Last day for this exhibition from one of the masters of photography. Apologies to the gallery and the readers that I did not get the posting up earlier but I have just been so busy at work. At least we have a record of the exhibition online.
Some of the media images were in a really shocking state. I can’t believe that an artist of Paul Strand’s standing would ever have wanted his photographs distributed in such a state – for example, enlarge the unrestored Milly, John and Jean MacLellan, South Uist, Hebrides (1954, detail) below, and then look at the restored version above that I have digitally cleaned.
What can you say about Strand that has not already been said before? He is a seminal figure in the history of photography. His Wall Street, New York (1915, below) is still one of my favourite images of all time – for its light, foreboding, and incisive comment on capitalism and the worker. Follow this by one of the first truly “modernist” images, and one that changed the course of photography (and what a difference a year, and an image makes), White Fence, Port Kent, New York (1916, below) and you set the scene for a stellar career. To have that natural perspicaciousness: a penetrating discernment – a clarity of vision or intellect which provides a deep understanding and insight – is an element of wisdom that cannot be taught. As an artist, you’ve either got it or you haven’t.
As is observed in the Wikipedia entry on perspicacity, “In 17th century Europe René Descartes devised systematic rules for clear thinking in his work Regulæ ad directionem ingenii (Rules for the direction of natural intelligence). In Descartes’ scheme, intelligence consisted of two faculties: perspicacity, which provided an understanding or intuition of distinct detail; and sagacity, which enabled reasoning about the details in order to make deductions. Rule 9 was De Perspicacitate Intuitionis (On the Perspicacity of Intuition). He summarised the rule as
Oportet ingenii aciem ad res minimas et maxime faciles totam convertere, atque in illis diutius immorari, donec assuescamus veritatem distincte et perspicue intueri.
We should totally focus the vision of the natural intelligence on the smallest and easiest things, and we should dwell on them for a long time, so long, until we have become accustomed to intuiting the truth distinctly and perspicuously.”
Intuiting the truth distinctly and perspicuously… quick to pick out, from among the thousands of things he sees, those that are significant, and to synthesise observations. This is what Strand does so well. His photographs are honest, direct, without ego. They just are. They live and breathe the subject. How do you get that look, that presence such as in Young Boy, Gondeville, Charente, France (1951, below). That presence is repeated again and again – in rocks, tendrils, people, buildings, landscapes – and finally, in the last years of his life, in intimate, sensitive and complex images of his garden at Orgeval.
God bless that we have great artists like Paul Strand.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the V&A for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Installation photographs of the exhibition Paul Strand: Photography and Film for the 20th Century at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London
For the first time in the UK in 40 years a major retrospective on the American photographer Paul Strand (1890-1976) opens at the V&A. The exhibition is the first of its kind since Strand’s death in 1976 and shows how the pioneering photographer defined the way fine art and documentary photography is understood and practiced today.
Part of a tour organised by Philadelphia Museum of Art, in collaboration with Fundación MAPFRE and made possible by the Terra Foundation for American Art, the V&A exhibition reveals Strand’s trailblazing experiments with abstract photography, screens what is widely thought of as the first avant-garde film and shows the full extent of his photographs made on his global travels beginning in New York in 1910 and ending in France in 1976. Newly acquired photographs from Strand’s only UK project – a 1954 study of the island of South Uist in the Scottish Hebrides – are also on show, alongside other works from the V&A’s own collection.
Paul Strand: Photography and Film for the 20th Century encompasses over 200 objects from exquisite vintage photographic prints to films, books, notebooks, sketches and Strand’s own cameras to trace his career over sixty years. Arranged both chronologically and thematically, the exhibition broadens understanding of Strand as an international photographer and filmmaker with work spanning myriad geographic regions and social and political issues.
Martin Barnes, curator of the exhibition said: “The V&A was one of a handful of UK institutions to collect Paul Strand’s work during his lifetime and the Museum now houses the most extensive collection of his prints in the UK. Through important additional loans, the exhibition explores the life and career of Strand, but also challenges the popular perception of Strand as primarily a photographer of American places and people of the early 20th century.”
The exhibition begins in Strand’s native New York in the 1910s, exploring his early works of its financial district, railyards, wharves and factories. During this time he broke with the soft-focus and Impressionist-inspired ‘Pictorialist’ style of photography to produce among the first abstract pictures made with a camera. The influence of photographic contemporaries Alfred Stieglitz and Alvin Langdon Coburn as well European modern artists such as Braque and Picasso can be seen in Strand’s experiments in this period. On display are early masterpieces such as Wall Street which depicts the anonymity of individuals on their way to work set against the towering architectural geometry and implied economic forces of the modern city. Strand’s early experiments in abstraction, Abstraction, Porch Shadows and White Fence are also shown, alongside candid and anonymous street portraits, such as Blind Woman, made secretly using a camera with a decoy lens.
The exhibition explores Strand’s experiments with the moving image with the film Manhatta (1920-21). A collaboration with the painter and photographer Charles Sheeler, Manhatta was hailed as the first avant-garde film, and traces a day in the life of New York from sunrise to sunset punctuated by lines of Walt Whitman’s poetry. Strand’s embrace of the machine and human form is a key focus of the exhibition. In 1922, he bought an Akeley movie camera. The close-up studies he made of both his first wife Rebecca Salsbury and the Akeley during this time are shown alongside the camera itself. Extracts of Strand’s later, more politicised films, such as Redes (The Wave), made in cooperation with the Mexican government are featured, as well as the scarcely-shown documentary Native Land, a controversial film exposing the violations of America’s workforce.
Strand travelled extensively and the exhibition emphasises his international output from the 1930s to the late 1960s, during which time he collaborated with leading writers to publish a series of photobooks. As Strand’s career progressed, his work became increasingly politicised and focused on a type of social documentary alongside the desire to depict a shared humanity. The exhibition features Strand’s first photobook Time in New England (1950), alongside others including a homage to his adopted home France and his photographic hero Eugène Atget, La France de profil, which he made in collaboration with the French poet, Claude Roy. One of Strand’s most celebrated images, The Family, Luzzara, (The Lusetti’s) was taken in a modest agricultural village in Italy’s Po River valley for the photobook Un Paese, for which he collaborated with the Neo-Realist screen writer, Cesare Zavattini. On display, this hauntingly direct photograph depicts a strong matriarch flanked by her brood of five sons, all living with the aftermath of the Second World War.
From the late 1950s to the mid-1960s, Strand photographed in Egypt, Morocco and Ghana, all of which had gone through transformative political change. The exhibition shows Strand’s most compelling pictures from this period, including his tender portraits, complemented by street pictures showing public meetings and outdoor markets. The exhibition concludes with Strand’s final photographic series exploring his home and garden in Orgeval, France, where he lived with his third wife Hazel until his death in 1976. The images are an intimate counterpoint to Strand’s previous projects and offer a rare glimpse into his own domestic happiness.
Fred Zinnemann and Emilio Gómez Muriel (directors) Paul Strand (photography) Silvestre Revueltas (music) Redes / The Wave 1936 Filmada en Alvarado, Veracruz (México)
Paul Strand and Leo Hurwitz (directors) Paul Strand (photography) Native Land 1942 VOSE (Tierra Natal)
Ahead of the first UK retrospective on Paul Strand in over 40 years, the V&A has acquired nine rare photographs from the pioneering 20th century photographer’s only UK-based series. Taken in 1954 in the Outer Hebrides in Scotland, the photographs document the threat to traditional Gaelic life during the Cold War. The photographs will be unveiled for the first time together as part of the exhibition, Paul Strand: Photography and Film for the 20th Century, opening 19 March.
Paul Strand defined the way fine art and documentary photography is understood and practiced today through his revolutionary experiments with the medium. The major acquisition, purchased for the V&A with the assistance of its Photographs Acquisition Group, comprise an intimate set of nine exquisite black and white vintage prints originally made for Strand’s photobook Tir A’Mhurain (‘Land of Bent Grass’).
A committed Marxist, Strand fled McCarthyism in the U.S. in 1950, pursued by the FBI. He settled in France, and carried out work there and in Italy before arriving on the Hebridean island of South Uist in 1954. Inspired by a BBC radio programme on Gaelic song, and news that the island would become home to a testing range for America’s new nuclear missile, Strand raced to capture the sights, sounds and textures of the place steeped in the threatened traditions of Gaelic language, fishing and agricultural life of pre-Industrial times. The photographs reveal Strand’s meticulous and methodical approach to photography, much like a studio photographer in the open air. They capture not only a pivotal moment in time, but also the end of a particular way of life for the islanders.
The acquisition encompasses four portraits of islanders staring directly at the camera, exuding strength and dignity. Each was photographed in their own environment, usually in or around their home, and is framed by weathered walls, doors or window frames – devices used often by Strand and borrowed from his 19th century photographic heroes David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson. The V&A has also acquired five of Strand’s evocative landscapes, revealing the island’s reliance on the land and sea.
John MacLellan was eight years’ old when he was photographed by Strand with his two sisters for the picture Milly, John and Jean MacLellan, South Uist (below). Of the experience, he said: “I was very young when I met Strand, but I knew he must have been a serious photographer because of the quality of his camera. Me and my sisters were lined up and knew to look at the camera. Looking at the picture, my mother had combed our hair and dressed us in our smartest clothes. I’ve since read that Strand was motivated to take these photographs by the idea that things would change. I know so many people in the photographs, it’s wonderful to be able to look at them now and remember the place I used to call home.”
Martin Barnes, Senior Curator of Photographs at the V&A said: “The photographs made by Strand in the Hebrides are for me a high point in his long and distinguished career. Strand worked slowly yet deliberately and with great poise in his pictures. By this time, his vision for his work had fully matured. His approach to sequencing and editing images in books such as ‘Tir A’Mhurain’ was informed by his collaborative experience making films for over twenty years. The Scottish book contains establishing panoramas of landscapes and the sea, a cast of characters with memorable faces, details of homes and workplaces and close-ups of the rocks, sands and grasses of the natural environment. The accompanying text by Basil Davidson is eloquent and informative about life on the islands, both in the past and at a pivotal time in the 1950s.The whole is a subtle sequence of meditative, revealing pictures and texts that avoid sentimentality and are yet full of empathy. These pictures make a surprising British link with this major American Modernist photographer and will have a satisfying legacy as part of the permanent collection at the V&A.”
Strand is an important figure in the history of photography not only because his career spanned much of the 20th century, but because he relentlessly trialled and pioneered myriad photographic approaches, subjects and technologies. Ironically it was his variety and failure to coin a signature style, and his belief in the integrity of the photographic print as an original artwork, that have seen him increasingly overlooked in the 40 years since his death. The V&A’s exhibition seeks to redress the balance, covering all aspects of Strand’s long career, from his trailblazing experiments in abstraction and dynamic views of New York in the 1910s to his final intimate pictures of his home and garden in France made during the 1970s.
He is making an image – his lower hand is about to go to the shutter button – the lens doesn’t have to be a camera lens, it could be an enlarger lens = note how the lens is tilted slightly forward to extend the depth of field… He has dressed up to take photos!!”
After I questioned holding a camera like this to take a photograph without using a tripod:
“Strand may not be making a picture – he may be just pretending. But he might be shooting @ f4. He might be showing off!!”
Victoria and Albert Museum Cromwell Road London SW7 2RL Phone: +44 (0)20 7942 2000
If your subject is essentially unrecognisable – a defining characteristic of many of Weston’s photographs – devoid of sentimentality, featuring an explosion of geometry as a form of Western expressionism, able to extract the microcosm from the macrocosm through an absence of human presence and apparent narrative – then your previsualisation must be spot on otherwise you loose clear focus as to just what it is you are trying to communicate. It’s all very well being obsessed with capturing the intricacies and rhythms of form, light and shadow, visual poetry in photography, but if that obsession has no ‘feeling’ outcome then you are doomed to failure.
Imagine (if you can) that master of documentary realism Eugène Atget placing his camera in just the wrong position for one of his photographs. The tripod just a little too low, the position a metre to the left of where it should have been. The resulting image would not feel like an Atget, the angles would not feel right, the mixture of objective and subjective would not be present, the magic of his photographs – recognisably his photographs – would be missing. What Atget does so convincingly is to combine the aesthetic with the documentary or representational. As G.H. Saxon Mills observes in his essay ‘Modern photography’ ‘”modern” photography means photography whose aim is partly or wholly aesthetic, as opposed to photography which is merely documentary or representational.’ Atget proves that both were possible within the same frame.
This is not the case with the photographs by Brett Weston in this posting. Although I have commented elsewhere on this website that, “Brett Weston’s pictures are ageing well – the decorative aesthetic seems to have more currency today than previously when the values of his father were predominant,” and admired the reductive minimalism of his photographs … this is not the case with these ‘significant details’. In this instance they are just representation, poor relations to the photographs of Minor White and Aaron Siskind.
I think that the best of his work is very fine – a sort of celebration of all that had gone before with a layer of super-fineness added. However he made many images that were a bit like a preacher rather than an artist. In some of his portfolios the choice of images is just plain weird, catering to the market rather than taking the chance to make a powerful statement. And photography aficionados remain unconvinced by his work, shying away from collecting it. Perhaps they know, or feel a lack of something, some spirit or other, or a seeming unevenness in the quality of his artistic production.
Perhaps it is his printing, which is a bit “Kodak meets EW” in the darkroom (even as his father entrusted him with printing some of his negatives). Weston achieved his good results because he was a careful craftsman, not an experimenter. Someone, I forget who, said that you never looked at his work when desperate for sustenance – and I think a lot of “connoisseurs” think that – and in a Brett Weston you can too often argue yourself out of the celebration. There is a certain dourness that is hard to overcome. I challenge you, now, to say one meaningful thing about any of the images presented here. They take you nowhere. They are either too tightly cropped (that lack of true previsualisation / placing the camera in the wrong position / lack of context) or rely on pattern and representation, and only that, to do the heavy lifting.
My feeling about his work is that he saw and felt many great things that he used in his work – but at the final hurdle, his implementation was always handled a little directly, or not a well as might have been… or is sometimes absent. Perhaps it’s just his viewpoint which seems to be too limited in a psychological sense. If Atget had photographed the city without those magnificent tripod positions and understanding of space, then they would have been dead. That’s how BW’s work sometimes feels. Instead of the space feeling larger than the camera can contain, on occasions his photographs feel enclosed and stilted.
Weston said, “There are a million choices for shot. At its simplest, photography is very complex. So I try to keep it simple and focus on things I can master.”
Sometimes, keeping things simple does not result in preternatural outcomes.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Pasadena Museum of California Art for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“My father was driven and so am I. You’re ruthless. You brush off your friends and women. He was much kinder than me. I don’t verbalize well and I don’t socialize much. Too time consuming. And I’m not a good salesman of my work. I love people, but they can be a drain. Some are stimulating; some are leeches. So I seek people on my own terms. Most artists are loners. I guess they have to be.”
Brett Weston
“Weston isn’t really a nature photographer… He was obsessed with capturing the intricacies and rhythms of form, light and shadow. Weston is as fascinated by close-ups of the exfoliating bark of a bristlecone pine or the spikes of a Joshua Tree as he is with the visual poetry of peeling paint on the side-panel of a rusted out truck.”
Jeffrey St. Clair. “A Natural Eye,” on the Counter Punch website, May 25, 2012 [Online] Cited 01/10/2021
Although Brett Weston (1911-1993) is best known for his striking scenic photographs, the majority of his work ranges from middle-distance scenes to close-up abstractions. These concentrated images share the high-contrast and graphic qualities of Weston’s panoramas while emphasising his affinity for “significant details” and the unprecedented attention to form, texture, shadow, and light that he explored throughout his nearly-seventy-year career.
Weston took up photography at the age of fourteen. Although he received basic technical instruction from his father, renowned photographer Edward Weston, Brett’s early efforts owed much to his intuition and innate eye. His elemental talent coupled with an unflagging commitment to his photographic vision – often at the expense of personal relationships and fiscal well-being – carried him from early critical acclaim, through difficult periods, to eventual financial success within his own lifetime.
By the age of twenty-five, Weston’s photographs were included in significant exhibitions both nationally and internationally, but despite early recognition he served as a WPA photographer during the Great Depression and as a Signal Corps photographer during World War II. By necessity, he also worked intermittently in the first half of his career as an industrial and portrait photographer. However, when he achieved prosperity beginning in the 1970s, he devoted himself exclusively to the photography and intercontinental expeditions that fulfilled him. His initial interest in abstracted details continually revealed itself, especially once he began using a new, smaller camera after health problems in the late 1960s forced him to abandon the bulky equipment he had used for over thirty years.
Early and continuing critical success notwithstanding, following Brett’s death, the comparison to his famed father left the younger Weston on the wrong side of a narrowing modern canon of photography. Reaffirming Weston’s legacy and his exceptional contributions to modernist photography, these uncharted, close-up images – more than half of which are on view for the first time – demonstrate the major themes present in Weston’s work: a focus on natural and urban landscapes and the objects therein, the absence of human presence and apparent narrative, and an extraordinary ability to extract the microcosm from the macrocosm.
Introduction text from the exhibition
Brett Weston (American, 1911-1993) Worm Wood, California c. 1937 (printed c. 1970) Silver gelatin print 10 1/2 x 13 3/4 inches The Brett Weston Archive Courtesy Christian Keesee Collection, 2016
Although Weston’s wife Cicely provided the couple with a steady income, she became pregnant with the pair’s first (and only) child in 1937, providing Weston impetus to generate additional means of support. Hoping to replicate the financial success of Ansel Adams’s portfolio of limited edition original photographs, Weston produced one of his own. His first portfolio San Francisco (1937) consisted of twelve 8 x 10 original prints. Unlike the photograph Staircase, San Francisco (1928) included in this exhibition, the portfolio photos were panoramic vistas. However, without the robust support of a collector like Albert Bender, who both promoted and purchased enough of Adams’s portfolios to assure commercial success, Weston didn’t profit from his portfolio. He lacked not only the promotional skills and collector base but also refused gallery sales owing to his deep distrust and outrage at their commissions.
Brett Weston (American, 1911-1993) Wood 1972 Silver gelatin print 7 1/2 x 8 5/8 inches The Brett Weston Archive Courtesy Christian Keesee Collection, 2016
One of the most celebrated and prolific photographers of the twentieth century, Brett Weston (1911-1993) is best known for his striking scenic images, yet the bulk of his work ranges from middle-distance scenes to closeup abstractions. The Pasadena Museum of California Art (PMCA) is proud to present Brett Weston: Significant Details, the first museum exhibition to focus on Weston’s close-up photography. The works – over half of which are on view for the first time – share the high-contrast and graphic qualities of Weston’s panoramic photographs while emphasising the “significant details,” the tendency toward abstraction and extremes in tonality that Weston explored through his nearly 60-year career. The exhibition further contextualises Weston within the pivotal Group f/64 and highlights how intuition and a dedication to photography in its purest form guided his practice.
