Exhibition: ‘Typologien: Photography in 20th-century Germany’ at Fondazione Prada, Milan

Exhibition dates: 3rd April – 14th July, 2025

Curator: Susanne Pfeffer

Heinrich Riebesehl (German, 1938-2010) 'Menschen Im Fahrstuhl, 20.11.1969' [People in the Elevator, 20.11.1969] 1969 from the exhibition 'Typologien: Photography in 20th-century Germany' at Fondazione Prada, Milan, April - July, 2025

Heinrich Riebesehl (German, 1938-2010)
Menschen Im Fahrstuhl, 20.11.1969 [People in the Elevator, 20.11.1969]
1969
Gelatin silver print, printed 2007
Kicken Berlin
© Heinrich Riebesehl, by SIAE 2025

Once more, with feeling

“Typology remains a highly challenging and complex notion. It operates in a paradoxical regime: on the one hand, this approach can lead to a systematic recording of people and objects based on extreme objectivity; on the other hand, typology corresponds to an individual and arbitrary choice, revealing itself as a disturbing and potentially subversive act.” (Press release)

Objective / subjective
Pattern / randomness
Isolation / extinction
Morphology / mutation
Specific / anonymous
Repetition / difference
Same / other
Structure / creativity
Orientation / disorientation
Universal / individual
Reality / imagination
Documentation / disruption
Omnipresent / unique
Exact / imprecise
Composed / emotional
Staged / snapshot
Concept / feeling
Formal / intuitive
Ritual / subversion
Collaboration / resistance

Et cetera, et cetera…

Inherent in one is the other.

Every photo within a Becher grid contains its own difference.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

Let’s not beat around the bush. Despite protestations to the contrary (appeals to the objectivity of the image, eschewing entirely the aspects of beauty, emotion and opinion; the rigorous frontality of the individual images giving them the simplicity of diagrams, while their density of detail offers encyclopaedic richness) these are subjective images for all their objective desire. The paradox is the more a photographer strives for objectivity, the more ego drops away, the more the work becomes their own: subjective, beautiful, emotive.

Marcus Bunyan commenting on the exhibition Bernd and Hilla Becher: Mines and Mills – Industrial Landscapes at Fotomuseum Winterthur, Zurich, February, 2012

“What happens in the case of mutation? Consider the example of the genetic code. Mutation normally occurs when some random event (for example, a burst of radiation or a coding error) disrupts an existing pattern and something else is put in its place instead. Although mutation disrupts pattern, it also presupposes a morphological standard against which it can be measured and understood as mutation. We have seen that in electronic textuality, the possibility for mutation within the text are enhanced and heightened by long coding chains. We can now understand mutation in more fundamental terms. Mutation is critical because it names the bifurcation point at which the interplay between pattern and randomness causes the system to evolve in a new direction. It reveals the productive potential of randomness that is also recognized within information theory when uncertainty is seen as both antagonistic and intrinsic to information.

We are now in a position to understand mutation as a decisive event in the psycholinguistics of information. Mutation is the catastrophe in the pattern / randomness dialectic analogous to castration in the presence / absence dialectic. It marks a rupture of pattern so extreme that the expectation of continuous replication can in longer be sustained. But as with castration, this only appears to be a disruption located at a specific moment. The randomness to which mutation testifies is implicit in the very idea of pattern, for only against the background of nonpattern can pattern emerge. Randomness is the contrasting term that allows pattern to be understood as such.”

Hayles, Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999, pp. 30-33

Heinrich Riebesehl (German, 1938-2010) 'Menschen Im Fahrstuhl, 20.11.1969' [People in the Elevator, 20.11.1969] 1969

In the series Menschen Im Fahrstuhl, 20.11.1969 (People in the elevator, 20.11.1969) shot in 1969, Heinrich Riebesehl conceptualised his interest in the photographic portrait. The portraits of the workers of the Hannoversche Presse (a daily newspaper in Hanover) – taken inside an elevator with a remotely operated small-format camera – are dated and numbered in sequential order: Riebesehl dispensed with a title or a more detailed description of the subjects portrayed. By omitting distinctive elements from the images, such as the profession or age of the subjects, he made the situation the key factor in the shots. In fact, the images are studies of the behaviors of people in that particular space, their body languages and gazes. Riebesehl knew that environment very well, because he had worked for a long time as a photojournalist, before turning to conceptual art photography.

Exhibition text from the Fondazione Prada by Cord Riechelmann

Installation view of the exhibition Typologien: Photography in 20th-century Germany at Fondazione Prada, Milan showing at left Bernd and Hiller Becher’s Hochöfen (Blast furnaces) 1970-1989; and at right, Candida Höfer’s Bibliotheque Nationale de France XXIII 1997

Candida Höfer (German, b. 1944) 'Bibliotheque Nationale de France XXIII' 1997 from the exhibition 'Typologien: Photography in 20th-century Germany' at Fondazione Prada, Milan, April - July, 2025

Candida Höfer (German, b. 1944)
Bibliotheque Nationale de France XXIII
1997
Inkjet print
© Candida Höfer, Cologne

In the photographs of libraries in London, Paris, and New York, which at first glance appear to be technically scientific records, Candida Höfer manages to capture something that is not visible: ingenuity. The libraries’ rooms have high ceilings, and the rows of seats are neatly arranged. In their impressiveness, they reflect the architecture of the 19th-century conception of knowledge and science, typical of the dominant nations of the time because of their commercial and colonial power. The objective nature of the deserted spaces, precisely in how they seem to be neutral to the individual needs of the students, suggests something in the image that could hardly be less objective: the possibility for intellectual exchange that these spaces promise and deliver in Höfer’s photographs.

Exhibition text from the Fondazione Prada by Cord Riechelmann

Candida Höfer (German, b. 1944)
Zoologischer Garten Washington DC IV
1992
Inkjet print
© Candida Höfer, by SIAE 2025/VG BildKunst, Bonn 2025

In Candida Höfer’s photographs shot in zoos, the animals document a specific form of loneliness in modern times. In these images, the lines of development of two disciplines collide. Not only in the photographs, but also in reality, they function independently of each other: modern architecture and behavioural research. Modern architecture has become established in zoological gardens but has never considered the animal and its needs. Based on the knowledge gained from behavioural research, by choosing to portray iconic large mammals such as giraffes, lions, and polar bears, Höfer has represented the dilemma of a world in which entire species are threatened with extinction and in which zoos see themselves as a kind of ‘Noah’s Ark.’

Exhibition text from the Fondazione Prada by Cord Riechelmann

Installation view of the exhibition Typologien: Photography in 20th-century Germany at Fondazione Prada, Milan showing Bernd and Hilla Becher’s Wassertürme (Water towers) 1966-1986

Bernd and Hilla Becher (German) Bernd Becher (German, 1931-2007) Hilla Becher (German, 1934-2015) 'Wassertürme (Water towers)' 1966-1986 from the exhibition 'Typologien: Photography in 20th-century Germany' at Fondazione Prada, Milan, April - July, 2025

Bernd and Hilla Becher (German)
Bernd Becher (German, 1931-2007)
Hilla Becher (German, 1934-2015)
Wassertürme (Water towers)
1966-1986
Leeds, GB, 1966
Hasselt, B, 1985
Newton le Willows, GB, 1966
Beaufays/Liège, B, 1979
Kwaadmechelen, B, 1971
Padova, I, 1986
Outreau/Boulogne, F, 1973
Primasens, Saarland, D, 1980
Mesnil-Val, F, 1972
9 gelatin silver prints
© Estate Bernd & Hilla Becher, represented by Max Becher, courtesy of Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur – Bernd & Hilla Becher Archive, Cologne, 2025

Installation view of the exhibition Typologien: Photography in 20th-century Germany at Fondazione Prada, Milan showing the work of Thomas Struth

Installation view of the exhibition Typologien: Photography in 20th-century Germany at Fondazione Prada, Milan showing the work of Thomas Struth with at left, Musée du Louvre IV Paris, 1989

Thomas Struth (German, b. 1954)
Musée du Louvre IV
Paris, 1989
Colour photograph on C-print
© Thomas Struth / Courtesy ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, Karlsruhe

In his practice, Thomas Struth demonstrates meticulous attention to the architectural environment, as well as to people and objects. In his large-format colour series Museum Photographs (1989-1992), Struth captures anonymous individuals and crowds gazing at artworks in museums. A significant example is Louvre 4, Paris 1989, in which the artist photographs from behind a group of viewers standing in front of Théodore Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa (1819). Often made with a large-format camera, his images reflect what Struth calls “exact vision”: the framing must not conceal anything or suggest secret content, thus resulting in an enigmatic outcome.

Exhibition text from the Fondazione Prada by Cord Riechelmann

Installation view of the exhibition Typologien: Photography in 20th-century Germany at Fondazione Prada, Milan showing Andreas Gursky’s Paris, Montparnasse 1993

Andreas Gursky’s large-format work, Paris, Montparnasse (1993) has become an iconic example of his work. It depicts the Maine-Montparnasse II block of flats, located on Rue Commandant-Mouchotte in Paris and built between 1959 and 1964 on a design by French architect Jean Dubuisson. This is one of the first images that Gursky created using digital post-production. In real life, the building does not look the way it appears in the image: using a digital editing process, Gursky transformed the façade into a game of differences and repetitions by processing the windows. In fact, by reiterating forms that are always identical, he produced a seemingly infinite number of them, with colour variations that are activated by a calculated dynamic.

Exhibition text from the Fondazione Prada by Cord Riechelmann

Installation view of the exhibition Typologien: Photography in 20th-century Germany at Fondazione Prada, Milan showing Andreas Gursky’s 99 Cent 1999

In 99 Cent (1999), Andreas Gursky photographed supermarket shelves using the same formal scheme used in Paris, Montparnasse (1993). The shelves crammed with everyday products such as detergents represent the inexhaustible flow of goods in the global system of production and distribution. Gursky’s work conveys a feeling of disorientation generated by the excessive stimuli and details typical of a shelf in a hypermarket.

Exhibition text from the Fondazione Prada by Cord Riechelmann

Andreas Gursky (German, b. 1955)
99 Cent
1999 (remastered 2009)
Inkjet print

“Typologien” is an extensive study dedicated to 20th-century German photography. The exhibition, hosted within Podium, the central building of the Milan headquarters, is curated by Susanne Pfeffer, art historian and director of the MUSEUM MMK FÜR MODERNE KUNST, Frankfurt.

The project attempts to apply the principle of “typology,” which originated in 17th- and 18th-century botany to categorise and study plants, and appeared in photography in the early 1900s, affirming itself in Germany throughout the 20th century. Paradoxically, the given formal principle allows for unexpected convergences of German artists spanning different generations and the manifestation of their individual approaches.

The exhibition path will follow a typological rather than a chronological order, bringing together more than 600 photographic works by 25 established and lesser-known artists essential for recounting a century of German photography, including Bernd and Hilla Becher, Sibylle Bergemann, Karl Blossfeldt, Ursula Böhmer, Christian Borchert, Margit Emmrich, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Isa Genzken, Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer, Lotte Jacobi, Jochen Lempert, Simone Nieweg, Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter, Heinrich Riebesehl, Thomas Ruff, August Sander, Ursula Schulz-Dornburg, Thomas Struth, Wolfgang Tillmans, Rosemarie Trockel, Umbo (Otto Umbehr), and Marianne Wex. A system of suspended walls will create geometric partitions in the exhibition space, forming unexpected connections between artistic practices that differ from each other, but are united by a common principle or intention of classification.

As stated by Susanne Pfeffer, “Only through juxtaposition and direct comparison is it possible to find out what is individual and what is universal, what is normative or real. Differences are evidence of the abundance of nature and the imagination of humans: the fern, the cow, the human being, the ear; the bus stop, the water tower, the stereo system, the museum. The typological comparison allows differences and similarities to emerge and the specifics to be grasped. Unknown or previously unperceived things about nature, the animal, or the object, about place and time become visible and recognisable.”

In photography, employing typologies means affirming an equivalence between images and the absence of hierarchies in terms of represented subjects, motifs, genres, and sources. Despite this, typology remains a highly challenging and complex notion. It operates in a paradoxical regime: on the one hand, this approach can lead to a systematic recording of people and objects based on extreme objectivity; on the other hand, typology corresponds to an individual and arbitrary choice, revealing itself as a disturbing and potentially subversive act.

The hypothesis that photography plays a key role not only in fixing distinctive phenomena but also in organising and classifying a plurality of visible manifestations remains a vital force in today’s artistic efforts to navigate the complexity of our social and cultural realities. With the spread of digital imagery and practices, the concept of typology continues to be questioned and re-defined by contemporary photographers and artists.

As underlined by Susanne Pfeffer, “The unique, the individual, seems to have been absorbed into a global mass, the universality of things is omnipresent. The Internet allows typologies to be created in a matter of seconds. And yet this is precisely when it seems important – to artists – to take a closer look.” As further explained by Pfeffer, “When the present seems to have abandoned the future, we need to observe the past more closely. When everything seems to be shouting at you and becoming increasingly brutal, it is important to take a quiet pause and use the silence to see and think clearly. When differences are not seen as something other, but turned into something that divides us, it is crucial to notice what we have in common. Typologies allow us to identify remarkable similarities and subtle differences.”

Text from the Fondazione Prada website

Typologien | Fondazione Prada Milano

An extensive study dedicated to 20th-century German photography. “Typologien” attempts to apply the principle of “typology,” which originated in 17th- and 18th-century botany to categorise and study plants, and appeared in photography in the early 1900s, affirming itself in Germany throughout the 20th century.

The exhibition, hosted within Podium, the central building of the Milan headquarters, is curated by Susanne Pfeffer, art historian and director of the MUSEUM MMK FÜR MODERNE KUNST, Frankfurt.

Installation view of the exhibition Typologien: Photography in 20th-century Germany at Fondazione Prada, Milan showing the work of Ursula Schulz-Dornburg

Ursula Schulz-Dornburg (German, b. 1938)
Transit Sites-Armenia-Erevan-Ararat
2001
Gelatin silver print on Forte paper
© Ursula Schulz-Dornburg

Ursula Schulz-Dornburg was visiting convents and monasteries in Armenia when she happened to come across one of these unique bus stops, partly futuristic and partly surreal. From 1997 to 2011, she portrayed numerous bus stops, often in very remote locations. In a country that was experiencing a dramatic transition, from being part of the Soviet Union to its new status as an independent republic, these bus stops look like the remnants of a utopian socialism, which in Schulz-Dornburg’s images are kept alive mainly by women and children. The photographer said she was so impressed by the dignity of those women waiting at the bus stop, who even in the most extreme poverty looked as though they were on their way to the Opera, that she asked their permission to photograph them. What emerged was a document of a quiet life that manages with dignity to deal with even the harshest adversity.

Exhibition text from the Fondazione Prada by Cord Riechelmann

Installation view of the exhibition ‘Typologien: Photography in 20th-century Germany’ at Fondazione Prada, Milan showing at left, flower photographs by Thomas Struth; and at right, Andreas Gursky’s Untitled XVIII 2015 (below)

Andreas Gursky (German, b. 1955)
Untitled XVIII
2015
Inkjet print
Atelier Andreas Gursky

Unlike works such as Paris, Montparnasse (1993), in the Untitled series he produced between 2015 and 2016, Andreas Gursky depicted rows of tulips without providing a title or location for the pictures. Viewed from a distance, the photographs are reminiscent of Abstract Expressionist paintings, but even looking at them at close range, the lushly blooming flowers are undiscernible. Living in Düsseldorf, close to the Dutch border, Gursky is familiar with the intensively cultivated Dutch tulip crops, where no unwanted insect or worm would possibly be allowed to spoil the bulbs. The sterility of industrial flower production, far from being harmless and healthy, is captured by Gursky in images that, in turn, are neither reassuring nor pleasant.

Exhibition text from the Fondazione Prada by Cord Riechelmann

Installation view of the exhibition Typologien: Photography in 20th-century Germany at Fondazione Prada, Milan showing the flower photographs of Thomas Struth with at left, Small Closed Sunflower, No. 18, Winterthur 1992 (below); and at third left, Single Red Lily – No. 51, Düsseldorf (Botanischer Garten) 1993 (below)

Thomas Struth (German, b. 1954)
Small Closed Sunflower, No. 18, Winterthur
1992
Colour photograph on C-print
© Thomas Struth / Courtesy ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, Karlsruhe

Thomas Struth (German, b. 1954)
Single Red Lily – No. 51, Düsseldorf (Botanischer Garten)
1993
C-print
Viehof Collection
© Thomas Struth / Courtesy Viehof Collection, Mönchengladbach

A student of the artist Gerhard Richter and later of the photographer Bernd Becher at the Art Düsseldorf Academy from 1973 to 1980, Thomas Struth habitually works in thematic cycles centered around museums, flowers, and portraits of families and passers-by. The “exact vision” – the intention underpinning Struth’s photography – can be seen in both the portraits of two cornflowers shoot in Düsseldorf and the image of a red lily in the city’s Botanical Garden. Struth notes down the name or address of the site where he took the photograph, as in the case of the flower of a hollyhock portrayed in Düsseldorf’s Nordpark. This is to evoke the poetry of the place and provide an exact account of the plants’ origin, preserving the authenticity of the shots without digitally altering them.

Exhibition text from the Fondazione Prada by Cord Riechelmann

Installation view of the exhibition Typologien: Photography in 20th-century Germany at Fondazione Prada, Milan showing the work of Hiller Becher

Hilla Becher (German, 1934-2015)
Eichenblatt [Oak Leaf]
1965
Gelatin silver print
© Estate Bernd & Hilla Becher, represented by Max Becher, courtesy Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur – Bernd & Hilla Becher Archive, Cologne, 2025

In terms of the objectivity of the approach, Hilla Becher’s 1965 photographic studies of an oak leaf, a cypress branch, and a ginkgo leaf are in keeping with the series on types of industrial buildings that she made with her husband Bernd Becher. Thematically, however, these studies represent a sort of return to the studies of branches and shoots made years earlier by Karl Blossfeldt. Unlike Blossfeldt’s images, the leaves, particularly the poplar leaves, are not uniformly lit. The shadowy areas cannot be clearly seen with the naked eye even on close and objective observation. One could say that nature has penetrated the technique, disappearing.

Exhibition text from the Fondazione Prada by Cord Riechelmann

Installation view of the exhibition Typologien: Photography in 20th-century Germany at Fondazione Prada, Milan showing the work of Karl Blossfeldt

Karl Blossfeldt (German, 1865-1932)
Adiantum pedatum, haarfarn, junge, noch eingerollte Wedel [Maidenhair fern, young, still curled fronds]
Nd
Gelatin silver print
Courtesy Berlin University of Arts, Archive – Karl Blossfeldt Collection in cooperation with Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur, Cologne

The young, still curling fronds of an ‘Unspecified fern’ are a kind of introduction to the themes that Karl Blossfeldt explored, and his working methods. Faced with a seemingly infinite variety of natural forms, the photographer tried to find an order by using tools borrowed from scientific botany. Blossfeldt collected plant samples tirelessly in and around Berlin, dried them, and enlarged those details not visible to the naked eye. However, the photographer was seeking something different from the aims of botanical research. This is already revealed by the title of the first volume, a publication of his photographs of plants – Urformen der Kunst (Art Forms in Plants, 1928). Right from the title, he explicitly refers to the model he used for the book’s conception: Ernst Haeckel’s Kunstformen in der Natur (Art Forms in Nature), published in 1924 and now a classic. Therefore, Blossfeldt sought archetypal formal models in nature, such as the fronds of the fern.

In his search for a primal form of nature that could then be shaped into art according to the natural model – as in the case of the curled fronds of
the fern – Karl Blossfeldt applied the systematic method specific to botany with a kind of exterior mimicry. He moved from the frond of an unidentified fern, in other words, not yet classified according to an order, to a fern that could at least be identified within a botanical classification. The frond of the order Polypodiales certainly has typological similarities to all the fronds photographed by Blossfeldt, but it remains a case apart in that it cannot be classified in any of the orders in which the other ferns are classified. However, this level of identification is a relevant indication: these very diverse plants in fact number about 9000 known species, and probably many more yet to be identified. Moreover, identifying their species is often only possible for a few specialists, and is even more difficult given the variety of forms that ferns take during their development.

The curled fronds of some ferns from the Osmundaceae family, royal ferns, with their botanical classification, confirm one of the fundamental intentions of Karl Blossfeldt’s studies: only by carefully analyzing the structure of a plant can one fully understand its natural form. He developed his approach opposite to that of the Jugendstil, the artistic movement – a variation of French Art Nouveau and Italian Liberty – that stylized plant forms and conceived of them primarily as ornamental elements. Blossfeldt was not interested in criticism or rejection of the ornamental, but in a radical reconfiguration of it. This could only be achieved by thoroughly studying natural forms.

Three still-curled fronds of a specimen of bracken fern – scientific name Hypolepidaceae – on the one hand, appear denaturalised, because Karl Blossfeldt focused his lens on the detail, leaving out the natural context. But on the other hand, they reveal a scrupulous observation of the plant world. By nature, in fact, fronds develop according to a strict formal principle – no natural form is purely random – and yet they eventually differ from one another. The fronds of ferns could appear as decalcomanias, given that in Blossfeldt’s representation they take on an almost mechanical quality for the observer. The emphasis on differences in resemblance, which Blossfeldt achieved more or less consciously by repeating the leaf motif in differently shaped ferns, can be considered one of the main aesthetic innovations of his photography.

Exhibition text from the Fondazione Prada by Cord Riechelmann

Installation view of the exhibition Typologien: Photography in 20th-century Germany at Fondazione Prada, Milan showing the work of Marianne Wex with at left, Let’s Take Back Our Space: ‘Female’ and ‘Male’ Body Language as a Result of Patriarchal Structures 1977-2018 (below); and at right, Arm and Leg Positions, Lying on the Ground 1977/2018

With the photographic project Let’s Take Back our Space, which resulted in a book published in 1979 with the subtitle “‘Female’ and ‘Male’ Body Language as a Result of Patriarchal Structures,” Marianne Wex produced one of the seminal works in 1970s feminist art studies. Starting with a scrupulous observation of the body influenced by the method of structuralism, a scientific approach that studies a whole by breaking it down into elements and units, Wex took hundreds of photographs arranged in specific thematic sections devoted, for example, to specific leg and arm positions. Wex succeeded in showing how apparently natural body postures are actually the result of centuries of social and cultural structures, not a ‘natural’ or genetic predisposition. Her photographs capture movements, postures, and gestures, documenting habits of the body that have been taught and passed down for generations, shaping the behaviour of men and women according to patriarchal expectations.

Exhibition text from the Fondazione Prada by Cord Riechelmann

Marianne Wex (German, 1937-2020)
Let’s Take Back Our Space: ‘Female’ and ‘Male’ Body Language as a Result of Patriarchal Structures
1977-2018
Inkjet print

Installation view of the exhibition Typologien: Photography in 20th-century Germany at Fondazione Prada, Milan showing photographs from Wolfgang Tillmans’ series Concorde 1997

In 1997, Wolfgang Tillmans photographed the Concorde, a supersonic passenger plane, in flight during landing and take-off. For him, the plane represented one of the last remaining inventions of the 1960s technological utopia. With its futuristic shape, supersonic speed, and the formidable roar it made during take-off and landing, the plane fascinated generations of technology enthusiasts. Today, the Concorde is a thing of the past and, together with the Titanic, epitomises more of a technological shock than a promise in the history of technology. These photographs reveal one of the aspects that Tillmans wants to highlight: they are symbols of “a super-modern anachronism” that ultimately left nothing behind but air pollution and environmental destruction.

Exhibition text from the Fondazione Prada by Cord Riechelmann

Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
Concorde L449-21
1997
Inkjet print
Courtesy of Galerie Buchholz

Fondazione Prada presents Typologien: Photography in 20th-century Germany, an extensive study dedicated to 20-century German photography, at its Milan venue from 3 April to 14 July 2025. The exhibition, hosted within Podium, the central building of the Milan headquarters, is curated by Susanne Pfeffer, art historian and director of the MUSEUM MMK FÜR MODERNE KUNST, Frankfurt.

The exhibition attempts to apply the principle of “typology,” which originated in 17th- and 18th-century botany to categorise and study plants, and appeared in photography in the early 1900s, affirming itself in Germany throughout the 20th century. Paradoxically, the given formal principle allows for unexpected convergences of German artists spanning different generations and the manifestation of their individual approaches.

The exhibition path follows a typological rather than a chronological order, bringing together more than 600 photographic works by 25 artists essential for recounting over a century of German photography. The exhibition features photographs by Bernd and Hilla Becher, Sibylle Bergemann, Karl Blossfeldt, Ursula Böhmer, Christian Borchert, Margit Emmrich, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Isa Genzken, Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer, Lotte Jacobi, Jochen Lempert, Simone Nieweg, Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter, Heinrich Riebesehl, Thomas Ruff, August Sander, Ursula Schulz-Dornburg, Thomas Struth, Wolfgang Tillmans, Rosemarie Trockel, Umbo (Otto Umbehr), and Marianne Wex. The project forms unexpected connections between artistic practices that differ from each other but are united by a common principle or intention of classification.

In photography, employing typologies means affirming an equivalence between images and the absence of hierarchies in terms of represented subjects, motifs, genres, and sources.

Despite this, typology remains a highly challenging and complex notion. It operates in a paradoxical regime: on the one hand, this approach can lead to a systematic recording of people and objects based on extreme objectivity; on the other hand, typology corresponds to an individual and arbitrary choice, revealing itself as a disturbing and potentially subversive act.

The hypothesis that photography plays a key role not only in fixing distinctive phenomena but also in organizing and classifying a plurality of visible manifestations remains a vital force in today’s artistic efforts to navigate the complexity of our social and cultural realities. With the spread of digital imagery and practices, the concept of typology continues to be questioned and re-defined by contemporary photographers and artists.

As underlined by Susanne Pfeffer, “The unique, the individual, seems to have been absorbed into a global mass, the universality of things is omnipresent. The Internet allows typologies to be created in a matter of seconds. In this very precise moment – it seems even more important to follow the artists’ gaze and look closely.” As further explained by Pfeffer, “When the present seems to have abandoned the future, we need to look closer at the past. When everything seems to be shouting at you and becoming increasingly brutal, it is important to take a quiet pause and use the silence to see and think clearly. When differences are no longer perceived seen as something other but are transformed into elements of division, we have to recognize what we have in common. Typologies allow us to identify undeniable similarities and subtle differences.”

