funny, skewed, ethereally glowing documents of human situations.”
Elliott Erwitt (American born France, 1928-2023) New York City 1955 Gelatin silver print
The essence of what happens
Elliott Erwitt’s “art of observation” is a gift of the eye and the mind, where the artist must be truly aware of the world around them in order to capture the mosaic of reality.
Look at the photograph Jackie Kennedy, Arlington, Virginia (1963, below). Observe the split second that particular look of despair was present on Jackie’s face. And there was Erwitt fully aware, in the moment, with his gift of the eye and the mind – and he knew, he absolutely knew that was the moment to take the photograph.
As with much of his work it is the subtle cadences within the image that create their emotional power and magic: sadness, happiness, whimsy, comedy, anger, loneliness, joy – all captured through the reality of the visual language of the image, fully acknowledged in the heart and the mind of the viewer when they imbibe (absorb the ideas) of their spirit.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“The work I care about is terribly simple … I observe, I try to entertain, but above all I want pictures that are emotion.”
Elliott Erwitt. Personal Exposures. W. W. Norton & Company, 1988
“You either see, or you don’t see.”
“You can take a picture of the most wonderful situation and it’s lifeless, nothing comes through… Then you can take a picture of nothing, of someone scratching his nose, and it turns out to be a great picture.”
“The whole point of taking pictures is so that you don’t have to explain things with words. To me, photography is an art of observation. It’s about finding something interesting in an ordinary place… I’ve found it has little to do with the things you see and everything to do with the way you see them.”
“All the technique in the world doesn’t compensate for the inability to notice.”
Elliott Erwitt
Elliott Erwitt (American born France, 1928-2023) Pasadena, California, USA Nd Gelatin silver print
Elliott Erwitt (American born France, 1928-2023) USA. California. Berkeley 1956 Gelatin silver print
Photographers with a comic outlook on life seldom win the acclaim granted to exalters of nature or chroniclers of war and squalor. Elliott Erwitt, who died at 95 on Wednesday at his home in Manhattan, was an exception.
For more than six decades he used his camera to tell visual jokes, finding material wherever he strolled. His sharp eye for silly, sometimes telling conjunctions – a dog lying on its back in a cemetery, a glowing Coca-Cola machine amid a public display of missiles in Alabama, a mangy potted plant in a tacky Miami Beach ballroom – earned him constant assignments as well as the affection of a public that shared his sweet, Chaplin-esque sense of the absurd.
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Ian Lobb, Station Street, Fairfield
5 October 2022
The luminosity of Ian Lobb
These words are a celebration of the life of an extraordinary human, a heartfelt stream of consciousness text that touches on aspects of the life of Ian Lobb, photographer.
Ian Lobb was my friend. He was a poet, photographer, raconteur. He my first photographer lecturer at university who I could always rely on for advice on art, photography, writing and life. He was an audiophile and a lover of music, anything from classical to jazz to Nina Simone, Paul McCartney and Bob Dylan. He was a lover of women. He was dreamer and a philosopher. He adored the American artist Cy Twombly. He was a rabid Sydney Swans fan!
In the early 1990s monthly reviews of student photographic work at Phillip Institute of Technology (PIT, which later became part of RMIT University) with Ian and fellow lecturer Les Walkling were electric. Ideas and passion for the work abounded, discussions ran for hours on how to create work – with feeling and insight into the condition of image (and human) becoming. Here Ian introduced me to Tarkovsky, Eisenstein and Joseph Campbell, and the Marathon Monks of Mount Hiei, Kyoto, Japan. And of course he introduced me to the French photographer Eugène Atget – oh how we loved Atget, and Strand, Weston, Caponigro and Minor White. We could talk on any subject. Many years later, at our regular coffee catchups in Fairfield, I would take him new photography books that I had bought and recent object d’art purchases and, over lunch, the conversation would range far and wide about photography, art and life. He helped me sequence my work – have you thought about this pairing together, what about swapping this one over – and we drew inspiration from the sequences of Minor White and his use of “ice/fire”.
Ian was a storyteller. His photographs tell stories. From the teachings of Minor White (especially his “Three Canons”) there was an acknowledgement in his work of the spirit of the object he was photographing – a moment of revelation sought in the negative and subsequent print through a connection and circular transmission of energy between artist and object back through the camera and onto film (Zen)(for example see Eagles Nest, Cape Paterson 1975, below). A moment of revelation of spirit that was so important to Ian that this moment of “revelatio” can still be seen and felt in his recent mobile phone images.
Ian was aware, fully present. He was attuned to his surroundings like few people I have met for he was tremendously attentive, tremendously awake and sensitive to the environment and the vibrations of energy that emanated from the city, the land, the sky. Imagine travelling to a small patch of earth in the Black Ranges year after year to photograph in all seasons and in all weather something that he could see and feel in that land… something any other human would not even recognise, would walk past without a moments hesitation as though nothing was there, was of no import. But not Ian. He recognised and felt the energy of that place, space.
Talking to the wonderful Australian photographer David Tatnall who was also a friend of Ian’s we reminisced the other day. Ian had won an Australia Council grant and went to America on board a cargo ship teaching yoga on the way over, first going to South America and then on to America. There he visited Barbara, Wynn Bullock’s wife, and Ralph Gibson, Brett Weston, Harry Callahan and William Clift. He attended workshops with Ansel Adams and Paul Caponigro. He visited the Museum of Modern Art’s reading room and examined box after box of iconic prints by the masters, all jumbled together as he told me in folders with little order or care for their preservation. David told me he rocked up unannounced at Eliot Porter’s and said he was a visiting photographer from Australia, and while Eliot made a pot of tea he was left to go through boxes of dye transfer prints. Back then there was a camaraderie of photography very different from the present. Can you imagine doing that today!