Although the teaching of his father, famed modernist photographer Edward Weston, was invaluable and his influence undeniable, Weston’s practice was largely shaped by instinct and informal training. He took up photography at the age of 14 when, on an extended trip to Mexico with his father, he started photographing the crew of the SS Oaxaca with the elder Weston’s Graflex camera. This trip also coincided with the end of his formal education; he was enrolled at an English-speaking school, but dropped out within two weeks. While in Mexico, Weston became part of the modernist mileu, socialising with and viewing the work of some of the greatest artists of the time, including David Siqueiros, Diego Rivera, and José Clemente Orozco.
Weston’s professional entry into the world of photography occurred during a shift from the East Coast Pictorialists and their accentuation of romantic effects to the West Coast photographic movement, which coalesced with Group f/64 and their sharp images that captured daily life. Like the members of Group f/64, which included Edward Weston and Ansel Adams, Brett Weston focused primarily on two types of images: close-ups and the scenic view. However, Weston’s approach was distinct, tending toward highly graphic images, with intense areas of dark and highlights, rather than mid-grey tones used by many, including his father.
By the age of 25, Weston’s work had been included in the landmark international photography exhibition Film und Foto and in a solo exhibition at the M. H. de Young Museum in San Francisco. Though he received critical acclaim and his reputation grew, Weston remained dedicated to art for art’s sake and to creating pure, elemental photographs. He was a simple man and used the same equipment for most of his career. However, when health problems forced him to switch to a smaller camera – the Rollei – in 1968, he further experimented with close-up photographs, and his work became even more intent on exploring specific details and abstract qualities. In Torn Leaf, Hawaii (1978, below), for example, the brittle, curling leaf appears monumental on a black ground. It exists as a singular object, not fully contained within the composition, and the size is indeterminable without context.
The uncharted, close-up images that are the focus of Significant Details demonstrate the major themes present in Weston’s work: a play on scale, the absence of the human presence, and a refrain from imposed order. This exhibition features approximately 40 works taken over a period of 55 years, ranging from 1929 to 1984, and brings to the forefront the unprecedented attention to form, texture, shadow, and light that was the distinctive characteristic of Weston’s oeuvre.
Press release from the Pasadena Museum of California Art
Brett Weston (American, 1911-1993) Wall, Europe 1971 Silver gelatin print 8 x 10 inches The Brett Weston Archive Courtesy Christian Keesee Collection, 2016
In 1971 Brett returned to Europe for the third time. While there, he captured both abstract images, like this one, and panoramas. Notably, this trip resulted in the photograph of Holland Canal, which Weston grew to hate, despite its commercial success or perhaps because of it, “I’m so sick of the thing but people love it. I could retire on sales of this print alone. I’d hate to tell you how many of these I’ve printed.” Although this scenic print wasn’t the legacy Weston desired for himself, it led to an overall increased attention from collectors interested in his work, including his abstractions.
Brett Weston (American, 1911-1993) Cracked Mud, High Sierra, California 1960 Silver gelatin print 8 x 10 inches The Brett Weston Archive Courtesy Christian Keesee Collection, 2016
Direct evidence of human presence was rare in Weston’s photos. But here, two playful sets of handprints on the mud provide scale, which would otherwise be indeterminable in the image.
Brett Weston (American, 1911-1993) Electrical Towers, Metal c. 1975 Silver gelatin print 8 x 10 inches The Brett Weston Archive Courtesy Christian Keesee Collection, 2016
Brett Weston: Significant Details
Brett Weston, born in 1911 in Tropico, CA (now Glendale), took up photography at the age of fourteen while on an extended trip to Mexico with his father, famed photographer Edward Weston. In Mexico for just over a year, his time there was pivotal in many ways, not only marking the start of his photography career, but also the end of his formal education. His father allowed him to drop out of the international school after two short weeks and provided the younger Weston with basic instructions in photography. Still, Brett relied heavily on his innate sensibilities toward form and tonality, evident in Tin Roof, Mexico, an early photograph from 1926 featuring a cropped view of a jagged roofline with dramatic dark shadows splitting the image. Weston also benefited from a social education of sorts. Through connections of his father’s mistress, photographer Tina Modotti, Weston became a part of the Mexican modernist milieu, socialising with and viewing the work of some of the greatest artists of the time, including Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros.
During his nearly-seventy-year career, Weston’s talent and unique vision developed into two related types of works, panoramic landscapes and abstracted close-ups. The image most associated with Weston was and probably still is Holland Canal from 1971. The photograph of a tree-lined canal with still water reflecting a flawless image of the surrounding landscape is sensual and magnificently balanced. However, the photographer bemoaned his connection to this particular work and its extreme popularity saying, “I’m so sick of the thing, but people love it.” Although this print and other panoramic images, such as Mendenhall Glacier, Alaska (1973), came to typify his work in the public’s mind, the bulk of Weston’s photographs range from middle-distance scenes to close-ups, which became increasingly abstract beginning in the 1950s. Brett Weston: Significant Details focuses on the close-up works that epitomise his unique and unwavering vision. These images share the high-contrast and graphic qualities of Weston’s well-known scenic photographs while emphasising what the photography historian Beaumont Newhall characterised as his affinity for “significant details.” Weston applied this penchant for details to natural and urban environments alike. Another early image, Stairway, Grandview Park, San Francisco from 1928, offers a fragmented view of a San Francisco stairwell. Without context, the unpopulated image’s narrative possibilities are limited; instead, the emphasis is on the orderly, graphic form of the staircase.
From the beginning of his career, Weston’s work was celebrated by institutions and peers. The year following Stairway, Weston’s work was included in the landmark 1929 German photography exhibition Film und Foto, and the early 1930s saw his association with Group f/64, a distinctly West Coast movement of “straight” photographers (as opposed to the East Coast Pictorialist tradition, which was waning at this time) that comprised Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, Edward Weston, and others. Brett’s work appeared in their 1932 inaugural exhibition at the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco. The following year, both San Francisco Stairway and Tin Roofs (presumably the same works discussed in this essay) were included with forty-three other photographs in a solo exhibition at the de Young.
Although Weston saw early success with his work included in major exhibitions, this did not translate into a steady income. Like most artists during the Great Depression, the Federal Art Project – a branch of the Works Progress Administration – employed Weston, first as a sculptor and then later as a photographer. He quit the FAP in December of 1936 after about two and half years because he had no passion for the documentary nature of the work and it impinged upon time for his personal projects, something that he could not bear for long. Throughout the thirties and forties, he worked intermittently – and discontentedly – as a portrait and industrial photographer to stave off poverty and support his daughter who was born in 1938. In complete contrast to the realistic, documentary style of his FAP and commissioned works, an untitled photograph from 1937 is an extreme close-up of paint that is almost organic in appearance, with leaf-like veins in the upper portion of the image. The subject is essentially unrecognisable, which is a defining characteristic of many of Weston’s photographs.
The slim Depression years segued into the tumultuousness of World War II, during which Weston served in the US Army before a much-requested transfer to the US Signal Corps stationed him to work as a photographer in New York. At the end of the war, when Brett returned to Carmel, CA, where the Weston family had made their long-time home, he found his father beginning to show marked symptoms of Parkinson’s disease, which would increasingly debilitate the elder Weston in the last decade of his life. Before Edward’s death in 1958, he enlisted his sons Brett and Cole and a small group of trusted assistants to secure his lasting legacy by making thousands of prints under his supervision. In addition to printing work for his father, during this time, Brett also worked on his Guggenheim fellowship project and his second and third portfolios, White Sands (1949) and New York (1954).
Besides photographing the beaches of Carmel, one of which was dubbed “Weston Beach,” Brett also traveled up and down the California coast countless times over the decades. He repeatedly returned to capture the dunes of Oceano, and these images range from sweeping vistas to striking abstractions. An image from 1952, Dune, Oceano, although not technically a detail, falls into the latter category. The dunes appear wave-like and swirling, and a dark, somewhat-menacing shadow at the centre – similar to the roofline image taken in Mexico – provides graphic force. Jellyfish, California, another beach image, taken in 1967, is a close-up of one of the bulbous marine animals washed ashore. In contrast to the ethereal and weightless appearance jellyfish take underwater, it looks monumental and grotesquely beautiful. The curving form expands beyond the picture’s boundaries and in place of luminescence is a gradation of pure white reflections to jet-black striated patterns on the bell.
Although the tendency to work close-up had always been present in Weston’s work, it became much more pronounced and obvious after health issues necessitated a change in camera equipment. For over thirty years, Weston worked with a large format 8 x 10 camera and preferred contact prints (versus enlarging from smaller negatives). However, a heart attack in 1967 and an ongoing battle with angina forced Weston to switch to a smaller camera because he could no longer manage the bulky equipment. In 1968, he began using the Rollei SL-66 almost exclusively. The camera used roll film that produced small, square negatives and allowed the artist to work close-up with ease. As a result, his work became even more intent on exploring specific elements and abstract qualities. Sand and Kelp from around 1970 is a lyrical example of this. Individual grains of sand are visible and marked by traces of implied movement, both in the dancing shadows of the kelp and the trailing patterns lightly indented into the surface.
While Weston had traveled steadily and as often as he could afford to in his younger years – expeditions that included Europe, Japan, the Pacific Northwest, Baja California, and Mexico – his later years were spent primarily in Hawaii. The tropical climate was beneficial for his health, and the varied terrain provided limitless visual appeal. In 1979, the photographer purchased land there on the slopes of a volcanic mountain. He became especially engrossed with the lava formations and the verdant and spectacular plant life, which he photographed until his death in 1993.
Weston achieved, within his lifetime, the recognition and financial comforts of a highly esteemed photographer. Even so, following his death, Brett’s reputation was eclipsed in favour of his father, due in part to the notion that there wasn’t room for two Westons in the canon of modernist photography. The 2008 exhibition Out of the Shadow (Oklahoma City Museum of Art and The Phillips Collection) and his biography A Restless Eye (2011) have begun to remedy this situation. Significant Details furthers that work by centring on the uncharted, closeup images that characterise Weston’s innate and distinctive eye. These photographs reveal the major themes present in his oeuvre: a focus on natural and urban landscapes and the objects therein, the absence of human presence and apparent narrative, and an extraordinary ability to extract the microcosm from the macrocosm.
Erin Aitali, Director of Exhibitions and Registrar
Brett Weston (American, 1911-1993) Broken Glass, California 1954 Silver gelatin print 8 x 10 inches The Brett Weston Archive Courtesy Christian Keesee Collection, 2016
Brett Weston (American, 1911-1993) Torn Leaf, Hawaii 1978 Silver gelatin print 10 3/4 x 12 inches The Brett Weston Archive Courtesy Christian Keesee Collection, 2016
Brett Weston (American, 1911-1993) Jellyfish, California 1967 Silver gelatin print 7 5/8 x 9 5/8 inches The Brett Weston Archive Courtesy Christian Keesee Collection, 2016
Brett Weston (American, 1911-1993) Cracked Paint 1937 (printed later) Silver gelatin print 12 1/2 x 10 1/8 inches The Brett Weston Archive Courtesy Christian Keesee Collection, 2016
Like Broken Glass, California (1954, above), this image of cracked paint is an extreme close-up to the point that the subject is indistinguishable. Instead pure form becomes the focus. This intense focus also characterises Weston’s approach to life; he prioritised his photography above all else, often at the expense of both financial stability and personal relationships (he was married four times and had countless lovers).
In 1937 Weston was living with his first wife, Cicely, in San Francisco who was employed as a violinist in the WPA symphony. Weston had recently quit the WPA because, as he explained in a letter to his father in December 1936, “It has been a good thing in many ways but after 2 1/2 years I feel that I have had enough experience of this kind. I feared it was beginning to tell on me as well as my work. I would rather divorce, starve, anything, than have this happen. The actual work I’ve been doing for the work program has been child’s play but the sacrifice of one’s priceless days… has become too much.”
Brett Weston (American, 1911-1993) Snow 1954 Silver gelatin print 9 1/2 x 7 5/8 inches The Brett Weston Archive Courtesy Christian Keesee Collection, 2016
I loved putting the Florence Henri and the skull together. Too exhausted after a long day at work to say much else!
Marcus
Many thankx to Museum Bellerive for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality, if one may so speak.”
In 1930 Stern and Ellen Rosenberg Auerbach founded ringl+pit, a critically acclaimed, prize-winning Berlin based photography and design studio. They used equipment purchased from Peterhans and became well known for innovative work in advertising. The name ringl+pit is from their childhood nicknames (Ringl for Grete, Pit for Ellen).
Intermittently between April 1930 and March 1933, Stern continued her studies with Peterhans at the Bauhaus photography workshop in Dessau, where she met the Argentinian photographer Horacio Coppola. In 1933 the political climate of Nazi Germany led her to emigrate with her brother to England, where Stern set up a new studio, soon to resume her collaboration there with Auerbach.
Stern first traveled to Argentina in the company of her new husband, Horacio Coppola in 1935. The newlyweds mounted an exhibition in Buenos Aires at Sur magazine, which according to the magazine, was the first modern photography exhibition in Argentina. In 1958, she became a citizen of Argentina.
In 1948 Stern began working for Idilio, an illustrated women’s magazine, targeted specifically at lower / lower-middle class women. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Stern created Los Sueños as illustrations for the woman’s magazine Idilio and its column “El psicoanálisis te ayudará” (Psychoanalysis Will Help You). Readers were encouraged to submit their dreams to be analysed by the ‘experts’ as an aid for its readers to find “self-knowledge and self-aid that would help them succeed in love, family and work”. Each week, one dream would be selected, analysed in depth by the expert, Richard Rest, and then illustrated by Stern through photomontage. Stern created about 150 of these photomontages, of which only 46 survive in negatives. Stern’s photomontages are surreal interpretations of the readers’ dreams that often subtly pushed back on the traditional values and concepts in Idilio magazine by inserting feminist critique of Argentinian gender roles and the psychoanalytic project in her images. The Idilio series has often been compared to Francisco Goya’s Sueños drawings, a series of preliminary drawings for his later body of work, Los Caprichos; they have also been directly compared to Los Caprichos themselves.
Stern provided photographs for the magazine and served for a stint as a photography teacher in Resistencia at the National University of the Northeast in 1959 and continued to teach until 1985.
In 1985, she retired from photography, but lived another 14 years until 1999, dying in Buenos Aires on 24 December at the age of 95.
Avant-garde photographs seem like pictures from a dream world. From new kinds of compositions and perspectives to photomontage, technical experiments, and staged scenes, Real Surreal offers a chance to rediscover the range and multifacetedness of photography between the real and the surreal. The exhibition leads the visitor through the Neues Sehen (New Vision) movement in Germany, Surrealism in France, and the avant-garde in Prague. Thanks to rare original prints from renowned photographers between 1920 and 1950, this exhibition offers a chance to see these works in a new light. In addition to some 220 photographs, a selection of historical photography books and magazines as well as rare artists’ books allow visitors to immerse themselves in this new view of the world. Furthermore, examples of films attest to the fruitful exchanges between avant-garde photography and cinema during this time.
An exhibition in cooperation with the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg
Artistic polymath Herbert Bayer was one of the Bauhaus’s most influential students, teachers, and proponents, advocating the integration of all arts throughout his career. Bayer began his studies as an architect in 1919 in Darmstadt. From 1921 to 1923 he attended the Bauhaus in Weimar, studying mural painting with Vasily Kandinsky and typography, creating the Universal alphabet, a typeface consisting of only lowercase letters that would become the signature font of the Bauhaus. Bayer returned to the Bauhaus from 1925 to 1928 (moving in 1926 to Dessau, its second location), working as a teacher of advertising, design, and typography, integrating photographs into graphic compositions.
He began making his own photographs in 1928, after leaving the Bauhaus; however, in his years as a teacher the school was a fertile ground for the New Vision photography passionately promoted by his close colleague László Moholy-Nagy, Moholy-Nagy’s students, and his Bauhaus publication Malerei, Photographie, Film (Painting, photography, film). Most of Bayer’s photographs come from the decade 1928-38, when he was based in Berlin working as a commercial artist. They represent his broad approach to art, including graphic views of architecture and carefully crafted montages.
In 1938 Bayer emigrated to the United States with an invitation from Alfred H. Barr, Jr., founding director of The Museum of Modern Art, to apply his theories of display to the installation of the exhibition Bauhaus: 1919-28 (1938) at MoMA. Bayer developed this role through close collaboration with Edward Steichen, head of the young Department of Photography, designing the show Road to Victory (1942), which would set the course for Steichen’s influential approach to photography exhibition. Bayer remained in America working as a graphic designer for the remainder of his career.
Introduction by Mitra Abbaspour, Associate Curator, Department of Photography, 2014 on the MoMA website [Online] Cited 01/10/2021.
Genia Rubin (actually Jewgeni Germanowitsch Rubin, 1906-2001) was a Russian fashion and portrait photographer and painter .
Rubin left Russia in 1927 and initially assisted the cameraman Karl Freund in Berlin. He then studied photography at AGFA IG Farben. In 1929 Rubin went to Paris, where he worked as a still photographer in the Pathé film studios and as a portrait photographer. In 1931 he returned to Berlin, met the photographer Rolf Mahrenholz and opened his own photo studio on Berlin’s splendid boulevard, the Kurfürstendamm. It was soon discovered and launched by Franz Wolfgang Koebner, editor-in-chief of the popular magazines Das Magazin and Elegante Welt. In 1935 Rubin moved back to Paris, where he met Harry Ossip Meerson; after his departure for America Meerrson took over his studio. During this time Rubin photographed fashion for “Femina”, Harper’s Bazaar and Australian “The Home”. After the war he met the English court photographer Baron (Stirling Henry Nahum); until 1956 he worked alternately as a “fashion guest photographer” in “Baron’s Studios” in London and as a Parisian photo correspondent for the Daily Express.
Rubin had started to paint in Paris at this time. Through his acquaintance with André Breton, for example, he came into contact with contemporary painting in Paris and was among other things. In 1947 he took part in the international surrealist exhibition at the Maeght Gallery .
In 1957 Rubin stopped photographing fashion and took pictures of parks, gardens, palaces and art objects in France, England and Italy for “Maison et Jardin” (“House and Garden”, Condé-Nast ). From 1959 he devoted himself again to modern painting, also as a collector.