In the early 20th century, Karl Blossfeldt (1865-1932) was one of the first artists to transfer the classification system used in botanical studies to photography. His vast and detailed plant atlas represented a foundational moment for German Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity). This artistic and photographic movement emerged in the 1920s during the Weimar Republic and promoted the importance of categories and distinctions and the remarkable ability of photography as a medium to explore the very idea of typology.

Another pioneering figure was August Sander (1876-1964), who published his photo book Antlitz der Zeit (Face of Our Time) in 1929, at the time excerpted from his landmark project Menschen des 20. Jahrhunderts (People of the 20th Century). Described by Walter Benjamin as a “training atlas” of physiognomic perception, Antlitz der Zeit was an ambitious attempt to portray the diversity and the structure of German society using class, gender, age, occupation, and social background as distinct categories of a rigid and neutral classification system.

Both Karl Blossfeldt’s and August Sander’s typologies were fundamental for Bernd Becher (1931-2007) and Hilla Becher (1934-2015) when, at the end of the fifties, they began an enormous and lifelong documentation and preservation project of industrial architecture. In 1971, they described the “industrial constructions” as “objects, not motifs”. They stated that “the information we want to provide is only created through the sequence, through the juxtaposition of similar or different objects with the same function”. Their black-and-white monuments, or “anonymous sculptures”, isolated against a monochromatic sky, centered, framed in the same format and arranged in a block, became an essential reference for American and European Post-Minimalist and Conceptual artists. They also represented a rich heritage for younger generations of German artists and photographers, such as Andreas Gursky (b. 1955), Candida Höfer (b. 1944), Simone Nieweg (b. 1962), Thomas Ruff (b. 1958) and Thomas Struth (b. 1954), who studied at the Academy in Düsseldorf in the class led by Bernd and Hilla Becher from 1976.

Hans-Peter Feldmann (1941-2023), internationally recognised for his fundamental contribution to conceptual art, traced a complementary trajectory in German photography. In his works, he documented everyday objects and historical events and combined deadpan humor with a systematic approach to accumulating, cataloguing, and rearranging elements of contemporary visual culture. In his series, he invented personal yet very political typologies and adopted a deliberate snapshot approach with a commercial aesthetic. For his work Alle Kleider einer Frau (All the Clothes of a Woman, 1975), he took 35mm-format photographs of underwear, hosiery, T-shirts, dresses, trousers, skirts, socks, and shoes, all hanging on hangers on the wall or laid on dark fabric. With his project Die Toten 1967-1993 (The Dead 1967-1993, 1996-1998), he paid homage to individuals murdered in the context of the political and terroristic movements in Post-War Germany. As pointed out by Susanne Pfeffer, “With his typologies, he emphasised the equal value of all photographs, their image sources and motifs, and underscored the de-hierarchisation inherent in every typology.”

In his apparently random collection of found, personal or pornographic images, press clippings, and historical photos of Nazi concentration camps, the Red Army Faction and German reunification, a “private album” named Atlas (1962 – present), Gerhard Richter (b. 1932) seemed to deny or challenge the very idea of typology. Instead, he took the principle of equivalence between images and their trivialization process to the limits, creating a jarring contrast and an acute awareness of a repressed collective memory.

In the seventies and eighties, in a dialectic relationship with the artistic lessons of the Bechers, Gursky, Höfer, Ruff, and Struth progressively abandoned the radicalism and black- and-white purism of their professors. They explored the colorful dominance of banality in their series of individual or family portraits, monumental and detailed city views, and spectacular documentation of cultural or tourist sites, generating a plethora of contemporary and conflicting typologies.

In the late seventies and early eighties, multimedia artist Isa Genzken (b. 1948) engaged in a direct dialogue with the photographic medium. In 1979, she created a series entitled Hi-Fi that featured advertisements of avant-garde Japanese stereo equipment, organising them in an imaginary commercial catalog. The second series entitled Ohr (Ear) (1980) depicted, in large-scale colour close-ups, the ears of random women Genzken photographed on the streets of New York City. She transferred the traditional portrait genre to physiognomic detail and ironically investigating the absolute singularity and infinite individual differentiation the photographic portrait can record.

An illustrated book, published by Fondazione Prada and designed by Zak Group, accompanies the exhibition “Typologien: Photography in 20th-century Germany”. It includes an introduction by Miuccia Prada, President and Director of Fondazione Prada, a text by the exhibition curator Susanne Pfeffer and three essays by renowned international art historians and curators Benjamin Buchloh, Tom Holert, and Renée Mussai.

Press release from Fondazione Prada

Installation view of the exhibition Typologien: Photography in 20th-century Germany at Fondazione Prada, Milan showing the work of August Sander

August Sander (German, 1876-1964)
Sekretärin beim Westdeutschen Rundfunk in Köln [Secretary at West German Radio in Cologne]
1931-1950s
Gelatin silver print
Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur, Cologne
© Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur – August Sander Archive, Cologne; SIAE, Roma, 2025

The series that August Sander dedicated to women is perhaps where the idea of categorising an archetype or social type shows the cracks most visibly. Whether it is an architect’s companion, an industrialist’s wife, or a high society lady, in Sander’s images the individuality of the female subject, in dress and posture, always prevails over type. And even when the subjects display characteristics that could be traced back to their class, origin, or occupation – such as the secretary who smokes – all the women depicted, from the sculptor to the photographer or the gym teacher, express ‘their own’ individuality. This is most evident when comparing the portraits of women with those of civil servants, whose gazes already show a serial uniformity associated with their positions.

Exhibition text from the Fondazione Prada by Cord Riechelmann

Erich Sander for August Sander’s studio
Politischer Häftling [Political Prisoner]
1941-1944 (print date late 1940s)
Menschen des 20. Jahrhunderts, 44a Politische Gefangene. [44a Political prisoners]
Gelatin silver print
Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur, Cologne
© Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur, Cologne – August Sander Archive, Cologne; SIAE, Roma, 2025

In 1935, Erich Sander, August Sander’s son, was sensationally put on trial and sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment for subversive activities. He served most of his sentence in Siegburg Prison, where he worked as the prison’s photographer. Determined to continue his resistance activities even in prison, he did not limit himself to taking ‘official’ photographs. He convinced his fellow prisoners to show him the scars of torture and have their portraits taken. Those photographs seemed to him to be in line with his father’s work. He had learned his trade from his father and worked with him before his imprisonment. He stayed in close contact with his parents during his ten years of imprisonment, and through them, managed to get many of those images out of the prison, leaving a valuable record of Nazi atrocities. Due to a misdiagnosis and lack of medical treatment during his imprisonment, Erich Sander died in 1944, six months before the end of his sentence.

Exhibition text from the Fondazione Prada by Cord Riechelmann

Installation view of the exhibition Typologien: Photography in 20th-century Germany at Fondazione Prada, Milan showing photographs by Thomas Struth with at left, The Richter Family 1, Cologne 2002; and at right, The Consolandi Family, Milan 1996

Thomas Struth (German, b. 1954) 'The Richter Family 1, Cologne' 2002 (installation view)

Thomas Struth (German, b. 1954)
The Richter Family 1, Cologne (installation view)
2002
C-print
Courtesy of the artist

Thomas Struth (German, b. 1954)
The Richter Family 1, Cologne
2002
C-print
Courtesy of the artist

Thomas Struth (German, b. 1954) 'The Consolandi Family, Milan' 1996 (installation view)

Thomas Struth (German, b. 1954)
The Consolandi Family, Milan (installation view)
1996
C-print
Courtesy of the artist

Installation view of the exhibition Typologien: Photography in 20th-century Germany at Fondazione Prada, Milan showing Thomas Ruff portraits

Thomas Ruff (German, b. 1958)
Porträt (Pia Stadtbäumer)
1988
C-print laminated on acrylic glass
MUSEUM MMK FÜR MODERNE KUNST, Frankfurt
© Thomas Ruff, by SIAE 2025 Photo by Axel Schneider, Frankfurt am Main

Between 1977 and 1985, Thomas Ruff studied with Bernd Becher at the Art Academy in Düsseldorf, where he himself has been teaching photography since 2000. During the 1980s, he photographed people from his circle of acquaintances in a series of identically framed shots. With the subjects portrayed in a half-length pose against a neutral background, the images are striking for their unusually large size. Every detail, every pore, and every imperfection in the skin is visible in the faces of the subjects, whose names Ruff also provides. The strictness of the composition, the uniform lighting, and the impassive gaze of the people portrayed give the images an objective and neutral atmosphere. What formally appears detached and unemotional immediately raises questions about the subject portrayed: who is this person? What does he or she do in life? With this series, Ruff challenges the conventions of the traditional portrait, encouraging the viewer to question not only the identity of the subject, but also the role of the photographer and the meaning of the portrait itself.

Exhibition text from the Fondazione Prada by Cord Riechelmann

Thomas Ruff (German, b. 1958)
Porträt (Simone Buch)
1988
C-print laminated on acrylic glass
MUSEUM MMK FÜR MODERNE KUNST, Frankfurt
© Thomas Ruff, by SIAE 2025 Photo by Axel Schneider, Frankfurt am Main

Installation view of the exhibition Typologien: Photography in 20th-century Germany at Fondazione Prada, Milan showing at left, Jochen Lempert’s The Skins of Alca Impennis 1992-2022; and at right, Thomas Ruff’s Portrait of Pia Stadtbäumer and Portrait of Simone Buch both 1988

Jochen Lempert (German, b. 1958) 'The Skins of Alca Impennis' 1992-2022 (detail)

Jochen Lempert (German, b. 1958)
The Skins of Alca Impennis (detail)
1992-2022
Gelatin silver prints on Bartya paper
54 parts
Courtesy of Jochen Lempert, BQ, Berlin, and ProjecteSD, Barcelona

The fifty-four profiles of the Alca impennis (the great auk), a large flightless bird that became extinct after its last sighting in 1852, are part of a project that took Jochen Lempert more than a decade to complete. Using the same methods, Lempert photographed the profiles of many of the seventy-eight specimens of the Alca impennis preserved in natural history collections. Having become increasingly rare due to hunting, the Alca impennis was increasingly coveted by collectors, so the skins of this species fetched very high prices. The presence of such a large number of stuffed specimens in collections was therefore one of the causes of this species’ extinction.

Lempert’s portraits also hint at a more significant phenomenon. Very marked individual variations can be found in the appearance of individual specimens of a species, testifying to the great degree of differentiation within the species. Therefore, the concept of species, or its depiction in a scientific classification book, provides something akin to an ‘ideal type,’ rather than a true representation of the actual variety found in real life.

Exhibition text from the Fondazione Prada by Cord Riechelmann

Installation view of the exhibition Typologien: Photography in 20th-century Germany at Fondazione Prada, Milan showing the work of Rosemarie Trockel, Elena I & II, 1993/2025, Maculata I & II, 1993/2025, Mela I & II, 1993/2025

The portraits of the dogs Mela, Elena, and Maculata grew out of Rosemarie Trockel’s interest in animals and the relationship between animals and humans, a subject she has been working with for a long time. From the drawings of monkeys, which represent a kind of monument to the profound melancholy of primates kept in captivity by humans, to A House for Pigs and People / Ein Haus føur Schweine und Menschen created with Carsten Höller for documenta X in 1997, Trockel’s exploration of the relationship between humans and animals involves various forms of expression and themes. However, in this case, the double portraits of the three dogs, photographed frontally and in profile, indicate a further correlation. If “every animal is an artist,” as Trockel has stated, these portraits seem to call these roles into question: who directs and who stages who? Does the artist portray the dogs or do the dogs direct the artist?

Exhibition text from the Fondazione Prada by Cord Riechelmann

Installation view of the exhibition Typologien: Photography in 20th-century Germany at Fondazione Prada, Milan showing at left, the work of Ursula Böhmer and her series All Ladies – Cows in Europe, 1998-2011; and at right, the work of Isa Genzken and her series Ohr, 1980

Ursula Böhmer (German, b. 1965) 'Highland Grampians / Scotland [All Ladies – Cows in Europe]' 2011

Ursula Böhmer (German, b. 1965)
Highland Grampians / Scotland
2011
From the series All Ladies – Cows in Europe, 1998-2011
Gelatin silver print on Baryta paper
© Ursula Böhmer

Getting a cow to stand still in a frontal pose and look towards the camera, as Ursula Böhmer managed to do with a Highlander in the Grampian Mountains, is certainly not an easy task, but one that requires patience and trust, one of the prerequisites for this project. Between 1998 and 2011, Böhmer visited 25 European countries to photograph specimens of cattle breeds in the places where their breeding history began. These breeds, many of them at risk of extinction, had to be portrayed in their own environments in order to illustrate how these environments had influenced their appearance. What emerged was a series of images of docile animals portrayed in often harsh landscapes, which at the same time document the ongoing conditioning by the environment on the forms of life also in breeding conditions.

Exhibition text from the Fondazione Prada by Cord Riechelmann

Isa Genzken (German, b. 1948)
Ohr
1980
Colour C-print in artist’s frame
Galerie Buchholz Courtesy the artist and Galerie Buchholz
© Isa Genzken, by SIAE 2025

In 1980, Isa Genzken took a series of close-ups of the ears of women she encountered on the streets of New York. The typical portraiture approach used in the photographs exalts and enhances the characteristics of the represented subject, on the one hand, but at the same time, with the anonymity of the immortalized figure, creates a contrast. In the course of the evolution of the human species, the ear has lost its value in terms of expressive power. While in many animal species ears still play an important role in expressing emotions, in the human being they are stiffly positioned at the sides of the head and no longer react to emotional states along with the facial muscles. Georg Simmel, a sociologist of the senses, sees the ear as merely a passive appendage in the human appearance. For Simmel, the ear is the selfish organ par excellence, which simply takes without giving. Genzken contradicts this verdict, because the ears she photographs, with all the ornaments attached, eloquently express individual differences.

Exhibition text from the Fondazione Prada by Cord Riechelmann

Isa Genzken (German, b. 1948)
Front Operation
1979
B/w photograph
Generali Foundation Collection – Permanent Loan to the Museum der Moderne Salzburg
© Generali Foundation / Isa Genzken, by SIAE 2025

In her first institutional exhibition, presented at the Museum Haus Lange in Krefeld in 1979, alongside sculptures and drawings, Isa Genzken exhibited a photography series dedicated to the latest and most expensive Hi-Fi systems. She created it by cutting out ads for turntables and amplifiers from international magazines and then photographing them. As she told photographer Wolfgang Tillmans in an interview, those advertisements showcased some of the most advanced technology of the time, highlighting cutting-edge design. Genzken also stated that a sculpture should be at least as modern as those devices. Her photography series dedicated to Hi-Fi systems can therefore be interpreted as a conceptual and aesthetic investigation of whether or not her sculptures and works could be compared to the everyday beauty of a stereo system.

Exhibition text from the Fondazione Prada by Cord Riechelmann

Sigmar Polke (German, 1941-2010)
Handschuhpalme (Glove palm tree)
1966
From the series … Höhere Wesen Befehlen, 1968 (… Higher beings Command, 1968)
13 stampe offset su carta artistica / 13 offset prints on art paper
MUSEUM MMK FÜR MODERNE KUNST, Frankfurt am Main

Lotte Jacobi (American born Poland, 1896-1990)
Folkwang-Auriga-Verlag, Orch 152. Neottia nidus avis. Vogel-Nestwurz, einzelne Blüte [Bird’s-nest orchid, single flower]
c. 1930
Gelatin silver print
Berlinische Galerie – Museum of Modern Art, Photography and Architecture
© Lotte Jacobi

Lotte Jacobi, known for her portraits of intellectuals including Martin Buber and W.E.B du Bois, artists such as Marc Chagall, and poets including Robert Frost and Vladimir Mayakovsky, created a series of plant portraits in 1930. Apart from the individual flowers of the Orchis latifolia, the broad-leaved helleborine or orchid, and Neottia nidus avis, the bird’s nest, she photographed an orchid in its entirety. The names of the plants, which Jacobi, like Karl Blossfeldt, makes explicit in the titles of the photographs, are an integral part of the unique poetics of the subjects. With her plant portraits, Jacobi followed in the tradition of the 1920s workers’ movement’s vision of nature. In fact, Jacobi was a member of the Vereinigung der Arbeiterfotografen Deutschlands (Union of German Labor Photographers), an organisation of photographers who documented the social life and struggles of the German working class.

Exhibition text from the Fondazione Prada by Cord Riechelmann

Thomas Struth (German, b. 1954)
People on the Street, Düsseldorf 1974-78
1974-1978
Gelatin silver print
Atelier Thomas Struth, Berlin
© Thomas Struth

In his photography, Thomas Struth has always been interested in the streets, squares, and houses of cities that consciously or unconsciously shape our experience, as well as that of the passers-by who walk through them. The study People on the Street, Düsseldorf 1974-78 explores the movements and figures of individuals passing in front of the camera lens. The subjects are never shot at close range. While some facial features are blurred in movement, others are clearly visible. Even if they are differentiated by their jackets, coats, or bags, all the subjects have a directional gait in common. No one is simply ‘here’: they all have an intention, which each person pursues in their own way.

Exhibition text from the Fondazione Prada by Cord Riechelmann

Umbo (Otto Umbehr) (German, 1902-1980)
Untitled (Kindergarten)
1928
Gelatin silver print
Berlinische Galerie – Museum of Modern Art, Photography and Architecture, Berlin
Permanent loan from the Federal Republic of Germany represented by the Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media

Umbo – born Otto Umbehr – found his expressive tool in the camera in 1926. In the early 1920s he studied at the Bauhaus with the intention of becoming a painter, until Walter Gropius, the director of the Institute, expelled him from the school for improper conduct. He then found in photography the medium that allowed him to work with his distinctive play of light and shadow. Photographs such as Unheimliche Straße (Eerie Street, 1928), Am Strand (auch Strandleben) (On the beach [also beach life], 1930) and Ohne Titel (Kindergarten) (Untitled [Kindergarten], 1930) epitomize his artistic innovations. There is nothing random in these images: everything has been composed. Umbo’s photographs are the opposite of snapshots or shots that capture the emotion of a moment; they express a formal intent without overpowering reality. Therefore, with all their poetry, they retain an abstract component. What clearly surfaces in this primacy of composition is his connection to the Bauhaus philosophy, which emphasised design and structure over emotion or spontaneity.

Exhibition text from the Fondazione Prada by Cord Riechelmann

Fondazione Prada Milan
Largo Isarco 2, within the Podium spaces
20139 MILAN
Phone: +39 02 5666 2611

Opening hours:
Mon-Sun, 10am – 7pm

Fondazione Prada Milan website

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Exhibition: ‘Tata Ronkholz: Designed World. A Retrospective’ at the Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur, Cologne in collaboration with VAN HAM Art Estate and Stadtmuseum Düsseldorf

Exhibition dates: 14th March – 13th July, 2025

Curator: Gabriele Conrath-Scholl, Director of SK Stiftung Kultur

Tata Ronkholz (German, 1940-1997)
Imbissstube Düsseldorf-Rath, Linienstraße 141 (Snack bar Düsseldorf-Rath, Linienstraße 141)
1977
© VAN HAM Art Estate: Tata Ronkholz, 2025

The work of Tata Ronkholz belongs to the Düsseldorf School of Photography which refers to a group of photographers who studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in the mid 1970s with teachers Bernd and Hiller Becher – whose conceptual rationale for an objective excellence for art photography emerged from the German Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) modern realist movement of the 1920s.

“This [objective] conceptualisation opens up an expanded terrain of becoming for photography … The work of these artists is vital to an understanding of the place of photography within the observation, construction and taxonomy of contemporary culture and its pictorial representation.”1

Ronkholz’s photographs are images of infinite focus … where the attention of the photographer is tightly controlled as to the conceptualisation of the image and the constructed reality that is being re/presented.

Ronkholz was aware of the importance of these ephemeral structures, the importance of documenting them, these industrial gates, kiosks and small shops, which arise and then are gone. Here today, gone tomorrow (much like life itself). “These often small, sometimes freestanding structures, with their designs, surroundings, product offerings, and advertisements, serve as vivid testaments to everyday culture.”2

And testaments to the transitory nature of contemporary culture.

I love these photographs of everyday things for their clear seeing, their frontality, their directness, which allows the viewer to address a reality which might have passed them by as they walk the streets in a dream.

Look. Awake.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

1/ Marcus Bunyan commenting on the exhibition Photographs Become Pictures. The Becher Class at the Städel Museum, Frankfurt, April – August, 2017

2/ Text from the Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur, Cologne website

Many thankx to Die Photographische Sammlung/ SK Stiftung Kultur, Cologne for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Tata Ronkholz (German, 1940-1997)
Palazzo dei Vescovi (Museo dell’Antico), Pistoia
1975
© VAN HAM Art Estate: Tata Ronkholz, 2025

Tata Ronkholz (German, 1940-1997)
Santa Maria Assunta, Dom, Volterra
1975
© VAN HAM Art Estate: Tata Ronkholz, 2025

An exhibition by Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur in collaboration with the Stadtmuseum Düsseldorf and VAN HAM Art Estate

The artist and photographer Tata Ronkholz (1940-1997) will be honoured in the spring with her first major retrospective. She is one of the first members of the class taught by Bernd Becher at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Due to her early death Ronkholz’s work has long been recognised only partly even though her oeuvre reflects a profound and continuous engagement with multiple themes. Ronkholz is best known for her series of kiosks and small shops in the Rhineland and Ruhr area, which she began in 1977. These often small, sometimes freestanding structures, with their designs, surroundings, product offerings, and advertisements, serve as vivid testaments to everyday culture. Additionally, she created a photographic series documenting various industrial gates. Together with her fellow student Thomas Struth, she documented Düsseldorf’s Rheinhafen district from 1979 to 1981 before its transformation into the so-called “Medienhafen”.

The exhibition will also feature surprising insights into Ronkholz’s early works as a freelance product designer and photographs of architectural forms taken in Italy. An accompanying catalog will be published.

Text from the Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur, Cologne website

Tata Ronkholz (German, 1940-1997)
ECT. Rotterdam / Prinses Beatrixhaven, Reeweg
1977
© VAN HAM Art Estate: Tata Ronkholz, 2025

Tata Ronkholz (German, 1940-1997)
Trinkhalle, Ratingen, Volkardeyer Straße 25
1977
© VAN HAM Art Estate: Tata Ronkholz, 2025

Tata Ronkholz (German, 1940-1997)
Trinkhalle, Düsseldorf, Sankt-Franziskus-Straße 107
1977
© VAN HAM Art Estate: Tata Ronkholz, 2025

Tata Ronkholz (German, 1940-1997)
Imbissstube Köln-Mülheim, Berliner Straße 120 (Snack bar Cologne-Mülheim, Berliner Straße 120)
1979
© VAN HAM Art Estate: Tata Ronkholz, 2025

Thomas Struth (German, b. 1954)
Rheinhafen (Berger Hafen v. d. VHS), Düsseldorf
1979
From the series Rheinhafen Düsseldorf 1979-1981
© Thomas Struth

Thomas Struth (German, b. 1954)
Getreidespeicher, Rhenus seitlich (Grain silo, Rhenus side)
1979
From the series Rheinhafen Düsseldorf 1979-1981
© Thomas Struth

Thomas Struth (German, b. 1954)
Zollhafen (Customs port)
1979
From the series Rheinhafen Düsseldorf 1979-1981
© Thomas Struth

Tata Ronkholz (German, 1940-1997)
Lagerhalle mit Löwenwappen (Warehouse with lion crest)
1979
From the series Rheinhafen Düsseldorf 1979-1981
© VAN HAM Art Estate: Tata Ronkholz, 2025

This retrospective is the first comprehensive tribute to the versatile work of Tata Ronkholz (born 1940 in Krefeld; died 1997 in Hürth-Kendenich, née Maria Juliana Roswitha Tölle). The exhibition features works by the photographer, product designer, and interior architect who was one of the early students of the Becher class at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Among her fellow students were renowned artists such as Candida Höfer, Axel Hütte, Thomas Ruff, Thomas Struth, and Petra Wunderlich. Ronkholz’s estate, acquired in 2011 by VAN HAM Art Estate in Cologne, forms the basis of the exhibition alongside the holdings of Stadtmuseum Düsseldorf. Significant contributions have also been made from the in-house collections of Die Photographische Sammlung/ SK Stiftung Kultur and from other lenders.

The retrospective finds its stylistically fitting context in the Photographic Collection, with the on-site Bernd and Hilla Becher Archive. Ronkholz’s works follow in the tradition of objective, documentary photography – a tradition decisively shaped by the Bechers. Her work is characterised by clear compositions, a serial approach, and a documentary focus on architectural structures and everyday architectures. Using her large-format camera, she produced sharply defined and realistic photographs in which the subject matter, rather than the photographer’s personal signature, takes center stage. Her work is predominantly in black and white, although color images also appear, demonstrating her ambition to engage with the emerging artistic colour photography in Germany during the 1970s and 80s.

Tata Ronkholz became known for her appealing series of kiosks and small shops that capture typical moments of urban everyday culture. These were photographed between 1977 and 1985, particularly in neighborhoods of Cologne and Düsseldorf, in the Ruhr area, as well as in Leverkusen and Krefeld. For example, the kiosk in Cologne-Nippes – with its ice cream and newspaper advertisements and vending machines for chewing gum and cigarettes – is captured in a straightforward, unadorned manner that is as amusing and engaging as the boutique in Cologne-Mülheim on Berliner Straße 120, where, according to the store sign, alongside clothing, “Third World records” were also offered. Many details in the images evoke personal memories – perhaps a shopping trip to a Turkish grocery store or an ice cream sundae at Eiscafé Fortuna. The photographs illustrate the transformation of product offerings, decoration, and advertising in urban spaces. The depicted details remind viewers of their own surroundings and provide insight into the shopping habits of past decades.

In this way, the subjects in Tata Ronkholz’s work indirectly testify to social, cultural, and economic change while also revealing how the personal tastes of shop owners influenced the design of these small retail outlets. Viewed in this light, her images offer a vivid basis for a sociological examination of our own species, addressing fundamental societal questions: What needs did we have and do we have? What did we need and do we need to live? How do we shape our surroundings? What role do images play?

Another significant series is dedicated to industrial gates, photographed between 1977 and 1985. The simple black-and-white images of these gates, with their grids and frameworks, offer glimpses into the interiors of industrial areas, their graphic structure appearing almost abstract. In the photographs, the gates function as interfaces between private and public space, between interior and exterior, and between activity and calm. Their aesthetic, reminiscent of abstract artworks, imbues the everyday with a new significance.