He conversed with the masters. Like a pebble making ripples in a pond the energy of these photographers was transferred by osmosis through Ian to a wider network of artists. David and I remembered how Ian taught us to look at the print upside down in order to understand the balance of the print and develop an appreciation of its structure and the music inherent in it. Look at the image of Caponigro’s Reflecting Stream, Redding, CT (1968, below) – one of Ian’s favourites – and you just know that water has to be “wet” in that print, that the shadows of the trees on the water have to be (Ansel Adams) Zone 2, and that the Zone 7 patch of grey under the boulder in the centre of the image is critical to its music, its balance. Ian knew these things instinctively, intuitively. Ian also taught both of us how to make Ansel Adams’ “burning in” tool… three pieces of stiff black board (with the top two pieces secured by tape to make a hinges) with gradually larger holes in each board for use under the enlarger, so that you could easily flip the boards to a larger or smaller hole for “burning in” while making a print. We both still have these indispensable tools, passed down like an oral history from the master. On reflection, learning from Ian and Les during those early days printing black and white photographs in the basement darkroom at Phillip Institute of Technology (PIT) in Bundoora, Melbourne were some of the happiest days of my life.
With friend and fellow director William (Bill) Heimerman (1950-2017), The Photographers’ Gallery and Workshop, Melbourne brought to Australia some of the most respected master photographers from around the world: Wynn Bullock, Emmet Gowin, Eikoh Hosoe, William Clift, Harry Callahan, Paul Caponigro, William Eggleston, Ralph Gibson, Duane Michaels, Lisette Model, August Sander, Aaron Siskind among others … and promoted local Australian photographers such as John Cato, Carol Jerrems, Christopher Koller, Jeff Busby and more. I was privileged to have several solo exhibitions in the gallery space. For the opening of Carol Jerrems exhibition at the gallery, Ian asked her who she would most like to attend – and Carol said Ron Barassi, then the most popular sporting and cultural personality in Australia. And on the day of the opening who attended – the great man himself. I don’t know how Ian did it, but he did!
David Tatnall took Ian to Cape Paterson only a couple of weeks before his passing, the first time he had been there since his father’s death many years ago (see the photographs below). Ian took some photographs with camera on tripod and on the mobile phone and then sat down, sat down and just looked at things in that self deprecating way of his. He just looked at the rocks and the form and the light and soaked in the spirit of the place. The same with his favourite tree, his beloved lemon scented gum in the garden of his church in Fairfield. Much as the Black Range series many years earlier, he took thousands of photographs on his mobile phone of this tree in all weather conditions, at all times of the day and year. He saw and felt something there that he kept coming back too, searching for the answer to that one great question that he could never answer.
David said that he believed that he was only using the mobile phone as a visual notebook before he came back to the place to photograph with an SLR – but respectfully I must disagree. Increasingly in his later years Ian surrendered the use of his bigger digital cameras to the flexibility of his mobile phone camera, trading in their heft for the felt immediacy of the mobile phone image and his ability to study the results as he pleased. While many would dismiss these phones images as preludes to the finished work, Ian recognised (as do many artists) that these impressions, these deeply felt visual sketches, had become fully rendered works of art. He moved with the times. As he observed, “For the last 18 months I’ve been spending the first few hours of the day in the local church yard where I am photographing a lemon scented gum. I’m doing this with an iPhone as a way of exploring different ways of working that facilitates.” (Email for William Clift sent to Marcus Bunyan 22 January 2023)
Ian loved telling a story. And he was passionate about the Sydney Swans. He regaled me with the story of how he was so incensed by seeing photographers inside the circle of players celebrating in the rooms after a victory that he wrote to the club to explain that this space, this inner sanctum of celebration, should be a “sacred space” as he put it just for the players… and that photographers should not be allowed in to that space, but only be able to look in from the outside. He was special like that. He understood the significance of that circle and the energy that flowed across the space as players linked arms and belted out the club song. Nothing should disturb the sanctity of that space, much as nothing should disturb the energy of a rock face.
Ian was a (com)passionate man. He was a spiritual man. Throughout his life he had a deep abiding faith in Jesus and the benevolence and goodness of the Almighty. Now he is be gone but his energy still surrounds us. In his beloved lemon scented gum and in the many memorable ideas and images he shared with us.
Ian Lobb was my friend. I will miss his wise counsel.
God bless him xx
Dr Marcus Bunyan
PS. A very interesting analysis by Gary Sauer-Thompson on Ian Lobb’s Black Range series and new concepts in contemporary landscape photography can be found in the article “Ian Lobb + contemporary landscape photography” on the Thought Factory website January 28, 2024. Recommended reading.
Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image. Many thankx to David Tatnall for allowing me to publish his images that are included in this posting.
“If you think of all the wonderful experiences of making images – and then sequencing them – really it is top of the world experience. If this then happens when society is particularly in flux – on spiritual and identity issues, and sequencing happens by someone who is sensitive to the time and the issues. And is sensitive to “image”. Then you really really hope that the book is well produced.”
Ian Lobb email to Marcus Bunyan, 29 May 2015
“In “LA Confidential” they give away their source by using the word “valediction”. A good name for a poem, maybe the best, but not an exhausted idea. Look out I have been inspired by genius. People say that they have to do something more difficult than they need. That’s ok. – there are angels to prevent that – but if you don’t want to go that way, most of them aren’t against us.”