“… Olga Solarics (1896-1969) and her husband Adorjan von Wlassics (1893-1946) ran the Manasse’ Foto-Salon in Vienna from 1922-1938. Olga seems to have been the one interested in the photographic nude. She (or they) exhibited at the 1st International Salon of Nude Photography in Paris in 1933…”
“… Studio Manasse, which flourished in the 1930s in Vienna, captured more than just portrait photography bursting with erotic charge; it immortalised the fluid state of beauty and the ‘new woman’: confident in her own sexuality as she struggled to redefine her position in the modern world. Each picture offers a conflict of concepts, as provocative poses are presented in such traditional roles that the cynicism intended renders them humorously absurd. Adorjan and Olga Wlassics, a husband-and-wife team, founded Studio Manasse in the early 1920s. The first Manasse illustrations appeared in magazines in 1924, a booming industry at the time, as the movie industry skyrocketed and publications aimed to satisfy a public obsessed with glimpses into the world of glamour. Attracting some of the leading ladies of the time from film, theatre, opera, and vaudeville, Studio Manasse created masterpieces, employing all the techniques of makeup, retouching, and overpainting to keep their subjects happy while upholding an uncompromised artistic vision. Moulded bodies were dreams with alabaster or marble-like skin; backgrounds were staged so that the photographer could control each environment. And as their art found a home, the Wlassics found themselves able to afford a style of life similar to those reflected in their photographs. Their clients ran the gamut, from the advertising agencies to private buyers. When the Wlassics opened a new studio in Berlin, their business in Vienna was managed more and more by associates, until 1937, when the firm’s name was sold to another photographer. Adorjan passed away just 10 years later; Olga remarried and died in 1969… “
Text from the Historical Ziegfeld Group website Nd [Online] Cited 20/06/2016, No longer available online
A magnificent installation from one of the world’s great photographers.
Why this artist is not having sell out retrospectives at MoMA New York, Centre Georges Pompidou Paris or the Tate in London is beyond me. Is it because of continuing cultural cringe, or the fact that he’s not as well known in Europe and America?
Their loss is our gain.
The darkened room contains only eight images beautifully lit to create a wondrous, enveloping atmosphere. Henson’s night photographs emit light as though a result of the excitation of atoms by energy – the energy of the mind transferred to the light of place. A luminescence of thought is imaged in the photograph through the emission of light … produced not so much by physiological or electromagnetic processes as much as by a culturally informed mind that seems to bring forth its own light. And behold there is light.
As that eminent photographer Minor White used to opine when asked for technical information on his photographs in the back of popular American photography monthlies: for technical information the camera was creatively used.
For me, these are not images of ethereal malevolence or Australian anxiety about our environment and the ominous ordinary. They do not possess that feeling at all. These pictures are about an understanding and contemplation of light and place, a process which is in balance one with the other. Yes, the transient nature of earthly existence but more than that. The soft details of flowers in the grass, or the spatter of rain on water, not noticed until you really look at the image; or the shadow of a truck on a bridge underpass. In my mind I know where this is, in Gipps Street, Abbottsford near the train bridge… or so I believe in my imagination. All of these photographs have a feeling of a subtle vibration of energy in the universe. There is no malevolence here.
My only criticism of this, the first photographic exhibition at Castlemaine Art Gallery, is that there is not enough of it. There needed to be more of the work. It just felt a little light on. Another gallery was needed to make the installation experience fully enveloping. Having said that, congratulations must go to the artist and to gallery who are putting on some amazing exhibitions in the heart of regional Victoria.
Bill Henson (Australian, b. 1955) Untitled #9 2005/2006 2005-2006 CL SH541 N2 Type C photograph 127 x 180cm (sheet) Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney
Bill Henson (Australian, b. 1955) Untitled #9 2005/2006 (detail) 2005-2006 CL SH541 N2 Type C photograph 127 x 180cm (sheet) Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney
Bill Henson (Australian, b. 1955) Untitled #21 2005-2006 (detail) 2005-2006 CL SH541 N2 Type C photograph 127 x 180cm
Bill Henson (Australian, b. 1955) Untitled 1999-2000 1999-2000 Type C photograph 103.8 x 154.0cm (image) 126.8 x 179.9cm (sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased with funds from the Victorian Foundation for Living Australian Artists, 2005 (2005.501) Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney
“Our current exhibition, Bill Henson: Landscapes captures the haunting convergence of opposites; two worlds, darkness and light.
These dreamlike pictures pursue the Romantic project by engulfing the viewer in the urban or semi-rural sublime. Through these landscapes, we are immersed in a realm which offers an otherworldly view of the transient nature of earthly existence. The inky depths of the encroaching natural environment suggest a dark abyss, an ethereal malevolence that relates to both the artistic conventions of Renaissance landscape painting and, a uniquely Australian anxiety about our environment and the ominous ordinary.”
Text from the Castlemaine Art Gallery Facebook page
Bill Henson (Australian, b. 1955) Untitled #28 (detail) 1998 Type C photograph 104 × 154cm
Bill Henson (Australian, b. 1955) Untitled #48 (detail) 1998/1999/2000 Type C photograph 127 × 180cm
Castlemaine Art Gallery and Historical Museum 14 Lyttleton Street (PO Box 248) Castlemaine, Vic 3450 Australia Phone: (03) 5472 2292 Email:info@castlemainegallery.com
I finally got around to scanning some more of my black and white archive, this time further photographs from a trip to England in 1994 forming a new sequence. The photographs picture my now ageing mother (these were taken over 20 years ago), an English fair, medieval tiles and Highgate Cemetery, among other subjects.
The image of my mother plays off against a land that is noting an absence – maybe an absence of a certain type of yang force… even the “strong draught horse” seems to come from another time.
My friend and mentor Ian Lobb said of the sequence: “Wow – that is really good Marcus”. Praise I value highly indeed.
The photographs form a sequence and should be viewed horizontally. Please click on the long small image below to see them in this format, and then click again to enlarge the images.
Unfortunately, WordPress only allows vertical presentations of images in this blog format that I am using – but I have still presented them for you to see in the posting below in horizontal form.
Please click on the first image below to see the spacing of the sequence, and click again to enlarge the sequence.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
I am scanning my negatives made during the years 1991-1997 to preserve them in the form of an online archive as a process of active memory, so that the images are not lost forever. These photographs were images of my life and imagination at the time of their making, the ideas I was thinking about and the people and things that surrounded me.
Photographs are available from this series for purchase. As a guide, a vintage 8″ x 10″ silver gelatin print costs $700 plus tracked and insured shipping. For more information please see my store web page.
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) England 1994 Second sequence
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Maman 1994 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Bridge, Chatsworth House 1994 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Covered figure with graves 1994 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) IOTA, 1893, Napoli, Cantanese Domenico, age 14 with gravestones 1994 Gelatin silver print
December 20th 1893, a mounted messenger galloped into Boscastle with news that a large ship was driving ashore, but by 4 pm the 1000-ton iron barque IOTA of Naples had crashed under the great Lye rock off Bossiney Cove. Her crew leapt for the rocks, but two fell and were crushed under the barque’s bilges, while Domenico Cantanese, aged fourteen, was swept away… Only the body of the young cabin boy was recovered from the sea, he’s buried in the windswept graveyard of St Materiana Church Tintagel, where a wooden cross and a lifebuoy bearing his name and ‘Iota, Napoli, 1893’ still marks his grave.
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) An English fair 1994 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Medieval tiles 1994 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Esther 1994 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Three crosses four graves, Highgate Cemetery 1994 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) An English fair 1994 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Death’s pathway 1994 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Descending 1994 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Landscape, Chatsworth House 1994 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) An English fair 1994 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Two graves, Highgate Cemetery 1994 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Five angels 1994 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) An English fair 1994 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Medieval tiles 1994 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Covered figure with flowers 1994 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) An English fair 1994 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Tree, Highgate Cemetery 1994 Gelatin silver print
Installation view of the opening room of the exhibition Jan Senbergs: Observation – Imagination at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia Photo: Marcus Bunyan
You only have five days left to catch what I consider to be one of the best exhibitions I have seen this year in Melbourne.
If ever there was a man deserving of a large retrospective, it is Jan Senbergs. This wondrous, intelligent, immersive exhibition by this iconic Australian artist is a joy. Particularly so as you witness the gestation of the artist, the journey from very first exhibition to latest work.
Witness is a particularly apt metaphor for Senbergs – he is a witness to the world who uses his imagination to create, as he says, “maybe something architectonic or machine-like, but not quite: and ambiguous … I was trying to create something irrational, something out of the imagination but belonging to the world.” He belongs to the world but creates things not of the world as we know it. It is a twisted world n/visioned in multiple forms. Twisted labyrinthine structures – mechanistic, naturalistic, humanistic – swirling around in his head, put down as marks on paper, synthetic polymer paint on canvas.
Mark making is important to this man. He maps mechanistic and biomorphic elements, always intelligently informed by sources as diverse as “literature, history, architecture and non-Western art, and finds imagery within obscure technical journals, ancient mythology and illustrated encyclopaedias.” His influences are various – German Expressionism, Max Beckmann, Neo-Expressionist painting of the early 1980s, Brutalism, Eduardo Paolozzi, Pop Art and the writing of American postmodernist author Donald Bartheme – to name but a few. And his perspective is unique, as John Olsen insightfully observes, “not often on the vanishing point, but … more related to the spatial orientation in Chinese or Islamic art. This kind of perspective gives weight to an object; the sensation is abrupt and very blunt, ideally related to his vision.”
Standing in front of the huge six painting wall of Senbergs’ Antarctic paintings you feel the power of that (topographical? analytical? cut-away) vision. I dare you not to.
There are downsides. When they do appear in his paintings, his literal figures and landscapes (such as people, boats and bays), are weak. But that’s not what this artist is about. His screen print work of the mid to late 1970s lead him into a formally stylistic dead end. But he was an intelligent enough artist to recognise it as such and returned to mark making: “But it was a period when I was getting too confident. It was time to leave it alone, go back to the mark.” And his popularist map paintings of Sydney and Melbourne, painted in a brighter colour palette, don’t have the depth of feeling and response to the world that other works possess.
His limited colour palette – all blacks and subdued colours in the early enamel work; green and browns in the 1970s work; greys, blacks and beiges in the early 1980s; blues and greens with splashes of colour for the Antarctic and mining paintings; through to the more colourful map paintings of the 1990s and the recent oranges of the bushfire paintings – has always given weight to the object, weight to his constructed upside-down world, weight to his vision of a place where anything might happen. And frequently does.
Irrational, perhaps (but the irrational can only exist if there is the rational). Something out of the imagination but belonging to the world, indubitably. A world that is neither dysfunctional in vision nor balance.
“I was always interested in painting buildings and things and I tried to make them half human, trying to put figures into them, in the end they blended together as one, the figures, the buildings and the people.”
Jan Senbergs, 1965
“I was always trying to invent new forms, different forms, shapes which were recognisable – maybe something architectonic or machine-like, but not quite: and ambiguous … I was trying to create something irrational, something out of the imagination but belonging to the world.”
Jan Senbergs, 2008
Alan Kilner Jan Senbergs, Melbourne c. 1959 Image courtesy Jan Senbergs
This is the first comprehensive retrospective of renowned Melbourne artist Jan Senbergs. Throughout his long career, Senbergs’ work has been characterised by a fundamental humanist vision, a finely-honed sense of the absurd, and a rigorous studio practice spanning printmaking, drawing and painting. He is considered to be amongst Australia’s leading painters and his large-scale expressive drawings are highly regarded. More recently Senbergs has created labyrinthine views of cities, employing aerial perspectives to present a bird’s eye view of humankind’s endeavours. The exhibition includes paintings, drawings and prints from his first exhibition in 1960 until the present day, borrowed from public and private collections around Australia.
Jan Senbergs is one of Australia’s most distinctive artists. He is both an acute observer and a creator of fantastical imagery. Since his first exhibition in 1960, Senbergs’s work has undergone many transformations of style, technique and subject, yet there have also been recurring themes and motifs. Elements from his very first works have reappeared, reworked and reinterpreted, throughout his career.
Senbergs’s artistic imagination has been fed by many sources, including his love of literature and poetry; his interest in no-Western artistic traditions and the work of outsider artists; journeys to distant locales as well as familiar places close to home. The artist has often referred to himself as a ‘visual scavenger’ of images – photographs, scientific diagrams, maps – which he transforms and incorporates into his own work. Above all, Senbergs’s art reflects his essential humanism, humour and wide-ranging curiosity.
Literature has always been an important source of imagery for Senbergs. This work, one of his earliest, is based upon an episode in The Trial (1925) by Czech writer Franz Kafka. In the painting two figures cower beneath ‘the whipper’, who metes out a brutal punishment to them. This work was included in Senbergs’s second solo exhibition at the Argus Gallery, Melbourne, in 1962.
Jan Senbergs (born Latvia 1939, arrived Australia 1950, died Melbourne 2024) Two heads 1961 Enamel paint on composition board Private collection, Melbourne
“I was always interested in painting buildings and things and I tried to make them half-human, trying to put the figures into them; in the end they blended together as one, the figures and the buildings and the people.”
Jan Senbergs (born Latvia 1939, arrived Australia 1950, died Melbourne 2024) The night parade (installation views) 1966 Enamel paint on composition board Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery Gift of the artist, 1977 Photos: Marcus Bunyan
At the time of its creation, this was Senbergs’s largest and most ambitious painting to date, and it formed the centrepiece of his 1966 exhibition at Georges Gallery in Melbourne. The triptych format recalls the work of German Expressionist painter Max Beckmann, one of Senbergs’s earliest and ongoing artistic heroes. In his review of the exhibition, critic Allan McCulloch wrote: “Instead of simply looking at abstract pictures we have the feeling of standing on the perimeter of a vast industrial landscape in which hills and slag heaps, factories and cities are relentlessly pushed and jostled by an omni-present parade of silent watchers. The huge triptych “The night parade’ … illustrates the point.”
On his return to Melbourne in late 1967, Senbergs’ work changed dramatically. He ceased painting with enamel on Masonite composition boards, and instead started working with oil or acrylic on canvas and began to incorporate screen printed elements into his paintings. Of his year in Europe he later recalled, “I got a lot out of it, it completely made me revise and rethink a whole lot of things regarding my painting, my work, my attitudes and so on … I felt very refreshed and confident when I came back.”
By the mid 1960s Senbergs’ imagery was becoming increasingly sculptural, merging mechanistic and biomorphic elements, in part stimulated by his interest in the work of Scottish Pop artist Eduardo Paolozzi. Senbergs entered what he refers to as his ‘axle-grease’ period, when his colours became darker and more sombre, which he considered would enhance form in his work.
Installation views of the exhibition Jan Senbergs: Observation – Imagination at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia showing at right, Column and still objects 1 (1968) Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Jan Senbergs (born Latvia 1939, arrived Australia 1950, died Melbourne 2024) Column and still objects 1 (detail) 1968 The Edith Cowan University Art Collection Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program by Mr Timothy James Bernadt
Jan Senbergs (born Latvia 1939, arrived Australia 1950, died Melbourne 2024) Black garden (detail) 1972 Synthetic polymer paint, oil screenprint on canvas plywood National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 1973
In 1972 Senbergs exhibition sixteen new paintings at Melbourne’s Gallery A, including Black garden, in which he created ambiguous cityscapes from surrealistic combinations of screen printed fragments of images. With their absurdist sensibility and disjointed fragmentary images, these paintings emulate the writing of American postmodernist author Donald Bartheme, whose short stories Senbergs admired greatly and whom he credits with being a major influence upon him.
The paintings Senbergs created in 1973 in response to his selection to represent Australia at the 12th São Paolo Biennial in Brazil were larger and more imposing than his 1972 paintings, and often incorporated an image of a ramp to suggest entry into the forms. With their realistic modelling of architectural forms set against a horizon line, these works evoke the real world, yet remain defiantly resistant to interpretation.
“The printing technique was very important to me because I was a kind of scavenger of odd sorts of images. I mean a lot of those sort of shapes and forms were things that one saw perhaps in an old engraving book, a little detail of a section of some background somewhere and I’d look into it and see certain sorts of forms there … I was a collector, a scavenger. I used to go to libraries and collect these images and I’d buy a lot of books.”
~ Jan Senbergs
“When I was doing these prints and as I was coming to a conclusion to them, I also realised I was handling it in a more sophisticated way. The prints were becoming more refined, more in control … But it was a period when I was getting too confident. It was time to leave it alone, go back to the mark.”
~ Jan Senbergs 2008
Installation views of the exhibition Jan Senbergs: Observation – Imagination at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia Photos: Marcus Bunyan
While living in Canberra, on his walk home Senbergs would see Parliament House: “I’d see this white glowing dreadnought in the distance … that’s the way it appeared, sort of floating, just this whiteness because it was lit up … This form fascinated me. But also, and on another level, I was there in ’75 when all the political things happened and [after that] it didn’t have that sort of purity and whiteness that it appeared to have beforehand. In a way that gave me more liberty to change the imagery of the building.”
Jan Senbergs (born Latvia 1939, arrived Australia 1950, died Melbourne 2024) Observatory of hard edges (detail) 1976 Synthetic polymer paint, oil screen print on canvas National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 1976
This is one of Senbergs’ most architectonic images; its massing of asymmetrical forms, pronounced geometry and pale colours bring to mind the contemporaneous style of Brutalist architecture.
Jan Senbergs (born Latvia 1939, arrived Australia 1950, died Melbourne 2024)
Port piers and overpass (top left) 1979 Pastel on paper Courtesy of the artist and Niagara Galleries, Melbourne
Port structure (bottom left) 1979 Pastel on paper Courtesy of the artist and Niagara Galleries, Melbourne
Station Pier (top right) 1980 Pastel on paper Courtesy of the artist and Niagara Galleries, Melbourne
Port signals (bottom right) 1980 Pastel on paper Courtesy of the artist and Niagara Galleries, Melbourne Photo: Marcus Bunyan
“Yesterday I visited Jan Senbergs at his studio in Port Melbourne … I was greatly impressed by what I saw: he has moved away from a photo image to observation, perhaps with [Max] Beckmann as his distant father. His line is slow and sullen and he creates a feeling of junk-heap menace … His perspective is not often on the vanishing point, but is more related to the spatial orientation in Chinese or Islamic art. This kind of perspective gives weight to an object; the sensation is abrupt and very blunt, ideally related to his vision.”
Installation view of the exhibition Jan Senbergs: Observation – Imagination at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia with Sticht’s view to the smelters 1 at right Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Jan Senbergs (born Latvia 1939, arrived Australia 1950, died Melbourne 2024) Sticht’s view to the smelters 1 (installation view) 1982 Synthetic polymer paint on canvas Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart Purchase with funds presented by Renison Goldfields Consolidated, 1983 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Jan Senbergs (born Latvia 1939, arrived Australia 1950, died Melbourne 2024) Sticht’s view to the smelters 1 (detail) 1982 Synthetic polymer paint on canvas Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart Purchase with funds presented by Renison Goldfields Consolidated, 1983
Robert Carl Sticht was an American metallurgist who in 1897 became general manager of the copper mine at Mount Lyell on the remote and rugged west coast of Tasmania. There he introduced a new technique of smelting which released large amounts of deadly sulphur into the air, one of the principal agents of destruction of the natural environment of the region.
In the Copperopolis – Mt Lyell series, Senbergs moved away from the smooth surfaces and clearly articulated forms of his Port Liardet paintings to a more gestural, painterly mode, in accord with the style of Neo-Expressionist painting of the early 1980s.