A particularly impressive documentary series is the body of work on the Düsseldorf Rhine Harbor, which Ronkholz began in 1979 together with her then fellow student Thomas Struth. The project originated from the planned redevelopment of the historic harbor area – a site that, in its original form, was considered an industrial area of significant urban historical and architectural importance. Struth observed the initial changes from his studio and convinced Tata Ronkholz to join the project. Together, they set out to document the harbor in its entirety, capturing its historic buildings, technical installations, and operational structures. They recorded façades, interiors, silos, warehouses, crane structures, and harbor basins in carefully composed images, before these elements partially disappeared or were fundamentally altered during the restructuring. The photographs strikingly showcase the industrial architecture of the 19th and 20th centuries while simultaneously highlighting the transformation from a center of commerce and production to today’s media harbor. Overall, this critically composed documentation of the Düsseldorf Rhine Harbor stands as an exemplary case for the complex issues of urban redevelopment in other locations as well.

In addition, the exhibition presents works that highlight Ronkholz’s achievements as a product designer, including depictions of geometrically shaped furniture and lighting fixtures as well as designs for office and cafeteria furniture. Between 1961 and 1965, she studied at the Werkkunstschule Krefeld with a focus on furniture design and subsequently worked as a freelance designer until 1977. Her designs are characterised by clear forms and functional elegance, as exemplified by the “Spherical Light” developed in collaboration with Adolf Luther, featuring a convex glass element. Finally, the retrospective also presents early photographs of architectural forms created in 1975/76 in Italy and France. Even in these works, her strong affinity for the aspects of the designed world across various areas of life becomes apparent.

Accompanying the exhibition is the catalog Tata Ronkholz: Designed World. A Retrospective published by Schirmer / Mosel Verlag, featuring texts by renowned authors (ger/en). The exhibition is supported by the City of Düsseldorf and VAN HAM Cologne.

Press release from Die Photographische Sammlung/ SK Stiftung Kultur, Cologne

Tata Ronkholz (German, 1940-1997)
Rheinhafen Düsseldorf, Technik und Kräne (Rhine port Düsseldorf, technology and cranes)
Undated
From the series Rheinhafen Düsseldorf 1979-1981
© VAN HAM Art Estate: Tata Ronkholz, 2025

Tata Ronkholz (German, 1940-1997)
Im Düsseldorfer Hafen (In Düsseldorf harbour)
Around 1980
From the series Rheinhafen Düsseldorf 1979-1981
© VAN HAM Art Estate: Tata Ronkholz, 2025

Tata Ronkholz (German, 1940-1997)
Friseur, Köln-Ehrenfeld, Philippstraße 30 (Barber, Köln-Ehrenfeld, Philippstraße 30)
1980
© VAN HAM Art Estate: Tata Ronkholz, 2025

Tata Ronkholz (German, 1940-1997)
Boutique, Köln-Mülheim, Berliner Straße 120
1980
© VAN HAM Art Estate: Tata Ronkholz, 2025

Tata Ronkholz (German, 1940-1997)
Trinkhalle, Köln-Nippes, Merheimer Straße 294
1983
© VAN HAM Art Estate: Tata Ronkholz, 2025

Tata Ronkholz (German, 1940-1997)
Firma Tromm, Tor Gleisanschluss, Köln-Niehl (Tromm Company, Gate Rail Connection, Cologne-Niehl)
1983
© VAN HAM Art Estate: Tata Ronkholz, 2025

Tata Ronkholz (German, 1940-1997)
Firma ROW, Hafen, Tor Nr. 0930, Wesseling-Godorf
1984
© VAN HAM Art Estate: Tata Ronkholz, 2025

Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur
Im Mediapark 7, 50670 Köln
Phone: +49 221/888 95

Opening hours:
The ongoing exhibitions are open daily from 2pm to 7pm. With the exception of being closed on Wednesdays.

Die Photographische Sammlung website

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Exhibitions: ‘Ricordati di me. I post mortem della collezione M. G. Jacob’ and ‘Attraverso la luce. I primi 20 anni della fotografia nelle collezioni della Fototeca’ at Biblioteca Panizzi, Reggio Emilia, Italy

Exhibition dates: 24th April – 5th July, 2025

‘Remember Me. Postmortems from the M. G. Jacob Collection’ and ‘Through Light. The First 20 Years of Photography in the Photo Library Collections’

Postmortem curators: Monica Leoni, Elisabeth Sciarretta with Laura Gasparini and Michael G. Jacob

Attraverso la luce curators: Monica Leoni, Elisabeth Sciarretta with Laura Gasparini

'Ricordati di me. I post mortem della collezione M. G. Jacob'

Sleeping beauty

“When I am dead and in my grave

And all my bones are rotten.

When this you see remember me

Lest I should be forgotten.”

This is the first posting on Art Blart on the phenomenon of postmortem photography for exhibitions on this subject are few and far between.

Any photograph is a “little death” which “refers to the concept of “la petite mort” or “the little death,” a French idiom and euphemism for the momentary loss of consciousness or breath, often associated with orgasm, but also used to describe the act of freezing a moment in time through photography. This concept suggests that photography, by capturing a specific moment, essentially stops time and thus, in a way, creates a small, contained death of that moment.” (Google AI Overview)

All photographs (and especially postmortem photography where the deceased are memorialised through images) can be seen as “memento mori”, a Latin phrase meaning “remember you must die,” reminding us that of the impermanence of life – for photographs “capture a moment in time, forever preserving a fleeting instant and highlighting the passage of time and the inevitability of death.” (Google AI Overview)

As Susan Sontag observed, “All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability.” (On Photography)

Victorians were faced with the vicissitudes of fortune, and death at any age was a common occurrence due to illness with no antibiotics available to treat the many lethal diseases. They became stoic in the face of the impermanence of life, stoic in the face of death and through photography, sought to record into permanence the likenesses of the departed (the beloved), so that they could remember and honour them. Photographs thus became symbols of mortality which encouraged reflection on the meaning and fleetingness of life…

But unlike a photographic self-portrait, where a human looks at their image (in which they are dead) which reminds them about their physical death in the future, an anterior future of which death is the stake (and the prick of discovery of this equivalence)1 – in postmortem photography the little death and the actual death are as one for the anterior future can never be viewed by the subject of the photograph (they are dead), a separation only revived in the heart and mind of another.

Through postmortem photography the deceased live in an interstitial space, forever brought back to life in the eyes of the viewer as we reawaken and reactivate their spirit in the world. I was once here and I am again. Remember me.

Thus the euphemism “sleeping” is appropriate (sleeping beauty awakened once more with a kiss), as the viewer transcends time bringing past dead back into living world – where past, present and future coalesce into single point in time – their death and our death connected through the gaze and the knowledge of our discontinuity. Eons contracted into an eternal moment.2

In this expanded-specific moment in time, through an awareness of our own dis/continuity, what we are doing is talking about something that is remarkable. We are moving towards a language that defines the human condition…

Dr Marcus Bunyan

1/ Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (La Chambre claire), Section 39, 1980

2/ Marcus Bunyan. “This is not my favourite photograph,” part of What makes a great photograph? at the Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP), Fitzroy, Wednesday 5th December 2012 [Online] Cited 27/06/2025

Many thankx to the Biblioteca Panizzi and Michael G. Jacob for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Unknown photographer (American)
A sleeping man
c. 1846
Daguerreotype
Title given by the collector

Unknown photographer (American) 'A sleeping man' c. 1846 (detail)

Unknown photographer (American)
A sleeping man (detail)
c. 1846
Daguerreotype
Title given by the collector

Ricordati di me

Una esposizione dedicata alla collezione di Michael G. Jacob, alla riscoperta della fotografia “post mortem”: la realizzazione di immagini commemorative di familiari defunti per genitori, amici e parenti era un aspetto significativo del lavoro quotidiano di molti studi fotografici vittoriani.

An exhibition dedicated to the collection of Michael G. Jacob, to the rediscovery of “post mortem” photography: the creation of commemorative images of deceased family members for parents, friends and relatives was a significant aspect of the daily work of many Victorian photographic studios.

Text translated by Google Translate from the Biblioteca Panizzi website

Unknown photographer (American)
A sleeping girl
c. 1846
Daguerreotype
Title given by the collector

Unknown photographer (American)
A woman with long fingernails, bured teeth & cut flowers
c. 1846
Daguerreotype
Title given by the collector

Unknown photographer (American) 'A woman with long fingernails, bured teeth & cut flowers' c. 1846 (detail)

Unknown photographer (American)
A woman with long fingernails, bured teeth & cut flowers (detail)
c. 1846
Daguerreotype
Title given by the collector

Unknown photographer (American)
Young girl holding a daguerrotype
c. 1846
Daguerreotype
Title given by the collector

L’esposizione dedicata alla collezione di Michael G. Jacob alla riscoperta della fotografia “post mortem” nell’epoca vittoriana, ha l’intento di illustrare il legame di affezione e rispetto di quella cultura che indusse i vivi a ricordare i propri defunti, analizzando come, dopo gli anni Quaranta del XIX secolo, la fotografia sia diventata centrale anche nel modo di sentire e vivere il lutto.

La pratica di raffigurare il volto del defunto è antichissima e la fotografia si innesta in questa tradizione, modificando il modo di vivere e comunicare il lutto. Come tutte le tradizioni più o meno radicate, anche nella colta ed evoluta Europa le esequie e il lutto seguono consuetudini e usanze che si sono perdute o modificate nel tempo. Il galateo del lutto, in epoca vittoriana, è uno degli aspetti per noi meno comprensibili ma più affascinanti, i cui codici, nel tempo, sono andati perduti o si sono radicalmente trasformati.

I rituali funebri, così come venivano concepiti dai vittoriani, si manifestavano in comportamenti, abbigliamento e usanze che spesso appaiono eccessivi per la sensibilità moderna e hanno oggi bisogno di essere decodificati per comprenderne la vasta iconografia. L’antropologia e la sociologia ci hanno spiegato quali reazioni emotive e formali l’essere umano ha avuto nel corso del tempo di fronte alla morte e al corpo dei defunti, indotte dalla cultura a cui apparteniamo, mentre la fotografia contribuisce sostanzialmente a documentare questa cultura del lutto.

The exhibition dedicated to the Michael G. Jacob collection and the rediscovery of “post mortem” photography in the Victorian era, aims to illustrate the bond of affection and respect of that culture that induced the living to remember their dead, analysing how, after the 1840s, photography also became central to the way of feeling and experiencing mourning.

The practice of depicting the face of the deceased is very ancient and photography is grafted onto this tradition, modifying the way of experiencing and communicating mourning. Like all more or less rooted traditions, even in cultured and evolved Europe, funerals and mourning follow customs and habits that have been lost or modified over time. The etiquette of mourning, in the Victorian era, is one of the aspects that is least comprehensible to us but most fascinating, whose codes, over time, have been lost or have radically transformed.

Funeral rituals, as conceived by the Victorians, manifested themselves in behaviors, clothing and customs that often seem excessive for modern sensibilities and today need to be decoded to understand their vast iconography. Anthropology and sociology have explained to us what emotional and formal reactions human beings have had over time in front of death and the body of the deceased, induced by the culture to which we belong, while photography contributes substantially to documenting this culture of mourning.

Text translated by Google Translate from the Biblioteca Panizzi website

Unknown photographer (American)
A mother, daughter and dead infant
c. 1848
Daguerreotype retouched in colour
Title given by the collector

Unknown photographer (American)
A family group
1853
Daguerreotype
Date in handwritten characters on the lower edge of the daguerreotype: “July 15 1853”
Title given by the collector

Unknown photographer (American) 'A family group' 1853 (detail)

Unknown photographer (American)
A family group (detail)
1853
Daguerreotype
Date in handwritten characters on the lower edge of the daguerreotype: “July 15 1853”
Title given by the collector

Unknown photographer (American)
Sleeping baby
c. 1860
Ambrotype
Title given by the collector

Unknown photographer (American) 'Sleeping baby' c. 1860 (detail)

Unknown photographer (American)
Sleeping baby (detail)
c. 1860
Ambrotype
Title given by the collector

Unknown photographer (American)
A Sleeping child
c. 1860
Ferrotype
Title given by the collector

Attraverso la luce

In occasione di Fotografia Europea, la Biblioteca Panizzi propone una mostra dedicata ai primi 20 anni della fotografia nelle collezioni della Fototeca attraverso l’esposizione di fotografie su carta salata, albumine, e dagherrotipi, tra cui la prestigiosa collezione di Michael G. Jacob.

On the occasion of Fotografia Europea, the Panizzi Library presents an exhibition dedicated to the first 20 years of photography in the collections of the Photo Library through the display of photographs on salted paper, albumen, and daguerreotypes, including the prestigious collection of Michael G. Jacob.

Text translated by Google Translate from the Biblioteca Panizzi website

John Brown
Portrait of a Young Man
c. 1848
3 Daguerreotypes

John Brown
Portrait of a Young Man
c. 1848
Daguerreotype

La mostra presenta un percorso attraverso rari esempi di fotografie su carta salata e numerosi dagherrotipi, ambrotipi, ferrotipi e album delle collezioni della Fototeca della Bibliotecca Panizzi. Una narrazione, quindi, che ci portera indietro nel tempo, agli anni pionieristici della sperimentazione sceintifica attraverso la luce, la chimica e la trasformazione di materiali quali l’argento, per arrivare ali’arte del ritratto e del paesaggio e giungere a quel’oggetto di culto che e stata la fotografia delle origini.

The exhibition presents a journey through rare examples of photographs on salted paper and numerous daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, ferrotypes and albums from the collections of the Photo Library of the Panizzi Library. A narrative, therefore, that will take us back in time, to the pioneering years of scientific experimentation through light, chemistry and the transformation of materials such as silver, to arrive at the art of portraiture and landscape and reach that cult object that was the photography of the origins.

Text translated by Google Translate from the Biblioteca Panizzi website

Unknown photographer (American)
Dead child in his mother’s arms
c. 1850
Daguerreotype

Unknown photographer (American)
Girl holding a flower
c. 1850
Daguerreotype

Unknown photographer (American)
Freckled girl with daguerreotype
c. 1850
Daguerreotype retouched in colour

Unknown photographer (American)
Tinted woman
c. 1850
Daguerreotype retouched in colour

Unknown photographer (American)
Portrait of mother with child
c. 1850
Daguerreotype

La magia della luce è stata per secoli oggetto di importanti studi scientifici, ma ha affascinato anche e soprattutto il mondo dell’arte, oltre che la cultura popolare. La fotografia, attraverso i vari procedimenti storici, si inserisce in questo capitolo della storia visuale, intrecciandosi con arte, scienza e tecnologia, unite alla passione comune per la nascita di un nuovo e accattivante linguaggio. La mostra presenta un percorso attraverso gli esemplari che appartengono alla collezione di Michael G. Jacob, ultima acquisita grazie alla generosa donazione di questo importante collezionista e studioso, insieme a rari esempi di fotografie su carta salata e numerosi dagherrotipi, ambrotipi, ferrotipi e album delle collezioni della Fototeca della Biblioteca Panizzi. Una narrazione, quindi, che ci porterà indietro nel tempo, agli anni pionieristici della sperimentazione scientifica attraverso la luce, la chimica e la trasformazione di materiali quali l’argento, per arrivare all’arte del ritratto e del paesaggio e giungere a quell’oggetto di culto che è stata la fotografia delle origini.

The magic of light has been the subject of important scientific studies for centuries, but it has also fascinated the world of art, as well as popular culture. Photography, through its various historical processes, fits into this chapter of visual history, intertwining with art, science and technology, combined with a shared passion for the birth of a new and captivating language. The exhibition presents a journey through the specimens that belong to the collection of Michael G. Jacob, the last acquired thanks to the generous donation of this important collector and scholar, together with rare examples of photographs on salted paper and numerous daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, ferrotypes and albums from the collections of the Photo Library of the Panizzi Library. A narrative, therefore, that will take us back in time, to the pioneering years of scientific experimentation through light, chemistry and the transformation of materials such as silver, to arrive at the art of portraiture and landscape and reach that cult object that was early photography.

Text translated by Google Translate from the Biblioteca Panizzi website

Unknown photographer (American)
Coach in park
c. 1860
Ambrotype

Unknown photographer (American)
Portrait of women
c. 1860
Ferrotype

Unknown photographer (American)
Double vignette friends
c. 1860
Ferrotype

Unknown photographer (American)
Well dressed lady
c. 1880
Ambrotype

Biblioteca Panizzi
Via Luigi Carlo Farini, 3,
42121 Reggio Emilia RE, Italy

Opening hours:
Monday – Saturday, 9am – 7pm

Biblioteca Panizzi website

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Exhibition: ‘Beyond Symmetry: George Dureau’s Celebrations of the Human Form’ at the Bob Mizer Foundation, San Francisco

Exhibition dates: 6th March – 28th June, 2025

Curators: Dennis Bell, founder of the Bob Mizer Foundation, and De Kwok, Head of Public Programming

*PLEASE NOTE: THIS POSTING CONTAINS ART PHOTOGRAPHS OF MALE NUDITY – IF YOU DO NOT LIKE PLEASE DO NOT LOOK, FAIR WARNING HAS BEEN GIVEN*

George Dureau (American, 1930-2014)
Untitled
Nd
Vintage silver gelatin print

Celebrations of the Human Spirit

~ Honesty

~ ~ Integrity

~ ~ ~ Dignity

~ ~ ~ ~ Vulnerability

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Respect

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Love

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Friendship

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Sexuality

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Strength

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Beauty

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Form

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Humanism

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Identity

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Personality

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Presence

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Intimacy

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Nude

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Empathy

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Revelation

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Spirit

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Truth

I’ve been wanting to do a posting on the magnificent New Orleans photographer George Dureau’s work for a long while but because there are so few exhibitions of his photographs I have never had the opportunity – until now.

It’s a great pity that his work is not as recognised as that of his contemporaries, Peter Hujar and Robert Mapplethorpe. Indeed, you can still pick up an original Dureau in the secondhand art market for around $500 whereas Mapplethorpe’s photographs run into the many thousands.

His photographs are not romantic, certainly not sentimental. He was fascinated by the people he photographed, their truth. These are the stories he conceptualised, posed, lit and photographed, stories that emerged from his imagination, that revealed surprising things about his subjects.

Unlike the clinical formalism of Mapplethorpe, Dureau worked with a poetry that was always present. Indeed, there is something so eloquent and sincere about his photographs for in them the artist draws (Dureau was also a painter) the mysteries of the soul of his subjects.

Dureau’s response to the world and the photographs that emanate from that engagement are humanist in the best sense of the word, revealing his subjects in a direct way that emphasises an individual’s dignity, worth and capacity for self-realisation.

Thus, I feel his photographs are a celebration not just of the human form but more importantly, of the human spirit.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to Dennis Bell, Corbin Crable and the Bob Mizer Foundation for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

“I live a warm, involved humanist sort of life. There are lots of people passing through it. I have exciting experiences and learn things about people. They always go into my art. I cannot have an experience and it not go into my art.”

George Dureau

John H. Lawrence, HNOC emeritus director of museum programs and himself a fine-art photographer, said Dureau’s portraits reveal a tangible intimacy between photographer and subject.

“George respected the people he asked to sit for him,” said Lawrence. “I don’t say that from a knowledge, just from what the photographs show. The direct stare into the camera, it may have been at George’s direction. Even with the gaze directed in that fashion, you don’t get the kind of quality you see in these portraits unless there is a mutual respect between the photographer and the subject. There is a vibe there that is based on these two people having respect for each other as the photograph is made.”

John H. Lawrence quoted in Dave Walker. “The Intimate Eye of George Dureau,” on The Historic New Orleans Collection website, December 31, 2021 [Online] Cited 20/06/2025

This exhibition presents 25 evocative black-and-white portraits by George Dureau, capturing the resilience and vulnerability of his subjects – from athletes to marginalised individuals – against the vibrant cultural backdrop of New Orleans, where beauty and humanity converge in transformative ways.

Installation view of the exhibition Beyond Symmetry: George Dureau’s Celebrations of the Human Form at the Bob Mizer Foundation, San Francisco showing Dureau’s photograph Craig Blanchette, 1992

Installation views of the exhibition Beyond Symmetry: George Dureau’s Celebrations of the Human Form at the Bob Mizer Foundation, San Francisco showing Dureau’s photograph John Slate, Nd

Installation view of the exhibition Beyond Symmetry: George Dureau’s Celebrations of the Human Form at the Bob Mizer Foundation, San Francisco

Installation views of the exhibition Beyond Symmetry: George Dureau’s Celebrations of the Human Form at the Bob Mizer Foundation, San Francisco

The Bob Mizer Foundation proudly presents Beyond Symmetry: George Dureau’s Celebrations of the Human Form, an exhibition showcasing 25 evocative black-and-white portraits by the acclaimed New Orleans artist George Dureau. This compelling collection captures the resilience, vulnerability, and individuality of Dureau’s subjects, spanning athletes, performers, and marginalised individuals.

Dureau’s photography transcends traditional portraiture, blending classical composition with the rich cultural spirit of New Orleans. His intimate works explore themes of identity and dignity, transforming vulnerabilities into powerful symbols of humanity’s resilience. The photographs invite viewers to reimagine beauty as inclusive, diverse, and multifaceted.

“George Dureau’s work is a testament to his unique ability to celebrate the human form while challenging societal norms,” says Den Bell, founder of the Bob Mizer Foundation. “His portraits honour the individuality of his subjects while weaving in the vibrancy of New Orleans, making his work timeless and deeply impactful.”

“Dureau photographed people with kindness and sympathy,” added Mizer Foundation’s Head of Programming, De Kwok, “It has been said that his subject matter became a member of his extended family and you can clearly see that in the way his camera lovingly captured them.”

The exhibition will be on view from March 6 to June 28, 2025, at the Bob Mizer Foundation’s Main Gallery. An opening reception will be held on March 6 from 6.00 pm – 8.30 pm, providing an opportunity to explore the works and celebrate Dureau’s extraordinary legacy.

About George Dureau

A celebrated figure in the art world, George Dureau (1930-2014) was renowned for his black-and-white photography and classical paintings. Rooted in the rich cultural heritage of New Orleans, Dureau’s art challenges conventions and highlights the resilience of the human spirit. His work has been exhibited internationally and continues to inspire audiences with its profound emotional depth and technical mastery.

Text from the Bob Mizer Foundation website

George Dureau (American, 1930-2014)
Wilbert with Hook
Nd
Vintage silver gelatin print
20 x 16 inches

George Dureau (American, 1930-2014)
B.J. Robinson
1995
Vintage silver gelatin print

George Dureau (American, 1930-2014)
Troy Brown “For Tennessee”
Nd
Vintage silver gelatin print

George Dureau (American, 1930-2014)
Untitled (Sonny Singleton)
Nd
Vintage silver gelatin print

This exhibition highlights the remarkable artistry of George Dureau through 25 compelling black-and-white portraits that showcase his unique vision. Created during the 1970s and 1980s, these photographs transcend traditional boundaries, blending classical composition with an unflinching exploration of the human experience. Dureau’s subjects – athletes, performers, friends, and individuals often marginalised by society – are elevated to iconic status through his lens.

The images reveal a profound empathy and an unshakable belief in the inherent dignity of every individual. With a studio rooted in the vibrant cultural milieu of New Orleans, Dureau captured not only the physical form but also the spirit of his subjects, transforming their vulnerabilities into striking symbols of resilience and humanity. His work redefines beauty as inclusive and multifaceted, challenging societal norms and inviting reflection on identity, strength, and community.

This exhibition Beyond Symmetry: George Dureau’s Celebrations of the Human Form presents 25 photographs by one of New Orleans’ most celebrated artists. Dureau’s black-and-white portraits, taken primarily during the 1970s and 1980s, capture the raw beauty, strength, and vulnerability of his subjects. Known for his classical approach and profound empathy, Dureau’s work invites us to confront traditional notions of beauty, body, and identity while celebrating the richness of the human experience.

George Dureau’s intimate portraits are both timeless and grounded in the rich cultural tapestry of New Orleans. His subjects include athletes, performers, friends, and marginalised individuals – including amputees and people with disabilities – rendered with dignity and compassion. Through his lens, Dureau elevates these figures to monumental status, echoing the grandeur of classical sculpture and Renaissance painting. His compositions emphasize the interplay of light and shadow, underscoring the sculptural quality of the human form.

One cannot discuss Dureau’s photography without acknowledging his connection to the city of New Orleans. His studio in the French Quarter became a space of artistic exploration, where he cultivated a dynamic and diverse community. This exhibition captures the spirit of that time and place, highlighting the distinct cultural influences that informed his work. The city’s unique blend of European, African, and Creole traditions provided a fertile ground for Dureau’s creativity, inspiring him to blend the classical and contemporary, the local and the universal.

Dureau’s photographs are celebrated not only for their technical mastery but also for their emotional depth. His subjects often meet the camera’s gaze directly, creating a sense of intimacy and trust. This rapport between artist and subject is palpable, revealing layers of vulnerability and strength. By choosing subjects who were often overlooked or marginalised, Dureau challenges societal norms and compels viewers to reconsider preconceived notions of worth and beauty.

This exhibition also explores the parallels between Dureau’s work and that of his contemporary, Robert Mapplethorpe. While the two artists shared a fascination with the human form and the dramatic use of black-and-white photography, their approaches diverged in significant ways. Dureau’s images are imbued with warmth and humanity that reflect his deep connection to his subjects. Unlike Mapplethorpe, who often sought a polished and idealised aesthetic, Dureau embraced imperfection and individuality, resulting in portraits that are as soulful as they are striking.

Among the works on display are several of Dureau’s most iconic images. Craig Blanchette, 1992 (above) captures a young man with a disarming gaze, his body framed in chiaroscuro that highlights his muscular form and absence of legs. The image challenges the viewer to see beyond the physical difference, emphasising Craig’s confidence and vitality. Similarly, Roosevelt Singleton features a subject with dwarfism, his ethereal presence heightened by the soft, diffused light. These works exemplify Dureau’s ability to transform the ordinary into the extraordinary, presenting his subjects as both individuals and archetypes.

Dureau’s artistry extends beyond the purely visual. His photographs resonate with themes of resilience, identity, and community. They ask us to confront the complexities of human existence and to celebrate the diversity of the human condition. By placing marginalised individuals at the forefront of his work, Dureau not only elevates their stories but also reflects the universal truths of vulnerability and strength that connect us all.

This exhibition offers viewers the opportunity to engage with Dureau’s legacy in a deeply personal way. Each photograph serves as a testament to the power of art to reveal the unseen, to challenge the status quo, and to inspire empathy. Through his lens, Dureau reminds us that every individual – regardless of their physical appearance or societal status – possesses inherent dignity and beauty.