Ian Lobb text to Marcus Bunyan, Monday 11 September 2023
“Marcus – can we be told how to love ? The first thought is no – but I’m not going to rush into an answer. Can we be told how to love a photograph or which photographs to love? I do know that my walk this morning has been recalling which photographs I have loved – and stopping on those where I have not lately dwelt. I didn’t get past the Paul Strand of the white picket fence. Sitting now on Station st as the coffee shops carry out their tables and seeing it.”
Ian Lobb text to Marcus Bunyan, Saturday, 16 September 2023
During this particular workshop Caponigro was sometimes in a room where he could display several prints at once – he would never take them all down after talking, but move the first images away and attach new images to the right as he talked. The workshop was with the senior students of an Oregon art school, it can be dated because it was during the impeachment of Nixon.
~ Ian Lobb email to Marcus Bunyan, 6 January 2015
Minor White (American, 1908-1976) Point Lobos, California
1948
Gelatin silver print
Marcus, have you been to Point Lobos? I think you would find it a big experience if you were there at a quiet time. Imagine Minor White going to visit Weston on Wildcat Hill, and then the short drive down to Point Lobos – there would be some frisson in that car!! It’s not quite Nietzsche going to visit Wagner – but it’s not bad. For a lot of the year the day starts with fog and then the fog pulls back a little offshore and then comes back again. I think Weston’s Pelican would have been photographed in fog.
When talking to him [Ansel Adams] you can imagine the number of mediocre questions. While I was listening all of his answers were quotes from his books. There had to be an extraordinary move to get him to break ranks with this rule.
~ Ian Lobb text to Marcus Bunyan, Sunday, 5 March 2023
Peter Leiss (Australian, b. 1951) Untitled [Bill Heimerman and Ian Lobb at the rear of the Photographers’ Gallery]
c. 1975-1980
Gelatin silver print
Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) Untitled [Atget’s Work Room with Contact Printing Frames]
c. 1910
I am very familiar with the old suitcases under the desk – I think that only one – if any – is a suitcase.
This is typically how an exhibition would arrive at the Photographers’ Gallery – it would hold about 40 matted prints. Undo the strap and open the box to typically find 2 or 3 brown paper parcels. Maybe some archival tissue on the next layer down = sometimes not = and then about 20 mounted and matted prints sometimes face to face. This is the way Caponigro for example sent his prints – I’m trying to remember William Clift – Maybe one box like that and a handmade bigger one – or maybe 2 wooden boxes = but at least half the exhibitions arrived in boxes like that.
But have a look to the left of those boxes –what are they? They look like old fashioned double-darks – maybe for a quarter plate camera. The distance from the emulsion to the edge of the case was different for these compared to the last generation 5×4 double darks. People sometimes tried to make a way of putting the old film carriers onto 5×4″ cameras – but they would be focussing on the wrong spot by not making adjustments for the different positions of the emulsion.
To return to the boxes – they would be waiting for us at the airport, and we would have to spin a yarn to the customs agents telling them that the prints were for “educational purposes only”. It was a great educational experience to unwrap some of the prints when they came with a piece of tissue paper between the print and the mat – you could see something of the image and then get to imagine it before removing the tissue.
Re Robert Frank – also note the size of the Lupe next to his hand. Ralph Gibson had Robert Franks Leica enlarger – For some reason it was in his “living room” – I have seen it!!!
~ Ian Lobb email to Marcus Bunyan 1 December, 2015
Carol Jerrems (Australian, 1949-1980) Untitled [Bill Heimerman and Ian Lobb at the Dog Rocks near Geelong]
c. 1975-1980
Gelatin silver print
David Tatnall (Australian, b. 1955) Ian at Eagles Nest, Cape Paterson
November 2023
This was the first Ian time had returned to Cape Paterson since the death of his father many years ago.
David Tatnall (Australian, b. 1955) Ian at Eagles Nest, Cape Paterson
November 2023
David Tatnall (Australian, b. 1955) Ian at Eagles Nest, Cape Paterson
November 2023
Lemon scented gum, Fairfield
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Ian Lobb, Fairfield
December 2021
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Ian Lobb, Fairfield
December 2021
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Ian Lobb, Fairfield
December 2021
Maxwell Allara (American born Italy, 1906-1981) Untitled (Minor White During a Workshop)
1959
Gelatin silver print
David Tatnall (Australian, b. 1955) Ian in front of his favourite tree, Fairfield
November 2021
Minor White (American, 1908-1976) Moencopi Strata, Capital Reef, Utah
1962
Gelatin silver print
Ian Lobb (Australian, 1948-2023) Lemon scented gum
24 January 2023
Ian Lobb (Australian, 1948-2023) Lemon scented gum
14 February 2023
“The light comes down the tree. But for some days it twists right to left and makes an early morning shadow.
~ Ian Lobb text to Marcus Bunyan, Monday 11 September 2023
Ian Lobb (Australian, 1948-2023) Lemon scented gum
22 February 2023
Ian Lobb (Australian, 1948-2023) Lemon scented gum
8 March 2023
Marcus – thanks for the mystic particles. After I have apple and rhubarb I’ll be walking to check on the tree in the church-garden. I’m interested in this, rather than my own garden. Who knows why I can’t photograph my own. Do you have a garden close by that you can walk through easily? I can’t wait for the sun to move a bit further and the light to come back on church gum. A few weeks.