Predrag Cancar/NGV Photographic Services Jan Senbergs in his studio 2015
From the vast expanses of Antarctica to labyrinthine Melbourne cityscapes, more than five decades of artist Jan Senbergs’ prolific oeuvre will be revealed in the major retrospective Jan Senbergs: Observation – Imagination.
The exhibition, Senbergs’ first-ever comprehensive survey, will feature over 120 works including large-scale paintings, drawings and prints which depict sprawling aerial views of Australian cities, dystopic industrial landscapes, raging bushfires in the Victorian Otways, the remote deserts of north-Western Australia and more. The exhibition spans Senbergs’ first exhibition in 1960 through to the present day, representing all periods of his career. Recognised for his sheer visual inventiveness and sitting outside any defined artistic trend, Senbergs draws inspiration from a remarkably diverse range of influences; literature, history, architecture and non-Western art, and finds imagery within obscure technical journals, ancient mythology and illustrated encyclopaedias.
Tony Ellwood, Director, NGV, said, “As one of Australia’s leading contemporary artists, Jan Senbergs is an extraordinary inventor of his own visual language, at once simple and bold. From lush landscapes to barren urban spaces, his body of work signifies an artist who has continually experimented with shape, form and motif, and one who to this day continues to push his art in new and unexpected directions. The NGV is pleased to present the first major retrospective of Jan Senbergs’ work and offer visitors the opportunity to experience the full spectrum and constant evolution of his career.”
Senbergs, born in 1939 in Latvia, moved to Melbourne in 1950 following the end of World War II. Among other honours, he represented Australia at the prestigious 12th São Paolo Biennial in 1973 and was appointed to the Visiting Chair in Australian Studies at Harvard University in 1989, the first artist to hold this illustrious post. Observation – Imagination will include key works from Senbergs’ most important and critically acclaimed series including his 1973 São Paolo Biennial paintings, the Copperopolis – Mt Lyell mining landscape series, 1983, and his immense multi-panelled studio drawings of 1993-1995.
Senbergs’ Antarctica series is considered one of the most significant artistic responses to the continent. In 1987, Senbergs spent six weeks with the Australian Antarctic Division, travelling with fellow artists Bea Maddock and John Caldwell, on an annual resupply mission. Observation – Imagination will include key works such as his epic landscapes Mawson and Davis. The exhibition will also present Senbergs’ epic, 4.6 metre long Pulaski Skyway painting, which reflects the post-industrial landscape of the five and a half kilometre freeway that crosses the wasteland of western New Jersey from Newark to Jersey City. In this, Senbergs found a metaphor for the American experience and its splendour and decay.
More recently Senbergs has produced intricate labyrinthine views of cities, combining memory and imagination, and the exhibition will include map-like images of Melbourne, Sydney, Geelong, Wollongong and Port Kembla. The exhibition will also feature works from Senbergs’ recent 2014 Victorian bushfire series, which burst with visual drama and chromatic brilliance. Senbergs often refers to himself as a scavenger and collector of imagery taken from a wide variety of sources, and Observation – Imagination will include an enormous showcase, created by the artist, filled with cut-outs, photographs and personal artefacts that reference the people, places and artworks which have fuelled his visual imagination.
Press release from the National Gallery of Victoria
Installation views of the exhibition Jan Senbergs: Observation – Imagination at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia showing in the top image, Blue angel of Wittenoom at top left (1988, below); and Otway night at bottom right (1994, below) Photos: Marcus Bunyan
The blue angel in the painting refers to the dangers of asbestos in the mining town of Wittenoom.
Wittenoom is a ghost town 1,106 kilometres (687 mi) north-north-east of Perth in the Hamersley Range in the Pilbara region of Western Australia. The area around Wittenoom was mainly pastoral until the 1930s when mining began in the area. By 1939, major mining had begun in Yampire Gorge, which was subsequently closed in 1943 when mining began in Wittenoom Gorge. In 1947 a company town was built, and by the 1950s it was Pilbara’s largest town. During the 1950s and early 1960s Wittenoom was Australia’s only supplier of blue asbestos. The town was shut down in 1966 due to unprofitability and growing health concerns from asbestos mining in the area.
Today, six residents still live in the town, which receives no government services. In December 2006, the Government of Western Australia announced that the town’s official status would be removed, and in June 2007, Jon Ford, the Minister for Regional Development, announced that the townsite had officially been degazetted. The town’s name was removed from official maps and road signs and the Shire of Ashburton is able to close roads that lead to contaminated areas.
The Wittenoom steering committee met in April 2013 to finalise closure of the town, limit access to the area and raise awareness of the risks. Details of how that would be achieved were to be determined but it would likely necessitate removing the town’s remaining residents, converting freehold land to crown land, demolishing houses and closing or rerouting roads. by 2015 six residents remained.
Jan Senbergs (born Latvia 1939, arrived Australia 1950, died Melbourne 2024) Otway night (detail) 1994 Synthetic polymer paint on canvas Art Gallery of New South Wales Purchase with assistance from Ruth Komon, 1994
After purchasing a holiday house at Aireys Inlet, Senbergs became interested in the history of Victoria’s west coast and the story of escaped convict William Buckley, ‘the wild white man’ who lived with the local Wathaurung people from 1803 until 1835 before being integrated back into colonial society.
Jan Senbergs (born Latvia 1939, arrived Australia 1950, died Melbourne 2024) Mawson (detail) 1987 Synthetic polymer paint on canvas Private collection, Melbourne
“As in previous settlements in history, in Antarctica we are again squatting on the edge of yet another continent and bringing our cultural baggage with us. Already there is a sense of history there: architectural, social and visual.”
~ Jan Senbergs, 2002
Installation views of the exhibition Jan Senbergs: Observation – Imagination at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia showing in the bottom image at top left, Bea Maddock being lifted onto the Icebird – Heard Island (1987, below); at top middle, Antarctic night (1989, below); at bottom left, Mawson; and at bottom middle, Platcha (1987, below) Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Senbergs was one of three artists invited by the Australian Antractic Division to take part in the resupply Voyage Six to Antarctica as observers. Leaving Hobart in early January 1987, during their six‐week journey the artists visited Heard Island, Scullin Monolith, Law Base, Davis, Mawson and the Russian base at Mirny. This painting depicts fellow artist Bea Maddock who broke her leg while disembarking at Heard Island and needed to be winched back on board. Unfortunately, she was incapacitated for the remainder of the trip.
“In a “cut-away” view, [Antarctic night] shows the interior of a winterer’s hut with its wall covered in a “tapestry” of pin-up images – from the earliest “pin‐up”, the Venus of Willendorf, to the Playboy centrefolds of the 1950s and 1960s … The more you saw of it, the more it seemed like an Antarctic Pop Art movement.”
Installation view of the exhibition Jan Senbergs: Observation – Imagination at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of New Guinea sheilas triptych (centre row) and New Guinea male triptych (bottom row) both 1993 Pastel on paper Courtesy of the artist and Niagara Galleries, Melbourne Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Detail view of New Guinea sheilas triptych (centre row) and New Guinea male triptych (bottom row) both 1993 Pastel on paper Courtesy of the artist and Niagara Galleries, Melbourne Photo: Marcus Bunyan
“I enjoy the freedom of drawing, the directness of what I call my “Long Arm Drawing” with a black pastel or an oil stick, where there’s no room for corrections or embellishments – dancing in front of a sheet of paper, keeping a spontaneous line, and if you hesitate, it shows. It’s “unforgiving” drawing and if you’re out of form you lose, and sheets of paper end up in the bin. Like an athlete or a dancer, you’ve got to put in the hours to make the confident mark.”
“[The] map-like images of the city that I’ve developed – of Melbourne, Sydney, Wollongong, Barcelona – they come out of a fascination with map-making, particularly early map-making … I started to look for an imagined way of painting and drawing actual places like Melbourne or Sydney: not exactly what you see in front of you but what you know to be there … It’s like those early maps, imaginary maps where people were drawing what they knew, not what they saw or measured.”
Figures and heads made from mechanistic and architectural elements was one of Senbergs’s earliest subjects. He returned to this motif recently in several monumental paintings, including Paolozzi’s city, 2010, and The elated city, 2009.
In the history of painting, a capriccio refers to an architectural fantasy where buildings and other architectural elements and places come together in imaginary settings. Senbergs’ Melbourne capriccio offers the viewer the pleasure of a bird’s-eye view of familiar landmarks, seen through a rich blend of memory and imagination.
As a young artist in the 1960s, Senbergs greatly admired Scottish Pop artist Edouardo Paolozzi’s strange fusions of machine and organic forms, and explored similar ideas in his own paintings and screen prints. In Paolozzi’s city Senbergs has created a fantastical head out of buildings and roads, and pays homage to one of his first artistic heroes.
“One of the rarest qualities in contemporary painting is wit … Jan Senberg’s ‘Geelong capriccio’ is in every way a painting of wit, its single and absurd proposition as to what the world would look like if Geelong had become the capital and the site of Melbourne remained open paddocks … It seems to be a very Antipodean painting: the upside-down world, which Europe imagined Australia to be, a place where anything might happen.”
Installation view of the opening room of the exhibition Jan Senbergs: Observation – Imagination at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia showing at top, Extended Melbourne labyrinth (2013, above); at left, Geelong capriccio (if Geelong were settled instead of Melbourne) (2010, above); at right Melbourne capriccio 3 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation views of the opening room of the exhibition Jan Senbergs: Observation – Imagination at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia showing at left in both images, The elated city followed by Paolozzi’s city Photo: Marcus Bunyan
In contrast to the enclosed, almost claustrophobic spaces of the studio interiors, by the end of the 1990s Senbergs had embarked upon a new series of map-like paintings, sprawling bird’s-eye view of cities, which continue to occupy him to the present day. Initially inspired by seeing Melbourne from a high-rise building, these works reflect the artist’s long fascination with early and non-Western map-making traditions. Like these maps, Senbergs’ views are not scientifically measured recordings; rather they are imaginative constructions of place based on observation and memory.
At the same time Senbergs began his most extensive group of landscapes, painting the rugged terrain of the Victorian west coast, an area that he knew well. While some of these works depict untouched wilderness, others include roads and townships and employ multiple perspectives to convey the experience of travelling through the landscape. Senbergs’ recent Heat – Fire – Smoke series is a response to the 2014 bushfires in Victoria, a new subject for the artist, in which he reflects on the cycle of destruction and regeneration. (Wall text from the exhibition)
“In January 2014 in Melbourne we had four days of forty-plus degrees of intense heat – with bushfires raging in the countryside casting a pall of acrid smoke over the extended city and all around ominous skies that seemed to portend an inferno that would be all engulfing. That oppressive atmosphere and that sense of threat at the edges of the extended city seemed as if an overwhelming and merciless force was at the gates and ready to break down the barricades.”
~ Jan Senbergs, 2015
The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia Federation Square Corner of Russell and Flinders Streets, Melbourne
Andrew Follows (Australian, d. 2019) Two 1930s Chevrolet hotrods 2016 From the series Carmania 2 Digital photograph
Australian vernacular
Hats off to my photographer friend Andrew Follows for another stunning set of Australian automobile photographs.
These photographs were taken at a fund raising display for brain injury in Epping, Melbourne, Australia.
Great job Andrew… with a little digital clean, retouch and colour balance from me!
Dr Marcus Bunyan
PS. Don’t forget Andrew is a vision impaired photographer, with only 10% vision in one eye and no vision at all in the other eye. All the more remarkable…
** Please make sure you enlarge these images to see them to best advantage. **
Co-curators: Joel Smith, the Morgan’s Richard L. Menschel Curator and Department Head of Photography, and Lisa Hostetler, Curator in Charge of Photography at the Eastman Museum
Timothy H. O’Sullivan (American born Ireland, 1840-1882) Historic Spanish Record of the Conquest, South Side of Inscription Rock 1873 From the album Geographical Explorations and Surveys West of the 100th Meridian Albumen silver print George Eastman Museum, purchase
In 1873 O’Sullivan joined Lieutenant George Wheeler’s Geographic Survey in New Mexico and Arizona. At El Morro, a sandstone promontory covered with ancient petroglyphs and historic-era inscriptions, the photographer singled out this handsomely lettered sentence to record and measure. It states: By this place passed Ensign Don Joseph de Payba Basconzelos, in the year in which he held the Council of the Kingdom at his expense, on the 18th of February, in the year 1726. Nearby, the rock record now bears another inscription that reads T. H. O’Sullivan.
This looks to be a fascinating exhibition. I wish I could see it.
While Sight Reading cuts across conventional historical and geographic divisions, with the exhibition being organised into nine “conversations” among diverse sets of works, we must always remember that these “themes” are not exclusory to each other. Photographs do cross nominally defined boundaries and themes (as defined by history and curators) so that they can become truly subversive works of art.
Photographs can form spaces called heterotopia, “a form of concept in human geography elaborated by philosopher Michel Foucault, to describe places and spaces that function in non-hegemonic conditions. These are spaces of otherness, which are neither here nor there, that are simultaneously physical and mental, such as the space of a phone call or the moment when you see yourself in the mirror… Foucault uses the term “heterotopia” (French: hétérotopie) to describe spaces that have more layers of meaning or relationships to other places than immediately meet the eye.”1
In photographs, there is always more than meets the eye. There is the association of the photograph to multiple places and spaces (the histories of that place and space); the imagination of the viewer and the memories they bring to any encounter with a photograph, which may change from time to time, from look to look, from viewing to viewing; and the transcendence of the photograph as it brings past time to present time as an intimation of future time. Past, present and future spacetime are conflated in the act of just looking, just being. Positioning this “‘annihilation of time and space’ as a particular moment in a dynamic cycle of rupture and recuperation enables a deliberate focus on the process of transition.”2 And that transition, Doreen Massey argues, ignores often-invisible contingencies that define spaces those relations that have an effect upon a space but are not visible within it.3
Photographs, then, form what Deleuze and Guattari call assemblages4, where the assemblage is “the processes by which various configurations of linked components function in an intersection with each other, a process that can be both productive and disruptive. Any such process involves a territorialization; there is a double movement where something accumulates meanings (re-territorialization), but does so co-extensively with a de-territorialization where the same thing is disinvested of meanings. The organization of a territory is characterized by such a double movement … An assemblage is an extension of this process, and can be thought of as constituted by an intensification of these processes around a particular site through a multiplicity of intersections of such territorializations.”5 In other words, when looking at a photograph by William Henry Fox Talbot or Timothy H. O’Sullivan today, the meaning and interpretation of the photograph could be completely different to the reading of this photograph in the era it was taken. The photograph is a site of both de-territorialization and re-territorialization – it both gains and looses meaning at one and the same time, depending on who is looking at it, from what time and from what point of view.
Photographs propose that there are many heterotopias in the world, many transitions and intersections, many meanings lost and found, not only as spaces with several places of/for the affirmation of difference, but also as a means of escape from authoritarianism and repression. We must remember these ideas as we looking at the photographs in this exhibition.
2/ McQuire, Scott. The Media City. London: Sage Publications, 2008, p. 14.
3/ Massey, Doreen. Space, Place and Gender. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994, p. 5 in Wood, Aylish. “Fresh Kill: Information technologies as sites of resistance,” in Munt, Sally (ed.,). Technospaces: Inside the New Media. London: Continuum, 2001, pp. 163-164.
4/ Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolisand London: University of Minneapolis Press, 1987.
5/ Wood, Aylish. “Fresh Kill: Information technologies as sites of resistance,” in Munt, Sally (ed.,). Technospaces: Inside the New Media. London: Continuum, 2001, p.166
Many thankx to the Morgan Library & Museum for allowing me to publish the text and photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Sight Reading: Photography and the Legible World exhibition sections
As its name declares, photography is a means of writing with light. Photographs both show and tell, and they speak an extraordinary range of dialects.
Beginning February 19 the Morgan Library & Museum explores the history of the medium as a lucid, literate – but not always literal – tool of persuasion in a new exhibition, Sight Reading: Photography and the Legible World. A collaboration with the George Eastman Museum of Film and Photography, the show features more than eighty works from the 1840s to the present and reveals the many ways the camera can transmit not only the outward appearance of its subject but also narratives, arguments, and ideas. The show is on view through May 30.
Over the past 175 years, photography has been adopted by, and adapted to, countless fields of endeavour, from art to zoology and from fashion to warfare. Sight Reading features a broad range of material – pioneering x-rays and aerial views, artefacts of early photojournalism, and recent examples of conceptual art – organised into groupings that accentuate the variety and suppleness of photography as a procedure. In 1936, artist László Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946) defined “the illiterate of the future” as someone “ignorant of the use of the camera as well as the pen.” The JPEG and the “Send” button were decades away, but Moholy-Nagy was not the first observer to argue that photography belonged to the arts of commentary and persuasion. As the modes and motives of camera imagery have multiplied, viewers have continually learned new ways to read the information, and assess the argument, embodied in a photograph.
“Traditional narratives can be found throughout the Morgan’s collections, especially in its literary holdings,” said Colin B. Bailey, director of the Morgan. “Sight Reading encourages us to use a critical eye to read and discover the stories that unfold through the camera lens and photography, a distinctly modern, visual language. We are thrilled to collaborate with the Eastman Museum, and together unravel a rich narrative, which exemplifies photography’s deep involvement in the stories of modern art, science, and the printed page.”
The exhibition
Sight Reading cuts across conventional historical and geographic divisions. Featuring work by William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877), Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904), John Heartfield (1891-1968), Lewis Hine (1874-1940), Harold Edgerton (1903-1990), John Baldessari (1931-2020), Sophie Calle (b. 1953), and Bernd and Hilla Becher (1931-2007; 1934-2015), among many others, the exhibition is organised into nine “conversations” among diverse sets of works.
I. The Camera Takes Stock
Photography’s practical functions include recording inventory, capturing data imperceptible to the human eye, and documenting historical events. In the first photographically illustrated publication, The Pencil of Nature (1845), William Henry Fox Talbot used his image Articles of China to demonstrate that “the whole cabinet of a … collector … might be depicted on paper in little more time than it would take him to make a written inventory describing it in the usual way.” Should the photographed collection suffer damage or theft, Talbot speculated, “the mute testimony of the picture … would certainly be evidence of a novel kind” before the law.
A century later, Harold Edgerton, an electrical engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, used the pulsing light of a stroboscope to record states of matter too fleeting for the naked eye. Gun Toss, an undated image of a spinning pistol, is not a multiple exposure: the camera shutter opened and closed just once. But during that fraction of a second, seven bright flashes of light committed to film a seven-episode history of the gun’s trajectory through space.
William Henry Fox Talbot (British, 1800-1877) Articles of China c. 1843, printed c. 1845 Salted paper print from calotype negative Collection of Richard and Ronay Menschel
In The Pencil of Nature (1845), the first photographically illustrated publication, Talbot used Articles of China to demonstrate that “the whole cabinet of a … collector … might be depicted on paper in little more time than it would take him to make a written inventory describing it in the usual way.” Should the collection suffer damage or theft, Talbot added, “the mute testimony of the picture … would certainly be evidence of a novel kind” before the law.