The 31 photographs selected for this show represent the breadth and depth of Dureau’s oeuvre. From tender portraits of friends to bold explorations of the male nude, the images on display capture the full spectrum of his artistic vision. Each piece is a study in contrasts: light and shadow, strength and vulnerability, individuality and universality. Together, they form a cohesive narrative that celebrates the complexity of the human experience.

George Dureau’s work has left an indelible mark on the world of photography and beyond. His ability to see and celebrate the humanity in every subject has cemented his place as a true visionary. This exhibition, Beyond Symmetry: George Dureau’s Celebrations of the Human Form, invites you to step into his world – a world where beauty is redefined, where differences are celebrated, and where the human spirit shines through in every frame.

As you explore these images, consider the stories they tell and the questions they pose. How do we define beauty? What does it mean to see and be seen? And how can art challenge us to look beyond the surface and connect with the essence of another human being? In celebrating the life and work of George Dureau, we celebrate the power of art to transform, to inspire, and to unite us all.

Press release from the Bob Mizer Foundation

George Dureau (American, 1930-2014)
B.J. Robinson
Nd
Vintage silver gelatin print

George Dureau (American, 1930-2014)
Untitled
Nd
Vintage silver gelatin print

George Dureau (American, 1930-2014)
Untitled (Bob Lang)
Nd
Vintage silver gelatin print

Bob Mizer Foundation
920 Larkin St., San Francisco, CA

Opening hours:
Tues – Sat 12 – 6pm

Bob Mizer Foundation website

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Exhibition: ‘Peter Mitchell: Nothing Lasts Forever’ at The Photographers’ Gallery, London

Exhibition dates: 7th March – 15th June, 2025

Peter Mitchell (British, b. 1943) 'Opticians, London, 1975' 1975 from the exhibition 'Peter Mitchell: Nothing Lasts Forever' at the Photographers' Gallery, London, March - June, 2025

Peter Mitchell (British, b. 1943)
Opticians, London, 1975
1975
C-print
© Peter Mitchell

I absolutely adore these Peter Mitchell 1970s colour photographs made from Hasselblad two and a quarter square negatives.

There is something so …. well, British about them.

The wit, the humour (pigeons sitting outside the racing pigeon shop), the stiff upper lip, the carry on regardless, the working class pantomime of life and death – the public commission flats where people formed caring communities that were destroyed through redevelopment – the integrity of an existence that has largely come and gone pictured with warmth and empathy.

The people, growing up during the Second World War the privations of which lasted well into the 1950s, now during a period of change in the 1970s standing behind the fish ‘n chip counter wondering where their lives had gone and how they had got there, but still with that British sense of spirit and grit.

Peter Mitchell, “a chaser of a disappearing world” pictures these “goners” – buildings, people (and a way of life) near the end of existence soon to be demolished – in an almost painterly manner.

His use of colour, perspective and form is very fine. Witness, the flow of the photograph ‘Edna, George & Pat, H.E. Greenwood Butcher, Waterloo Road, Leeds, 1977’ (below) as, in the shot, the camera allows the eye to pan from one vanishing point at left to the other at right, with the patchwork of colours and panels of the building creating an almost Mondrian-like texture – blue to black to beige to white sign to pale blue to yellow to green to pale green, surmounted by the dark blue of the threatening sky highlighting the jagged form of the building. Superb.

My favourite photograph in the posting is The Chair, Priestly House Interior, Quarry Hill Flats, Leeds, 1978 (below). This photograph is from what I believe to be Mitchell’s strongest body of work on the demolition of the Quarry Hill Flats in Leeds. ‘One of those doomed deserts was Quarry Hill flats, irresistible both as a symbol of the fate of all architecture and of the great clock in the heavens signalling everybody’s life span’ (Peter Mitchell quoted on The Guardian website)

A drab, beige, wallpapered room with double aspect window, an art deco chair with mirror reflecting nothing, an electrical socket, a ceiling light sprouting malignant plant and trapped in the window panes, little birds fluttering against their capture, trapped forever inside an abandoned flat, this abandoned life.

Yes, there’s a sense of nostalgia and melancholy in these photographs but their restrained, formal, representation of life does much to ennoble the people and buildings contained within them which, through osmosis, ennobles the mind of the viewer.

As I myself sense the great clock in the heavens signalling my life span, the pleasure and comfort I get from feeling the spirit of Peter Mitchell’s photographs is immeasurable.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

Peter Mitchell (British, b. 1943) 'Mrs Clayton and Mrs Collins, summer 1974' 1974 from the exhibition 'Peter Mitchell: Nothing Lasts Forever' at the Photographers' Gallery, London, March - June, 2025

Peter Mitchell (British, b. 1943)
Mrs Clayton and Mrs Collins, summer 1974
1974
C-print
© Peter Mitchell

Peter Mitchell (British, b. 1943) 'Mr and Mrs Hudson, Newsagents, Seacroft, Leeds, 1974' 1974 from the exhibition 'Peter Mitchell: Nothing Lasts Forever' at the Photographers' Gallery, London, March - June, 2025

Peter Mitchell (British, b. 1943)
Mr and Mrs Hudson, Newsagents, Seacroft, Leeds, 1974
1974
C-print
© Peter Mitchell

‘Mr and Mrs Hudson in Seacroft Green, Leeds. I took this photograph on the 14 August 1974 at about 11am. I like the way the ladder is propping up the shop. They had just moved into a new shop on the same spot, with the church getting a facelift to match’

Peter Mitchell quoted on The Guardian website

Peter Mitchell (British, b. 1943)
Mrs. McArthy & her daughter, Sangley Road, Catford, London, 1975
1975
C-print
© Peter Mitchell

Peter Mitchell (British, b. 1943)
Kingston Racing Motors, Olinda Terrace, Leeds 1975
1975
C-print
© Peter Mitchell

Is the man with the wrench a mechanic? Why is the woman with the clapped-out Porsche looking so naughty? Will James C Gallagher, whose business it is, always have his back to the camera? And after painting the wall, why did Barry have to leave Leeds? The council demolished the lot shortly after this snap.

Text from The Guardian website

Peter Mitchell (British, b. 1943)
Two anonymous ladies, Tivoli Cinema, Acre Road from Sisson’s Lane, Leeds, 1976
1976
C-print
© Peter Mitchell

Peter Mitchell (British, b. 1943)
Sir Yank’s Records (& Heavy Disco), Gathorne Street, Leeds 1976
1976
C-print
© Peter Mitchell

Peter Mitchell (British, b. 1943)
Concorde Wallpaper, Devon Road, 1970s
1970s
C-print
© Peter Mitchell

Peter Mitchell (British, b. 1943)
Alea Stony Rock, Westlock Grove, 1970s
1970s
C-print
© Peter Mitchell

Peter Mitchell (British, b. 1943)
Beetham’s, Church Street, Leeds, 1970s
1970s
C-print
© Peter Mitchell

A retrospective of work by one of the leading early colour photographers of the 20th century opens this March at The Photographers’ Gallery.

Peter Mitchell (b. 1943, UK) is widely regarded as one of the most important early colour photographers of the 1970s and 1980s. A powerful storyteller and social historian, Mitchell’s photography unfolds a longstanding and poetic connection with Leeds. He has chronicled the people and fortunes of the city with warmth and familiarity for over 40 years.

Described as ‘a narrator of who we were, a chaser of a disappearing world’ (Val Williams), his work reveals his love, and at times quirky, off-beat vision, of the people and changing face of Leeds.

The retrospective explores the breadth of Mitchell’s photographic practice. It brings together his famous series ‘A New Refutation of the Viking 4 Space Mission’, which imagines England as seen through the eyes of an alien from Mars, demolished flats, shopkeepers and their shops, and boarded-up and disused buildings, as well as his portraits of scarecrows. The exhibition marks a return to The Photographers’ Gallery for Mitchell – he first exhibited at the Gallery in 1984.

A chronicler of a changing city, he said of his work photographing the demise of the iconic Quarry Hills Estate in Leeds, ‘I know there was no point in keeping Quarry Hill flats. But what it stood for might have been worth keeping.’

Calling himself ‘a man of the pavement’, Mitchell continues to regularly walk the streets of Leeds to photograph his beloved hometown today.

Peter Mitchell: Nothing Lasts Forever will include rarely seen works from Mitchell’s own collection, personal ephemera and found objects.

Peter Mitchell: Nothing Lasts Forever is in collaboration with Leeds Art Gallery. Nothing Lasts Forever, published by RRB Photobooks, is available now.

Peter Mitchell

Peter Mitchell was born in Manchester in 1943. He studied at Hornsey College of Art in London, then moved north to look for work and never left. Living and working in Leeds for much of his life, Mitchell treats his surrounding with a unique sense of care. An essential part of the colour documentary scene in the 1970s and 80s, Mitchell’s landmark show A New Refutation of the Space Viking 4 Mission at Impressions Gallery in York in 1979 was the first colour photography show in the UK.

Press release from The Photographers’ Gallery

Peter Mitchell (British, b. 1943)
Ready mixed Concrete Ltd., Elland Road, Leeds, 1977
1977
C-print
© Peter Mitchell

Peter Mitchell (British, b. 1943)
Edna, George & Pat, H.E. Greenwood Butcher, Waterloo Road, Leeds, 1977
1977
C-print
© Peter Mitchell

Peter Mitchell (British, b. 1943)
‘How many Aunties?’, Back Hares Mount, Leeds, 1978
1978
C-print
© Peter Mitchell

Peter Mitchell (British, b. 1943)
The Sir Yank’s Heavy Disco, Harehills Avenue, Leeds, 1978
1978
C-print
© Peter Mitchell

Peter Mitchell (British, b. 1943)
Priestly House, Quarry Hill Flats, 1978
1978
C-print
© Peter Mitchell

Peter Mitchell (British, b. 1943)
The Kitson House telephone, Quarry Hill Flats, 1978
1978
C-print
© Peter Mitchell

‘It was obvious to me that they were something special. York House was one side of the football pitch, Thoresby House opposite’

Peter Mitchell quoted on The Guardian website

Peter Mitchell (British, b. 1943)
The Garden of Rest, Quarry Hill Flats, Leeds, 1978
1978
C-print
© Peter Mitchell

Peter Mitchell (British, b. 1943)
Thoresby House, Quarry Hill Flats, Leeds, 1978
1978
C-print
© Peter Mitchell

‘I photograph dying buildings and Quarry Hill was terminal by the time I got to it. Times change and I know there was no point in keeping Quarry Hill flats. But what it stood for might have been worth keeping’

Peter Mitchell quoted on The Guardian website

Peter Mitchell (British, b. 1943)
Nielson House interior, Quarry Hill Flats, Leeds, 1978
1978
C-print
© Peter Mitchell

Peter Mitchell (British, b. 1943)
The Chair, Priestly House Interior, Quarry Hill Flats, Leeds, 1978
1978
C-print
© Peter Mitchell

‘One of those doomed deserts was Quarry Hill flats, irresistible both as a symbol of the fate of all architecture and of the great clock in the heavens signalling everybody’s life span’

Peter Mitchell quoted on The Guardian website

Peter Mitchell (British, b. 1943)
Abandoned car, Wright House, Quarry Hill Flats, Leeds, 1978
1978
C-print
© Peter Mitchell

Peter Mitchell (British, b. 1943)
Frances Gaven. Leeds, 1979
1979
From A New Refutation of the Viking 4 Space Mission
C-print
© Peter Mitchell

Francis Craven on Woodhouse Moor, Leeds in April 1979. He’d built this apparition himself but was having trouble with its arms – the pulleys had given out

Text from the Guardian website

Peter Mitchell’s A New Refutation of the Viking 4 Space Mission features photos and portraits, taken in Leeds in the 1970s. The pictures show the traditional urban landscape presented on a background of space charts, the concept being that an alien has landed from Mars and is wandering around Leeds with a degree of surprise and puzzlement.

In the Earthly vernacular these photographs are of Nowheresville. Yet, for some people, they are the centre of the universe. Usually they call it Home.

Text from the Martin Parr Foundation website [Online] Cited 25/05/2025

Mitchell’s series documents backstreets, corner shops, factories, churches and cemeteries in Leeds and Sheffield, as well as other locations in Cumbria and London, building a compelling picture of these cities during the late 1970s. Many of the portraits show the city inhabitants standing outside their homes or places of work. Equal attention is paid to the entirety of the setting, the figures often appearing dwarfed in the composition by their surroundings. The majority of the subjects gaze directly at the camera adopting stiff, frontal poses giving the images a formal impression and sense of stillness. Describing the distinctive style and subject matter of the photographs, historian David Mellor has commented, ‘it is as if Alan Bennett had met Diane Arbus in an urban picaresque’ (Mellor 2005, accessed 12 June 2017).

Ruins, crumbling facades, abandoned shops and cemeteries punctuate the series, pointing to themes of life, death, memory and loss. For example, Mitchell’s pictures includes shots of Mrs Lee’s dress shop – which burnt down the day after closure – a decayed synagogue and a defunct station in Sheffield, where the trains pass through but never stop. The 1970s were a time of great change in Britain as it struggled with widespread social unrest as well as the collapse of heavy industries. Commenting on this aspect of the series, Mellor noted, ‘NASA’s 1976 Viking Landers were a triumph of robotics, of remote sensing and imaging – that very culture of digitised information which was to supplant the manual world of industrial era Leeds.’ (Ibid.)

Text is a crucial element in Mitchell’s work, and each image in this series is accompanied by a caption to be displayed alongside. These idiosyncratic snippets of text are excerpted from Mitchell’s diary, and range from deadpan descriptions of place, to short anecdotes and humorous musings. Historian Val Williams has likened the artist’s distinctive combination of photography and text across his different bodies of work to the Situationist writing of the French theorist Guy Debord. …

Mitchell’s work occupies an important position within the history of colour photography specifically. He was photographing in colour at a time when black and white was the predominate medium for documentary photography in Britain, and before colour photography was fully embraced by museum collections. His work thus evidences an alternate history of colour photography distinct from the predominant narrative of the emergence of colour photography in the United States in the work of photographers such as William Eggleston (born 1939) and Stephen Shore (born 1947).

Sarah Allen
June 2016

Collection text on the Tate website [Online] Cited 24/05/2025

Peter Mitchell (British, b. 1943)
Max Babbin, Vulcan Street, Leeds, 1979
1979
C-print
© Peter Mitchell

Peter Mitchell (British, b. 1943)
ABC (Aerated Bread Company offices), Camden Road, London, 1979
1979
C-print
© Peter Mitchell

Peter Mitchell (British, b. 1943)
Old Kent Road, London, 1979
1979
C-print
© Peter Mitchell

His early photographs were made in the 1970s and 80s, when he was working as a truck driver. His vantage point removed him from the immediacy of the street, and he developed his distinctive graphic framing of the buildings and landscapes, which reveal the layers of urban and social history

Text from The Guardian website

Peter Mitchell (British, b. 1943)
Mr Costas, Stroud Green Road, London, 1979
1979
C-print
© Peter Mitchell

Mr Costas on Stroud Green Road, London in May 1979. He was thinking to himself: ‘If only this was Athens instead of Finsbury Park’

Text from The Guardian website

Peter Mitchell (British, b. 1943)
Nosey ‘Twat, Sackville Street, Leeds, 1980s
1980s
C-print
© Peter Mitchell

Peter Mitchell (British, b. 1943)
Kirkstall Road, Leeds, 1980s
1980s
C-print
© Peter Mitchell

Peter Mitchell (British, b. 1943)
Francis Gavan, Ghost Train Ride, Woodhouse Moor, Leeds, Spring 1986
1986
C-print
© Peter Mitchell

Peter Mitchell (British, b. 1943)
Racing Pigeon Shop (ii), Blake Grove, Leeds, Summer 2009
2009
C-print
© Peter Mitchell

John Murray owned the Racing Pigeon Shop and remembers “great times” on Blake Grove.

The Photographers’ Gallery
16-18 Ramillies Street
London
W1F 7LW

Opening hours:
Mon – Wed: 10.00 – 18.00
Thursday – Friday: 10.00 – 20.00
Saturday: 10.00 – 18.00
Sunday: 11.00 – 18.00

The Photographers’ Gallery website

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Exhibition: ‘American Photography’ at Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Exhibition dates: 7th February – 9th June, 2025

Curators: Mattie Boom and Hans Rooseboom

Amanda López (American, b. 1982) 'Homegirls, San Francisco' 2008 from the exhibition 'American Photography' at Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, Feb - June, 2025

Amanda López (American, b. 1982)
Homegirls, San Francisco
2008
Inkjet print
320 x 435 mm
National Museum for American History, Washington (DC)
© Amanda López

Let’s get down to brass tacks.

While I haven’t physically seen this exhibition – according to Rijksmuseum “the Netherlands’ first major survey exhibition of American photography… the first comprehensive survey of American photography in Europe … reflect[ing] the rich and multifaceted history of photography in the United States. The exhibition presents the country as seen through the eyes of American photographers, and shows how the medium has permeated every aspect of our lives: in art, news, advertising and everyday life” – you can glean a lot about an exhibition from the installation photographs.

The feeling I get from the installation photographs is of a particularly meagre offering – gallery halls with minimal photographs, huge empty spaces (just look at the installation photograph Curio box made of cigarette packets with portraits of roommates, late 1960s below) – and to then consider this is supposed to be “the first comprehensive survey of American photography in Europe” and reflect the large photographic holdings of the Rijksmuseum. Really? You wouldn’t really know it from looking at “the show”.

Perhaps the problem stems from the rationale of the exhibition:

“There is no hierarchy to the selection. A sequence of rooms present numerous fields – portraiture, landscape, advertising work, art photography – like chapters in a novel. “We tried to find surprising images and things we’ve never seen before,” says Boom. The result is a broad mix, shaped with co-curator Hans Rooseboom, of anonymous photography, commercial work, news coverage, medical prints and propaganda, presented in tandem with masterpieces such as Robert Frank’s enigmatic picture of a woman watching a New Jersey parade in 1955, her face partially obscured by an unfurled Stars and Stripes.”1 (see below)

The phrase “a broad mix” says it all: a mishmash of anonymous photography, commercial work, fine art photography, the political power of photography, photographs on racism, war, etc., … taking on too much in one exhibition (the American landscape is largely absent from the walls), proclaiming to be a comprehensive survey of American photography. An impossible task.

“The exhibition has deliberately departed from a “top 100” approach, Rooseboom [one of the curators] adds, stating “that would have been too easy”.”2

Easy to say (and move away from) but not easy to do…

What I feel is lacking in this subjective selection (all exhibitions are subjective) is the focused “energy” present in American photography radiating from the wall – the energy that documents and imagines the growth of a nation and the passion of the artists that capture that energy.

Where is, for example, the passion of Sally Mann’s photographs of the American South, the New York buildings of Berenice Abbott, George Dureau’s portraits of friends and amputees in New Orleans, the narrative stories of Duane Michals or the darkness / otherness that has always been present from the very start in American photography. In the selection in the posting, the photographs of Robert Frank (a foreigner, whose photographs of America were reviled when they were first published) and Nan Goldin (photographs of counter culture America) come closest to this alternate perspective, both outsiders from the main stream point of view.

Thus, while there are some interesting photographs in the exhibition it’s all too ho hum for me, perhaps a “vapour” of something almost brought into consciousness.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

1/ Christian House. “American Photography: unforgettable images of the beauty and brutality of a nation,” on The Guardian website Thu 13 Feb 2025 [Online] Cited 06/06/2025

2/ Deborah Nicholls-Lee. “Eight images that tell the story of America,” on the BBC website 12 February 2025 [Online] Cited 06/06/2025

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

Installation view of the exhibition ‘American Photography’ at Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam showing at right photography by Robert Frank

Installation view of the exhibition American Photography at Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam showing at right photographs by Robert Frank (below)
Photo: Rijksmuseum/Olivier Middendorp

Robert Frank (Swiss, 1924-2019)
City fathers – Hoboken, New Jersey
1955
Gelatin silver print

Robert Frank (Swiss, 1924-2019)
Parade – Hoboken, New Jersey
1955
Gelatin silver print

Robert Frank (Swiss, 1924-2019)
U.S. 91, Leaving Blackfoot, Idaho
1956
Gelatin silver print

Robert Frank (Swiss, 1924-2019)
New York City
1955
Gelatin silver print

Rijksmuseum moves you to The American Dream. To the real American. To unexpected recognition. The Rijksmuseum is staging the Netherlands’ first major survey exhibition of American photography.

The more than 200 works on display in American Photography reflect the rich and multifaceted history of photography in the United States. The exhibition presents the country as seen through the eyes of American photographers, and shows how the medium has permeated every aspect of our lives: in art, news, advertising and everyday life.

Over the past decades the Rijksmuseum has been assembling a collection of American photographic work. This is the first time we are exhibiting photographs from the collection, alongside loaned works from American, Dutch and other European collections. This show includes iconic photographs by the likes of Sally Mann, Robert Frank, Lisette Model, Nan Goldin, Richard Avedon, Andy Warhol, Paul Strand, Diane Arbus and James Van Der Zee, as well as surprising images by unknown and anonymous photographers.

Text from the Rijksmuseum website

Installation view of the exhibition ‘American Photography’ at Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Installation view of the exhibition American Photography at Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam showing in the bottom image at left, Sally Mann’s Jessie #34
(2004, below); at second left, Chuck Close’s Phil [Photo Maquette of Philip Glass] (1969, below); and at third right, László Moholy-Nagy’s Parking lot in Chicago, 1938 (1938, below)
Photo: Rijksmuseum/Olivier Middendorp

Sally Mann (American, b. 1951)
Jessie #34
2004
Gelatin Silver enlargement print from 8 x 10 in. collodion wet-plate negative, with Soluvar matte varnish mixed with diatomaceous earth

Chuck Close (American, 1940-2021)
Phil [Photo Maquette of Philip Glass]
1969
16 x 12 inches (40.64 x 30.48cm)
Gelatin silver print mounted on mat board
© Chuck Close

László Moholy-Nagy (Hungarian, 1895-1946)
Parking lot in Chicago, 1938
1938
Gelatin silver photograph
23.8 × 33.8cm

Installation view of the exhibition American Photography at Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam showing the work of Nan Goldin from The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (below)
Photo: Rijksmuseum/Olivier Middendorp

Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953)
Cookie with Me After Being Hit at the SPE Conference, Baltimore, MD, 1986
1986

Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953)
Cookie and Vittorio’s Wedding: The Ring, NYC, 1986
1986

Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953)
Cookie in the Bathroom at Hawaii 5.0, NYC, 1986
1986

The Rijksmuseum presents the first comprehensive survey of American photography in Europe. With more than 200 works spanning three centuries, American Photography will be an exploration of the rich and multifaceted history of photography in the United States, showing how the medium has permeated every aspect of our lives: in art, news, advertising and everyday life.

Over the past decade, the Rijksmuseum has built an extensive collection of American Photography. This exhibition is the first ever presentation of Rijksmuseum’s collection, which will be shown together with loans from over 30 collections in the United States, the Netherlands and other European countries. Works by icons including Sally Mann, Robert Frank, Lisette Model, Nan Goldin, Richard Avedon, Andy Warhol, Paul Strand, Diane Arbus and James Van Der Zee will be on view alongside eye-opening photographs by unknown and anonymous photographers.

The exhibition is possible by Rijksmuseum’s major partnership with Baker McKenzie. American Photography runs from 7 February to 9 June 2025. Concurrently with American Photography, Carrie Mae Weems’s 2021 series Painting the Town will be on show in the Rijksmuseum’s photography gallery.

American Photography will give picture of the country through the eyes of American photographers, showing the country in all its complexity. The exhibition takes themes such as the American dream, landscapes and portraiture to trace how photographers increasingly reflected on changes and events in their country. A major topic of the show is photography’s evolution as an art form, from 19th-century daguerreotypes of frost flowers on a window to the work of Paul Strand, Charles Sheeler, Sally Mann, Irving Penn, Dawoud Bey and Sarah Sense. Another important theme is how photography has grown to be a part of everyday life, which is demonstrated by family portraits, advertisements, postcards, gramophone record covers and more.

Press release from Rijksmuseum

Installation view of the exhibition ‘American Photography’ at Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam showing at right, Jocelyn Lee's 'Julia in Greenery' (2005)

Installation view of the exhibition American Photography at Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam showing in the bottom photograph at right, Jocelyn Lee’s Julia in Greenery (2005, below)
Photo: Rijksmuseum/Olivier Middendorp

Jocelyn Lee (American, b. 1962)
Julia in Greenery
2005
Archival Pigment Print
20 × 24 in | 50.8 × 61cm

Installation view of the exhibition American Photography at Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam showing in the display case, Curio box made of cigarette packets with portraits of roommates, late 1960s (below)
Photo: Rijksmuseum/Olivier Middendorp

Curio box made of cigarette packets with portraits of roommates, late 1960s from the exhibition 'American Photography' at Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, Feb - June, 2025

Curio box made of cigarette packets with portraits of roommates, late 1960s
Wood, handwoven cigarette packets, gelatin silver prints
140 x 110 x 195 mm
Collection of Daile Kaplan, Pop Photographica, New York
Photo: Andy Romer Photography, New York

Installation view of the exhibition American Photography at Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam showing at left, Diane Arbus’ A young man in curlers at home on West 20th St., N.Y.C. 1966 (1966, below); and at second left, Ming Smith’s America Seen Through Stars and Stripes, New York City (1976, below)
Photo: Rijksmuseum/Olivier Middendorp

Diane Arbus (American, 1923-1971)
A young man in curlers at home on West 20th St., N.Y.C. 1966
1966
Gelatin silver print

Ming Smith (American, b. 1951) 'America Seen Through Stars and Stripes, New York City' 1976 from the exhibition 'American Photography' at Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, Feb - June, 2025

Ming Smith (American, b. 1951)
America Seen Through Stars and Stripes, New York City
1976
Gelatin silver print
318 x 470 mm
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond (VA)
Adolph D. and Wiliams C. Williams Fund

In the post-war years, mass immigration to the US brought new ways of thinking. the US took over from Europe as a cultural trendsetter, and photography was eventually accepted as an art form. Playful approaches to photography emerged, moving beyond documenting people and places to provoking emotion and inviting deep questions. Ming Smith’s America Seen Through Stars and Stripes (1976), created on the bicentenary of the Declaration of Independence, turns again to the flag inviting America to reflect on its history. By placing a figure in mirrored sunglasses in front of a shop window, she creates a disorientating mesh of reflective surfaces. The grid structure suggests incarceration but – in combination with the round glasses and the stars on the flag – also creates an abstract composition reminiscent of modern art. “She’s a careful observer, playing with all these layers in the image,” says Boom.