~ Ian Lobb text to Marcus Bunyan, Wednesday 12 July 2023
Ian Lobb (Australian, 1948-2023) Lemon scented gum
13 September 2023
Mobile phone photographs
Ian Lobb (Australian, 1948-2023) Untitled (Green woman)
22 November 2022
Ian Lobb (Australian, 1948-2023) Alex
21 December 2022
Ian Lobb (Australian, 1948-2023) Untitled (pink and black)
31 January 2023
Ian Lobb (Australian, 1948-2023) The path from the coffee shop
Fairfield, 4 February 2023
Ian Lobb (Australian, 1948-2023) The path to the coffee shop
Fairfield, 4 February 2023
Ian Lobb (Australian, 1948-2023) Building his ying, Ignoring his yang
21 February 2023
The First One
First one through the forest
First one on the beach
First one through the shallows
First one in the deep
Yes, first in the water
To swim out of reach
First one to belong
And then to be gone
First one to be gone too soon.
First foot off the platform
First step off the map
First one to learn
With nothing to teach
First one in this life
To whisper my name.
First one through my shallows
First one in my deep
First one to be gone too soon.
First winter field night
When the fires are lit
First soul at midnight
Watching burning trees twist.
At your back is the darkness
That turns you to see …
First one to the shadows
First one to the deep
First one to be gone too soon.
There’s a sound that’s so big
We can’t even hear
Not a murmur, a pulse
A note, nor a song
After midnight it wakes you
To its echoes and trace
First one to be swallowed
First one in the deep
First one to be gone too soon.
You’re the first, yes its true
On the roll call of friends
Now there’s spaces, not names
And you: you’re the worst.
You’re a very faint glow
On a very faint path
You were first through the shallows
First one in the deep
First one to be gone too soon.
Ian Lobb 28 August 2018
Ian Lobb (Australian, 1948-2023) A small moment with…
25 February 2023
“If only the lens didn’t have anti flare – it would have been an Atget moment.”
Ian Lobb (Australian, 1948-2023) Billiard
2 March 2023
Ian: Please see full screen for pleasing puns
Marcus: Love how the graffiti imitates the shape of the wood in the trolley and how the triangle of white dots is a metaphor for the billiard triangle used to rack up the balls
Ian: Yes. And with the billiard signage I thought it was like a players gesture – towards the corner pocket
~ Ian Lobb text to Marcus Bunyan, Friday, 3 March 2023
Ian Lobb (Australian, 1948-2023) Untitled (Mother)
30 April 2023
Apart from the teenagers at church, the mention that you were talking to your mother, was one of the few mentions of that relationship since my mother had passed. One minute after that I took this on my way home.
~ Ian Lobb text to Marcus Bunyan, Sunday, 30 April 2023
Ian Lobb (Australian, 1948-2023) Untitled (black oblong)
Fairfield, 8 May 2023
Ian Lobb (Australian, 1948-2023) Untitled (My walk this morning) Fairfield, 11 May 2023
On my second roll of HP4 were pictures of a young lady lying under clear sheets of curved 2mm plastic that I had sprayed with water (1968?). The attached is from my walk this morning. The similar mood is quite scary.
~ Ian Lobb text to Marcus Bunyan, Thursday, 11 May 2023
Ian Lobb (Australian, 1948-2023) mmmm, Pasta Poetry Fairfield, 21 June 2023
Thinking about John Cato this morning. If you can google “the world is too much with us” – Wordsworth – and give a toast to John. Proteus!!!
~ Ian Lobb text to Marcus Bunyan, Wednesday, 5 July 2023
The world is too much with us
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;–
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not. Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.
William Wordsworth 1802
Cy Twombly (American, 1928-2011) Coronation of Sesostris (Part III)
2000
Affirmation: When you Sing
(An affirmation from Cy Twombly’s Coronation of Sesostris)
If you sing, don’t let them hesitate
When you sing, don’t let them make signs of regret
When you sing, let them bear the loss of silence
When you sing, the lost gods are found
When you sing, the birds and trees love their shadows
Lying quietly on the ground
When you sing, the mark of nature and the mark of the mark rejoice
When you sing we trace to the source of trace – the realm.
Sing to the ghosts, sing to those to come
Flow over – into – flow over
Let the trees rise from the earth because you sing:
New sunlight on new leaves cutting into space
Write your name
with their scintilla through the air as you sing
Then each letter narrows, fades white
Still unending trace as sing and sing as a lost god.
One majesty fades to another
Sing Osiris , sing that god into Orpheus
scribes
Porous sparse voice, could have been scattered
Empty surface – instead open sky
Bell
Nothing to shatter
Sing for the old rivers,
Sailors sink into sails,
The opposite bank still opposite
Take this – sing – most important , to the next life.
Like tall trees, rising from …
Gods cannot depart while love, I mean song, remains
Gods have not departed: it would have been heeded,
Reported as a hoax,
No arc of departure divulged song, weightless Gods have not departed – it is a drunken hoax, rumour.
Ian Lobb 30 August 2018
Cy Twombly (American, 1928-2011) Coronation of Sesostris (Part V)
2000
Cy Twombly (American, 1928-2011) Coronation of Sesostris (Part VI)
2000
Last house
Are you travelling to this very last house
On the very last street of this town?