Harold Edgerton (American, 1903-1990) Gun Toss 1936-1950 Gelatin silver print Collection of Richard and Ronay Menschel
Edgerton, an electrical engineer, used the rapidly pulsing light of a stroboscope to record states of matter too fleeting to be perceived by the naked eye. This image of a spinning pistol is not a multiple exposure: the camera shutter opened and closed just once. But during that fraction of a second, seven bright flashes of light committed to film a seven-episode history of the gun’s trajectory through space.
John Pfahl (American, 1939-2020) Wave Theory I-V, Puna Coast, Hawaii, March 1978 1978 From the series Altered Landscapes Chromogenic development (Ektacolor) process prints, 1993 George Eastman Museum, purchase
In this sequence, Pfahl twisted the conventions of photographic narrative into a perceptual puzzle. The numbered views appear to chronicle a single event: a wave breaking on the shore. Close inspection, however, reveals that the numeric caption in each scene is made of string laid on the rock in the foreground. The exposures, then, must have been made over a span of at least several minutes, not seconds – and in what order, one cannot say.
II. Crafting A Message
The camera is widely understood to be “truthful,” but what photographs “say” is a product of many procedures that follow the moment of exposure, including page layout, captioning, and cropping of the image. During World War I, military personnel learned to interpret the strange, abstract looking images of enemy territory made from airplanes. Their specialised training fundamentally altered the nature of wartime reconnaissance, even as the unusual perspective unique to aerial photography introduced a new dialect into the expanding corpus of modern visual language. An Example of an Annotated Photograph with Local Names of Trenches Inserted (1916), on view in the exhibition, shows that the tools of ground strategy soon included artificial bunkers and trenches, designed purely to fool eyes in the sky.
In László Moholy-Nagy’s photocollages of the late 1920s, figures cut out of the plates in mass market magazines appear in new configurations to convey messages of the artist’s devising. Images such as Massenpsychose (Mass Psychosis) (1927) propose a new kind of visual literacy for the machine age. To contemporary eyes, Moholy’s collages seem to foreshadow cut-and-paste strategies that would later characterise the visual culture of cyberspace.
László Moholy-Nagy (American born Hungary, 1895-1946) Massenpsychose (Mass Psychosis) 1927 Collage, pencil, and ink George Eastman Museum, Purchased with funds provided by Eastman Kodak Company
To make his photocollages of the late 1920s, Moholy-Nagy cut figures out of photographs and photomechanical reproductions and arranged them into new configurations that convey messages of his own devising. By extracting the images from their original context and placing them into relationships defined by drawn shapes and volumes, he suggested a new visual literacy for the modern world. In this world – one in which images course through mass culture at a psychotic pace – a two-dimensional anatomical drawing acquires sufficient volume to cast a man’s shadow and a circle of bathing beauties cues up for a pool sharp. To contemporary eyes, the language of Moholy-Nagy’s photo collages seems to foreshadow strategies common to the visual culture of cyberspace.
Unidentified maker An Example of an Annotated Photograph with Local Names of Trenches Inserted c. 1916 Gelatin silver print George Eastman Museum
During World War I, aerial photography progressed from a promising technological experiment to a crucial strategic operation. As advances in optics and engineering improved the capabilities of cameras and aircraft, military personnel learned to identify topographic features and man-made structures in the images recorded from above. Such training fundamentally altered the significance and practice of wartime reconnaissance. At the same time, the unusual perspective unique to aerial photography introduced a new dialect into the expanding corpus of modern visual language.
PhotoMetric Corporation, 1942-1974 PhotoMetric Tailoring c. 1942-1948 Gelatin silver prints George Eastman Museum
In an effort to streamline the field of custom tailoring, textile entrepreneur Henry Booth devised a method for obtaining measurements by photographing customers with a special camera and angled mirrors. The system was said to be foolproof, making it possible for any sales clerk to operate it. The resulting slides were sent to the manufacturer along with the customer’s order. A tailor translated the images into physical measurements using a geometric calculator, and the company mailed the finished garment to the customer.
III. Photographs in Sequence
Photography’s debut in the late 1830s happened to coincide with the birth of the modern comic strip. Ultimately the narrative photo sequence would lead to the innovations that gave rise to cinema, another form of storytelling altogether. Exact contemporaries of one another, Eadweard J. Muybridge in the United States and Étienne-Jules Marey (1830-1904) in France both employed cameras to dissect human movement. Muybridge used a bank of cameras positioned to record a subject as it moved, tripping wires attached to the shutters. The result was a sequence of “stop-action” photographs that isolated gestures not otherwise visible in real time. Beginning in 1882, Marey pursued motion studies with a markedly different approach. In the works for which he is best known, he exposed one photographic plate multiple times at fixed intervals, recording the arc of movement in a single image.
Étienne Jules Marey (French, 1830-1904) Chronophotographic study of man pole vaulting c. 1890 Albumen silver print George Eastman Museum, Exchange with Narodni Technical Museum
Exact contemporaries, Muybridge and Marey (the former in the United States, the latter in France) both employed cameras to dissect human movement. Muybridge used a bank of cameras positioned and timed to record a subject as it moved, tripping wires attached to the shutters. The result was a sequence of “stop-action” photographs that isolated gestures not otherwise visible in real time. Beginning in 1882, Marey took a markedly different approach. In the works for which he is best known – such as the image of the man pole-vaulting – he exposed a single photographic plate multiple times at fixed intervals, recording the arc of movement in a single image. In Marey’s chronophotograph of a man on a horse, the action reads from bottom to top. The convention of arranging sequential photographic images from left to right and top to bottom, on the model of written elements on a page, was not yet firmly established.
William N. Jennings (American, b. England, 1860-1946) Notebook pages with photographs of lightning c. 1887 Gelatin silver prints mounted onto bound notepad paper George Eastman Museum, Gift of 3M Foundation; Ex-collection of Louis Walton Sipley
With his first successful photograph of a lightning bolt on 2 September 1882, Jennings dispelled the then widely held belief – especially among those in the graphic arts – that lightning traveled toward the earth in a regular zigzag pattern. Instead, his images revealed that lightning not only assumed an astonishing variety of forms but that it never took the shape that had come to define it in art.
Bernd Becher (German, 1931-2007) Hilla Becher (German, 1934-2015) Industriebauten 1968 Gelatin silver prints in presentation box George Eastman Museum, Purchase
The photographs in this portfolio were made only a few years into what would become the Bechers’ decades-long project of systematically documenting industrial architecture in Europe and the United States. The straightforward and rigidly consistent style of their work facilitates side-by-side comparison, revealing the singularity of structures that are typically understood to be generic.
IV. The Legible Object
Some photographs speak for themselves; others function as the amplifier for objects that can literally be read through the image. In her series Sorted Books, American artist Nina Katchadourian (b. 1968) composes statements by combining the titles of books drawn from the shelves of libraries and collections. Indian History for Young Folks, 2012, shows three books from the turn of the twentieth century that she found in the Delaware Art Museum’s M.G. Sawyer Collection of Decorative Bindings. The viewer’s eye silently provides punctuation: “Indian history for young folks: Our village; your national parks.” Though at first glance it appears merely to arrange words into legible order, Katchadourian’s oblique statement – half verbal, half visual – would be incomplete if divorced from the physical apparatus of the books themselves.
David Octavius Hill (Scottish, 1802-1870) Robert Adamson (Scottish, 1821-1848) The Artist and the Gravedigger (Denistoun Monument, Greyfriars Churchyard, Edinburgh) c. 1845 Salted paper print from calotype negative George Eastman Museum, Gift of Alvin Langdon Coburn
Hill, his two nieces, and an unidentified man pose for the camera at the tomb of Robert Denistoun, a seventeenth-century Scottish ambassador. Contemplative poses helped the sitters hold still during the long exposure, even while turning them into sculptural extensions of the monument. Hill puts pen to paper, perhaps playing the part of a graveyard poet pondering mortality. Above him, the monument’s Latin inscription begins: “Behold, the world possesses nothing permanent!”
Robert Cumming (American, 1943-2021) Submarine cross-section; feature film, “Gray Lady Down” – Stage #12, March 14, 1977 1977 Inkjet print George Eastman Museum, Gift of Nash Editions
In the Studio Still Lifes he photographed on the backlots of Universal Studios, Cumming sought to portray the mechanisms behind cinema vision “in their real as opposed to their screen contexts.” Admiring yet subversive, his documents use strategies native to the still camera – distance, point of view, and clear-eyed testimony – to translate Hollywood’s familiar illusions into worksites where “marble is plywood, stone is rubber, … rooms seldom have ceilings, and when the sun shines indoors, it casts a dozen shadows.”
Nina Katchadourian (American, b. 1968) Indian History for Young Folks 2012 From Once Upon a Time in Delaware / In Quest of the Perfect Book Chromogenic print The Morgan Library & Museum, Purchase, Photography Collectors Committee
In her ongoing series Sorted Books, Katchadourian composes statements by combining the titles of books from a given library – in this case, the M. G. Sawyer Collection of Decorative Bindings at the Delaware Art Museum. Though her compositions are driven by the need to arrange words in a legible order, Katchadourian’s oblique jokes, poems, and koans would be incomplete if divorced from the cultural information conveyed by the physical books themselves.
V. The Photograph Decodes Nature
As early as 1840, one year after photography’s invention was announced, scientists sought to deploy it in their analysis of the physical world. Combining the camera with the microscope, microphotographs recorded biological minutiae, leading to discoveries that would have been difficult, if not impossible, to obtain by observing subjects in real time. Similarly, the development of X-ray technology in 1895 allowed scientists to see and understand living anatomy to an unprecedented degree. Such innovations not only expanded the boundaries of the visible world but also introduced graphic concepts that would have a profound impact on visual culture. In other ways, too, nature has been transformed in human understanding through the interpretive filter of the lens, as seen in Sight Reading in the telescopic moon views of astronomers Maurice Loewy (1833-1907) and Pierre Henri Puiseux (1855-1928) and in the spellbinding aerial abstractions of William Garnett (1916-2006).
William Garnett (American, 1916-2006) Animal Tracks on Dry Lake 1955 Gelatin silver print The Morgan Library & Museum, Purchased on the Charina Endowment Fund
After making films for the U.S. Signal Corps during World War II, Garnett used GI-Bill funding to earn a pilot’s license. By the early 1950s, he had the field of artistic aerial landscape virtually to himself. This print, showing the ephemeral traces of wildlife movement on a dry lake bed, appeared in Diogenes with a Camera IV (1956), one in a series of exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art that highlighted the great variety of ways in which artists used photography to invent new forms of visual truth.
William Henry Jackson (American, 1843-1942) “Tea Pot” Rock 1870 Albumen silver print George Eastman Museum, Purchase
Jackson made this photograph as a member of the survey team formed by Ferdinand V. Hayden to explore and document the territory now known as Yellowstone National Park. Hayden’s primary goal was to gather information about the area’s geological history, and Jackson’s photographs record with precision and clarity the accumulated layers of sediment that allow this natural landmark to be fit into a geological chronology. The human figure standing at the left of the composition provides information about the size of the rock, demonstrating that photographers have long recognised the difficulty of making accurate inferences about scale based on photographic images.
Dr Josef Maria Eder (Austrian, 1855-1944) Eduard Valenta (Austrian, 1857-1937) Zwei Goldfische und ein Seefisch (Christiceps argentatus) Two goldfish and a sea fish (Christiceps argentatus) 1896 From the book Versuche über Photographie mittelst der Röntgen’schen Strahlen (Experiments on photography using X-rays) Photogravure George Eastman Museum, Gift of Eastman Kodak Company; Ex-collection of Josef Maria Eder
As early as 1840 – a year after photography’s invention was announced – scientists sought to deploy it in their analysis of the physical world. Combining the camera with the microscope, microphotographs recorded biological minutiae, leading to discoveries that would have been difficult, if not impossible, to obtain by observing subjects in real time. Similarly, the development of x-ray technology in 1895 allowed doctors to study living anatomy to an unprecedented degree. Such innovations not only expanded the boundaries of the visible world but also introduced graphic concepts that would have a profound impact on visual culture.
Dr James Deane (American, 1801-1858) Ichnographs from the Sandstone of Connecticut River 1861 Book illustrated with 22 salted paper prints and 37 lithographs George Eastman Museum, Gift of Alden Scott Boyer
These photographs, which depict traces of fossils discovered in a sandstone quarry, illustrate a book written by Massachusetts surgeon James Deane, who was the author of texts on medicine as well as natural history. Published posthumously using his notes and photographs as a guide, the volume is an early demonstration of photography’s potential as a tool of scientific investigation.
VI. The Photograph Decodes Culture
The photograph not only changed but to a great extent invented the modern notion of celebrity. Modern-age celebrities live apart from the general public, but their faces are more familiar than those of the neighbours next door. Since the mid-nineteenth century, viewers have come to “know” the famous through accumulated photographic sightings, which come in formats and contexts that vary as much as real-life encounters do. In four images that would have communicated instantly to their intended viewers in 1966, Jean-Pierre Ducatez (b. 1970) portrayed the Beatles through closeups of their mouths alone. The graphic shorthand employed by Jonathan Lewis in his series The Pixles is of a more recent variety, but he, too, relies on the visual familiarity conferred by tremendous celebrity. Each print in the series reproduces the iconic art of a Beatles album cover at life size (12 x 12 inches) but extremely low resolution (12 x 12 pixels). Like celebrities themselves, perhaps, the images look more familiar to the eye at a distance than close-up.
Unidentified maker U. S. Grant c. 1862 Albumen silver print George Eastman Museum, Purchase
Timothy H. O’Sullivan (American born Ireland, 1840-1882) A Council of War at Massaponax Church, Va. 21st May, 1864. Gens. Grant and Meade, Asst. Sec. of War Dana, and Their Staff Officers 1864 From the series Photographic Incidents of the War Albumen silver print stereograph George Eastman Museum, Gift of Albert Morton Turner
Modern celebrities live apart from the general public, yet their faces are more familiar than those of the neighbors next door. Since the mid-nineteenth century, viewers have come to “know” the famous through accumulated photographic sightings, which come in formats and contexts that vary as much as real-life encounters do. First as a Union hero in the American Civil War and later as president, Ulysses S. Grant (1822-1885) lived in the public imagination through news images, popular stereographs, campaign buttons, and ultimately the (photo-based) face on the $50 bill. Grant was even a subject for Francois Willème’s patented process for generating a sculpted likeness out of photographs made in the round – an early forerunner to the technology of 3-D printing.
Jonathan Lewis (British, b. 1970) Abbey Road 2003 From The Pixles Inkjet print George Eastman Museum, By exchange with the artist
Jonathan Lewis (British, b. 1970) Please Please Me 2003 From The Pixles Inkjet print George Eastman Museum, By exchange with the artist
Jonathan Lewis (British, b. 1970) Rubber Soul 2003 From The Pixles Inkjet print George Eastman Museum, By exchange with the artist
Synecdoche is a poetic device in which a part stands in for the whole. (In the phrase “three sails set forth,” sails mean ships.) In four images that would have communicated instantly to their intended viewers in 1966, Ducatez portrayed the Beatles solely through close-ups of their mouths. The graphic shorthand Lewis employs in his series The Pixles is of a more recent variety, though he, too, relies on the visual familiarity conferred by tremendous celebrity. Each print in the series reproduces a Beatles album cover at life size (12 x 12 inches) but extremely low resolution (12 x 12 pixels).
VII. Meaning is on the Surface
Photographs are not just windows onto the world but pieces of paper, which can themselves be inscribed or otherwise altered in ways that enrich or amend their meaning. The group portrait Joint Meeting of the Railway Surgeons Association, Claypool Hotel, Indianapolis (1920) is contact printed, meaning that the negative was the same size as the print. After the portrait sitting, the photographer appears to have presented the developed film to the sixty-four sitters for signing during the three days they were assembled for their convention. The result is a document that unites two conventional signifiers of character: facial features and the autograph.
Gravelle Studio, Indianapolis (American, active 1920) Joint Meeting of the Railway Surgeons Association, Claypool Hotel, Indianapolis 1920 Gelatin silver print The Morgan Library & Museum, Purchased as the gift of Peter J. Cohen
Panoramic group portraits such as this are made using a banquet camera, which admits light through a narrow vertical slit while rotating on its tripod. This image was contact printed, meaning the negative was the same size as the print. The photographer appears to have presented the developed film to the sixty-four sitters for signing during the three days they were assembled. The result is a document that unites two conventional signifiers of character: facial features and the autograph.
Keith Smith (American, b. 1938) Book 151 1989 Bound book of gelatin silver prints, thread, and leather Collection of Richard and Ronay Menschel
This unique object unites the arts of photography, quilting, and bookmaking. The composite image on each right-hand page appears to be made of prints cut apart and sewn together. In fact, Smith began by printing patchwork-inspired photomontages in the darkroom. He then stitched along many of the borders where abutting images meet, creating the illusion of a photographic crazy quilt.
VIII. Photography and the Page
News of the world took on a newly visual character in the 1880s, when the technology of the halftone screen made it practical, at last, to render photographs in ink on the printed page.
Among the earliest examples of photojournalism is Paul Nadar’s (1820-1910) “photographic interview” with Georges Ernest Boulanger, a once-powerful French politician. The article’s introduction explains that the photographs were printed alongside the text in order to provide evidence of the encounter and to illustrate Boulanger’s dynamic body language during the conversation.
Stephen Henry Horgan (American, 1854-1941) Shanty Town April 1880 Photomechanical printing plate A Scene in Shantytown, New York, c. 1928 Lithograph George Eastman Museum, Gift of 3M Foundation; Ex-collection of Louis Walton Sipley
Paul Nadar (French, 1856-1939) Interview with Georges Ernest Jean Marie Boulanger 1889 Le Figaro, 23 November 1889 Photomechanical reproduction George Eastman Museum, gift of Eastman Kodak Company; ex-collection Gabriel Cromer
Among the earliest examples of photojournalism is Nadar’s “photographic interview” with Georges Ernest Boulanger, a once-powerful French politician who had fallen out of public favour by the time this was published. The article’s introduction explains that the photographs were printed alongside the text in order to provide evidence of the encounter and to illustrate Boulanger’s body language during the conversation.
Lewis W. Hine (American, 1874-1940) Italian Family Looking for Lost Baggage, Ellis Island 1905 Ellis Island Group, 1905 Gelatin silver print George Eastman Museum, Gift of Photo League Lewis Hine Memorial Committee
In an effort to counter American xenophobia in the early years of the twentieth century, Hine photographed immigrants as they arrived at Ellis Island, composing his images to stir sympathy and understanding among viewers. He understood the importance of disseminating his photographs and actively sought to publish them in newspapers, magazines, and pamphlets. The white outline in the photograph on the right instructs the designer and printer where to crop the image for a photomontage featuring figures from multiple portraits.