Smith explores the artistic potential of photography, experimenting with double-exposure, shutter speed and collage. In one version of this image, she paints on bold red stripes, altering this snapshot of the US with marks that resemble blood or flames. Smith’s work builds on the civil rights movement that preceded it and features activists such as James Baldwin and Alvin Ailey. She was the first woman to join the African-American photography collective the Kamoinge Workshop and the first black woman to have her work acquired by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Yet her demographic was largely overlooked by the art world. “I worked to capture black culture, the richness, the love. That was my incentive,” she told the Financial Times in 2019. “It wasn’t like I was going to make money from it, or fame – not even love, because there were no shows.”

Deborah Nicholls-Lee. “Eight images that tell the story of America,” on the BBC website 12 February 2025 [Online] Cited 06/06/2025

Henry Fitz Jnr (American, 1808-1863)
Self-portrait
1840
Daguerreotype
Smithsonian National Museum of American History, Washington (DC)

In 1840, using a self-made copper plate, Henry Fitz Jnr produced one of the world’s first selfies, his eyes gently closed to prevent any blinking from spoiling the result. In creating this striking blue image, he was doing more than record his appearance; he was also documenting America’s first essays into an art form that would tell its story in radical new ways.

Deborah Nicholls-Lee. “Eight images that tell the story of America,” on the BBC website 12 February 2025 [Online] Cited 06/06/2025

Thomas Martin Easterly (American, 1809-1882)
Chief Keokuk (Watchful Fox)
1847
Daguerreotype
Missouri History Museum

Anonymous photographer
View of a wooden house or barn with a man and a woman in front
c. 1870-1875
Tintype
164 x 215 mm
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

A 19th-Century tintype (an image made on a sheet of metal) featuring a man and woman in front of a rustic barn is a case in point. The image was probably sold on the spot by a travelling tin typist “for a modest price”, explains Rooseboom. “Many people had just arrived and were living in the countryside, no big city nearby, so this was the only possibility of having your portrait taken.” The man stands proud, looking at the camera, but the woman’s head is bowed and she is looking away. “Sometimes you can sense that people were simply not used to being photographed,” says Rooseboom. “Nowadays, we’ve seen in magazines and movies how to pose elegantly.” This may be the only time in their whole life that they would be photographed, and the result, adds Boom, “would hang on the wall of the house where they lived forever”.

Deborah Nicholls-Lee. “Eight images that tell the story of America,” on the BBC website 12 February 2025 [Online] Cited 06/06/2025

Detroit Photographic Company
Home of Rip Van
Nd
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Bertha E. Jaques (American, 1863-1941)
Tree – in Governor Gleghorn’s Place Honolulu
1908
Cyanotype
248 x 152 mm
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, purchased with the support of Baker McKenzie

Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) (photographer) (mentioned on object)
A free country? This is America … Keep it Free!
Nd
Sheldon-Claire Company

United News Company (publisher)
12,000 Employees of the Ford Motor Company, Detroit, Mich.
1913
Postcard, relief halftone and colour lithography
88 × 137 mm
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

… a 1913 postcard featuring 12,000 employees of the Ford Motor Company in Detroit may have been the “most expensive picture that was ever taken”, quipped a newspaper at the time, as the factory had to shut down for two hours to assemble the staff. The image, the company boasted, was “the largest specially posed group picture ever made” and illustrates a turning point where industry saw the value in investing large sums in promotional photography. Taken in the year when Ford introduced America’s first moving assembly line and the US had become the world’s largest economy, the photograph also depicts the mass production that would shape the country.

The image’s reappearance in Ford marketing also made it an early example of photoshopping. While the same tinted faces swarmed in the foreground, the number of employees cited in the caption increased exponentially, and a building to the left was cropped out in one version and acquired extra floors in another. “Apparently, many photographers and their publishers had no qualms about abandoning their medium’s potential for realism,” write Boom and Rooseboom in the exhibition catalogue.

Deborah Nicholls-Lee. “Eight images that tell the story of America,” on the BBC website 12 February 2025 [Online] Cited 06/06/2025

Schadde Brothers Studio
Display, sample or trade catalogue photograph for sweet manufacturer Brandle & Smith Co.,
c. 1915
Gelatin silver print with applied colour
288 x 240 mm
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Charles Sheeler (American, 1883-1965)
Nude #3
1918-1919
Gelatin silver print
127 × 171 mm
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

James Van Der Zee (American, 1886-1983)
Portrait of an Unknown Man, Harlem, New York City
1938
Gelatin silver print
244 x 203 mm
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
Purchased with the support of Baker McKenzie
© The James Van Der Zee Archive/The Metropolitan Museum of Art

… the New York portrait photographer James Van Der Zee was also embellishing his work, drawing jewellery on to his subjects and retouching their faces to erase dark lines and wrinkles. “I put my heart and soul into them and tried to see that every picture was better looking than the person,” he said. As a black photographer working from his Harlem studio at the height of the Harlem Renaissance, his work records a period when black migrants fleeing the segregationist South were forging a new life for themselves in the urban North. For the first time, African Americans and other minority groups could be photographed by someone inside their community, and represented in a way that uplifted them. Van Der Zee’s Portrait of an Unknown Man (1938), for example, is carefully posed to suggest confidence. The outfit is elegant and the buttonhole daisy adds a dandyish flourish. It’s an image that reflects the aspirations and upward mobility of African-American people and the pride Van Der Zee had in his culture.

Deborah Nicholls-Lee. “Eight images that tell the story of America,” on the BBC website 12 February 2025 [Online] Cited 06/06/2025

Hy Hirsh (American, 1911-1961)
Untitled (abstraction)
c. 1950
Chromogenic print, 251 x 200 mm
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
Purchased with the support of Baker McKenzie

Anonymous photographer
Family Standing beside their Car
c. 1957-1960
Chromogenic print (Kodak Instamatic)
76 x 76 mm
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Irene Poon (American, b. 1941)
Virginia
1965
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Gift of Charles Wong
© Irene Poon Photography Archive, Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries

It is the Chinese-American community that is the focus of the work of Irene Poon, who grew up in San Francisco’s Chinatown, where her parents, first-generation immigrants from Guanghzou, ran a herbalist store. A 1965 image features Poon’s sister Virginia in a local sweet shop, crowded out by Hershey’s and Nestlé bars. The letters “Nest” peep out from the densely packed shelves, reinforcing a sense that she is enclosed by this mass of graphic lettering. Beside her head a “Look” bar competes for attention, hinting at that other ever-expanding role for American photography: advertising − a sector in which the US was a forerunner. “Many of the 20th-Century artists started in advertising. It’s part of art history,” Boom says. “This whole field already existed, and the arts, and photography as an art form, draws from it.”

Deborah Nicholls-Lee. “Eight images that tell the story of America,” on the BBC website 12 February 2025 [Online] Cited 06/06/2025

Bruce Wrighton (American, 1950-1988)
Portrait of a woman, Binghampton, NY (‘Woolworth Shopper’)
1987
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
Purchased with the support of Baker McKenzie
© Estate of Bruce Wrighton, Courtesy Laurence Miller Gallery

Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie (American, b. 1954)
This is not a commercial, this is my homeland
1998
Platinum lambda print
476 x 609 mm
Courtesy of the artist

The political power of photography is also seen in the work of Native American (Seminole-Muscogee-Navajo) photographer Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie who uses the camera to correct misconceptions about Indigenous populations and to offer an alternative viewpoint on US history. “No longer is the camera held by an outsider looking in, the camera is held with brown hands opening familiar worlds,” she writes in a 1993 essay. “We document ourselves with a humanising eye, we create new visions with ease, and we can turn the camera and show how we see you.”

Tsinhnahjinnie’s captioning of a touristic image of Monument Valley, Arizona with This is not a commercial, this is my homeland highlights the commodification of American land, and uses what she calls “photographic sovereignty” to take us back to the very beginning and reclaim and retell the story of America. In combination with works such as Bryan Schutmaat’s Tonopah, Nevada (2012), which documents mining’s effect on the landscape of the American West, images like Tsinhnahjinnie’s tell a story of a beautiful land that means different things to different people: financial gain, security or a sacred space.

Deborah Nicholls-Lee. “Eight images that tell the story of America,” on the BBC website 12 February 2025 [Online] Cited 06/06/2025

Bryan Schutmaat (American, b. 1983)
Tonopah, Nevada
2012
Inkjet print
1017 x 1277 mm (printed 2021)
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
Purchased with the support of Baker McKenzie

Rijksmuseum
Museumstraat 1
1071 XX Amsterdam

Opening hours:
Open daily 9 – 17h

Rijksmuseum website

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Exhibition: ‘Sun and Silver: Early Photographs of China by Lai Fong and John Thomson’ at the Loewentheil Photography of China Collection, New York

Exhibition dates: 13th March – 10th June, 2025

Curator: Stacey Lambrow

Lai Fong (Chinese, c. 1838 or 1839-1890) (Lai Afong / Afong Studio)
Interior of a Flower Boat
c. 1870
Albumen silver print

A Monday posting!

It is a privilege to be able to publish these beautiful photographs together with installation photographs of the exhibition.

The synthesis of light, perspective and feeling for subject matter is superb. Just look at John Thomson’s River Reeds (c. 1870, below) or Lai Fong’s View in Garden (c. 1870, below), both are which are virtuoso examples of the art of early photography.

The older I get the more attuned I become to these early photographs, a moment in time captured forever in perfect tonality, synchronous to the opening guitar solo of the Adagio of Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez for guitar and orchestra.

Many thankx to the curator Stacey Lambrow for sending me the media images and installation photographs, the latter allowing us to understand the structure and layout of the exhibition. It is very much appreciated.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to the Loewentheil Photography of China Collection for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Installation view of the exhibition 'Sun and Silver: Early Photographs of China by Lai Fong and John Thomson' at the Loewentheil Photography of China Collection, New York

Installation views of the exhibition Sun and Silver: Early Photographs of China by Lai Fong and John Thomson at the Loewentheil Photography of China Collection, New York

The Loewentheil Photography of China Collection presents Sun and Silver: Early Photographs of China by Lai Fong and John Thomson curated by Stacey Lambrow. This exhibition brings together masterpieces by two giants of 19th-century photography of China. Lai Fong and John Thomson originated many of the most significant developments in the early art of photography in China. This show reveals the intricate and fascinating relationship between the works of the most famous early Chinese photographer and those of his leading foreign contemporary. The two photographers crossed paths, competed for patrons, and had a meaningful influence on one another and the art of photography.

This major exhibition gives viewers the opportunity to compare and contrast Lai Fong’s expressive artistry and technical ingenuity alongside Thomson’s stylistic virtuosity.

Sun and Silver: Early Photographs of China by Lai Fong and John Thomson spans the careers of both artists through the finest examples of vintage prints, all dating to the 1860s and 1870s. It also presents works by other 19th-century photography studios in China that share the themes and subjects of Lai Fong’s and Thomson’s photographs. The exhibition suggests new ways of looking at the origins of photography in China.

This exhibition of works by Lai Fong and John Thomson presents a tiny sliver of the holdings of the Loewentheil Collection, the most important collection of early China photographs in the world.

Text from the Loewentheil Photography of China Collection website

Lai Fong (Chinese, c. 1838 or 1839-1890) (Lai Afong / Afong Studio)
Cliffs View
c. 1870
Albumen silver print

John Thomson (Scottish, 1837-1921)
Yuen Fu Rapids
c. 1870
From Foochow and the River Min
Carbon print

John Thomson (Scottish, 1837-1921)
Buddhist Monks
c. 1870
Albumen silver print

Lai Fong (Chinese, c. 1838 or 1839–1890) (Lai Afong / Afong Studio)
Spirit Way Nanjing
c. 1870
Albumen silver print

Lai Fong (Chinese, c. 1838 or 1839-1890) (Lai Afong / Afong Studio)
Mountain View
c. 1870
Albumen silver print

Lai Fong (Chinese, c. 1838 or 1839–1890) (Lai Afong / Afong Studio)
Portrait of a Naval Officer
c. 1870
Albumen silver print

Ye Chung (Yi chang studio)
Portrait of Buddhist Nuns
c. 1870
Albumen silver print

LAI FONG AND AFONG STUDIO (c. 1839-1890)

Lai Fong, also known by his trade name Afong, was the leading Chinese photographer of the nineteenth century. His career appears to have started around 1859, and by the 1870s he was the most successful Chinese photographer. A gifted businessman as well as a skilled artist, he developed both a Chinese and foreign cosmopolitan clientele. Lai Afong advertised in English-language newspapers – offering a “Larger, and more complete collection of Views than any other Establishment in the Empire of China” – and the artist captioned much of his work in both Chinese and English. Lai Fong’s talent and reputation secured him photographic sessions with distinguished men and women and everyday citizens of nineteenth-century China. The artist also took striking photographs of Chinese landscapes, cities, landmarks, and architecture.

The Afong studio survived its founder’s death in 1890 and continued to flourish selling prints from negatives made by Lai Fong and his studio decades earlier. Lai Fong’s son Lai Yuet-chen and his daughter in law Cheung Yuen Ming ran the Hong Kong studio until sometime in the 1940s. Thus the studio that Lai Fong established became one of the most prosperous and longest standing photography studios in China.

LAI FONG and AFONG STUDIO

Lai Fong holds a distinguished position in the history of nineteenth-century photography for the exceptional body of work he created in China. He took more photographs in more places than any other Chinese photographer, traveling widely throughout the 1870s and 1880s. Expansive in the range of views and subjects he captured, and sensitive as an artist, Lai Fong created photographs that continue to resonate with viewers today. His photographs, distinguished by their aesthetic rigor, were made with painstaking care and superior proficiency in photographic chemistry. Within decades of the invention of photography, Lai Fong had mastered the new art form and produced some of the most accomplished early photographs of China ever created.

John Thomson, dismissive of some Chinese and European photographers, offered high praise of Lai Fong, remarking that the photographer had “exquisite taste.” Thomson conferred on Lai Fong a privileged status among his colleagues and competitors: “Judging from his portfolios of photographs, he must be an ardent admirer of the beautiful in nature; for some of his pictures, besides being extremely well executed, are remarkable for their artistic choice of position.” Lai Fong’s talent as a photographer of exceptional artistic ability and vision was publicly recognised as was his expertise as a gifted technician of the new photographic process.

Lai Fong played a fundamental role in defining the aesthetic and technical standards of Chinese photography in the late Qing dynasty. His immense catalogue of photographs is an unrivaled visual compendium of art, architecture, nature, and life in China. It is among the most important bodies of work in the history of photography of China.

JOHN THOMSON (1837-1921)

John Thomson is one of the most important figures in nineteenth-century photography of China. He was one of the first European photographers to travel to Asia. Thomson established a photography studio in Hong Kong in 1868 and made photographic journeys throughout China, venturing up the Min and Yangtze rivers. Thomson introduced the beauty of inland China to the world through his photographic prints and his highly acclaimed photographically illustrated books. Thomson’s magnum opus is his photographically illustrated work Foochow and the River Min (1873), which survives in only eight known sets. Thomson’s photographs are prized for his unconventional approach to composition and his ability to convey his great appreciation for Chinese people, culture, and art in the late Qing dynasty.

When Thomson returned to London from his photographic journeys, the publication of the monthly magazine Street Life in London (1876-1877) containing his poignant photographs of the working class and poor cemented his reputation as an important artist. He is considered an early photojournalist. Thomson was elected a member of the Royal Photographic Society in 1879 and was appointed photographer to the British royal family by Queen Victoria in 1881.

FUJIAN PROVINCE

The stunning scenery of around Fuzhou (Foochow) captured the imaginations of Lai Fong and John Thomson. Lai Fong made the first known photographic expedition there in 1869. His photographs in and around the treaty port of Fuzhou in Fujian province include splendid views of the mountains and valleys of Wuyishan. The views, evoking the scenery in China’s venerated tradition of ink paintings, capture the region’s rock formations, crags, cliff faces, and stone ledges that fascinated literati for centuries.

John Thomson likely saw Lai Fong’s dramatic photographs of the region after he arrived in China. Printed studio labels reveal that Afong studio was located at No. 54 Queen’s Road and Thomson’s studio was nearby at No. 29 Queen’s Road in Hong Kong.

Thomson soon followed in the Chinese photographer’s footsteps by traveling to Fuzhou in 1870. Thomson introduced the beauty of inland China to the West through his photographic prints and his pioneering and highly acclaimed photographically illustrated books. Thomson brought to his photography a rare combination of visual virtuosity and keen intellectual curiosity. Thomson’s photographs are prized for their intrinsic qualities – the great beauty of their imagery, their acute sense of immediacy and their unconventional compositions. Thomson’s scenes on the River Min foreshadow many of the innovations of twentieth century photography. As an artist Thomson is celebrated for his unconventional approach to composition, his appreciation of Chinese pictorial traditions, and his ability to convey his great respect for Chinese people and culture through his lens.

Thomson’s Fuzhou photographs were published in his magnum opus, Foochow and the River Min, the greatest of all Chinese photographic works. An artistic triumph, Foochow and the River Min was extremely expensive to produce, and as a result few copies were published. Only eight examples survive. The Loewentheil Collection copy is perhaps the finest extant.

THEMES IN EARLY PHOTOGRAPHY

The Chinese had a long-established tradition of genre painting. The arrival of photography in China threatened the livelihoods of some of the artists working in this tradition. Some of the painters became photographers themselves, while others worked as colourists for established photographers. These artists brought Chinese techniques, symbolism, motifs, and sensibilities to their work in photography. Early European photographers, in turn brought their own conventions of genre photography when they came to China. Lai Fong, John Thomson, and other early Chinese and foreign photography studios offered images of Chinese tradespeople and photographs of Chinese ‘types’ reflecting the diverse people and trades of China.

Chinese and foreign photography studios presented these works in ways reflecting their distinctive traditions.

PORTRAITURE IN CHINA

Lai Fong’s portraits are among the most important of the late Qing dynasty. After 150 years, viewers continue to sense the sitter’s inner thoughts, feelings, personality, and even their response to being photographed. Posing for the camera was a formal event for most people in the nineteenth century. Lai Fong was able to collaborate with his Chinese clients to create portraits that at times presented an idealized self. Through the position and gaze of his sitters, their clothing, and the use of symbolic props, Lai Fong conveyed the dignity and character of his sitters. Similarly, John Thomson’s respect for the Chinese people he encountered is evident in his sympathetic and sensitive portraits.

Most late Qing dynasty photographs of Chinese women were created by Chinese photography studios which were culturally sensitive to the needs of their sitters. Appreciation for these portraits of women requires an understanding of the strong influence of traditional Chinese visual culture. Lai Fong’s portraits of women are often rich with Chinese symbolism for beauty, longevity, joy, longing, and love expressed through props such as chrysanthemums and peonies, and folding and round fans. As numerous Chinese art historians and scholars note, Chinese photographers including Lai Fong refashioned compositions, motifs, and tropes from traditional Chinese paintings as they created photographic studio portraits. The art historian Yi Gu observes that all twelve Chinese words for photography in the first decades after its invention were preexisting terms for portrait painting.

Lai Fong and Thomson made significant portraits of the diverse people of late Qing dynasty China, from portraits of princes of the late Qing dynasty and high-ranking government officials to women and children, and others living humble lives in remote rural villages.

The camera’s ability to create an accurate depiction of a human being, together with its power to reveal and touch human emotions, enchanted the Chinese imagination. While contending with the demands of the highly technical wet-plate collodion process, Lai Fong and Thomson created portraits that are haunting and intimate, direct and visceral.

RETOUCHING

Lai Fong was an innovator in his manipulation of negatives for artistic effect. In the present photograph Lai Fong used a composite negative to add dramatic clouds to an 1863 negative by Dutton & Michaels. Enhancing the original negative by adding painted clouds to a glass plate presented technical challenges while giving scope for the photographer’s imagination and artistry. The French photographic artist Gustave Le Gray is considered the most important French photographer of the nineteenth century in part because of the way he used these techniques to create mood and atmosphere through the addition of clouds.

Lai Fong was not just an accomplished artist but also an astute businessman. Like many contemporaries in China and in the West, Afong Studio used the work of other photographers in building its portfolio. The studio’s photographs include images taken by photographers such as John Thomson, Dutton & Michaels, and Milton Miller. Rather than removing or covering the other photographer’s credit, as was usual, Lai Fong usually retained the studio markings of others. Once Lai Fong travelled to important sites and made his own superior views, he often discontinued his use of negatives by other photographers.

In his essay “Hong-kong Photographers,” published in 1872 in the British Journal of Photography, Thomson explained that the relationship between photography and painting was particularly strong for Chinese photographers. Thomson stated that there was something about the complicated chemistry and “nicety of manipulation” in the darkroom that “suits the Chinese mind.” Thomson acknowledged Lai Fong’s “exquisite taste” and understood Chinese artist’s deep connection with traditional Chinese painting was revealed in his photographic prints.

Wall text from the exhibition from the Loewentheil Photography of China Collection

Lai Fong (Chinese, c. 1838 or 1839–1890) (Lai Afong / Afong Studio)
View in Garden
c. 1870
Albumen silver print

John Thomson (Scottish, 1837-1921)
River Reeds
c. 1870
from Foochow and the River Min
Carbon print

John Thomson (Scottish, 1837-1921)
The Island Pagoda
c. 1870
From Foochow and the River Min
Carbon print

John Thomson (Scottish, 1837-1921)
Exterior of a Flower Boat
c. 1870
Albumen silver print

John Thomson (Scottish, 1837-1921)
Foochow Ladies
c. 1870
From Foochow and the River Min
Carbon print

John Thomson (Scottish, 1837-1921)
Portrait of a Woman
c. 1870
Albumen silver print

Loewentheil Photography of China Collection
10 West 18th Street 7th Floor

Open by appointment only: 646-838-4576 or 410-602-3002

Loewentheil Photography of China Collection website

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Exhibition: ‘Lucia Moholy – Exposures’ at Fotostiftung Schweiz, Winterthur, Zurich

Exhibition dates: 8th February – 9th June, 2025

Curator: Jan Tichy

Lucia Moholy (British born Czech, 1894-1989) 'Roof of the Atelier-House, Bauhaus Dessau' 1926 from the exhibition 'Lucia Moholy – Exposures' at Fotostiftung Schweiz, Winterthur, Feb - June, 2025

Lucia Moholy (British born Czech, 1894-1989)
Roof of the Atelier-House, Bauhaus Dessau
1926
© 2025, ProLitteris, Zürich

I love Bauhaus design and photographs of the Bauhaus School and these are excellent photographs of both by Lucia Moholy: powerful, graphic, minimalist, modernist, echoing the ethos of the school itself. The strong portraits are pretty damn good as well…

It’s interesting to note then that Moholy was not particularly enamoured of this new modernist vision: “From her diaries, we know that Moholy didn’t like living in Dessau and her photos of the school, which are very alluring, also hint at her despair and dislike of being there.”

Then to learn that Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus School, “had taken the negatives with him when he emigrated to the USA via London leading to years of negotiation with lawyers to get the negatives back.”

Why would you take the negatives of another artist, use them without credit and then refuse to give them back for many years without lawyers being involved? It’s incredible what human beings especially males will do (power and control), all because Gropius found the images useful for him to use! (see below)

While it is wonderful to be able to publish the first posting on Art Blart on the artist, I wish galleries and museums would stop making claims such as, Moholy “was one of the 20th century’s most internationally recognised and important female photographers.”

Let’s be frank: she wasn’t, not anywhere close.

Even in Europe in the 1930s we think of Florence Henri, Germaine Krull, Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, Ilse Bing, Edith Tudor-Hart, Dora Maar etc etc… without even considering American female photographers of the era, or indeed the rest of the century. Today, many have more significance in the history of photography than Lucia Moholy ever will have.

This is in no way denigrating her work at all which I like tremendously, but just to assert that statements not thought through by marketing and media departments may come back to bite you on the arse.

Best just to say that Lucia Moholy was an accomplished artist who made focused, thoughtful, beautiful photographs of an era now nearly a century past. What more do you need to say.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

“In 1938, while Moholy lived in London, Walter Gropius used about fifty of Moholy’s images from the Bauhaus years – from her negatives that he still had in his possession – in the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) exhibition and the accompanying catalogue, without giving her any credit. …

Gropius had been using her photographs without crediting her. She repeatedly reached out to Gropius to reclaim her images and he would continuously protest. Moholy resorted to hiring a lawyer to retrieve her work^.

Some relevant letters between Walter Gropius and Lucia Moholy are displayed on the website 99% Invisible. Moholy stated, “These negatives are irreplaceable documents which could be extremely useful, now more than ever” to which Gropius replied, “[…] long years ago in Berlin, you gave all these negatives to me. You will imagine that these photographs are extremely useful to me and that I have continuously made use of them; so I hope you will not deprive me of them.” Lucia Moholy responded, “Surely you did not expect me to delay my departure in order to draw up a formal contract stipulating date and conditions of return? No formal agreement could have carried more weight than our friendship. It is a friendship I have always relied on, and which, also, I am now invoking.^“

Moholy did not get physical possession of her original material until 1957, but even then she only could recover a portion of them, 230 out of the 560 Bauhaus-era negatives she took, while 330 negatives, according to Moholy’s own card catalogue, are still missing.”

Anonymous. “Lucia Moholy,” on the Wikipedia website [Onloine] Cited 30/05/2025

Lucia Moholy (British born Czech, 1894-1989) 'Workshop wing, design by Walter Gropius, Bauhaus Dessau' around 1926 from the exhibition 'Lucia Moholy – Exposures' at Fotostiftung Schweiz, Winterthur, Feb - June, 2025

Lucia Moholy (British born Czech, 1894-1989)
Workshop wing, design by Walter Gropius, Bauhaus Dessau
around 1926
© 2025, ProLitteris, Zürich

Lucia Moholy (1894-1989) was one of the 20th century’s most internationally recognised and important female photographers. Her architectural photographs and portraits from her years at the Bauhaus in Dessau, which have become icons of photographic history, still shape how that institution is perceived today. However, Moholy was not just a photographer, but also an art historian, critic, writer and archivist; she described herself as a ‘documentalist’ and made a name for herself in the field of information science.

The exhibition Lucia Moholy – Exposures is the first to show the broad scope of her work from the 1910s to the 1970s. Her photographic oeuvre is presented together with numerous documents, some of them newly discovered, which shed light on Moholy’s role in the avant-garde during the interwar period, as well as her youth in Prague, her editorial work in Germany, her activity as a portraitist in London, and her involvement with early microfilm technology in England and Turkey.