That I built here for you,
Where I wait for you
If you go round the back you’ll find wild flowers
That you could almost touch
And you would watch the clouds come down from the hills
Long ago I promised this to you
It became my story that you’d come
To the last street
And to the last house
I watch all the doors to see you enter
So that we would almost touch
And you could watch the rain come down from the hills
Yes, it’s true, the house backs onto darkness
I swear there’s really nothing out there
Beyond this last street
Beyond this last house
Nothing you could be sure to name
Nothing we can almost touch
And at night you could keep watch, from here to the hills
You can smell salt in the air from all of the rooms
And hear the wind in the waves
But out the back you’ll only find wildflowers.
Not those grey choppy waves
That we can almost touch
On this last street
In this last house.
Ian Lobb 29 August 2018
Flickerd (Australian) Zac Foot of Sydney during the 2019 NEAFL round 14 match between NT Thunder and Sydney at TIO Stadium on Saturday, 6 July 2019 in Darwin, Northern Territory
2019
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International
Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Again
Why are the waves,
Coming straight at me?
Fold upon fold
Waves in wind –
And why is the wind
Becoming my breath,
And my breath, the wind?
So now you
Beautiful friend
Breathe my friend
Jump the wave,
Jump up, laughing
The sun right above you,
Here on the coast
Among waves and trees.
Enter your home
Like a nest
Beautiful friend,
Dear friend,
Read till you sleep –
Your breath on the pages
That tell of the road and
On that road where you meet
Those twilight lit:
One, two,
Then three again.
Ian Lobb
“His prints are direct and emotionally clean records of a rare and subtle perception, and represent perhaps the earliest expression of true photographic art.”
Ansel Adams
“There is nothing I could ask for better than to roll myself between sheets of Atgets, each new one I find (and there are thousands) is a revelation.”
Julien Levy
“In looking at the work of Eugène Atget, a new world is opened up in the world of creative expression.”
Atget used a view camera with a bellows placed on a tripod, typical of the second half of the 19th century. He worked with 18 × 24 cm negative glass plates, oriented to obtain either a vertical or horizontal photograph. A tilt-shift technique was used to make perspective corrections. This resulted in vignetting (a circular shadow around the edges of the image), a phenomenon seen in a number of Atget’s photographs.
Atget always used gelatin-silver negative glass plates, 1.5mm thick. The plate was held in the camera in a wooden frame by clips that left characteristic marks on many of the prints. A long exposure time resulted in numerous blurs caused by the presence of moving people or objects. Atget developed the negatives himself and wrote the negative number directly onto the gelatin with a pointed stiletto.
Atget made all of his own photographic prints using a technique in which light-sensitive paper, in contact with the glass negative, was printed-out in natural light (never developed). The printing-out process proceeded until Atget determined that the image had the proper density. The photograph was then washed, gold toned, fixed and washed again. Atget’s prints are never black-and-white; their tone varies from deep sepia to violet-brown. Atget was capable of producing high-quality prints but there is great variation in these today depending on his printing and toning techniques and the way his photographs were preserved and exhibited. He never enlarged his photographs.
Atget’s paper
Atget used three types of paper:
Albumen
The light-sensitive emulsion was formed by silver chloride introduced into an albumen binder (beaten egg whites). The majority of Atget’s prints were on albumen paper. He turned to other processes after the First World War, when such paper could no longer be found on the market.
Matt albumen
After the war Atget used another kind of industrially produced printing-out paper with a matt surface.
Aristotype
Atget chose a commercially manufactured printing-out paper made with gelatin. Aesthetically similar to albumen prints, although thicker and with a glossier surface, the process was the same for toning and printing. Some of these prints have yellow stains from sulphuration due to poor processing of the image (such as the use of an exhausted fixing bath or insufficient washing).
Anonymous. “Atget’s technique,” on the Art Gallery of New South Wales website Nd [Online] Cited 03/10/2023
Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) Balcon, [15] rue du Petit Pont
1913
Albumen print
Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) Pavilion du Hanovre, boulevard des Capucines 33
1913
Albumen print
Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) Fête du Trône
1914
Albumen print
“My excitement at seeing these few photographs would not let me rest. Who was this man? I learned that Atget lived up the street from where I worked – at 17 bis rue Campagne Premiere, and that his prints were for sale. Perhaps I could own some. I wanted to see more, and lost no time in seeking him out. I mounted the four flights to his fifth floor apartment. On the door was a modest handmade sign, “Documents pour Artistes”. He ushered me into a room approximately fifteen feet long, the ordinary room of a small apartment, sparsely and simply furnished. Atget, slightly stooped, impressed me as being tired, sad, remote, appealing. He was not talkative. He did not try to “sell” anything. He showed me some albums, which he had made himself, and I selected as many prints as I could afford to pay for from my meager wages as a photographer’s assistant. I returned many times, and we became more friendly.” Several years passed and Berenice Abbott became a portrait photographer. “By that time I had become a portrait photographer on my own, and I persuaded Atget to come to my studio at 44 rue du Bac to sit for his portrait. To my surprise he arrived in a handsome overcoat. I had always seen him in his patched work clothes. It would have been desirable to photograph him in these too, since they were exquisitely photogenic, but time is a fickle unpredictable master and did not permit another sitting. After developing the portraits she took the images to show Atget. Abbott missed the sign and made one more flight of stairs to find the concierge.” She asked about Atget and was shocked to hear that he had died. “Youth is little equipped to accept or even anticipate the fact of death. And I had just finished his portraits.” Inquiring about his collection of photographs, she found that they had been left to Andre Calmette. It took months of correspondence and convincing, but she eventually acquired Atget’s entire collection. Abbott also wrote a book about Atget and published many of his prints. Many critics have attacked Atget’s work, saying Atget was merely a disappointed painter or actor, and a little ashamed of his medium. Claims have been made that Atget did not really know what he was doing, that reflections in his shop front windows were accidents which he did not even see. Berenice Abbott fiercely defended Atget and his work. Goethe had said, “there is no variety of Art that should be looked upon lightly. Each has delights which great talent can bring to fulfillment.” If Atget had not had this talent he would have been just another record producer of the travel guide variety – tourist fare. I believe the photographer’s eye develops to a more intense awareness than other people’s, as a dancer develops his muscles and limbs, and a musician his ear. The photographer’s act is to see the outside world precisely, with intelligence as well as sensuous insight. This act of seeing sharpens the eye to an unprecedented acuteness. He often sees swiftly an entire scene that most people would pass unnoticed. Capturing the city of Paris and its people was the photographic art of Atget. How one becomes a photographer, well-schooled or self-taught, does not matter. Ultimately, it is the test of time. As with many of the world’s great photographer’s, their images are timeless and still have the appeal as when first developed. Not only did Atget document a city; he also captured its essence.