Claude Cahun (French, 1894-1954) La Poupée (Puppet) 1936 Gelatin silver print Collection of Richard and Ronay Menschel
John Heartfield (German, 1891-1968) Hurrah, die Butter ist alle! (Hooray, the Butter Is Finished!) 1935 Rotogravure George Eastman Museum, purchase
This is one of 237 photomontages that Heartfield created between 1930 and 1938 for the antifascist magazine Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung(Worker’s Pictorial Newspaper). It is a parody of the “Guns Before Butter” speech in which Hermann G.ring exhorted German citizens to sacrifice necessities in order to aid the nation’s rearmament. The text reads: “Iron ore has always made an empire strong; butter and lard have at most made a people fat.” Heartfield combined details from several photographs to conjure the image of a German family feasting on tools, machine parts, and a bicycle in a swastika-laden dining room, complete with a portrait of Hitler, a framed phrase from a popular Franco-Prussian war-era song, and a throw pillow bearing the likeness of recently deceased president Paul von Hindenburg.
Unidentified maker Certificate of Marriage between Daniel W. Gibbs and Matilda B. Pierce c. 1874 Tintypes in prepared paper mount George Eastman Museum, Purchase
Graphic cousins to one other, these wedding certificates are equipped with precut windows for photographs of the bride, groom, and officiant. The portraits, in partnership with the printed and inscribed text on the forms, contribute both to the documentary specificity of the certificates and to their value as sentimental souvenirs.
IX. Empire of Signs
The plethora of signs, symbols, and visual noise endemic to cities has attracted photographers since the medium’s invention. Their records of advertisers’ strident demands for attention, shopkeepers’ alluring displays, and the often dizzying architectural density of metropolitan life chronicle sights that are subject to change without notice. The photographer’s perspective on contemporary social life – whether it is anecdotal, as in John Thompson’s (1837-1921) Street Advertising from Street Life in London (1877), or haunting, as in Eugène Atget’s (1857-1927) Impasse des Bourdonnais (c. 1908) – is embedded in each image.
John Thomson (Scottish, 1837-1921) Street Advertising 1877 From Street Life in London, 1877 Woodburytype George Eastman Museum, Gift of Alden Scott Boyer
Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) Impasse des Bourdonnais c. 1908 Albumen silver print George Eastman Museum, Purchase
Margaret Bourke-White (American, 1904-1971) At the Time of the Louisville Flood 1937 Gelatin silver print George Eastman Museum
The plethora of signs, symbols, and visual noise endemic to cities has attracted photographers since the medium’s invention. Their records of advertisers’ strident demands for attention, shopkeepers’ alluring displays, and the often dizzying architectural density of metropolitan life chronicle sights that are subject to change without notice. The photographer’s perspective on contemporary social life – whether it is ironic, as in Margaret Bourke-White’s image of a line of flood victims before a billboard advertising middle-class prosperity, or bemused, as in Ferenc Berko’s photograph of columns of oversized artificial teeth on the street – is embedded in each image.
Ferenc Berko (American born Hungary, 1916-2000) Rawalpindi, India 1946 Gelatin silver print George Eastman House, Gift of Katharine Kuh
Aaron Siskind (American, 1903-1991) New York 6 1951 Gelatin silver print The Morgan Library & Museum, Gift of Richard and Ronay Menschel
Alex Webb (American, b. 1952) India 1981 Chromogenic development print George Eastman Museum, Purchased with funds from Charina Foundation
The Morgan Library & Museum 225 Madison Avenue, at 36th Street New York, NY 10016-3405 Phone: (212) 685-0008
Edward S. Curtis (American, 1868-1952) Winter – Apsaroke 1908 Photogravure Courtesy of the Christopher G. Cardozo Collection
Not only was he one of the greatest ethnographic photographers of all time (as well as being an ethnographer recording more than 10,000 songs on a primitive wax cylinder, and writing down vocabularies and pronunciation guides for 75 languages) … he was also an aesthetic photographer. Looking at his photographs you can feel that he adhered to the principles of the nature and appreciation of beauty situated within the environment of the Native American cultures and peoples. He had a connection to the people and to the places he was photographing.
Curtis created a body of work unparrallleled in the annals of photography – an ethnographic study of an extant civilisation before it vanished (or so they thought at the time). Such a project stretched over thirty years, producing 45-50 thousand negatives “many of them on glass and some as large as fourteen by seventeen inches” of which 2,200 original photographs appeared in his magnum opus:
“The North American Indian: a twenty-volume, twenty-portfolio set of books hand – bound in leather, with hand-set letter press text and hand -pulled photogravure prints, all printed on handmade, imported etching stock. [It] contained more than 2,200 original photographs, printed in photogravure, and nearly 4,000 pages of anthropological text including transcriptions of language and music. Each set included twenty quarto-size volumes containing approximately seventy-five original photogravures and two hundred pages of text. The volumes were supplemented by bound portfolios, each containing approximately thirty-six oversize gravures on eighteen-by-twenty-two-inch etching stock. Curtis offered subscribers their choice of three premium handmade papers: Dutch Van Gelder, Japanese Vellum, and India Proof Paper (commonly known as tissue).” (Text from the Cardoza Fine Art website)
While all great photographers have both technical skill and creative ability it is the dedication of this artist to his task over so many years that sets him apart. That dedication is critically coupled with his innate ability to capture the “spirit” of the Native American cultures and peoples, their humanity. In other hands this material could have felt dead but as the text from the Cardoza Fine Art website states:
“Having become deeply impassioned by the power and dignity of the American Indian, Curtis began to realise for the first time that he might create a record preserving the history of these magnificent people and their extraordinary culture. In the same letter to Grinnell, Curtis went on to say, “But I can start-and sell prints of my pictures as I go along. I’m a poor man, but I’ve got my health, plenty of steam, and something to work for.” Curtis was thirty-two years old, with a family and a thriving business. His willingness to put at risk everything he had worked for up until then is a testament to his enlightened view of humanity, the strength of his individualism, and his creative genius… Yet Curtis had no way of knowing that he was about to embark on a thirty-year odyssey that would have unforeseen tragic consequences; his wife would divorce him, and he would lose his family, his financial success, and his physical and emotional health – all in the pursuit of his big dream.”
He might have been a poor man but he was strong in spirit. You can feel it in his work. And he had a vision – “It’s such a big dream, I can’t see it all.”
For that dream and for his inspiration, we are eternally grateful.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Palm Springs Art Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image. All texts about each tribe are taken from the Wikipedia website.
“When he started in 1896, Indians were at their low ebb, with a total population that had dwindled to less than 250,000. Many scholars thought they would disappear within a generation’s time. Curtis set out to document lifestyle, creation myths and language. He recorded more than 10,000 songs on a primitive wax cylinder, and wrote down vocabularies and pronunciation guides for 75 languages.”
Thomas Eagan, biographer of Edward S. Curtis
“One of Curtis’ enthusiastic early backers, Theodore Roosevelt – who authored the introduction to Volume One – was, “like many of Curtis’ eventual supporters,” writes Valerie Daniels, “more interested in obtaining a record of vanishing Native American cultures as a testament to the superiority of his own civilization than out of any concern over their situation or recognition of his own role in the process.” Though Curtis did not necessarily share these views, and later became “radical in his admonition of government policies toward Native Americans,” he also had to please his financiers and his audience, most of whom would have felt the way Roosevelt did. We should bear this cultural context in mind as we take in Curtis’ work, and ask how it shaped the creation and reception of this truly impressive record of both American history and American myth.”
Edward S. Curtis (American, 1868-1952) A Mono Home 1924 Photogravure Courtesy of the Christopher G. Cardozo Collection
Mono
The Mono/ˈmoʊnoʊ/ are a Native American people who traditionally live in the central Sierra Nevada, the Eastern Sierra (generally south of Bridgeport), the Mono Basin, and adjacent areas of the Great Basin…
Throughout recorded history, the Mono have also been known as “Mona,” “Monache,” or “Northfork Mono,” as labeled by E.W. Gifford, an ethnographer studying people in the vicinity of the San Joaquin River in the 1910s. The tribe’s western neighbours, the Yokuts, called them monachie meaning “fly people” because fly larvae was their chief food staple and trading article. That led to the name Mono. The Mono referred to themselves as Nyyhmy in the Mono language; a full blooded Mono person was called cawu h nyyhmy.
Today, many of the tribal citizens and descendants of the Mono tribe inhabit the town of North Fork (thus the label “Northfork Mono”) in Madera County. People of the Mono tribe are also spread across California in: the Owens River Valley; the San Joaquin Valley and foothills areas, especially Fresno County; and in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Edward S. Curtis (American, 1868-1952) Kutenai Duck Hunter 1910 Photogravure Courtesy of the Christopher G. Cardozo Collection
Kutenai / Ktunaxa
The Ktunaxa (English pronunciation: /tʌˈnɑːhɑː/tun-ah-hah; Kutenai pron. [ktunʌ́χɑ̝]), also known as Kutenai (English /ˈkuːtᵊneɪ, –ni/), Kootenay (predominant spelling in Canada) and Kootenai (predominant spelling in the United States), are an indigenous people of North America. There are four bands that form the Ktunaxa Nation and the historic allied and through intermarriage kindred Shuswap Indian Band in British Columbia, in Montana together with the Bitterroot Salish (also known as Flathead) and Upper Pend d’Oreilles they are part of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Nation. There are also the Kootenai Tribe of Idaho in Idaho and small populations in Washington in the United States, where they are part of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation.
The Kutenai language is an isolate, unrelated to the languages of neighbouring peoples… The Ktunaxa people today live in southeastern British Columbia, Washington State, Idaho, and Montana. In Montana they are known as Ksanka. Ktunaxa is the term that these tribes call themselves, which is pronounced Ta-na-ha, with a barely perceptible ‘k’ sound at the beginning of the word. Traditionally these people have been known as Kootenay or Kootenai, which is an anglicisation of the Blackfoot word used to refer to the Ktunaxa, so in some of their tribal organisations and activities, the Ktunaxa refer to themselves as Kootenay, or in Montana, Kootenai.
Edward S. Curtis (American, 1868-1952) An Oasis in the Badlands 1905 Photogravure Courtesy of the Christopher G. Cardozo Collection
This classic Curtis image was made in the heart of the Bad Lands of South Dakota. The subject is Red Hawk who was born 1854 and was a fierce warrior who ultimately engaged in 20 battles, including the Custer fight in 1876. This lyrical image is widely considered to be Curtis’ most important and beautiful Great Plains peopled landscape. Curtis loved the visual and metaphorical qualities of water, and the image conveys the beauty of water as an aesthetic element. The compelling composition and subject matter have helped make this one of Curtis’ most sought-after images, even one hundred years after it was originally created.
Text from Cardoza Fine Art website
Edward S. Curtis (American, 1868-1952) Canyon de Chelly – Navaho 1904 Photogravure Courtesy of the Christopher G. Cardozo Collection
Canyon de Chelly
Canyon de Chelly long served as a home for Navajo people before it was invaded by forces led by future New Mexico governor Lt. Antonio Narbona in 1805. In 1863 Col. Kit Carson sent troops to either end of the canyon to defeat the Navajo population within. The resulting devastation led to the surrender of the Navajos and their removal to Bosque Redondo, New Mexico.
Navaho
The Navajo (Navajo: Diné or Naabeehó) are a Native American people of the Southwestern United States. They are the second largest federally recognised tribe in the United States with 300,460 enrolled tribal members as of 2015.The Navajo Nation constitutes an independent governmental body that manages the Navajo reservation in the Four Corners area, including over 27,000 square miles of land in Arizona, Utah, and New Mexico. The Navajo language is spoken throughout the region with most Navajo speaking English as well.
The states with the largest Navajo populations are Arizona (140,263) and New Mexico (108,306). Over three-quarters of the Navajo population reside in these two states.
The Long Walk
Beginning in the spring of 1864, around 9,000 Navajo men, women and children were forced to embark on a trek of over 300 miles (480 km) to Fort Sumner, New Mexico for internment at Bosque Redondo. The internment at Bosque Redondo was a failure for many reasons as the government failed to provide an adequate supply of water, wood, provisions, and livestock for 4,000-5,000 people. Large scale crop failure and disease were also endemic during this time, as well as raids by other tribes and civilians. In addition, a small group of Mescalero Apaches, long enemies of the Navajo, had been relocated to the area resulting in conflicts. In 1868, a treaty was negotiated between Navajo leaders and the Federal government allowing the surviving Navajo to return to a reservation on a portion of their former homeland. The Navajos were not provided with much protection that other enemies of the Navajos would swoop in and take Navajo women and children back to their camps and force them to work as slaves. While at Bosque Redondo the government did not provide the Navajos with food or shelter and some Navajos froze during the winter because of poor shelters that they had to make on their own.
Edward S. Curtis (American, 1868-1952) Untitled (Raven-ma) – Qagyuhl 1914 Gelatin silver Courtesy of the Christopher G. Cardozo Collection
Edward S. Curtis (American, 1868-1952) Watching the Dancers 1906 Photogravure Courtesy of the Christopher G. Cardozo Collection
Three Hopi girls, wrapped in heavy blankets and wearing the squash blossom hairstyle of maidens, sit and stand on an adobe rooftop, watching a pueblo dance below. A fourth girl is hidden behind the girl at right, with only a single twist of her hair visible over the standing girl’s shoulder. The standing girl glances suspiciously at the photographer, Edward Curtis, who has invaded the girls’ privacy with his camera’s presence. In this photograph, the onlookers have themselves become an event to be witnessed.
Text from the J. Paul Getty Museum website
Curtis visited the Hopi on multiple occasions and went as early as 1900, went back in 1902, 1904, 1906, 1911, 1912, and 1919, so dating which images where shot when can pose something of a challenge, but he does note that the traditional squash blossom hairdo was discontinued by the second decade of the twentieth century. In these early images, “Watching the Dancers” and “The Hopi Maiden,” Curtis captured young unwed women at a time when they still wore their hair in the traditional style. So one can understand that such images confirmed his, and other’s views, that traditional ways of life where passing, and for Curtis, it confirmed the popular view, which his images helped to cement in the popular imagination – that Native Americans were a “vanishing race.”
The Hopi are a Native American tribe, who primarily live on the 2,531.773 sq mi (6,557.26 km2) Hopi Reservation in northeastern Arizona. As of 2010, there were 18,327 Hopi in the United States, according to the 2010 census.The Hopi language is one of the 30 of the Uto-Aztecan language family. The majority of Hopi people are enrolled in the Hopi Tribe of Arizona but some are enrolled in the Colorado River Indian Tribes…
The name Hopi is a shortened form of their autonym, Hopituh Shi-nu-mu (“The Peaceful People” or “Peaceful Little Ones”).The Hopi Dictionary gives the primary meaning of the word “Hopi” as: “behaving one, one who is mannered, civilised, peaceable, polite, who adheres to the Hopi way.” In the past, Hopi sometimes used the term “Hopi” and its cognates to refer to the Pueblo peoples in general, in contrast to other, more warlike tribes. Hopi is a concept deeply rooted in the culture’s religion, spirituality, and its view of morality and ethics. To be Hopi is to strive toward this concept, which involves a state of total reverence and respect for all things, to be at peace with these things, and to live in accordance with the instructions of Maasaw, the Creator or Caretaker of Earth. The Hopi observe their traditional ceremonies for the benefit of the entire world.
Traditionally, Hopi are organised into matrilineal clans. When a man marries, the children from the relationship are members of his wife’s clan. These clan organisations extend across all villages. Children are named by the women of the father’s clan. On the twentieth day of a baby’s life, the women of the paternal clan gather, each woman bringing a name and a gift for the child. In some cases where many relatives would attend, a child could be given over forty names, for example. The child’s parents generally decide the name to be used from these names. Current practice is to either use a non-Hopi or English name or the parent’s chosen Hopi name. A person may also change the name upon initiation into one of the religious societies, such as the Kachina society, or with a major life event.
The Hopi have always viewed their land as sacred. Agriculture is a very important part of their culture, and their villages are spread out across the northern part of Arizona. The Hopi and the Navajo did not have a conception of land being bounded and divided. They lived on the land that their ancestors did. On December 16, 1882 President Arthur passed an executive order creating a reservation for the Hopi. It was much smaller than the Navajo reservation, which was the largest in the country.
Edward S. Curtis (American, 1868-1952) Bear’s Belly – Arikara 1908 Photogravure Courtesy of the Christopher G. Cardozo Collection
Born in 1847 in the present day North Dakota, Bear’s Belly was a highly respected and honoured warrior and became a member of the Bears in the Medicine Fraternity. He acquired his bearskin in a dramatic battle in which he single-handedly killed three bears, thus gaining his personal “medicine”. This image was printed as a photogravure, plate 150 from Portfolio V, with the text below from the accompanying Volume V of Curtis’ The North American Indian.
Born in 1847 at Fort Clark in the present North Dakota. He had no experience in war when at the age of nineteen he joined Custer’s scouts at Fort Abraham Lincoln, having been told by old men of the tribe that such a course was the surest way to gain honours. Shortly after his arrival, Custer led a force into the Black Hills country; in the course of which, the young Arikara counted two first coups and one second. Bear’s Belly fasted once. Going to an old man for advice, he was taken to the outskirts of the village to an old buffalo skull, commanded to strip, smear his body with white clay, and sit in front of the skull. When he had taken the assigned position, the old man held up a large knife and an awl while he addressed the buffalo skull: “this young man sits in front of you, and is going to endure great suffering. Look upon him with great favour, you and Neshanu, and give him a long, prosperous life.” With that he cut pieces of skin from the faster’s breast and held them out to the buffalo skull. Bear’s Belly married at the age of nineteen. He became a member of the Bears in the medicine fraternity and relates the following story of an occurrence connected with that event:
“Needing a bearskin in my medicine-making, I went, at the season when the leaves were turning brown, into the White-Clay hills. All the thought of my heart that day was to see a bear and kill him. I passed an eagle trap, but did not stop: it was a bear I wanted, not an eagle. Coming suddenly to the brink of a cliff I saw me three bears. My heart wished to go two ways: I wanted a bear. But to fight three was hard. I decided to try it, and, descending, crept up to within forty yards of them, where I stopped to look around for a way of escape if they charged me. The only way out was by the cliff, and as I could not climb well in moccasins I removed them. One bear was standing with his side toward me, another was walking slowly toward him on the other side. I waited until the second one was close to the first and pulled the trigger. The farther one fell; the bullet had passed through the body of one and into the brain of the other. The wounded one charged, and I ran, loading my rifle, then turned and shot again, breaking his backbone. He lay there on the ground only ten paces from me and I see his face twitching. A noise caused me to remember the third bear, which I saw rushing upon me only six or seven paces away, I was yelling to keep up my courage and the bear was growling in his anger. He rose on his hind legs, and I shot, with my gun nearly touching his chest. He gave a howl and ran off. The bear with the broken back was dragging himself about with his forelegs, and I went to him and said, “I came looking for you to be my friend, to be with me always.” Then I reloaded my gun and shot him through the head. His skin I kept, but the other two I sold.”