Finally, the exhibition also invites visitors to encounter Lucia Moholy in the context of Zurich, where she spent the last thirty years of her life. During that time, she also maintained a relationship with the then fledgling Fotostiftung Schweiz, which today is home to a large collection of her photographs.

Text from the Fotostiftung Schweiz website

Lucia Moholy (British born Czech, 1894-1989)
Gropius House in Dessau
1925
© 2025, ProLitteris, Zürich

“This street view of Gropius’s house in Dessau is glimpsed through a line of birch trees that conjures a feeling of entrapment, almost like prison bars. It reinforces this sense of being fenced in or fenced off – a feature of many of Moholy’s images of the Masters’ Houses, which provided accommodation for Bauhaus teachers.

“The photograph really captures the modernist style of Gropius’s buildings, with the rectilinear geometric shapes and the dark windows inserted into the white facades. While living in Dessau, Moholy’s relationship with Gropius and his wife Isa was amiable and continued to be so when the Gropiuses emigrated to the United States.

“It was only in the 1950s, when she learned how the negatives she left behind in Berlin in 1933 had been used to build the legacy of the school without her knowledge, that the relationship turned sour and she engaged a lawyer to help her recover the images.”

Meghan Forbes, co-curator of the exhibition when it was at Kunsthalle Praha quoted in Alyn Griffiths. “Lucia Moholy’s photographs provide a different perspective on the Bauhaus,” on the Dezeen website, 9th August, 2024 [Online] Cited 10/05/2025

Lucia Moholy (British born Czech, 1894-1989)
Workshop wing from south-west, Bauhaus Dessau
1926
© 2025, ProLitteris, Zürich

Lucia Moholy (British born Czech, 1894-1989)
Bauhaus Dessau: Workshop building from the southwest
c. 1926
© 2025, ProLitteris, Zürich

Lucia Moholy (British born Czech, 1894-1989)
Workshop wing of the Bauhaus Building in Dessau
c. 1926
© 2025, ProLitteris, Zürich

“To me, this photograph of Walter Gropius’s Bauhaus building with a muddy, unpaved road in the foreground shows the messier, dirtier aspects of constructing a new modernist vision. From her diaries, we know that Moholy didn’t like living in Dessau and her photos of the school, which are very alluring, also hint at her despair and dislike of being there.

“Moholy’s photographs documenting the Bauhaus buildings and design objects already appeared – with and without credits – in books at the time, as well as in the popular press. In the 1950s, she discovered that at least 40 of her images were used in the catalogue of the seminal 1938 Bauhaus exhibition held at MoMA in New York.

“It kickstarted a life-long campaign of letter-writing to try to obtain both the possession of her glass negatives from the Bauhaus years and appropriate author credit and compensation for the publication of her images.”

Lucia Moholy (British born Czech, 1894-1989)
Dining room Moholy-Nagy, Meistersiedlung Bauhaus Dessau
1926
© 2025, ProLitteris, Zürich

In the exhibition Lucia Moholy – Exposures, Fotostiftung Schweiz is honouring the oeuvre of a versatile 20th-century pioneer. The famous Bauhaus photographs taken by Lucia Moholy (1894-1989) still shape how that institution is seen today. She also left a significant legacy via her work as an art historian, critic, writer and microfilm expert. The exhibition shines a spotlight on this long-underestimated figure, who spent the last 30 years of her life in Zollikon, near Zurich.

Lucia Moholy – Exposures presents, for the first time, the full breadth of her work from the 1910s to the 1970s. Photographs, letters, diaries, publications and microfilms are shown, spread across three exhibition rooms. The focus is on key periods of her life: her youth in Prague, her time at the Bauhaus, her exile in London and her pioneering work on microfilm technology. One point of emphasis is her connection with Zurich and with Fotostiftung Schweiz, which holds many of her images. Works by the contemporary Czech artist and curatorJan Tichy will also be on display. The exhibition is realised in cooperation with Kunsthalle Praha.

Photographer of the Bauhaus

Lucia Moholy left Prague in 1915 to work for various German publishers. In Berlin, she met Hungarian artist László Moholy-Nagy, whom she married in 1921. Together, they explored new reproduction technologies and the possibilities of the photogram. When Moholy-Nagy was appointed as a master at the Bauhaus, Moholy accompanied him and began to take photographs: Between 1923 and 1928, she documented Bauhaus design objects and Walter Gropius’s famous Dessau buildings. Her clearly composed shots still characterise the visual legacy of that institution to this day. Moholy’s portraits of Bauhaus figures like Anni Albers, Walter Gropius and Florence Henri are particularly impressive, and have been made central to the exhibition.

Exile and a new beginning

In 1928, Lucia Moholy and László Moholy-Nagy left the Bauhaus and moved to Berlin, where they soon separated. Moholy took charge of the photography class at Johannes Itten’s art school, while simultaneously trying her hand at photojournalism. Her flight from the Nazis in 1933 took her to London. There, she opened a photo studio and wrote the bestseller A Hundred Years of Photography, 1839-1939. After her studio was destroyed by bombing in 1940, she turned to microfilm technology. She founded her own documentation service and set up a microfilm centre in Ankara as a UNESCO expert.

The search for the glass negatives

After the end of the Second World War, Moholy noticed many of her Bauhaus photographs appearing in newly released publications. After extensive research, she eventually learnt that Walter Gropius had taken the negatives with him when he emigrated to the USA via London. It was not until 1957, after years of legal negotiations, that Lucia Moholy was able to get a large number of her negatives back, which are now in the Bauhaus Archive in Berlin.

Late recognition of the photographer

Moholy moved to Zurich in 1959. Here, she wrote about Zurich exhibitions for English magazines and was a prominent figure on the art scene. During the 1970s and 1980s, interest in Moholy’s photographic works finally grew. They were shown in exhibitions and published in magazines. In 1981, a solo exhibition was held in her honour at Gallery Ziegler in Zurich. Four years later, her first monograph was published, with in-depth analysis of her work by art historian Rolf Sachsse. Moreover, two founding members of Fotostiftung Schweiz, Rosellina Burri-Bischof and Walter Binder, maintained contact with Lucia Moholy. Thanks to a purchase and a donation from Moholy’s estate, Fotostiftung Schweiz now holds 146 of her prints, which can be accessed via the Online Image Archive and constitute the largest collection outside the Bauhaus Archive.

Jan Tichy – Weight of Glass

The exhibition at Fotostiftung Schweiz is supplemented with contemporary works by the artist and curator Jan Tichy, who has been engaging with Moholy’s legacy for almost 20 years. His microfilm installation can be seen in the passage leading to the photo library. In addition, contemporary video works, installations and photographs are being shown at oxyd-Kunsträume from the 7th of February to the 2nd of March 2025, including the impressive Installation no. 30 (Lucia), for which Tichy arranges and illuminates 330 glass plates in the size of the original negatives. Set up in a dark room, the installation creates a fleeting and fragile memorial to an important protagonist of the 20th century.

Lucia Moholy – Exposures is a Kunsthalle Praha exhibition project, organised in cooperation with Fotostiftung Schweiz, Winterthur, and the Bauhaus Archive, Berlin.

Press release from Fotostiftung Schweiz, Winterthur

Lucia Moholy (British born Czech, 1894-1989) 'Metal workshop, design by Marianne Brandt, Bauhaus Dessau' 1924 from the exhibition 'Lucia Moholy – Exposures' at Fotostiftung Schweiz, Winterthur, Feb - June, 2025

Lucia Moholy (British born Czech, 1894-1989)
Metal workshop, design by Marianne Brandt, Bauhaus Dessau
1924
© 2025, ProLitteris, Zürich

“Marianne Brandt is a really important Bauhaus designer who ended up living in East Germany in relative obscurity, although her work is now also receiving due attention. The somewhat static composition of the two objects side by side is dynamised by the diagonals produced by the larger vessel’s slender spout and the decision to slant in the ashtray’s top, emphasizing the use value.

“It also shows how Moholy played with reflective surfaces when photographing metal objects, evoking the work of Florence Henri who was at the Bauhaus at the same time. Henri was known for capturing her own portrait as she played with glass and metal in her photographs.

“We can also occasionally catch a glimpse of Moholy in some of her metal studies. But in other instances, she focuses on highlighting the lustrous quality of the objects in isolation. These images of metal objects are perhaps the best-known of her Bauhaus product photographs. But she also took pictures of pieces made from ceramics or wood that indicate the evolution of design thinking at the school.”

Lucia Moholy (British born Czech, 1894-1989)
Edith Tschichold, Bauhaus Dessau
1926
© ProLitteris, Zürich

Edith Tschichold was the wife of Bauhaus typographer and graphic designer Jan Tschichold (German, 1905-1986)

Lucia Moholy (British born Czech, 1894-1989)
László Moholy-Nagy, Bauhaus Dessau
1926
© 2025, ProLitteris, Zürich

~ European art research tour exhibition: ‘László Moholy-Nagy and New Typography: A Reconstruction of a Berlin Exhibition from 1929’ at the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, August – September 2019, posted November 2020
~ Exhibition: ‘Moholy-Nagy: Future Present’ at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, February – June 2017
~ Exhibition: ‘Moholy-Nagy: Future Present’ at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, May – September 2016
~ Exhibition: ‘László Moholy-Nagy. The Art of Light’ at the Ludwig Museum, Budapest, June – September 2011
~ Exhibition: ‘László Moholy-Nagy – Art of Light’ at Martin Gropius-Bau, Berlin, November 2010 – January 2011
~ Exhibition: ‘László Moholy-Nagy  Retrospective’ at Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, October 2009 – February 2010

Lucia Moholy (British born Czech, 1894-1989)
Walter Gropius, Bauhaus Dessau
1926
© 2025, ProLitteris, Zürich

Lucia Moholy (British born Czech, 1894-1989)
Ingeborg Lebert
1927
Gelatin silver print
22 x 29.8cm
© 2025, ProLitteris, Zürich

Lucia Moholy (British born Czech, 1894-1989)
Lou Scheper
1927
© 2025, ProLitteris, Zürich

Lou Scheper-Berkenkamp née Hermine Luise Berkenkamp (German, 1901-1976) was a painter, colour designer, the avant-garde author of children’s books, fairy-tale illustrator and costume designer.

More information on the Wikipedia website

Lucia Moholy (British born Czech, 1894-1989)
Florence Henri, Bauhaus Dessau
1927
© 2025, ProLitteris, Zürich

“Henri’s sophisticated, avante-garde, sculptural compositions have an almost ‘being there’ presence: a structured awareness of a way of looking at the world, a world in which the artist questions reality. She confronts the borders of an empirical reality (captured by a machine, the camera) through collage and mirrors, in order to take a leap of faith towards some form of transcendence of the real. Here she confronts the limitless freedom of creativity, of composition, to go beyond objectivity and science, to experience Existenz (Jaspers) – the realm of authentic being.*

These photographs are her experience of being in the world, of Henri observing the breath of being – the breath of herself, the breath of the objects and a meditation on those objects. There is a stillness here, an eloquence of construction and observation that goes beyond the mortal life of the thing itself. That is how these photographs seem to me to live in the world. I may be completely wrong, I probably am completely wrong – but that is how these images feel to me: a view, a perspective, the artist as prospector searching for a new way of authentically living in the world.”

Marcus Bunyan commenting on the exhibition Florence Henri. Compositions at the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, March – September 2014

Lucia Moholy (British born Czech, 1894-1989)
Gypsy, Jugoslavia
1930-1931
© 2025, ProLitteris, Zürich

Lucia Moholy (British born Czech, 1894-1989)
Ruth Fry
1936
© 2025, ProLitteris, Zürich

Anna Ruth Fry (British , 1878-1962), usually known as Ruth Fry, was a Quaker writer, pacifist and peace activist.

More information on the Wikipedia website

Lucia Moholy (British born Czech, 1894-1989)
Emma, Countess of Oxford and Asquith, London
1937
© 2025, ProLitteris, Zürich

Hans Peter Klauser (Swiss, 1910-1989)
Lucia Moholy in her studio in Zollikon
1972
© Hans Peter Klauser/Fotostiftung Schweiz

Fotostiftung Schweiz
Grüzenstrasse 45
CH-8400 Winterthur (Zürich)
Phone: +41 52 234 10 30

Opening hours:
Tuesday – Sunday 11am – 6pm
Wednesday 11am – 8pm
Closed on Mondays

Fotostiftung Schweiz website

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Exhibition: ‘Hill & Adamson | Fashion & Textiles 1843-1848’ at the National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh

Exhibition dates: 15th February – 8th June, 2025

David Octavius Hill & Robert Adamson. 'Mr Finlay, deerstalker in the employ of Campbell of Islay [b]' 1843-1847

David Octavius Hill & Robert Adamson
David Octavius Hill (Scottish, 1802-1870)
Robert Adamson (Scottish, 1821-1848)
Mr Finlay, deerstalker in the employ of Campbell of Islay [b]
1843-1847
Salted paper print
20.1 x 13.6cm
Scottish National Gallery

This photograph shows Mr Finlay in Highland dress, possibly chosen by his employer. Although there is a rich history of tartan appearing in earlier portrait painting, Hill and Adamson were among the first to photograph this iconic Scottish fabric. The calotype process does not show colour, but it offered a means to capture the detail of the different styles of woven fabric. The differences in weave density and pattern between two tartans is clearly visible.

I have supplemented the meagre seven media images with other photographs from the Scottish National Gallery collection (public domain) which I have selected to further illustrate the fashion & textile theme of the exhibition.

Beautiful textiles, intricate fashion, beguiling portraits.

Taken within the first few years of the invention of photography, Hill & Adamson had a profound understanding of how the spirit of a person could be captured by the camera, clothed in working class attire, the robes of respectable society, or fantastical creations of their imagination.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

David Octavius Hill & Robert Adamson. 'Sir George Harvey' 1806-1876

David Octavius Hill & Robert Adamson
David Octavius Hill (Scottish, 1802-1870)
Robert Adamson (Scottish, 1821-1848)
Sir George Harvey, 1806 – 1876. Artist [a]
1843-1847
Salted paper print
20 x 16cm
Scottish National Gallery
Elliot Collection, bequeathed 1950

George Harvey’s boldly patterned coat was likely selected to make this portrait of an artist appear exotic. In the final print this flamboyant garment draws our eye to the sitter, in contrast with the softly draping fabric background and the hard stone of the statue in the corner.

This small display highlights the remarkable skill of pioneering photographers Hill and Adamson in using this very new technology to showcase the fashions of the 1840s.

David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson were working in Edinburgh when photography was in its infancy. They used the calotype process, where a paper negative prepared with a salt solution is used to print a positive photograph. It created a much softer image than later photographs made with glass negatives, making it harder to capture detail.

Hill and Adamson depicted many Edinburgh residents during their partnership, from working men to society ladies. They often focused on people’s clothing to demonstrate what was unique about their lives and posed their sitters to highlight particularly interesting details. They embraced the technical challenge of photographing the varied textiles and fashions of the day. Still experimenting with the calotype process, they successfully show us the delicate pattern on a pair of lace gloves, the rough wool of tartans and tweeds and the sheen of silk.

Text from the National Galleries of Scotland website

David Octavius Hill & Robert Adamson. 'Lady Mary Hamilton (Campbell) Ruthven, 1789 - 1885. Wife of James, Lord Ruthven [a]' 1843-1847

David Octavius Hill & Robert Adamson
David Octavius Hill (Scottish, 1802-1870)
Robert Adamson (Scottish, 1821-1848)
Lady Mary Hamilton (Campbell) Ruthven, 1789 – 1885. Wife of James, Lord Ruthven [a]
1843-1847
Salted paper print
19.8 x 15.3cm
Scottish National Gallery
Gift of Mrs. Riddell in memory of Peter Fletcher Riddell, 1985

The subject of this photograph is Lady Ruthven but the focus is on her clothing. The pose, with her body angled diagonally away from the camera, allowed Hill and Adamson to capture how light fell on the different textures in her outfit. In both the negative and the final print, the intricate lace of her shawl is almost translucent draped over the delicate pattern of the dress below. This is one of the most technically accomplished photographs made by Hill and Adamson during their partnership.

David Octavius Hill & Robert Adamson. 'Mr Laing or Laine' 1843

David Octavius Hill & Robert Adamson
David Octavius Hill (Scottish, 1802-1870)
Robert Adamson (Scottish, 1821-1848)
Mr Laing or Laine
1843
Salted paper print
19.6 x 14.3cm
Scottish National Gallery

The identity of the smartly dressed tennis player in this staged scene is uncertain and yet this calotype has become a popular picture postcard. Hill and Adamson are best remembered for the subtlety and perceptiveness of their photographic portraits but at times they showed a keenness for the representation of movement. Here movement is easy to detect in the blur of the racket and the man’s forearm. The player’s intense gaze furthermore suggests that a tennis ball just just gone out of the picture frame.

David Octavius Hill & Robert Adamson. 'Misses Binney' 1843-1847

David Octavius Hill & Robert Adamson
David Octavius Hill (Scottish, 1802-1870)
Robert Adamson (Scottish, 1821-1848)
Misses Binney
1843-1847
Salted paper print
20.4 x 14.6cm
Scottish National Gallery
Given by Miss Janet Notman

These photographs of the aristocratic Misses Binney have been carefully staged to highlight the rich and varied textiles in their outfits. The positioning in this photograph of Miss Binney’s lace-gloved hand on the dark fabric of her sister’s shawl enhances the contrast between the delicate pattern and her pale skin. This image demonstrates Hill and Adamson’s skill in capturing the unique qualities of lace, silk and satin.

David Octavius Hill & Robert Adamson. 'Jimmy Miller. Son of Professor James Miller [c]' 1843-1847

David Octavius Hill & Robert Adamson
David Octavius Hill (Scottish, 1802-1870)
Robert Adamson (Scottish, 1821-1848)
Jimmy Miller. Son of Professor James Miller [c]
1843-1847
Salted paper print
20.5 x 14.3cm
Scottish National Gallery
Given by Miss Janet Notman

Jimmy Miller was the son of James Miller, a professor of surgery at the University of Edinburgh from 1842, and an advocate of the temperance movement. The family were supporters of and had taken part in the disruption of 1843 , where a group of 450 ministers broke away from the Church of Scotland to establish the Free Church of Scotland. Jimmy was one of the few children to appear in Hill’s painting commemorating the event. Hill referred to him as ‘The Young Savage’.

David Octavius Hill & Robert Adamson. 'Mr Lane [called John Lane, Dr Lane and Edward William Lane] [a]' 1843-1847

David Octavius Hill & Robert Adamson
David Octavius Hill (Scottish, 1802-1870)
Robert Adamson (Scottish, 1821-1848)
Mr Lane [called John Lane, Dr Lane and Edward William Lane] [a]
1843-1847
Materials: Salted paper print
19.8 x 14.5cm
Scottish National Gallery
Elliot Collection, bequeathed 1950

Although this sitter is named as Mr Lane, his identity and connection to India are uncertain. During their partnership, Hill and Adamson made a small number of portraits of sitters in South Asian national dress. Mr Lane has been posed to show the layering of different patterns and textures. His position also allows us to see the shape of his headdress, and the way the beads around his neck interact with the ornate fabric of his robe and the pale undershirt below.

More Hill & Adamson photographs showing fashion not in the display

David Octavius Hill & Robert Adamson. 'Mrs Anne (Palgrave) Rigby 1777 - 1872 [f]' 1843-1847

David Octavius Hill & Robert Adamson
David Octavius Hill (Scottish, 1802-1870)
Robert Adamson (Scottish, 1821-1848)
Mrs Anne (Palgrave) Rigby 1777 – 1872 [f]
1843-1847
Salted paper print
19 x 14.4cm
Scottish National Gallery
Elliot Collection, bequeathed 1950

Anne Rigby was the widowed wife of a doctor and had fourteen children. While living in Edinburgh in the 1840s, she and her daughters were photographed on a number of occasions by Hill and Adamson. This photograph bears a striking resemblance to Whistler’s famous portrait of his mother, which is not at all surprising given that the two ladies were friends. Mrs Whistler may have owned a copy of this calotype of Mrs Rigby.

David Octavius Hill & Robert Adamson. 'Mrs Kinloch. Of Park; nee Napier [b]' 1843-1846

David Octavius Hill & Robert Adamson
David Octavius Hill (Scottish, 1802-1870)
Robert Adamson (Scottish, 1821-1848)
Mrs Kinloch. Of Park; nee Napier [b]
1843-1846
Salted paper print
20.9 x 15.4cm
Scottish National Gallery

David Octavius Hill & Robert Adamson. 'Lady Elizabeth (Rigby) Eastlake, 1809-1893. Writer' 1843-1847

David Octavius Hill & Robert Adamson
David Octavius Hill (Scottish, 1802-1870)
Robert Adamson (Scottish, 1821-1848)
Lady Elizabeth (Rigby) Eastlake, 1809 – 1893. Writer [m]
1843-1847
Salted paper print
20.8 x 15.7cm
Scottish National Gallery
Gift of Mrs. Riddell in memory of Peter Fletcher Riddell, 1985

David Octavius Hill & Robert Adamson. 'Mrs Elizabeth (Johnstone) Hall [Newhaven]' 1843-1847

David Octavius Hill & Robert Adamson
David Octavius Hill (Scottish, 1802-1870)
Robert Adamson (Scottish, 1821-1848)
Mrs Elizabeth (Johnstone) Hall [Newhaven]
1843 – 1847
Carbon print
19.80x 14.6cm
Scottish National Gallery
Edinburgh Photographic Society Collection, gifted 1987

David Octavius Hill & Robert Adamson. 'Miss Ellen and Miss Agnes Milne [Group 194]' 1843-1847

David Octavius Hill & Robert Adamson
David Octavius Hill (Scottish, 1802-1870)
Robert Adamson (Scottish, 1821-1848)
Miss Ellen and Miss Agnes Milne [Group 194]
1843-1847
Salted paper print
18.6 x 14cm
Scottish National Gallery
Edinburgh Photographic Society Collection, gifted 1987

David Octavius Hill & Robert Adamson. 'Rev. John Wilson' 1804-1875. Vice-Chancellor of the University of Bombay' 1843-1847; printed later

David Octavius Hill & Robert Adamson
David Octavius Hill (Scottish, 1802-1870)
Robert Adamson (Scottish, 1821-1848)
Rev. John Wilson, 1804 – 1875. Vice-Chancellor of the University of Bombay
1843-1847; printed later
Salted paper print
22.8 x 16.1cm
Scottish National Gallery
The MacKinnon Collection. Acquired jointly with the National Library of Scotland with assistance from The National Lottery Heritage Fund, Scottish Government and Art Fund

David Octavius Hill & Robert Adamson. 'Willie Liston, 'Redding [cleaning or preparing] the line'; Newhaven fisherman [Newhaven 3]' 1843-1847

David Octavius Hill & Robert Adamson
David Octavius Hill (Scottish, 1802-1870)
Robert Adamson (Scottish, 1821-1848)
Willie Liston, ‘Redding [cleaning or preparing] the line’; Newhaven fisherman [Newhaven 3]
1843-1847
Salted paper print
20 x 14.1cm
Scottish National Gallery
Gift of Mrs. Riddell in memory of Peter Fletcher Riddell, 1985

David Octavius Hill & Robert Adamson. 'Dr George Bell. Founder of 'Ragged Schools' [c]' 1843-1847

David Octavius Hill & Robert Adamson
David Octavius Hill (Scottish, 1802-1870)
Robert Adamson (Scottish, 1821-1848)
Dr George Bell. Founder of ‘Ragged Schools’ [c]
1843-1847
Carbon print
21.3 x 16cm
Scottish National Gallery
Elliot Collection, bequeathed 1950

David Octavius Hill & Robert Adamson. 'Rev. Peter Jones or Kahkewaquonaby' 1802-1856. Indian chief and missionary in Canada

David Octavius Hill & Robert Adamson
David Octavius Hill (Scottish, 1802-1870)
Robert Adamson (Scottish, 1821-1848)
Rev. Peter Jones or Kahkewaquonaby, 1802 – 1856. Indian chief and missionary in Canada [c]
1843-1847
Salted paper print
20.2 x 14.6cm
Scottish National Gallery
Purchased from the estate of Sophia Finlay (Charles Finlay’s Trust), 1937

Born in Canada, Peter Jones’ father was a Welsh-born, American immigrant and his mother was of Ojibwa Indian ancestry. He grew up as a Native-American Indian with the name ‘Kahkewāquonāby’, meaning sacred waving feathers. Following his father’s wishes he was baptised by the Methodist church which led to his role as an Indian missionary. To fundraise he toured the United States and the United Kingdom, giving speeches and sermons to captivated audiences. He arrived in Edinburgh in July 1845 and this calotype is one of a series showing Jones in both Indian attire and western clothes. These are some of the oldest surviving photographs of a North American Indian.

David Octavius Hill & Robert Adamson. 'Lady Abercromby (or Hon Mrs Abercromby)' 1843-1847

David Octavius Hill & Robert Adamson
David Octavius Hill (Scottish, 1802-1870)
Robert Adamson (Scottish, 1821-1848)
Lady Abercromby (or Hon Mrs Abercromby)
1843-1847
Carbon print
20.2 x 15.7cm (trimmed)
Scottish National Gallery
Elliot Collection, bequeathed 1950

David Octavius Hill & Robert Adamson. 'Lane and Lewis in oriental dress' 1843-1847

David Octavius Hill & Robert Adamson
David Octavius Hill (Scottish, 1802-1870)
Robert Adamson (Scottish, 1821-1848)
Lane and Lewis in oriental dress
1843-1847
Salted paper print
20 x 14.2cm
Scottish National Gallery

David Octavius Hill & Robert Adamson. 'James Drummond, 1816 - 1877. History painter; curator of the National Gallery of Scotland [b]' 1843-1847

David Octavius Hill & Robert Adamson
David Octavius Hill (Scottish, 1802-1870)
Robert Adamson (Scottish, 1821-1848)
James Drummond, 1816 – 1877. History painter; curator of the National Gallery of Scotland [b]
1843-1847
Salted paper print
19.3 x 14.7cm

James Drummond was an accomplished artist and antiquarian, who specialised in history paintings. He studied at the Trustees’ Academy in Edinburgh and was elected to the Royal Scottish Academy in 1852. Between 1848 and 1859 Drummond produced a series of pencil and wash drawings of closes, streets and buildings in Edinburgh. They were later published as lithographs in a folio volume entitled ‘Old Edinburgh’. In 1868 Drummond became curator of the Scottish National Gallery, a position he held until his death in 1877. An admirer of the new medium of photography, he was a member of the Photographic Society of Scotland and owned two albums of Hill and Adamson’s calotypes.