Lori Oden. “Eugène Atget,” on the International Photography Hall of Fame and Museum website Nd [Online] Cited 03/10/2023
Some quotations on beauty which you may find illuminating:
“Beauty changes quickly, much as the landscape constantly changes with the position of the sun.”
Auguste Rodin
“It is certainly not true that there is in the mind of many any universal standard of beauty with respect to the human body.”
Charles Darwin, “The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex,” in Great Books of the Western World: 49, Darwin, Encyclopedia Britannica, Chicago, 1952 quoted in Elaine Hatfield and Susan Sprecher, Mirror, Mirror: The Importance of Looks in Everyday Life, State University of New York Press, Albany, 1986, p. 4.
“Beauty is not instantly and instinctively recognisable: we must be trained from childhood to make those discriminations. Nor can we assume an objective and quantifiable standard of beauty against which everyone could be judged with equal fairness …”
“Beauty becomes, like money, externalised, a possession, one that, like money, can be lost. But it is different from money, for it must be lost, sooner of later.”
Robin Lakoff and Raquel Scherr, Face Value: The Politics of Beauty, Routledge and Kegan Paul, Boston, 1984, p. 30, p. 34.
“‘Photogeneity’ is the camera’s contribution to the language of beauty. Suddenly, beauty begins to be judged in new terms… Photographic reproduction helped to make beauty big business… The success of photographically reproduced beauty depended primarily on its popular consumption. Beauty became a collective experience. And consumerism and the camera became bedfellows.
Magazines and movies felt the immediate benefits of photographic reproduction. Audiences were captivated by what they saw… Suddenly, places, objects, people, situations that had once seemed inaccessible became familiar. But at the core remained a paradox which would with time become troublesome. Photographic reproduction seemed to make things familiar, yet they remained remote. It promised intimacy, yet kept the images themselves untouchable, impersonal. In short, it offered the impossible under the guise of the possible. And so it was with beauty which, now turned professional found these media as its new arena, the place where it could best advertise itself.”
Robin Lakoff and Raquel Scherr, Face Value: The Politics of Beauty, Routledge and Kegan Paul, Boston, 1984, pp. 74-75.
“It is not so much that we have to develop a ‘new style’ of beauty … We have to transcend, in the first place, dependence on ‘style’: for as long as we worry about the current fashion in beauty, not only must we worry about ourselves as individuals and how well we fare, individual to individual; but we also become dependent upon the whims of tastemakers beyond our acquaintance, forces we cannot see or touch, and that help to create our confusion…”
Robin Lakoff and Raquel Scherr, Face Value: The Politics of Beauty, Routledge and Kegan Paul, Boston, 1984, p. 283.
“Ideal beauty is ideal because it does not exist; the action lies in the gap between desire and gratification… The beauty myth moves for men as a mirage; its power lies in its ever-receding nature. When the gap is closed, the lover embraces his own disillusion. The myth actually undermines sexual attraction. Attraction is a dialogue… that depends on the unique qualities, memories, patterns of desire, of the two people involved; “beauty” is generic. Attraction is about a sexual fit: two people imagining how they will work together.
“Beauty” is only a visual, more real on film or in stone than in three living dimensions. The visual is the sense monopolised by the advertisers, who can manipulate it much better than mere human beings. But with other senses, advertising is at a disadvantage: Humans can smell, taste, touch, and sound far better than in an advertisement. So humans, in order to become dependable, sexually insecure consumers, had to be trained away from these other, more sensual senses. One needs distance, even in the bedroom, to get a really good look … “Beauty” leaves out smell, physical response, sounds, rhythm, chemistry, texture, fit, in favour of a portrait on the pillow.
The shape and weight and texture and feel of bodies is crucial to pleasure but the appealing body will not be identical… The world of attraction grows blander and colder as everyone, first women and soon men, begin to look alike. People loose one another as more masks are assumed.”
Wolf, Naomi. The Beauty Myth. London: Vintage, 1991, pp. 176-177.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to PhotoVogue Festival for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
The PhotoVogue Festival, the first conscious fashion photography festival that focuses on the common ground between ethics and aesthetics, returns for its eighth edition. From November 16 to 19, 2023, BASE Milano will host a series of exhibitions and a three-day symposium examining the profound impact of artificial intelligence (A.I.) on human existence and the creation of images, complemented by satellite events at the city’s finest galleries. Embracing the digital era, the festival also offers online portfolio reviews and panel discussions on the PhotoVogue platform and it will give the opportunity to students from CondéFuture – a program led by Condé Nast community talent that targets high school students from underrepresented communities – to showcase some of their photography and video pieces. Last year’s edition was a great success: about 10 thousand people visited the exhibitions and attended the talks.