Text from the Cardoza Fine Art website, November 23, 2011 [Online] Cited 21/05/2016. No longer available online
Edward S. Curtis (American, 1868-1952) Sioux Mother and Child 1905 Platinum print Courtesy of the Christopher G. Cardozo Collection
Sioux
The Sioux/ˈsuː/ are a Native American tribe and First Nations band government in North America. The term can refer to any ethnic group within the Great Sioux Nation or any of the nation’s many language dialects. The Sioux comprise three major divisions based on language variety and subculture: the Santee, the Yankton-Yanktonai, and the Lakota.
The Santee (Isáŋyathi; “Knife”) reside in the extreme east of the Dakotas, Minnesota and northern Iowa. The Yankton and Yanktonai (Iháŋktȟuŋwaŋ and Iháŋktȟuŋwaŋna; “Village-at-the-end” and “Little village-at-the-end”), collectively also referred to by the endonym Wičhíyena, reside in the Minnesota River area. They are considered to be the middle Sioux, and have in the past been erroneously classified as Nakota. The Lakota, also called Teton (Thítȟuŋwaŋ; possibly “Dwellers on the prairie”), are the westernmost Sioux, known for their hunting and warrior culture.
Today, the Sioux maintain many separate tribal governments scattered across several reservations, communities, and reserves in North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Minnesota, and Montana in the United States; and Manitoba and southern Saskatchewan in Canada.
Edward S. Curtis (American, 1868-1952) The Apache Maiden 1906 Platinum print Courtesy of the Christopher G. Cardozo Collection
Palm Springs Art Museum is presenting the extraordinary Edward S. Curtis: One Hundred Masterworks exhibition, featuring vintage photographs that represent an important historical documentary of the Indians of North America; and Changing the Tone: Contemporary American Indian Photographers, showcasing works by living artists of Native American heritage. The exhibitions are on view now through May 29, 2016.
Beginning in 1900, Edward S. Curtis (1868-1952) set out on a monumental quest to create an unprecedented, comprehensive record of the Indians of North America. The culmination of his 30-year project led to his magnum opus, “The North American Indian,” a twenty-volume, twenty-portfolio set of handmade books containing a selection of over 2,200 original photographs. Today One Hundred Masterworks stands as a landmark in the history of photography, book publishing, ethnography, and the history of the American West, producing an art historical record of enormous and irreplaceable importance.
One Hundred Masterworks presents an extraordinary selection of vintage photographs by Curtis that highlight both iconic and little known images that reveal the aesthetic, emotional, and spiritual qualities of his art. The exhibition showcases seven photographic print mediums including photogravure, platinum, goldtone (orotone), toned and un-toned gelatin silver, cyanotype, and gold-toned printing-out paper prints. Arranged by geographic region, the exhibition includes a selection of Curtis’s most compelling and rare photographs that look beyond the documentary nature of his work to focus on his aesthetic and technical contributions to the art of photography. Accompanying the exhibition is a 184-page catalogue available for purchase at the Museum Store at Palm Springs Art Museum.
In conjunction with Edward S. Curtis: One Hundred Masterworks, the museum presents a special installation of photographs taken by Curtis on loan from the collections of the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians and Agua Caliente Cultural Museum, along with a selection of Native American objects from Palm Springs Art Museum’s permanent collection.
The exhibition Edward S. Curtis: One Hundred Masterworks has been organised by the Foundation for the Exhibition of Photography, Minneapolis / New York City / Paris / Lausanne, in collaboration with Palm Springs Art Museum. The Palm Springs showing is funded in part by the museum’s Western Art Council and its Gold Sponsors Donna MacMillan and Harold Matzner, and Mary Ingebrand-Pohlad, along with support from Carol and Jim Egan, Terra Foundation for American Art through Board Member Gloria Scoby, Luc Bernard and Mark Prior, and the museum’s Photography Collection Council. Exhibition Season Sponsors are Dorothy Meyerman and Marion and Bob Rosenthal.
Changing the Tone: Contemporary American Indian Photographers features photographs and videos by artists of Native American heritage including Gerald Clarke, Will Wilson, Kent Monkman, Nicholas Galanin, Shelley Niro, and Lewis de Soto. In images that reflect on portraiture, cultural heritage, and their relationship to the land, these artists offer diverse perspectives on Native American identity as well as on critical issues around photography as a documentary medium, i.e., the extent to which it is fact, fiction, or some combination of both. These works provide a contemporary context for Curtis’s historical photographs. Changing the Tone is organised by Palm Springs Art Museum with generous support from Roswitha Kima Smale and John Renner.
Press release from the Palm Springs Art Museum
More images from the exhibition
These reproductions are freely available online (from websites such as the Library of Congress and Wikipedia).
Edward S. Curtis (American, 1868-1952) Self Portrait 1899 Photogravure
Edward S. Curtis (American, 1868-1952) Chief Joseph – Nez Perce 1903 Photogravure
The earth is the mother of all people, and all people should have equal rights upon it.
I believe much trouble would be saved if we opened our hearts more.
Treat all men alike. Give them the same law. Give them an even chance to live and grow.
It does not require many words to speak the truth.
Chief Joseph
Hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekt, Hinmatóowyalahtq̓it in Americanist orthography, popularly known as Chief Joseph or Young Joseph (March 3, 1840 – September 21, 1904), succeeded his father Tuekakas (Chief Joseph the Elder) as the leader of the Wal-lam-wat-kain (Wallowa) band of Nez Perce, a Native American tribe indigenous to the Wallowa Valley in northeastern Oregon, in the interior Pacific Northwest region of the United States.
He led his band during the most tumultuous period in their contemporary history when they were forcibly removed from their ancestral lands in the Wallowa Valley by the United States federal government and forced to move northeast, onto the significantly reduced reservation in Lapwai, Idaho Territory. A series of events that culminated in episodes of violence led those Nez Perce who resisted removal, including Joseph’s band and an allied band of the Palouse tribe, to take flight to attempt to reach political asylum, ultimately with the Lakota led by Sitting Bull, who had sought refuge in Canada.
They were pursued eastward by the U.S. Army in a campaign led by General Oliver O. Howard. This 1,170-mile (1,900km) fighting retreat by the Nez Perce in 1877 became known as the Nez Perce War. The skill with which the Nez Perce fought and the manner in which they conducted themselves in the face of incredible adversity led to widespread admiration among their military adversaries and the American public.
Coverage of the war in United States newspapers led to widespread recognition of Joseph and the Nez Perce. For his principled resistance to the removal, he became renowned as a humanitarian and peacemaker. However, modern scholars, like Robert McCoy and Thomas Guthrie, argue that this coverage, as well as Joseph’s speeches and writings, distorted the true nature of Joseph’s thoughts and gave rise to a “mythical” Chief Joseph as a “red Napoleon” that served the interests of the Anglo-American narrative of manifest destiny.
Nez Perce
‘The Nez Perce’/ˌnɛzˈpɜːrs/ (autonym: Niimíipu) are an Indigenous people of the Plateau, who live in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States, which is on the Columbia River Plateau. They are federally recognized as the Nez Perce Tribe and currently govern their reservation in Idaho. Anthropologists have written that the Nez Perce descend from the Old Cordilleran Culture, which moved south from the Rocky Mountains and west into lands where the tribe coalesced. Their name for themselves is Nimíipuu (pronounced [nimiːpuː]), meaning, “The People,” in their language, part of the Sahaptin family…
Nez Perce is a misnomer given by the interpreter of the Lewis and Clark Expedition at the time they first encountered the Nez Perce in 1805.It was a French term meaning “pierced nose.” This is an inaccurate description of the tribe. They did not practice nose piercing or wearing ornaments. The “pierced nose” tribe lived on and around the lower Columbia River in the Pacific Northwest and are commonly called the Chinook tribe by historians and anthropologists. The Chinook relied heavily upon salmon, as did the Nez Perce. The peoples shared fishing and trading sites but the Chinook were much more hierarchical in their social arrangements.
Edward S. Curtis (American, 1868-1952) At the Old Well – Acoma 1904 Photogravure
Acoma Pueblo (/ˈækəmə/; Western Keresan: Haak’u; Zuni: Hakukya; Navajo: Haak’oh) is a Native American pueblo approximately 60 miles (97 km) west of Albuquerque, New Mexico in the United States. Three villages make up Acoma Pueblo: Sky City (Old Acoma), Acomita, and Mcartys. The Acoma Pueblo tribe is a federally recognised tribal entity.The historical land of Acoma Pueblo totaled roughly 5,000,000 acres (2,000,000 ha). Only 10% of this land remains in the hands of the community within the Acoma Indian Reservation.
Edward S. Curtis (American, 1868-1952) Geronimo – Apache 1905 Platinum print
Geronimo
Geronimo (Mescalero-Chiricahua: Goyaałé[kòjàːɬɛ́] “the one who yawns”; June 16, 1829 – February 17, 1909) was a prominent leader from the Bedonkohe band of the Chiricahua Apache tribe. From 1850 to 1886 Geronimo joined with members of three other Chiricahua Apache bands – the Chihenne, the Chokonen and the Nednhi – to carry out numerous raids as well as resistance to US and Mexican military campaigns in the northern Mexico states of Chihuahua and Sonora, and in the southwestern American territories of New Mexico and Arizona. Geronimo’s raids and related combat actions were a part of the prolonged period of the Apache-American conflict, that started with American settlement in Apache lands following the end of the war with Mexico in 1848…
Geronimo was not counted a chief among the Apache. At any one time, only about 30 to 50 Apaches would be numbered among his personal following. However, since he was a superb leader in raiding and revenge warfare he frequently led numbers larger than his own following. Among Geronimo’s own Chiricahua tribe many had mixed feelings about him – while respected as a skilled and effective leader of raids or warfare, he emerges as not very likeable, and he was not widely popular among the other Apache. Nevertheless, Apache people stood in awe of Geronimo’s “powers” which he demonstrated to them on a series of occasions. These powers indicated to other Apaches that Geronimo had super-natural gifts that he could use for good or ill. In eye-witness accounts by other Apaches Geronimo was able to become aware of events, as they happened, though they were at a far distant place, and he was able to anticipate events that were in the future. He also demonstrated powers to heal other Apaches.
Apache
The Apache (/əˈpætʃiː/; French: [a.paʃ]) are culturally related Native American tribes from the Southwestern United States and Northern Mexico. These indigenous peoples of North America speak Southern Athabaskan languages, which are related linguistically to Athabaskan languages in Alaskaand western Canada. Apache people traditionally have lived in Eastern Arizona, Northern Mexico (Sonora and Chihuahua), New Mexico, West Texas, and Southern Colorado. Apacheria, their collective homelands, consists of high mountains, sheltered and watered valleys, deep canyons, deserts, and the southern Great Plains…
Apache groups are politically autonomous. The major groups speak several different languages and developed distinct and competitive cultures. The current post-colonial division of Apache groups includes Western Apache, Chiricahua, Mescalero, Jicarilla, Lipan, and Plains Apache (also known as the Kiowa-Apache). Apache groups live in Oklahoma and Texas and on reservations in Arizona and New Mexico. Apache people have moved throughout the United States and elsewhere, including urban centres.
Edward S. Curtis (American, 1868-1952) The Piki Maker 1906 Vintage goldtone
Piki is a bread made from corn meal used in Hopi cuisine.
Edward S. Curtis (American, 1868-1952) Qahatika Girl 1907 Photogravure
Qahatika
The Qahatika (or Kohatk) were a Native American tribe of the Southwestern United States. They were apparently a sub-tribe of the Tohono O’Odham, and lived in the vicinity of present-day Quijotoa, Arizona.
According to Edward Sheriff Curtis, the Qahatika belonged to the Pima group of tribes and lived in five villages “in the heart of the desert south of the Gila River”, about forty miles from the Pima reservation. A legend said that after the Pima suffered defeat in a war with Apache, the tribe fled and split. One splinter of the tribe, the ancestors of Qahatika, went into the barren desert and settled there in separation from other Pimas. The Qahatika, according to Curtis, managed to find land suitable for growing wheat. Their method of “dry farming” relied exclusively on winter rainfall: the soil near their villages was capable of retaining winter moisture for a whole season, and a few winter rains guaranteed a fair crop in summer. The Qahatika seen by Curtis were “almost identical in appearance” to Pima and Papago. They retained the Pima art of basket weaving and developed their own tradition of pottery. Their houses were built almost exclusively of dried giant cactus carcasses.
Edward S. Curtis (American, 1868-1952) Shot in the Hand – Apsaroke 1908 Photogravure
Crow or Apsaroke
The Crow, called the Apsáalooke in their own Siouan language, or variants including Absaroka, are Native Americans, who in historical times lived in the Yellowstone River valley, which extends from present-day Wyoming, through Montana and into North Dakota, where it joins the Missouri River. Today, they are enrolled in the federally recognised Crow Tribe of Montana.
Pressured by the Ojibwe and Cree peoples (the Iron Confederacy), who had earlier and better access to guns through the fur trade, they had migrated there from the Ohio Eastern Woodland area to settle south of Lake Winnipeg, Canada. From there, they were pushed to the west by the Cheyennes. Both the Crow and the Cheyennes were then pushed farther west by the Lakota (Sioux), who took over the territory from the Black Hills of South Dakota to the Big Horn Mountains of Montana; the Cheyennes finally became close allies of the Sioux, but the Crows remained bitter enemies of both Sioux and Cheyennes. The Crow were generally friendly with the whites and managed to retain a large reservation of over 9300km despite territorial losses. Since the 19th century, Crow people have been concentrated on their reservation established south of Billings, Montana. They also live in several major, mainly western, cities. Tribal headquarters are located at Crow Agency, Montana.
Edward S. Curtis (American, 1868-1952) Waiting in the Forest – Cheyenne 1910 Photogravure
Cheyenne
The Cheyenne (/ʃaɪˈæn/shy-an) are one of the groups of indigenous people of the Great Plains and their language is of the Algonquian language family. The Cheyenne comprise two Native American groups, the Só’taeo’o or Só’taétaneo’o (more commonly spelled as Suhtai or Sutaio) and the Tsétsêhéstâhese (also spelled Tsitsistas). These tribes merged in the early 19th century. Today, the Cheyenne people are split into two federally recognised groups: Southern Cheyenne, who are enrolled in the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes in Oklahoma, and the Northern Cheyenne, who are enrolled in the Northern Cheyenne Tribe of the Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation in Montana.
Palm Springs Art Museum 101 Museum Drive Palm Springs CA 92262
To be honest, Robert Capa was not the most natural colour photographer, especially when you compare him to the likes of Paul Outerbridge and Saul Leiter who were working at around the same time. Even the official text from Jeu de Paume that accompanies the exhibition is littered with descriptions like “uninspired”, “the color photographs lack focus”, or worse, “Fleur Cowles at Look and Len Spooner at Illustrated were disappointed with the color images.”
His work in this medium is what I would call “observational” colour photography. The images are best when the subject is intimate, human and ‘on set’, preferably using a limited palette with splashes of subdued colour – such as in the gorgeous Model wearing Dior on the banks of the Seine, Paris, France (1948), the delicate Woman on the beach, Biarritz, France (1951), and the simpatico duo of Humphrey Bogart and Peter Lorre on the set of ‘Beat the Devil’, Ravello, Italy (April 1953) and Truman Capote and Jennifer Jones on the set of ‘Beat the Devil’, Ravello, Italy (April 1953). The photographs of Ava Gardner on set are also cracking images for their vitality and overall balance, as is the almost monochromatic Gen X girl, Colette Laurent, at the Chantilly racetrack, France (1952). Other ensemble tableaux might as well have been shot in black and white, such as Spectators at the Longchamp Racecourse, Paris, France (c. 1952).
Capa too often resorts to one or two strong primary colours for effect, as in Capucine, French model and actress, on a balcony, Rome, Italy (August 1951), Rambaugh Family Circus, Indiana, USA (1949) or American Judith Stanton, Zermatt, Switzerland (1950). In the the former two images the composition doesn’t work with the colour; only in the latter does it become a vigorous and joyous structural element.
Sometimes I think that Capa didn’t exactly know what to do with colour – Woman at an ice bar, Zürs, Austria (1949-1950) and Party, Rome, Italy (August 1951) are not very good at all – but here we must acknowledge an artist experimenting with a relatively new commercial medium, even as he seeks to sell these images to his clients.
Capa in Color is at his best when he employs subtlety, constructing strong human compositions with nuanced placement of shades and hues.
One of the most complex images in the posting is Anna Magnani on the set of Luchino Visconti’s ‘Bellissima’ (Rome, 1951-1952). Just look at this image: your eye plays over the surface, investigating every nook and cranny, every modular plane. The blue of the skirt, the brown of the top, the patterns of the two bikinis and the earthiness of tree and earth. I am reminded of the paintings of Paul Cézanne.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Jeu de Paume for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
The first exhibition dedicated to Capa’s fourteen years of color photographs, Capa in Color has an ambition to evaluate and place these photographs in the timeline of his career and of their period. Capa in Color shows how color photography renewed his vision and how his work gained from a new sensibility after the war, by readapting his compositions in colour, but also to a public attracted to entertainment and to the discovery of new types of images.
Recently presented at the International Center of Photography and now available for travel, Capa in Color presents Robert Capa’s colour photographs to the European public for the first time. Although he is recognised almost exclusively as a master of black-and-white photography, Capa began working regularly with colour film in 1941 and used it until his death in 1954. While some of this work was published in the magazines of the day, the majority of these images have never been printed or seen in any form.
Capa in Color includes over 150 contemporary colour prints by Capa, as well as personal papers and tear sheets from the magazines in which the images originally appeared. Organised by Cynthia Young, curator of Capa Collections at ICP, the exhibition presents an unexpected aspect of Capa’s career that has been previously edited out of posthumous books and exhibitions, and show how he embraced colour photography and integrated it into his work as a photojournalist in the 1940s and 1950s.
Robert Capa’s (1913-1954) reputation as one of history’s most notable photojournalists is well established. Born Endre Ernö Friedmann in Budapest and naturalised as a U.S. citizen in 1946, he was deemed “The Greatest War Photographer in the World” by Picture Post in a late 1938 publication of his Spanish Civil War photographs. During World War II, he worked for such magazines as Collier’s and Life, extensively portraying preparation for war as well as its devastating aftermath. His best-known images symbolised for many the brutality and valour of war and changed the public perception of, and set new standards for, war photography.
July 27, 1938, while in China for eight months covering the Sino-Japanese war, Robert Capa wrote to a friend at his New York agency, “… send 12 rolls of Kodachrome with all instructions; … Send it “Via Clipper” because I have an idea for Life“. Although no colour film from China survives except for four prints published in the October 17, 1938, issue of Life, Capa was clearly interested in working with colour photography even before it was widely used by many other photojournalists.