National Galleries of Scotland
The Mound, Edinburgh, EH2 2EL

Opening hours:
Daily, 10am – 5pm

National Galleries of Scotland website

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Exhibition: ‘The basement: photography from Prahran College (1968-1981)’ at the Museum of Australian Photography, Wheelers Hill, Melbourne

Exhibition dates: 1st March – 25th May, 2025

Curators: Angela Connor, MAPh Senior Curator, and Stella Loftus-Hills, MAPh Curator

Exhibiting artists: Colin Abbott, Robert Ashton, Con Aslanis, Polly Borland, Peter Bowes, John Brash, Peter Burgess, Nanette Carter, John Cato, Andrew Chapman, Lyn Cheong, Jon Conte, Kim Corbel, Paul Cox, Mimmo Cozzolino, Christina de Water, Duncan Frost, Rob Gale, Sandra Graham, Bill Henson, Julie Higginbotham, Graham Howe, Carol Jerrems, Moira Joseph, Peter Kelly, Christopher Köller, Johann Krix, Paul Lambeth, Derrick Lee, Peter Leiss, Carolyn Lewens, Steven Lojewski, Ian Macrae, James McArdle, Jim McFarlane, Rod McNicol, Julie Millowick, Peter Milne, Jacqueline Mitelman, Richard Muggleton, Martin Munz, Nicholas Nedelkopoulos, Greg Neville, Glen O’Malley, Viki Petherbridge, Ross Powell, Philip Quirk, Leonie Reisberg, Susan Russell, Stella Sallman, Athol Shmith, Geoff Strong, Ian Tippett, George Volakos, Stephen Wickham, Andrew Wittner, Ken Wright, Lynette Zeeng

Andrew Chapman (Australian, b. 1954) 'Lest we forget' 1980 from the exhibition 'The basement: photography from Prahran College (1968-1981)' at the Museum of Australian Photography, Wheelers Hill, Melbourne, March - May 2025

Andrew Chapman (Australian, b. 1954)
Lest we forget
1980
Gelatin silver print
Museum of Australian Photography, City of Monash Collection donated 2024

Nurture

A world of creativity and transformation

This is a magnificent exhibition at the Museum of Australian Photography which showcases the work of students and teachers at Prahran College between 1958-1981.

People more eminent than myself have commented on the exhibition.

Gael Newton AM – formerly curator of photography at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, and the Senior Curator of Australian and International Photography at the National Gallery of Australia (NGA) in Canberra – “highlights the diverse and passionate nature of the Prahran College community, where an unstructured curriculum and open debates encouraged multiple approaches – from documentary and still life to collage and staged tableau – while the influence of European cinematic sensibilities and the local film and music scenes added depth to the artistic expression.”1

Daniel Palmer – Professor in the School of Art at RMIT University, his research and professional practice focuses on contemporary art and cultural theory, with a particular emphasis on photography and digital media – commenting on the era “frames the 1970s as a transformative era for Australian society and photography, characterised by social activism.”1

Helen Ennis – formerly Curator of Photography at the National Gallery of Australia and outstanding writer on Australian photography and photographers – emphasises “productive intergenerational exchanges between students and their older educators Prahran represented a space of creative possibility and hope” while acknowledging Prahran’s limitations including gender imbalance, “noting examination records from 1974 showing only five of twenty students were female, with the first woman (Julie Millowick) not appointed to teach until 1983.”1

“Ennis’s address brings to light from The Basement a critical reassessment of how we understand and present 1970s Australian photography. She advocated for approaches that preserve the complexity, contradictions, and energy of this formative period rather than imposing retrospective order that might simplify or misrepresent it. Her reflections bridge historical understanding with contemporary curatorial practice, suggesting ways to engage more authentically with photography’s rich past.”2

Bill Henson AO – former student and internationally acclaimed photographer – acknowledges that “that political movements such as feminism were present among Prahran’s students in the 1970s – “there were the feminists; there were little groups doing their social diligence” – he noted that these stances did not overshadow the college’s overarching emphasis on beauty and creative exploration. “There wasn’t this righteousness, this indignation, this kind of territorial thing about issues,” he said. In contrast there was an openness and enthusiasm that defined Prahran during his time there – a place where beauty and creativity were paramount.”3

On reflection

What struck me most about this exhibition was the creative strength of the STUDENT work … and that is something nobody mentions. This was student work.

These were artists finding their personal voice, exploring the world, being creative, learning how to envision the world in their photographs – through social documentary or conceptual, experimental photographs that challenged how Australian viewed itself. As Assoc. Professor James McArdle, a former student and one of the many driving forces behind this exhibition, insightfully observes:

“Prahran, at this time, was a nexus for the ‘New Photography’ movement in Australia, bringing to our country international developments from the 1960s, the candid, loosely structured photographic language that contrasted sharply with the rigid narratives of photojournalism and the increasingly commercial aesthetics of colour photography.

Prahran College itself played a critical role in the legitimisation of photography as an art form within Australia. It spearheaded the integration of art photography into tertiary education curricula, fostering an environment where young artists … could experiment formally and conceptually.”4

Indeed, Melbourne in the late 1960s and early 1970s could be seen as the nurturing centre of photography in Australia.

As my friend Ian Lobb said to me before he died, “In 1970 where did you go to see a fine art photograph on exhibition in a non-institutional gallery in Melbourne? The only place was the doorway to the John Cato / Athol Shmith / Peter Barr studio in Collins Street. You would never know which of the three photographers would have a print placed in that doorway.”5

But then things changed.

Variously, Melbourne had Jenny Boddington appointed curator of photography in 1972 at the National Gallery of Victoria, becoming the first such curator in Australia and perhaps only the third in the world.

Melbourne also had three commercial art photography galleries that supported local and international exhibitions, exposing major international photographers to local artists. These included Brummels Gallery of Photography reopened in the early 1970s by that wonderful photographer Rennie Ellis and deputy director Robert Ashton (Prahran), the first privately run art gallery in the country to be devoted specifically to photography; The Photographers’ Gallery and Workshop founded in 1973 by Paul Cox (Prahran), Ingeborg Tyssen, John F. Williams and Rod McNicol (Prahran), taken over by Ian Lobb in 1974 and joined by co-director Bill Heimerman in 1976 showcasing mostly American and some European original fine prints from major artists which were influential on Australian audiences and practitioners; and Church Street Photographic Centre opened by Joyce Evans OAM in 1976, the third commercial photographic gallery in 1970s Melbourne which exhibited international 19th and 20th Century photography

Prahran College was closely followed by Phillip Institute of Technology (PIT) which was a tertiary college in Bundoora which had an art photography course run by Ian Lobb and Les Walkling, from 6 January 1982 to 30 June 1992 at which time the school integrated as part of RMIT University. I attended PIT in 1991 and then RMIT University where I completed by doctorate, after having undertaken two years at Brighton Technical College completing two years on the basics of photography, a grounding for many budding photographers in those years under the direction of Peter Barker.

I remember at RMIT fine art photography course we would have reviews of student work every 4 weeks, where over 2 days students put up new work and we all sat together with the lecturers and discussed the ideas contained in the work. The atmosphere was electric, the disparate work, the in-depth conversations, the passion. Look at Greg Neville’s photograph Tutorial: lecturers and students [back row L–R Derrick Lee, Bryan Gracey, Athol Shmith, Paul Cox, Elizabeth Tainsh] (c. 1971, below) and you can feel a similar energy…

So Melbourne has been particularly blessed – I dislike that word but there is no other that really conveys what I mean – by this confluence of events, people and places that supported the rigorous investigation of photography and life that Prahran College was a part of. At Prahran there was optimism, social conscience, and an engagement with the street and with life, there was “creative rebellion and intellectual engagement”. I asked James McArdle at an artist’s talk about this: how exciting this would have been, the bouncing of ideas one off another, the sense of community and camaraderie, and yes they were all there … encouraging an “atmosphere” of creativity which has produced a generation of outstanding photographers who will leave a lasting legacy in the history of Australian photography.

As an artist who arrived as a “second generation” photographer after Prahran College I have a great affection for the people and the work produced in the exhibition.

I knew John Cato and his delightful wife Dawn Cato well and went down to their house for afternoon tea to discuss photography and life; together with Bill Heimerman I co-curated his retrospective at The Photographers’ Galley and Workshop in 2002, the text ‘and his forms were without number’ used in the book accompanying the exhibition John Cato Retrospective at the Ballarat International Foto Biennale in 2013 where Paul Cox and I made opening speeches. Both were good friends.

Joyce Evans was my substitute mother in Australia. What a wonderful, bohemian, creative, intelligent woman she was. I wrote “Nothing emerges from nothing,” foreword to her book We Had Such High Hopes: Student Activism and the Peace Movement 1949-1952, A Photographic Memoir by Joyce Evans 2019 published before she died, a book that instils the social conscience ethos emerging in postwar Australia which leads into the work of the Prahran College photographers. I still her miss greatly.

As I do both Ian Lobb and Bill Heimerman (pictured below in Peter Leiss’ Untitled [Bill Heimerman (right) and Ian Lobb (left) at the rear of The Photographers’ Gallery] c. 1975-1980), both good friends. Ian Lobb was my first photography lecturer at PIT and became my mentor and friend for over 30 years; Bill gave me three solo exhibitions at The Photographer’s Gallery and Workshop in my early days as an artist, and much excellent advice, for which I am forever grateful.

James McArdle and Gael Newton remain valued friends, both amazing fonts of knowledge in all aspects of photography and photographic research.

In conclusion, congratulations to all who have been involved in bringing this exhibition to fruition: artists, writers and curators. It is a magnificent achievement and a testament to the creativity and passion of the times, both theatre and document reflecting an era that sadly can no longer be repeated.

Prahran College photographers followed their heart and their eye, they possessed a curiosity which “evokes the care one takes for what exists or could exist; an acute sense of the real which, however, never becomes fixed; a readiness to find our surroundings strange and singular; a certain restlessness in ridding ourselves of our familiarities and looking at things otherwise; a passion for seizing what is happening now and what is passing away; a lack of respect for traditional hierarchies of the important and the essential.”6

However long I live, it has always been a privilege to be part of this community, to be part of the Melbourne photographic community.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

1/ James McArdle. “Launched!,” on the On This Date in Photography website, 6th April 2025 [Online] Cited 06/04/2025

2/ Helen Ennis quoted in James McArdle. “Unfixing,” on the On This Date in Photography website, 29th March 2025 [Online] Cited 06/04/2025

3/ Bill Henson opening speech summarised in James McArdle. “Opening!” on the On This Date in Photography website, 1st March, 2025 [Online] Cited 18/04/2025

4/ James McArdle. “Epoch,” on the On This Date in Photography website, 25th April, 2025 [Online] Cited 28/04/2025

5/ “Steve Lojewski [in the year ahead of me at PCAE] and I job shared at Shmith / Cato / Barr. A fantastic opportunity to work mainly in the darkroom, occasionally assisting in the studio and as they gained confidence in me sent out on [mickey mouse] jobs when they were double booked. A HUGE break and when Peter Barr bought out John and Athol and established Peter Barr & Associates he invited me to freelance out of his new studio. That offer would not have happened without the prior experience of the darkroom & studio work. My first job on the Monday morning of my 2 week trial for Athol, John and Peter was 250 prints [on fibre paper] of Malcom Fraser by 11.00 am [ie the wet deadline was 11.00. Dry and out the door was, from memory, 12.noon].”

Julie Millowick in conversation with Marcus Bunyan via Facebook, 20th May 2025

6/ Michel Foucault, “The Masked Philosopher” in Politics, philosophy, culture: interviews and other writings, 1977-1984. London: Routledge, 1988, p. 328

Apologies if a couple of the photographs are slightly out of focus, these were digital RAW files shot on a Sony rx100 handheld at 1000ASA with low depth of field.

For more information please see The Prahran Photography website which upholds the legacy of Prahran College 1970s photography through posts on profiles of the alumni and lecturers (an ongoing project).

“Curiosity is a vice that has been stigmatized in turn by Christianity, by philosophy and even by a certain conception of science. Curiosity, futility. I like the word however. To me it suggests something all together different: it evokes concern; it evokes the care one takes for what exists or could exist; an acute sense of the real which, however, never becomes fixed; a readiness to find our surroundings strange and singular; a certain restlessness in ridding ourselves of our familiarities and looking at things otherwise; a passion for seizing what is happening now and what is passing away; a lack of respect for traditional hierarchies of the important and the essential.”

Michel Foucault, “The Masked Philosopher” in Politics, philosophy, culture: interviews and other writings, 1977-1984. London: Routledge, 1988, p. 328

Gallery One (clockwise)

Installation view of the exhibition 'The basement: photography from Prahran College (1968-1981)' at the Museum of Australian Photography, Wheelers Hill, Melbourne

Wall text from the exhibition 'The basement: photography from Prahran College (1968-1981)' at the Museum of Australian Photography, Wheelers Hill, Melbourne, March - May, 2025

Installation views of the exhibition The basement: photography from Prahran College (1968-1981) at the Museum of Australian Photography, Wheelers Hill, Melbourne
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

In May 1968 the newly formed photography department of Prahran Technical School (known as Prahran College of Advanced Education (PCAE) from 1973) moved into the basement of a freshly completed art and design building on the corner of High Street and Thomas Street in Melbourne’s inner southeastern suburb of Prahran. Here, for the first time in Australia, photography was taught as an artform.

Featuring the work of approximately 60 artists, The basement brings to light rare vintage prints from the 1960s through to the early 1980s, key archival ephemera and folio work – from students and teachers of the College’s Diploma of Art & Design (Photography). It was a period where new discussions developed quickly around the possibilities of what photography could be. These students and teachers were part of a progressive, edgy wave of image-makers excited about the medium’s potential.

Under the vanguard of influential photographers such as John Cato, Paul Cox and Athol Shmith, the school became a breeding ground for some of this country’s most important art photographers: Carol Jerrems, Bill Henson, Nanette Carter, Rod McNicol, Polly Borland, Peter Milne, Robert Ashton, Philip Quirk, Peter Leiss, Jacqueline Mitelman, Mimmo Cozzolino, Graham Howe and Julie Millowick, among many others.

The exhibition’s accompanying publication elucidates the experience from several perspectives. As we hear from the curators, students, colleagues and academics, it’s clear that this course, in this time, was of great consequence to our photographic ecosystem and its development.

Curated by Angela Connor, MAPh Senior Curator, and Stella Loftus-Hills, MAPh Curator, The basement gathers works from close to 60 artists, traversing over 13 years of image-making and adjacent subcultures in music, protest, fashion and art criticism. This landmark exhibition will deliver new research into the canon of Australia’s cultural history through its assembled works and attendant publication.

Text from the Museum of Australian Photography website

Installation view of the reverse of the opening wall of the exhibition The basement: photography from Prahran College (1968-1981) at the Museum of Australian Photography, Wheelers Hill, Melbourne
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Moira Joseph (Australian, b. 1955)
'Jack with a cigarette sitting in the church garden, St Kilda' 1974 (installation view) from the exhibition 'The basement: photography from Prahran College (1968-1981)' at the Museum of Australian Photography, March - May, 2025

Moira Joseph (Australian, b. 1955)
Jack with a cigarette sitting in the church garden, St Kilda (installation view)
1974
Gelatin silver print
Museum of Australian Photography, City of Monash Collection
Acquired 2024
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Moira Joseph (Australian, b. 1955)
'Herald boys, Fitzroy Street, St Kilda' 1975 (installation view)

Moira Joseph (Australian, b. 1955)
Herald boys, Fitzroy Street, St Kilda (installation view)
1975
Gelatin silver print
Museum of Australian Photography, City of Monash Collection
Acquired 2024
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Moira Joseph is a Melbourne-based professional photographer, filmmaker and teacher. She studied photography at Prahran College from 1974 to 1977. Joseph created the works on display here while she was a student. Armed with her Mamiya 220 medium-format camera, Joesph often walked between the College and her home in St Kilda, affectionately documenting the characters she regularly encountered. Jack with a cigarette sitting in the church garden, St Kilda (1974), for example, shows an elderly gentleman from a nearby men’s refuge sitting alone in Acland Street’s church square. Children regularly feature in Joseph’s student work, and she spent time photographing at luna park, as well as Prahran Primary School.

Wall text from the exhibition

Moira Joseph alumni profile on the Prahran Legacy website

Moira Joseph (Australian, b. 1955)
'Three Herald boys, Acland Street, St Kilda' 1975 (installation view)

Moira Joseph (Australian, b. 1955)
Three Herald boys, Acland Street, St Kilda (installation view)
1975
Gelatin silver print
Museum of Australian Photography, City of Monash Collection
Acquired 2024
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the first gallery of the exhibition The basement: photography from Prahran College (1968-1981) at the Museum of Australian Photography, Wheelers Hill, Melbourne showing Julie Millowick ‘s photographs from clockwise: ANZAC woman alone, draped in leopard skin coat, 1975; Carlisle Street shopping, 1975; Luna Park, St Kilda, 1975; Mother and child from 46 Blanche Street, St Kilda, 1977 from the series Portraits of women
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Julie Millowick studied photography at Prahran College from 1974 to 1976 and gained early experience working in the darkroom of Athol Shmith, John Cato and Peter Bart. She is widely known for her work as a commercial photographer and photojournalist as well as her personal documentary projects.

1975 was Millowick’s second year at Prahran College, and also International Women’s Year, as designated by the United Nations. With the spotlight set firmly on women’s rights, Millowick made an extensive series of photographs entitled Portraits of women, which she continued in subsequent years. This human-centred series with feminist undertones, sympathetically captured women in a variety of locations and depicted moments of motherhood, friendship, loneliness, old-age and youth.

Wall text from the exhibition

Read my review “Down with Earth,” on the exhibition Julie Millowick: Surrounding at the Castlemaine Art Museum, June 2024

Julie Millowick Alumni profile on the Prahran Legacy website

Julie Millowick (Australian, b. 1948)
'Mother and child from 46 Blanche Street, St Kilda' 1977 from the exhibition 'The basement: photography from Prahran College (1968-1981)' at the Museum of Australian Photography, Wheelers Hill, Melbourne, March - May 2025

Julie Millowick (Australian, b. 1948)
Mother and child from 46 Blanche Street, St Kilda
1977
Gelatin silver print
15.9 x 23.7cm
Museum of Australian Photography, City of Monash Collection donated by Julie Millowick 2024

Wall text from the exhibition The basement: photography from Prahran College (1968-1981) at the Museum of Australian Photography, Wheelers Hill, Melbourne
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the first gallery of the exhibition 'The basement: photography from Prahran College (1968-1981)' at the Museum of Australian Photography, Wheelers Hill, Melbourne

Installation views of the first gallery of the exhibition The basement: photography from Prahran College (1968-1981) at the Museum of Australian Photography, Wheelers Hill, Melbourne
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the first gallery of the exhibition The basement: photography from Prahran College (1968-1981) at the Museum of Australian Photography, Wheelers Hill, Melbourne showing at left, George Volakos’ photograph Vietnam moratorium 1 1970; at top centre, Graham Howe’s photograph Protester, moratorium to end the war in Vietnam 1970 followed by two photographs Moratorium to end the war in Vietnam 1970 (below)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

As a student at Prahran College in the early 1970s, Graham Howe embraced photography’s ability to document social change. For Howe, photography was the perfect medium for observing the world around him and expressing a point of view. This is evident in his images of a Vietnam War moratorium in Melbourne in September 1970. Immersed in a sea of people, placards and peace signs, Howe made a series of tightly framed and often close-up views of the protesters, showing the event from his perspective as an impassioned participant rather than an objective observer. Other Prahran College students, such as Johann Kris and George Volvos, also took photographs at these demonstrations, documenting the intensity of the activist movement

Wall text from the exhibition

Graham Howe alumni profile on the Prahran Legacy website

Graham Howe (Australian, b. 1950)
'Moratorium to end the war in Vietnam' 1970, printed 2024 (installation view)

Graham Howe (Australian, b. 1950)
Moratorium to end the war in Vietnam (installation view)
1970, printed 2024
Pigment inkjet print
Collection of the artist
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Graham Howe (Australian, b. 1950)
'Moratorium to end the war in Vietnam' 1970, printed 2024 (installation view) from the exhibition 'The basement: photography from Prahran College (1968-1981)' at the Museum of Australian Photography, March - May, 2025

Graham Howe (Australian, b. 1950)
Moratorium to end the war in Vietnam (installation view)
1970, printed 2024
Pigment inkjet print
Collection of the artist
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the first gallery of the exhibition The basement: photography from Prahran College (1968-1981) at the Museum of Australian Photography, Wheelers Hill, Melbourne showing from left clockwise, Ken Wright’s Rally for Gough 1975; Andrew Chapman’s Street protest, November 11th 1975; Richard Muggleton’s Untitled (F19 protest) c. 1977; and Andrew Chapman’s Lest we forget 1980
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Ken Wright (Australian / New Zealand, 1948-1998)
'Rally for Gough' 1975 (installation view)

Ken Wright (Australian/New Zealand, 1948-1998)
Rally for Gough (installation view)
1975
Gelatin silver print
Private collection
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Andrew Chapman (Australian, b. 1954) 'Lest we forget' 1980 (installation view)

Andrew Chapman (Australian, b. 1954)
Lest we forget (installation view)
1980
Gelatin silver print
Museum of Australian Photography, City of Monash Collection donated 2024
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Andrew Chapman studied photography at Prahran College from 1974 to 1976 and then again in 1980. His Street protest, November 11th (1975) documents a politically motivated rally. It was taken on the corner of Albert Street and moray Street in South Melbourne. Chapman was in his second year at Prahran College and had been listening to parliament on the radio in the office of the then photography technician Murray White. When the news broke of the Whitlam Government’s dismissal, Chapman was quick to join the rallies that broke out in the streets. Later, in 1980, the streets were still politically charged when Chapman returned to Prahran to complete his course. His image, Lest we forget (1980) was made in City Square on Swanston Street at an anti-Fraser demonstration in the lead-up to the 1980 federal election. Described by Julie Millowick as the student who never stopped photographing, even during class, Chapman always has his Leica camera ready. Throughout his career Chapman has photographed much of Australia’s social and political landscape, working both personally and for clients, including as a photojournalist for major Australian newspapers and magazines.

Wall text from the exhibition

Andrew Chapman alumni profile on the Prahran Legacy website

Wall text from the exhibition The basement: photography from Prahran College (1968-1981) at the Museum of Australian Photography, Wheelers Hill, Melbourne
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the first gallery of the exhibition The basement: photography from Prahran College (1968-1981) at the Museum of Australian Photography, Wheelers Hill, Melbourne showing from top left clockwise photographs by Julie Higginbotham: Greville Street Market, 1975; Catching butterflies, Prahran Park, 1974; and Greville Street, 1976
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Julie Higginbotham practiced a style of unobtrusive street photography in the mid-1970s, making candid expressive images such as ‘Catching butterflies, Prahran Park’ (1974), which records a moment of human interaction with a keen eye for composition and synchronicity. Higginbotham recalls being offered a bohemian, European-inspired style of education at Prahran College while she was there from 1971 to 1974, particularly by Cox whose emphasis on freedom of expression and personal choice resonated. Through her street photography, Higginbotham was interested in recording the cultural changes that were taking place in Melbourne at the time. Living above a shop in the heart of Greville Street in 1975, she was part of a lively hippie community in Prahran. While living conditions were squalid, the cheap rents attracted artists, musicians and alternative thinkers to the area. Greville Street at this time was one of Melbourne’s key counterculture locations, known for live music, organic food and second-hand clothes shops. Higginbotham produced several images that document the vibrancy of this movement, including a series of street photographs she made at the Greville Street Market on Saturday in 1975.

Wall text from the exhibition

Julie Higginbotham alumni profile on the Prahran Legacy website

Julie Higginbotham interview Prahran CAE 1971 – 74 Photography

Installation view of the first gallery of the exhibition The basement: photography from Prahran College (1968-1981) at the Museum of Australian Photography, Wheelers Hill, Melbourne showing from left, Andrew Chapman’s photographs Anti Fraser demonstrator, Collins Street Melbourne 1979; Tribune newspaper seller, Melbourne 1980; Party supporter, Liberal Party campaign launch, Moorabbin Town Hall 1980
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Andrew Chapman (Australian, b. 1954) 'Tribune newspaper seller, Melbourne' 1980 (installation view)

Andrew Chapman (Australian, b. 1954)
Tribune newspaper seller, Melbourne (installation view)
1980
Gelatin silver print
Museum of Australian Photography, City of Monash Collection donated 2024
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Andrew Chapman (Australian, b. 1954) 'Tribune newspaper seller, Melbourne' 1980 from the exhibition 'The basement: photography from Prahran College (1968-1981)' at the Museum of Australian Photography, Wheelers Hill, Melbourne, March - May 2025

Andrew Chapman (Australian, b. 1954)
Tribune newspaper seller, Melbourne (installation view)
1980
Gelatin silver print
Museum of Australian Photography, City of Monash Collection donated 2024

Andrew Chapman (Australian, b. 1954) 'Party supporter, Liberal Party campaign launch, Moorabbin Town Hall' 1980 (installation view)

Andrew Chapman (Australian, b. 1954)
Party supporter, Liberal Party campaign launch, Moorabbin Town Hall (installation view)
1980
Gelatin silver print
Museum of Australian Photography, City of Monash Collection donated 2024
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Rob Gale (Australian, b. 1953) 'Untitled 01' 1978 (installation view)

Rob Gale (Australian, b. 1953)
Untitled 01 (installation view)
1978
From the series Swanston Street 5pm
Pigment ink-jet print, printed 2024
Collection of the artist
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Rob Gale studied photography at Prahran Collect from 1976 to 1978. For his series, Swanston Street, 5pm (1978), Gale took inspiration from an iconic painting by the Australian artist John Brack, Collins Street, 5pm (1955). Gale’s photographic exploration of Brack’s stylised view of Melbourne’s office workers was made during peak hour at a busy tram stop near Flinders Street Station. Influenced by American street photographers such as Bruce Golden and Weegee, Gale used a hand-held flash to illuminate his subjects. In a nod to Brack’s painting, this technique allowed Gale to create harsh, stylised views of impatient commuters. The flash also seems to have induced grimaces and sideways stares which, along with the harsh lighting, shadows and unusual camera angles, served to accentuate the strange and surreal atmosphere in the photographs.