At the core of the new edition will be a three-day symposium, featuring a distinguished lineup of experts and thought leaders at the forefront of the A.I. revolution. This symposium aims to comprehensively address all aspects of AI around the creation of images, delving into the legal implications, copyright issues, biases, and the potential threat to the documentary value of photography. Moreover, discussions will extend to exploring how governments should act, gaining insights from big tech’s perspectives, and examining practices in place to mitigate potential threats.
Beyond the technicalities, the symposium will also embark on profound philosophical inquiries about what makes us human. It will explore the marvels of creativity that arise when art is liberated from the constraints of the real. This intellectually enriching journey promises to unveil the complexities and possibilities that AI presents to the world of visual representation, prompting us to reflect on the future of human creativity and expression.
PhotoVogue Festival is a project directed by Alessia Glaviano (Head of Global PhotoVogue) and co-curated by Francesca Marani (Senior Photo Editor, Vogue Italia) Chiara Bardelli Nonino (Editor, Writer and Curator), Daniel Rodríguez Gordillo (Content Operations & Strategy Manager, Condé Nast) and Caterina De Biasio (Visual Editor, PhotoVogue)
Since its inception, the PhotoVogue Festival has been dedicated to exploring ethically and aesthetically crucial themes, ranging from the female gaze to inclusivity and masculinity. Building on last year’s exploration of how the ubiquity of images influences our understanding of experiences and reactions to events, the upcoming PhotoVogue Festival in Milan will take a deep dive into the profound impact of artificial intelligence (A.I.) on human existence and the creation of images.
“Our intention is to address the ethical, aesthetic, and political implications raised by this revolutionary technology. Together, we will explore A.I.’s potential for reshaping our understanding of creativity, human existence, and the very essence of how we communicate and convey our visions to the world” ~ Alessia Glaviano, Head of Global PhotoVogue and Director of PhotoVogue Festival
Exhibitions
What Is Beauty
Throughout its past Open Calls, PhotoVogue festival has celebrated the female gaze, searched for the next great fashion image makers, highlighted diversity behind and in front of the camera, explored masculinity, reframed history, and consistently challenged stereotypes, clichés, and homogeneous representations. Continuing its journey dedicated to shaping a more just and inclusive society through visual literacy, PhotoVogue invited artists from around the world to submit work that challenges the traditional notions of beauty.
As cultural shifts unfold across the globe, so must the very idea of beauty evolve. We break free from the constraints of gender, perfection, and homogeneity, recognising that beauty cannot be confined to pass-fail tests based on antiquated norms. Instead, it becomes a boundless and ever-evolving concept, liberated from the tired stereotypes that once dominated our cultural landscape. Never before has artistic expression been more diversified, and representation more far-reaching.
The exhibition on display at BASE features work by 40 artists from 24 countries, selected by a jury comprising Condé Nast staff from across the globe and experts from the international visual community.
Artists featured: Amy Woodward | Ana María Arévalo Gosen | Andras Ladocsi | Avijit Halder | Avion Pearce | Bettina Pittaluga | Chiron Duong | Clara Belleville | Claudia Revidat | Enrique Leyva | Francesca Bergamini | Gabo Caruso | Hayley Lohn | Imraan Christian | Irina Werning | Jaimy Gail | Jara García Azor and Lucía Lomas | Jean-Claude Moschetti | Jess T. Dugan | Jude Lartey | Julia Cybularz | Kate Biel | Katerina Tsakiri | Kriss Munsya | Kristina Rozhkova | Leslie Fratkin | Luisa Dörr | Lumi Tuomi | Marina Adam | Mauricio Holc | Omar Khaleel | Ruiqi Zhang | Sarfo Emmanuel Annor | Silvana Trevale | Tara Laure Claire | Togo Yeye | Yao Yuan | Yongbin Park | Zahui Yvann | Ziyu Wang
Togo Yeye is a conceptual publication by two friends – London-based photographer and Nataal art director Delali Ayivi and Lomé-based fashion activist Malaika Nabillah. Created for Ayivi’s graduate project at London College of Fashion, she and Nabillah set out to champion Togo’s young fashion creatives, contribute to debates around defining an authentic contemporary identity for the country and dream of its fantastic future.
Eb proudly shows her post-mastectomy flat closure. She chooses not to wear a prosthesis in everyday life because she feels no less of a woman without breasts. She is proud to model this for her 16-year-old daughter. Eb was told that she and her husband would not be able to conceive without IVF, but much to their surprise, she became pregnant in 2021 with her son, Arlo.
Joselin Brenda Mamani tinta (27) and Lucia Rosmeri tinta Quispe (46) from the series Imilla.
Brenda and her mother are considered Pollera women from a different ethny called Aymara from La Paz. Brenda started skateboarding 6 years ago and felt that this activity could give her direction, something to learn that would stimulate her to drop her fears and get out of her comfort zone. She says – “It makes me feel capable because I can break my own limits and I can dare to do things that I have never thought about, and like this I can get over my daily fear.
For her skateboarding in Pollera outfits means a challenge by itself because it is very hard to skateboard wearing a voluminous skirt but she knows that perseverance and practice will help and she has been improving her skills. For her this activity represents her roots, the place she comes from and who she is.