In 1941, he photographed Ernest Hemingway at his home in Sun Valley, Idaho, in colour, and used colour for a story about crossing the Atlantic on a freighter with an Allied convoy, published in the Saturday Evening Post. While Capa is best known for the black-and-white images of D-Day, he also used colour film sporadically during World War II, most notably to photograph American troops and the French Camel Corps in Tunisia in 1943.
Capa’s use of colour film exploded in his postwar stories for magazines such as Holiday (USA ), Ladies’ Home Journal (USA ), Illustrated (UK), and Epoca (Italy). These photographs, which until now have been seen only in magazine spreads, brought the lives of ordinary and exotic people from around the world to American and European readers alike, and were markedly different from the war reportage that had dominated Capa’s early career. Capa’s technical ability coupled with his engagement with human emotion in his prewar black-and-white stories enabled him to move back and forth between black and white and colour film and integrate colour to complement the subjects he photographed. These early stories include photographs of Moscow’s Red Square from a 1947 trip to the USS R with writer John Steinbeck and refugees and the lives of new settlers in Israel in 1949-50. For the Generation X project, Capa traveled to Oslo and northern Norway, Essen, and Paris to capture the lives and dreams of youth born before the war.
Capa’s photographs also provided readers a glimpse into more glamorous lifestyles that depended on the allure and seduction of colour photography. In 1950, he covered fashionable ski resorts in the Swiss, Austrian, and French Alps, and the stylish French resorts of Biarritz and Deauville for the burgeoning travel market capitalised on by Holiday magazine. He even tried fashion photography by the banks of the Seine and on the Place Vendôme. Capa also photographed actors and directors on European film sets, including Ingrid Bergman in Roberto Rossellini’s Viaggio in Italia, Orson Welles in Black Rose, and John Huston’s Moulin Rouge. Additional portraiture in this period included striking images of Picasso, on the beach near Vallauris, France with his young son Claude.
Capa carried at least two cameras for all of his postwar stories: one with black-and-white film and one with colour, using a combination of 35mm and 4 x 5 Kodachrome and medium-format Ektachrome film, emphasising the importance of this new medium in his development as a photographer. He continued to work with colour until the end of his life, including in Indochina, where he was killed in May 1954. His colour photographs of Indochina presage the colour images that dominated the coverage from Vietnam in the 1960s.
Capa in Color is the first museum exhibition to explore Capa’s fourteen-year engagement with colour photography and to assess this work in relation to his career and period in which he worked. His talent with black-and-white composition was prodigious, and using colour film halfway through his career required a new discipline. Capa in Color explores how he started to see anew with colour film and how his work adapted to a new postwar sensibility. The new medium required him to readjust to colour compositions, but also to a postwar audience, interested in being entertained and transported to new places.
It is surprising, even shocking to some, that famous photojournalist Robert Capa (born Budapest 1913, died Indochina 1954) photographed in colour, and not just occasionally, but regularly after 1941. His coloured work is essentially unknown. Capa is considered a master of black-and-white war photography, a man who documented some of the most important political events of Western Europe in the mid-twentieth century. His photographs of 1930s Paris, the Spanish Civil War, World War II, postwar Europe, and his last images in Indochina are known to us in black-and-white. None of the posthumous retrospective projects of his work have included colour, with a few rare exceptions..
Capa first experimented with colour in 1938, two years after Kodak developed Kodachrome, the first colour roll film. While in China covering the Sino-Japanese War, he wrote to a friend at his New York agency, Pix, “Please immediately send 12 rolls of Kodachrome with all instructions; whether special filters are needed, etc. – in short, all I should know. Send it ‘Via Clipper’, because I have an idea for Life“. Only four colour images from China were published, but Capa’s enthusiasm for colour was born. He photographed with colour film again in 1941 and for the next two years he fought hard to persuade editors to buy his colour images in addition to the black-and-white. After the war, the magazines were eager to include colour and his colour assignments increased. For the rest of his life, he almost always carried at least two cameras: one for black-and-white and one for colour film.
Jay F. Shelley, Sr., 88, of Yuma,formerly of Scottsdale, Arizona, entered Eternity on June 6, 2004. Jay was born May 16, 1916, in Long Beach, California. He was a decorated B-17 Bomber Pilot during WWII and flew 54 combat missions. He received a degree in business administration with a major in accounting from University of Montana. Jay worked as an accountant until 1979 when he retired with his wife to Scottsdale, Arizona. Capt. Jay F Shelleywas assigned to the 301st BG 32nd Squadron.
In 1941, Capa produced his first colour film story for the Saturday Evening Post, about crossing the Atlantic from New York on a convoy. Once in England, he was also able to sell these images to the English magazine Illustrated, because the two magazines did not have the same readerships.
He made the crossing again the next year, carrying a larger format camera that made bigger, more spectacular portraits of the ship’s crew. The turnaround time for Kodachrome film was several weeks. As Kodak maintained secrecy surrounding the formula, the undeveloped film had to go to a special Kodak processing plant and then returned to the photographer. It was not ideal for timely news. The magazines published few of Capa’s colour images from the UK, but he persisted in using it. In 1943, he entered the battlefields of World War II in North Africa, first traveling on a troop ship from England to Casablanca. His last colour images from the war were taken on a boat from Tunisia to Sicily in July 1943, where he debarked and moved up to Naples with America soldiers over the following months. It appears that for the rest of the war he did not use colour film, apparently discouraged by a combination of the slow shutter speed of the film, long processing times, and the uneven commitment to his colour images by the magazines.
Soon after his return from England, in the fall of 1941, Capa traveled to Sun Valley, Idaho, to do a story for life on his friends, the writers Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn, whom he had met during the Spanish Civil War. After World War II, Capa sought out new relationships with magazines and holiday became one of his most important supporters.
A glamorous travel magazine that featured New Yorker – caliber writers, Holiday was launched in 1946 by the Philadelphia-based Curtis Publishing Company, which also carried The Saturday Evening Post and Ladies’ Home Journal. Born in full colour, it was a peacetime publication catering to an ideal of American postwar prosperity. Holiday covered American cities, but immediately assigned stories on stylish international hot spots, places readers could dream of visiting with the advent in 1947 of nonstop transatlantic flights. In 1950, Holiday sent Capa to Indianapolis, and while his pictures of a nuclear family of five exploring the city are uninspired, he also photographed a family-run traveling circus. Despite Capa’s lukewarm attitude toward American culture, the colour images present a strong vision of American small-town life.
The year 1947 was a turning point in Capa’s life. He founded Magnum, the photographers cooperative agency he had dreamed of since 1938. The same year, he traveled to the Soviet Union, a trip that he had wanted to make in 1937 and then in 1941, both times unable to obtain a visa or magazine support for the trip.
He teamed up with writer John Steinbeck to report on the lives and opinions of ordinary Russians in opposition to Cold War rhetoric. Their adventures were published in the book A Russian Journal the following year and syndicated in newspapers and international picture magazines. Although the colour images were well represented in the magazines and on the cover of Illustrated for a special issue, Capa did not shoot much colour film in the Soviet Union, and no colour was included in A Russian Journal, except for the cover. Either he deemed only a few places worthy of the new medium format Ektachrome colour film that did not require special processing – chiefly Moscow and collective farms in the Ukraine and Georgia – or he had only a limited amount of film and used it sparingly. The images of Red Square take full advantage of colour film.
Some of Capa’s colour works were considerably less successful than his black-and-white photographs. This was the case with his 1948 feature on Picasso, originally sold to look as a story about the artist’s pottery, but as Capa failed to take pictures of the pottery, it became a story about Picasso and his family.
He instructed his Magnum colleague Maria Eisner: “Look gave me a definite assignment but no price so you have to insist on $200 pro black and white and $300 pro coloured page, and $250 for expenses. If they are not willing to pay a reasonable sum, you can withdraw, but Madame Fleurs Cowles was so positive on this matter and the pictures are so exclusive that I could be very surprise[d] if this doesn’t work”. Both Fleur Cowles at Look and Len Spooner at Illustrated were disappointed with the colour images, although delighted with the story, which included Capa’s now famous picture of Picasso holding a sun umbrella over his ravishing young artist girlfriend, Françoise Gilot, parading on the beach.
Hungary
In 1948, Holiday sent Capa to his native Budapest and commissioned him to write the accompanying article. Capa had been widely praised for the hilarious and self-deprecating 1947 book about his wartime exploits, slightly out of focus, so the editors were hardly taking risk by asking him to write a long article.
Holiday used four colour images in the November 1949 issue. Unlike the glamorous destinations the magazine usually covered or that Capa would later cover for them, the images and accompanying article, one of the strongest texts he wrote about a place, functioned more as a letter from Budapest. He observes with fascination and humour the clashing end of one empire with the start of another, bittersweet against the reality of what his childhood city had become. While he seemed to have had more colour film on this assignment than in Russia, it was expensive to buy and process, so he still conserved, and there are many more black-and-white negatives of similar scenes than in colour.
Morocco
Capa’s 1949 trip to Morocco was one of the few postwar stories he made concerning a political subject, but it was a complicated sell and failed as an international news story.
The assignment was muddled from the start, as it combined Moroccan politics, lead mines, and the filming of The Black Rose with Orson Welles. Paris Match first published some of the pictures in a piece about the annual tour of the country by the Moroccan leader Sultan Sidi Mohammed. Illustrated published a story with only black-and-white images about the strange effects of the Marshall Plan, in which as a French colony Morocco received American aid through France, although the French General was not recognised as the leader in charge by the U.S. State Department. Some of the best images are portraits of the Moroccan people.
Capa’s big geopolitical assignment of the late 1940s took him to Israel. He first traveled there in 1948 to cover the Arab-Israeli war, then returned in 1949, for Holiday and Illustrated, with writer Irwin Shaw.
He came back in 1950 to continue photographing the new nation in transition, focusing on the influx of refugees arriving from Europe and neighbouring Arab countries, the ongoing repair of the physical destruction, portraits of immigrants, agricultural work, kibbutzim, and various Jewish festivities. While there is only one colour image from the 1948 trip, of the Altalena ship burning in the water off the beach in Tel Aviv – a result of the conflict between extreme right-wing Irgunists and the Israeli government – by the time Capa arrived in 1949, he seemed to have all the colour film he needed. His Israel stories were picked up by all the major international picture news magazines, spurred by the 1950 publication Report on Israel, with text by Shaw and photos by Capa.
Following the success of his skiing story, Capa proposed a piece on French seaside resorts. In the summer of 1950, he traveled to Deauville in Normandy, with its racetrack and casino, photographing only in black-and-white (all that appeared in Illustrated).
He knew he could do more with the story and pitched it to Holiday as a double feature with Biarritz, in Basque Country. A year later, he returned to Deauville with colour film to photograph the scene, capturing the mix of social classes at the horse races. He then traveled to Biarritz, covering the beach, nightlife, and traditional folklore. For this story, the black-and-white and colour images complement each other – the colour adding details to the black-and-white, which set the stage. The layout, not published until September 1953, balances the colour and black-and-white with Capa’s humorous, self-deprecating text about his time in each resort.
Capucine (6 January 1928 – 17 March 1990) was a French fashion model and actress known for her comedic roles in The Pink Panther (1963) and What’s New Pussycat? (1965). She appeared in 36 films and 17 television productions between 1948 and 1990. At age 17, while riding in a carriage in Paris, she was noticed by a commercial photographer. She became a fashion model, working for fashion houses Givenchy and Christian Dior.She adopted the name, “Capucine” (French for nasturtium). She met Audrey Hepburn while modelling for Givenchy in Paris. The two would remain close friends for the rest of Capucine’s life.
In 1957, film producer Charles K. Feldman spotted Capucine while she was modelling in New York City. Feldman brought her to Hollywood to learn English and study acting under Gregory Ratoff. She was signed to a contract with Columbia Pictures in 1958 and landed her first English-speaking role in the film Song Without End (1960) for which she was nominated for a Golden Globe Award. Over the next few years, Capucine made six more major motion pictures. They included North to Alaska (1960), a comedy, as a prostitute who becomes the love interest of John Wayne, and Walk on the Wild Side (1962), in which she portrayed a redeemed hooker, before moving to Switzerland in 1962.
Much of 1963’s hit film The Pink Panther was shot in Europe. A crime comedy that led to a number of sequels, the film starred David Niven and Peter Sellers along with Capucine. The risqué comedy What’s New Pussycat? (1965), which co-starred Sellers and Peter O’Toole, was filmed entirely in France. She continued making films in Europe until her death.
In his article on Norway for Holiday, Capa wrote: “I have revisited Budapest because i happen to have been born there, and because the place offered only a short season for revisiting. I even got to Moscow, which usually offers no revisiting at all. I kept on revisiting Paris because I used to live there before the war; London, because I lived there during the war; and Rome, because I was sorry that I had never lived there at all.”
Capa traveled to Rome for Holiday in 1951 and his pictures were published in April 1952, with a text authored by Alan Moorehead. A writer for The New Yorker at the time of the Rome assignment, Moorehead had been a correspondent for the Daily Express of London during World War II, and he and Capa had been together in North Africa, Sicily, and Normandy. Capa’s accompanying colour photographs pursued a glamorous city filled with beautiful people engaged in endless partying, reflecting a Rome removed from postwar destruction and entering the period of La Dolce Vita.
Skiing was one of Capa’s favourite pastimes and he vacationed annually in Klosters, Switzerland, to relax and recuperate. In 1948, he and a Magnum colleague were trying to drum up a story on Megève, France, a popular ski resort for Parisians, on its “dual personality … simple peasant life and gay, café society set.”
Capa photographed in Zürs, Austria, in early 1949, for a Life story, although the magazine ultimately killed it. Holiday pulled in after Life dropped out and, in late 1949, signed on to a feature about the great skiing resorts of Austria, Switzerland, and France, which would become one of Capa’s most joyous and successful colour stories. In fact, it was arguably better in colour, which provided the additional elements of glitter and humour that black-and-white often missed. For two months, he traveled from the Austrian resorts of Kitzbühel, St. Anton, Zürs, and Lech, to the Swiss towns of Davos, Klosters, and Zermatt, then over the French border to Val d’Isère. In each place, he found a glamorous circle to depict: director Billy Wilder and writer Peter Viertel from Hollywood, young international ski champions, and current and ex-European royalty, including the Queen and Prince of Holland. Everyone was healthy and the mood festive. Capa found a relaxed, casual confidence in his subjects.
Paris was Capa’s de facto home from 1933 to 1939 and then as his postwar base, usually in a back room of the elegant Hotel Lancaster off the Champs-Élysées, where he was friend with the owner.
Holiday‘s editor Ted Patrick commissioned Capa to provide photographs for a special issue on Paris in 1952, and Capa brought in other Magnum colleagues – Henri Cartier-Bresson, Chim, and the young Dennis Stock. The magazine included texts by Irwin Shaw, Paul Bowles, Ludwig Bemelmans, Art Buchwald, and Colette, among others, and is a romantic paean to the city, almost a stage set for romance, gastronomy, and history. Some of Capa’s best images from this story are the quirkiest ones and play with the contrasts that he seemed to revel in, between the young and old, human and animal, high-life and low-life, particularly at the horse races, about which he noted: “The sport of kings is also the sport of concierges”. For his photographs of plein air painters, Capa wrote: “Place du Tertre is a painter’s paradise. A few stops from Sacré Coeur we find an old gentleman in beard and beret looking like an American movie producer’s idea of the kind of French painter found in Montmartre”.
Capa developed Generation X, also known as Gen X, for Magnum on the mark of the half century in late 1949. McCall’s was originally behind the project, but had pulled out by 1951, when Capa insisted on injecting more political content.
Holiday filled the void and supported the project all the way to a three-part series published in early 1953. Capa observed, “it was one of those projects, of which many are born in the minds of people who have big ideas and little money. The funny thing about this project is that it was accomplished.” He assigned the photographers, including Chim, Cartier-Bresson, and Eve Arnold, to each create a portrait of a boy and/or girl in countries where they were already working or had worked. Each subject answered a detailed questionnaire about his or her life, family, personal beliefs, and goals. The project eventually included twenty-four individuals in fourteen countries on five continents. Capa photographed all his subjects – a French girl, a German boy, and Norwegian boy and girl – in colour and black-and-white, but only the Norwegian photos were published in colour. Capa’s biographer Richard Whelan suggested that Capa’s depiction of the French girl, Colette Laurent, was an oblique portrait of himself at the time: “Her life is superficial, artificial on the surface and holds none of the good things except the material ones.”
Capa was friends with a number of movie stars and directors and incorporated them into his professional work. He met John Huston in Naples in 1944, while Huston was making films for the Army Signal Corps, and Ingrid Bergman in 1945 when she was filming in Paris, before beginning a one-year love affair.
As part of his 1948 trip to Morocco, he included a story on The Black Rose and its star Orson Welles. He photographed the set of Huston’s Beat the Devil, written by Truman Capote and filmed in the hillside town of Ravello, Italy. The cast visited the set of Viaggio in Italia in nearby Almalfi with Bergman, Roberto Rossellini, and George Sanders and Capa also dipped down to Paestum with his friend Martha Gellhorn, casting her as a caryatid in the ancient ruins. Capa covered another Huston film, Moulin Rouge, about the life of painter Toulouse Lautrec, shot in Paris and at Shepparton Studios near London. Capa’s colour portraits of the actors eschew traditional head shots and capture the varied pace and playful moments on the set.
In 1953, Capa traveled to London to cover the coronation of the young Elizabeth II with friends Humphrey Bogart and John Huston. His colour images of crowds waiting for the parade of guests before the coronation, for which he used 35mm Kodachrome, suggest a new interest in colour for colour’s sake.
In 1954, he received an invitation from Mainichi Press to travel to Japan for six weeks with Japanese cameras and an unrestricted amount of film to shoot what he liked in return for images they could publish. The trip was an easy one, but the colour photographs lack focus. He wandered around markets, documented foreign signs, watched people visiting temples and shrines, and photographed Children’s Day in Osaka, but they are little better than tourist snaps. Only a few images of a May Day workers’ celebration in Tokyo, in bright colours, show some engagement, reminiscent of his 1930s images of workers in France and Spain.
In 1953, Capa expressed his readiness “to get back to real work, and soon. What and where I do not know, but the Deauville and Biarritz and motley movie period is over.”
In the same letter, he writes of his desire to go to “Indochina, or any other proposition which would get me back to reporting on my own type of territory”. While in Japan the next year, Capa received a cable from Life asking him to cover for their photographer in Indochina. The assignment was only for a few weeks and would bring in some needed money. He reached Hanoi on May 9 and on May 25, with Time reporter John Mecklin and Scripps-Howard correspondent John Lucas, left Mandihn with two cameras, a Contax with black-and-white film, and a Nikon with colour film. Their convoy traveled along a dirt road lined by rice paddies. Moving toward Thaibinh, Capa left the convoy and walked on by himself. He photographed the soldiers advancing through the fields, and as he climbed the dike along the road, he stepped on a land mine and was killed. While the colour images are some of the strongest war pictures he made, none were used in the press at the time, probably in part because of the extra time required to process the colour film.
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