The Ghanaian artist explores beauty, fashion and daily life in the African country. He focuses on the dynamic youth and their role in shaping the continent’s future. Through his energetic portraits, Annor challenges conventional beauty standards and emphasises the connections that unite the nation beyond ethnicity and religion. His art captures the essence of Africa’s cultural awakening and showcases the beauty that arises from Ghana’s unique cultural heritage.
‘I encountered this woman, who had the most mesmerising eyes I’d ever seen and a massive, tousled white wig. I asked if I could take her photograph. She hesitated, but eventually, in a barely audible voice, granted permission. I snapped a few shots, noticing a man parked nearby in a car, exuding irritation. After a couple of minutes, he walked up to the camera and declared: “Enough.” Instantly, she averted her gaze. She entered the man’s car and they swiftly departed. I doubt she comprehends the extent of her own beauty’
Featuring 13 artists whose A.I.-generated image submissions earned widespread acclaim from the jury, this exhibition delves into the festival’s overarching theme, “What Makes Us Human? Image in the Age of A.I.” While distinct from traditional photography, these artworks highlight the profound intersection of technology and human creativity, inviting profound contemplation of the boundless possibilities of A.I. in reshaping the artistic landscape and its impact on human expression in the digital era.
Artists featured: Alina Gross | Andrea Baioni | Angelo Formato | Dmytro Levdanski | Guido Castagnoli | Java Jones | Lala Serrano | Lars Nagler | Noah De Costa | Rozemarlin Borkent | Salome Gomis Trezise | Sander Coers | Xinxu Chen
Photography has long been the lingua franca of our transitional epoch: an era where daily life is exponentially shifting into a virtual dimension, where relationships are consumed online, being beautiful means being photogenic, the proliferation of fake news render any collective discourse precarious and what we once called nature is reduced, at best, to content. The radical ambiguity of the photographic medium, which on the one hand promises adherence to the subject and on the other allows artifice and manipulation, seemed the perfect language to narrate a fluid world in which we moved like tightrope walkers, balancing between the digital and the real.
This exhibition aims to be a principle of cartography of this new world. And it does so through an investigation of how A.I. is changing, along with image production, our idea of photography, and inevitably also that of reality. Above all, the exhibition is an invitation to confrontation, at the intersection of many possible readings of a still largely empty map, where around the small known world there are still large, obscure areas, yet to be explored.
The artists: Alex Huanfa Cheng | Alexey Chernikov | Ali Cha’aban | Alkan Avcıoğlu | Carlijn Jacobs | Chanhee Hong | Charlie Engman | Exhibit A-i | Filippo Venturi | Jonas Bendiksen | Laurie Simmons | Maria Mavropoulou | Michael Christopher Brown | Minne Atairu | Philipp Klak | Prateek Arora | Roope Rainisto | Synchrodogs | Vogue Covers
![Peter Leiss (Australian, b. 1951) 'Untitled [Bill Heimerman and Ian Lobb at the rear of the Photographers' Gallery]' c. 1975-1980](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/leiss-william-heimerman2-web.jpg "Peter Leiss (Australian, b. 1951) 'Untitled [Bill Heimerman and Ian Lobb at the rear of the Photographers' Gallery]' c. 1975-1980")
![Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) 'Untitled [Atget's Work Room with Contact Printing Frames]' c. 1910](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/atgets-work-room-web1.jpg "Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) 'Untitled [Atget's Work Room with Contact Printing Frames]' c. 1910")
![Carol Jerrems. 'Untitled [Bill Heimerman and Ian Lobb at the Dog Rocks near Geelong]' c. 1975-1980](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/jerrems-william-heimerman-ian-lobb-web.jpg "Carol Jerrems. 'Untitled [Bill Heimerman and Ian Lobb at the Dog Rocks near Geelong]' c. 1975-1980")
![Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) 'Cactus [Nice]' before 1900](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/atget-cactus-nice-before-1900.jpg "Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) 'Cactus [Nice]' before 1900")
![Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) 'Maison, rue Saint-Romain [Rouen]' 1907](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/atget-maison-rue-saint-romain-rouen-1907.jpg "Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) 'Maison, rue Saint-Romain [Rouen]' 1907")
![Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) 'Pommiers [et blés]' 1910 or earlier](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/atget-pommiers-et-bles-1910-or-earlier.jpg "Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) 'Pommiers [et blés]' 1910 or earlier")
![Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) 'Sapin ([Petit] Trianon)' 1910 or earlier](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/atget-sapin-petit-trianon-1910-or-earlier.jpg "Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) 'Sapin ([Petit] Trianon)' 1910 or earlier")
![Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) 'Balcon, [15] rue du Petit Pont' 1913](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/atget-balcon-15-rue-du-petit-pont-1913.jpg "Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) 'Balcon, [15] rue du Petit Pont' 1913")
![Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) 'Plessis Piquet [Entrée pittoresque, Châtillon]' 1921](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/atget-plessis-piquet-entree-pittoresque-chatillon-1921.jpg "Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) 'Plessis Piquet [Entrée pittoresque, Châtillon]' 1921")
![Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) 'Moulin Rouge [86 boulevard de Clichy]' 1926](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/atget-moulin-rouge-86-boulevard-de-clichy-1926.jpg "Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) 'Moulin Rouge [86 boulevard de Clichy]' 1926")
![Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) 'Saint-Cloud [19h matin, mars 1926]' 1926](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/atget-saint-cloud-19h-matin-mars-1926-1926.jpg "Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) 'Saint-Cloud [19h matin, mars 1926]' 1926")
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