Wall text from the exhibition

Rob Gale alumni profile on the Prahran Legacy website

Rob Gale (Australian, b. 1953)
'Untitled 12' 1978 from the series 'Swanston Street 5pm' from the exhibition 'The basement: photography from Prahran College (1968-1981)' at the Museum of Australian Photography, Wheelers Hill, Melbourne, March - May 2025

Rob Gale (Australian, b. 1953)
Untitled 12
1978
From the series Swanston Street 5pm
Pigment ink-jet print, printed 2024
Collection of the artist

Installation view of the exhibition The basement: photography from Prahran College (1968-1981) at the Museum of Australian Photography, Wheelers Hill, Melbourne showing photographs from left clockwise, Steven Lojewsi’s Man with umbrella near curb, Melbourne 1975; Johann Krix’s Proud moment, Moomba c. 1971; and Andrew Wittner’s Where’s my car, Melbourne 1973
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Andrew Wittner (Australian, b. 1955)
Where’s My Car?
1973, printed 2024
Gelatin silver print
Collection of the artist

Andrew Wittner alumni profile on the Prahran Legacy website

Steven Lojewsi (Australian born England, b. 1952) 'Man with umbrella near curb, Melbourne' 1975 (installation view)

Steven Lojewsi (Australian born England, b. 1952)
Man with umbrella near curb, Melbourne (installation view)
1975
Gelatin silver print
Museum of Australian Photography, City of Monash Collection donated 2025
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Steven Lojewski was born in London and grea up in Canada before arriving in Australian in 1969. He studied photography at Prahran College from 1974 to 1976 and later at Sydney College of the Arts. While studying at Prahran, Lojewski made a number of photographs on the streets of Melbourne. Sparsely populated, these early-career vintage prints demonstrate Lojewski’s highly defined, formal approach to documenting the urban landscape and illustrate his ability to produce a subtle range of silvery mid-tones and carefully styled compositions.

Wall text from the exhibition

Steven Lojewski alumni profile on the Prahran Legacy website

Steven Lojewsi (Australian born England, b. 1952)
Man with umbrella near curb, Melbourne
1975
Gelatin silver print
Museum of Australian Photography, City of Monash Collection donated 2025

Installation view of the exhibition The basement: photography from Prahran College (1968-1981) at the Museum of Australian Photography, Wheelers Hill, Melbourne showing at left, John Conte’s Telephone, Prahran 1971; at centre top, Philip Quirk’s Lone ranger (Prahran resident with Royal Show souvenirs) 1973; at centre bottom, Philip Quirk’s The headmistress, sports day, Como Park 1975; and at right, Johann Krix’s Toorak Road, South Yarra 1972
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Philip Quirk (Australian, b. 1948)
'Lone ranger (Prahran resident with Royal Show souvenirs)' 1973 (installation view)

Philip Quirk (Australian, b. 1948)
Lone ranger (Prahran resident with Royal Show souvenirs) (installation view)
1973
Gelatin silver print
15.9 x 23.8cm
Museum of Australian Photography, City of Monash Collection acquired 2024
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Based in Sydney, Philip Quirk has been a practising documentary photographer since the 1970s. He studied photography at Prahran College from 1971 to 1973 and has frequently used his camera to capture endearing images of humanity. Influenced by international photographers such as Henri Cartier-Bresson and Diane Arbus, Quirk’s images feature unusual characters and situations, often incorporating humour and incongruity. His work, Lone ranger (Prahran resident with Royal Show souvenirs) (1973) formed part of his final portfolio assessment at Prahran College. Walking through the streets of Prahran, Quirk stopped to talk to this elderly resident and photographed him in the afternoon sunlight. With its emphasis on light and composition combined with an interest in Australian culture, this photograph is a precursor to the street and social documentary work Quirk produced in the years immediately following his time at Prahran College.

Wall text from the exhibition

Phil Quirk alumni profile on the Prahran Legacy website

Johann Krix (Australian born Austria, b. 1948) 'Toorak Road, South Yarra' 1972 (installation view)

Johann Krix (Australian born Austria, b. 1948)
Toorak Road, South Yarra (installation view)
1972
Gelatin silver print
Collection of the artist
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition The basement: photography from Prahran College (1968-1981) at the Museum of Australian Photography, Wheelers Hill, Melbourne showing Robert Ashton’s photographs, Champion Jackpot 1974; Builders Arms Hotel 1974; Family 1974 from the series Fitzroy
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Robert Ashton (Australian, b. 1950)
'Champion Jackpot' 1974, printed 2008 (installation view)

Robert Ashton (Australian, b. 1950)
Champion Jackpot (installation view)
1974, printed 2008
Pigment inkjet print
Museum of Australian Photography, City of Monash Collection acquired 2010
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Robert Ashton studied photography at Prahran college from 1968 to 1970 and first exhibited his work at Brummels Gallery of Photography in 1973. As a student at Prahran, Ashton recalls being taught to follow his heart and his eye in a way that was free of constraints, developing a visual language influenced by the style of European black-and-white photography that he was introduced to by Paul Cox. His early documentary work concentrated on inner-city subjects, and he is widely known for his acclaimed series Fitzroy, which warmly documents the people of Fitzroy, focusing on human life and community connection. This series was originally published as a photobook, Into the hollow mountains a portrait of Fitzroy, in 1974.

Wall text from the exhibition

Robert Ashton alumni profile on the Prahran Legacy website

Installation view of the exhibition The basement: photography from Prahran College (1968-1981) at the Museum of Australian Photography, Wheelers Hill, Melbourne showing from left clockwise, Geoff Strong’s Bald man enjoying the sun, St Kilda 1975; Steven Lojewski’s Man with hat and lighthouse, St Kilda 1975; Glen O’Malley’s St Kilda 1973; and Steven Lojewski’s Man on bench, Stardust St Kilda 1975
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Geoff Strong (Australian, b. 1950)
Bald man enjoying the sun, St Kilda
1975
Gelatin silver print
19.1 x 26.3cm
Museum of Australian Photography, City of Monash Collection donated 2025

Geoff Strong moved to Melbourne from Brisbane for the photography course at Prahran College, which he began in 1975 after already having established himself as a political journalist. Strong’s image, Bald man enjoying the sun, St Kilda (1975) showcases his acute interest in the qualities of Melbourne’s sunlight. The human element, a man’s bald head, becomes a formal, compositional device, which appears more like a bronze ball than a human form. Strong’s depiction of harsh light in this sparse composition accentuates the photograph’s formal elements and calls to mind the surreal paintings of Georgio de Chirico.

Text from the Museum of Australian Photography website

Geoff Strong alumni profile on the Prahran Legacy website

Steven Lojewsi (Australian born England, b. 1952) 'Man with hat and lighthouse, St Kilda' 1975 (installation view)

Steven Lojewsi (Australian born England, b. 1952)
Man with hat and lighthouse, St Kilda (installation view)
1975
Gelatin silver print
Museum of Australian Photography, City of Monash Collection donated 2025
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

James McArdle (Australian, b. 1950)
'Couple, Luna Park' 1976 (installation view)

James McArdle (Australian, b. 1950)
Couple, Luna Park (installation view)
1976
Gelatin silver print
Museum of Australian Photography, City of Monash Collection donated 2025
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

James McArdle (Australian, b. 1950)
'Conscript, Luna Park' 1976 (installation view)

James McArdle (Australian, b. 1950)
Conscript, Luna Park (installation view)
1976
Gelatin silver print
Museum of Australian Photography, City of Monash Collection donated 2025
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

James McArdle is a photographic artist, curator, writer and educator based in Castlemaine, Victoria. While studying photography at Prahran College from 1974 to 1976, McArdle took his camera out onto the streets of Melbourne. He made several social documentary images as well as more playful, abstract compositions, which highlight his interest in shadow and form. The vintage silver gelatin prints on display here come mostly from McArdle’s first-and second-year street photography folios. They were made during long walks around St Kilda and Elwood. Conscript, Luna Park (1976) formed part of McArdle’s third-year major project on Luna Park, which included portraits taken in the Penny Arcade. Created using a Linhof 4 x 5 inch press camera and flash, this folio was assessed by Wolfgang Sievers.

Wall text from the exhibition

Dr James McArdle profile on the Academia website

Installation view of the exhibition The basement: photography from Prahran College (1968-1981) at the Museum of Australian Photography, Wheelers Hill, Melbourne
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition The basement: photography from Prahran College (1968-1981) at the Museum of Australian Photography, Wheelers Hill, Melbourne showing from left clockwise, James McArdle’s Hungry puddle, Elwood 1975 and St Kilda Courthouse 1974; Martin Munz’s Man at crossing, Lower Esplanade St Kilda 1979; and Greg Neville’s Man and shadow 1971
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

James McArdle (Australian, b. 1950)
Hungry puddle, Elwood
1975
Gelatin silver print
27.0 x 18.5cm
Museum of Australian Photography, City of Monash Collection donated by James McArdle in honour of John Cato 2025

Greg Neville (Australian, b. 1950) 'Man and shadow' 1971 (installation view)

Greg Neville (Australian, b. 1950)
Man and shadow (installation view)
1971
Gelatin silver print
Collection of the artist
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition The basement: photography from Prahran College (1968-1981) at the Museum of Australian Photography, Wheelers Hill, Melbourne showing Sandra Graham’s photographs Walls 3 (Joseph) and Walls 2 (cloak 1) 1976 from the series Walls (left); and Backstage, Chapel street bridge, Prahran 1976 (right)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Sandra Graham (Australian, b. 1947)
'Walls 3 (Joseph)' 1976 (installation view)

Sandra Graham (Australian, b. 1947)
Walls 3 (Joseph) (installation view)
1976
Gelatin silver print
Collection of the artist
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Formal concerns permeate the street portraits by Sandra Graham who studied photography at Prahran college fromollege from 1974-1975. In her series Walls, Graham relates the human forms of her subjects to the textured walls behind them. For instance, in Walls 3 (Joseph) (1976), the weathered face and stained clothes of a painter are shown in front of a mottled wall that he is about to paint white. Graham blends figure and ground in this image, playing with tonal relationships in black and white. She creates a painterly style of flatness through this series, which was made on streets around St Kilda and Albert Park.

Wall text from the exhibition

Sandra Graham alumni profile on the Prahran Legacy website

Sandra Graham (Australian, b. 1947)
Walls 3 (Joseph)
1976
Gelatin silver print
Collection of the artist

Gallery two section one (clockwise)

Installation views of the second gallery part A of the exhibition The basement: photography from Prahran College (1968-1981) at the Museum of Australian Photography, Wheelers Hill, Melbourne
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Wall text from the exhibition The basement: photography from Prahran College (1968-1981) at the Museum of Australian Photography, Wheelers Hill, Melbourne
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Lyn Cheong (Australian, b. 1954)
'Self-portrait' 1977; 'Self-portrait' 1977 (installation view)

Lyn Cheong (Australian, b. 1954)
Self-portrait (installation view)
1977
Self-portrait (installation view)
1977
Dye diffusion transfer prints
Collection of the artist
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Nicholas Nedelkopoulos (Australian, b. 1955)
'Shrunken head' 1978-1991; 'Dark wedding' 1978-1990 (installation view)

Nicholas Nedelkopoulos (Australian, b. 1955)
Shrunken head (installation view)
1978-1991
Dark wedding (installation view)
1978-1990
Chromogenic prints
Museum of Australian Photography, City of Monash Collection acquired 1992
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Nicholas Nedelkopoulos (Australian, b. 1955) 'Shrunken head' 1978-1991 (installation view)

Nicholas Nedelkopoulos (Australian, b. 1955)
Shrunken head (installation view)
1978-1991
Chromogenic print
Museum of Australian Photography, City of Monash Collection acquired 1992
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Leonie Reisberg (Australian, b. 1955) 'Portrait of Peggy Silinski, Merimbula, NSW' 1974 (installation view)

Leonie Reisberg (Australian, b. 1955)
Portrait of Peggy Silinski, Merimbula, NSW (installation view)
1974
Gelatin silver print
Museum of Australian Photography, City of Monash Collection donated by Janice Hinderaker through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program 2023
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Leonie Reisberg attended Prahran College between 1974 and 1975, where she developed her photographic practice. Her work from this period is often associated with a growing interest in experimental and documentary photography that emerged in Melbourne during the 1970s.

Reisberg’s approach blends real-life moments with a more composed and conceptual style, often exploring themes of intimacy, femininity and social dynamics. She is part of a cohort of photographers that helped shape the trajectory of contemporary Australian photography, particularly within the context feminist and documentary practices.

Wall text from the exhibition

Leonie Reisberg alumni profile on the Prahran Legacy website

Leonie Reisberg (Australian, b. 1955)
Portrait of Peggy Silinski, Merimbula, NSW
1974
Gelatin silver print
Museum of Australian Photography, City of Monash Collection donated by Janice Hinderaker through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program 2023

Installation view of the exhibition The basement: photography from Prahran College (1968-1981) at the Museum of Australian Photography, Wheelers Hill, Melbourne showing at centre, Andrew Chapman’s Self-portrait in bath 1975; and at right, Viki Petherbridge’s Frames 10-18 1975 from the series Frames
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Viki Petherbridge (Australian, b. 1954) 'Frames 10-18' 1975 (installation view)

Viki Petherbridge (Australian, b. 1954)
Frames 10-18 (installation view)
1975
from the series Frames
Gelatin silver print
Collection of the artist
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Wall text from the exhibition The basement: photography from Prahran College (1968-1981) at the Museum of Australian Photography, Wheelers Hill, Melbourne
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition The basement: photography from Prahran College (1968-1981) at the Museum of Australian Photography, Wheelers Hill, Melbourne showing Peter Milne’s photographs from top clockwise, Rowland S Howard 1977; Polly Borland 1979; and Rowland S Howard, Nick Cave, Ollie Olsen, Megan Bannister, Anita Lane, Bronwyn Adams 1977
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Peter Milne (Australian, b. 1960)
'Rowland S Howard' 1977 (installation view)

Peter Milne (Australian, b. 1960)
Rowland S Howard (installation view)
1977
Pigment inkjet print
Museum of Australian Photography, City of Monash Collection donated by Helen Frajman 2023
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Peter Milne began his studies at Prahran College in 1980. Prior to this, he had already begun photographing his friends, family, and the Melbourne punk scene in the mid-to late 1970s. Over the following decades, Milne captured a range of cultural icons, including Nick Cave, Rowland S Howard and Polly Borland. Known for his intimate and warm portraiture, Milne uses dramatic lighting to create strong compositions. His images of Rowland S Howard, in particular, highlight these techniques, with some photographs featuring Howard in striking light or set against brutalist architecture.

Wall text from the exhibition

See the exhibition Juvenilia: Peter Milne at Strange Neighbour, Fitzroy, Melbourne February – March 2015

Peter Milne (Australian, b. 1960)
Polly Borland
1979
Pigment ink-jet print
48 x 32cm
Museum of Australian Photography, City of Monash Collection donated by Helen Frajman 2021

Polly Borland (Australian, b. 1959)
'Dave' 1983, printed 2025 (installation view)

Polly Borland (Australian, b. 1959)
Dave (installation view)
1983, printed 2025
Silver dye bleach print
Collection of the artist
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Polly Borland attended Prahran College between 1980 and 1983. Borland shot most of her student work, featured here, on Kodachrome. She shot the works in her Camberwell apartment with direct sunlight pouring through the window. Pieces of carefully placed cellophane on the window created coloured shadows across the subjects’ faces. …

Borland and Cave first began working together in the early 1980s after they met at a party in St Kilda in 1979. The image of Borland at the St Kilda party is documented by fellow friend Peter Milne. Borland’s formative photographs in the early 1980s were part of a new wave of experimental images that departed from renderings of ordinary life.

Wall text from the exhibition

Polly Borland (Australian, b. 1959) 'Nick' 1983, printed 2025 (installation view)

Polly Borland (Australian, b. 1959)
Nick (installation view)
1983, printed 2025
Silver dye bleach print
Museum of Australian Photography, City of Monash Collection acquired 2025
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Polly Borland (Australian, b. 1959)
Nick
1983, printed 2025
Silver dye bleach print
Museum of Australian Photography, City of Monash Collection acquired 2025

Polly Borland made this work during her student days at Prahran College where she studied between 1980 and 1983. Borland shot most of her student work on Kodachrome. Shot on Kodachrome, this work forms part of a series of portraits Borland made in her Camberwell apartment with direct sunlight pouring through the window. Pieces of carefully placed cellophane on the window created coloured shadows across the subjects’ faces.

Borland’s images of Nick Cave from the 1980s and 1990s have become legendary. Often described as raw and intense, these images highlight the tension between the public persona of the famous musician and the more vulnerable, human side of the singer and artist. Borland and Cave first began working together in the early 1980s after they met at a party in St Kilda in 1979.

Text from the Museum of Australian Photography website

Installation view of the exhibition The basement: photography from Prahran College (1968-1981) at the Museum of Australian Photography, Wheelers Hill, Melbourne showing from top left clockwise, Christopher Köller’s photographs Past self portrait 1980; Philip and Maria 1981; Joe as a Russian soldier 1980; and Bauhausler (homage to Oscar Schlemmer and August Sander) 1980
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Christopher Köller (Australian born England, b. 1943)
Past self-portrait
1980
Gelatin silver print
23.0 x 24.0cm
Museum of Australian Photography, City of Monash Collection acquired 2024

Christopher Köller trained as a silk-screen printer before travelling extensively throughout the late 1960s and 1970s. Upon his return to Australia, Köller studied photography at Prahran college fromollege, graduating in 1980. Köller enrolled in Prahran with the intention of doing an expose on the conditions experienced by the miners of Bolivia as he had learnt about their plight while travelling in South America.

In his second year Köller stopped looking at photography books and started poring over the pages of art book, influenced by his now partner and historian Nanette Carter and lecturer Norbert Loeffler. Inspired by these teachings, Köller started to set up his images. His first self-portrait titled Past self portrait (1980) is an image of a young artist arriving at Station Pier, Melbourne with his passport in hand. It was part of a series of self-portraits that were shown at The Photographers’ Gallery and Workshop. Other works in this period were influenced by Russian Constructivism – particularly Vladimir Mayakovsky – and 1930s German avant-garde art. In another image, Köller’s subject, dressed in a shirt and tie, stand in front of an Oskar Schlemmer drawing, made by the artist.

Wall text from the exhibition

Christopher Köller alumni profile on the Prahran Legacy website

Christopher Köller (Australian born England, b. 1943) 'Joe as a Russian soldier' 1980 (installation view)

Christopher Köller (Australian born England, b. 1943)
Joe as a Russian soldier (installation view)
1980
Gelatin silver print
Museum of Australian Photography, City of Monash Collection acquired 2024
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Christopher Köller (Australian born England, b. 1943)
Joe as a Russian soldier
1980
Gelatin silver print
Museum of Australian Photography, City of Monash Collection acquired 2024

Installation view of the exhibition The basement: photography from Prahran College (1968-1981) at the Museum of Australian Photography, Wheelers Hill, Melbourne showing Nanette Carter’s photographs Proof 1979 and Newspaper 1980
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Nanette Carter (Australian, b. 1954) 'Proof' 1979 (installation view)

Nanette Carter (Australian, b. 1954)
Proof (installation view)
1979
Gelatin silver print
Museum of Australian Photography, City of Monash Collection acquired 1981
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Nanette Carter studied first-year photography at Prahran College in 1974 and then completed a diploma (1977) and post graduate diploma (1980) in fine art at the Phillip Institute of Technology, majoring in photography. Her practice explored feminist issues with autobiographical overtones, and she exhibited her work widely between 1981 and 1995. She ceased practising as a Photographer in the early 1990s to pursue her career as a lecturer in design history.

Carter’s image Proof (1979) is a striking self-portrait that reflects on the concept of identity and addresses the idea of photographic ‘proof’ in a multifaceted way. The word written across her face explores the proof of identity and the assertion of existence that photography claims. Newspaper (1980) utilities her partner Christopher Köller as subject. From early on in their relationship, Carter and Köller used each other as models.

Wall text from the exhibition

Nanette Carter alumni profile on the Prahran Legacy website

Nanette Carter (Australian, b. 1954)
Proof
1979
Gelatin silver print
Museum of Australian Photography, City of Monash Collection acquired 1981

Installation view of the exhibition The basement: photography from Prahran College (1968-1981) at the Museum of Australian Photography, Wheelers Hill, Melbourne showing from left clockwise, Rod McNicol’s photographs Nanette 1978; Stewart 1978; and Kent 1978 from the series Permanent mirrors
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Rod McNicol (Australian, b. 1946)
'Nanette' 1978 (installation view)

Rod McNicol (Australian, b. 1946)
Nanette (installation view)
1978
From the series Permanent mirrors
Gelatin silver print
Museum of Australian Photography, City of Monash Collection donated 2024
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Rod McNicol (Australian, b. 1946)
Nanette
1978
From the series Permanent mirrors
Gelatin silver print
Museum of Australian Photography, City of Monash Collection donated 2024

Rod McNicol has been drawn to portraiture ever since he attended Prahran College in 1974. His fellow classmates included Nanette Carter and Bill Henson, and he formed a close connection with Athol Shmith, who would become, in McNicol’s words, ‘a lifelong mentor and friend’. McNicol held his first exhibition and Brummels Gallery of Photography with Carol Jerrems, where he exhibited works from his Permanent mirrors series. This exhibition marked a transition to what McNicol would call his structured approach to portraiture. In the image Nanette, McNicol made a makeshift studio on Paul Cox’s front veranda and placed Carter against a neutral backdrop.

In late 1978, McNicol moved into his warehouse apartment on Smith Street, Fitzroy. Since this move, he has incorporated this space into his work and it has become an important component, both as a location and as an aesthetic context.

Wall text from the exhibition

Rod McNicol alumni profile on the Prahran Legacy website

Rod McNicol (Australian, b. 1946)
'Kent' 1978 (installation view)

Rod McNicol (Australian, b. 1946)
Kent (installation view)
1978
From the series Permanent mirrors
Gelatin silver print
Museum of Australian Photography, City of Monash Collection acquired 2013
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Rod McNicol’s series of portraits Permanent mirrors grew out of his interest in nineteenth-century photographic portraiture, whereby the slow exposure times necessitated what he calls a ‘gauche, self-conscious, fatalist stare’. For McNicol, these portraits carried the ‘spectre of mortality itself’. The environmental portraits that make up his Permanent mirrors series embody many of the formal attributes of nineteenth-century portraiture that appealed to him, insofar as the sitters are seated in highly static poses, staring directly and blankly at the camera. Soon after, McNicol introduced a range of highly significant formal changes to his portraits, whereby sitters were photographed on a kitchen chair against a plain, neutral background in the artist’s Fitzroy studio. McNicol continues to photograph people from his neighbourhood in this way.

Text from the Museum of Australian Photography website

Installation view of the exhibition The basement: photography from Prahran College (1968-1981) at the Museum of Australian Photography, Wheelers Hill, Melbourne showing from left top to bottom, Stella Sallman’s photographs Sue at the mirror 1977; Sue on the bed 1977; Sue and Carmen 1978; Sue, Simon and Carmen 1977; Beautiful transvestite 1975
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Stella Sallman (Australian, b. 1956)
'Sue and Carmen' 1978 (installation view)

Stella Sallman (Australian, b. 1956)
Sue and Carmen (installation view)
1978
Chromogenic print
Museum of Australian Photography, City of Monash Collection acquired 2025
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Stella Sallman attended Prahran College from 1976 to 1978. She had originally planned to study fashion design at RMIT, but she was unable pursue the course because she didn’t have a folio. Instead, after completing the preliminary year in Art and Design at Prahran College, she discovered a deep fascination with photography.

Sallman was invited by Rennie Ellis to exhibit her series of glam punks, which she started in her second year, at Brummels Gallery of Photography in 1978, as a support for fellow photographer Jon Rhodes. She said, ‘Rennie came and did some lectures at Prahran. I found him very inspiring because he wasn’t about things looking technically correct.’ He was also brimming with ‘exuberant enthusiastic positive energy.’ The 13 works exhibited at Brummels were portraits of people that Sallman had encountered. Sallman had seen Sue whilst travelling on a train and asked if she could take her portrait. ‘I was very curious about people that didn’t conform.’ In Sallman’s images, she uses colour to emphasise the personality and mood of her subjects, challenging the more traditional, formal portraiture that had prevailed at the time.

Wall text from the exhibition

Stella Sallman alumni profile on the Prahran Legacy website

Gallery two section two (clockwise)

Carol Jerrems (Australian, 1949-1980) Letter from the 'Alphabet folio' 1968 dated 1969 (installation view)

Carol Jerrems (Australian, 1949-1980)
Letters from the Alphabet folio (installation views)
1968 dated 1969
Gelatin silver print
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased 1971
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Carol Jerrem’s Alphabet folio is one of her most celebrated and iconic works, and it holds an important place in the history of Australian photography, Created as an assignment during her time as a student at Prahran College, the Alphabet folio consists of 25 letters, with the letter ‘S’ deliberately omitted by Jerrems. The assignment left a lasting impression on Jerrems, as she regularly set this assignment for her own students when she was teaching at the Heidelberg Technical School and the Tasmania School of Art.

Wall text from the exhibition

Carol Jerrems studied at Prahran College between 1967-1969 and graduated in 1970, studying under lecturers McKenzie, Cox, and Lee.

Carol Jerrems alumni profile on the Prahran Legacy website

These photographs of the model Lynn Allen and her then boyfriend are part of a set of assignment images from the late 1960s, when Jerrems was studying at Prahran College. Jerrems and Allen met at High School (Jerrems was one year ahead) and they lived one street apart from each other when these images were taken. Allen modelled for Jerrems for two years.

Wall text from the exhibition

Carol Jerrems (Australian, 1949-1980) 'No title' 1969; 'No title' 1969 (installation view)

Carol Jerrems (Australian, 1949-1980)
No title (installation view)
1969
No title (installation view)
1969
Gelatin silver print
Museum of Australian Photography, City of Monash Collection donated 2024
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Carol Jerrems (Australian, 1949-1980) 'No title' 1969 (installation view)

Carol Jerrems (Australian, 1949-1980)
No title (installation view)
1969
Gelatin silver print
Museum of Australian Photography, City of Monash Collection donated 2024
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition The basement: photography from Prahran College (1968-1981) at the Museum of Australian Photography, Wheelers Hill, Melbourne showing Carol Jerrems’ photographs at left top, Kath Walker 1974; at bottom left, Thancouple (Gloria Fletcher) and Carole Johnson 1974; and at right, Ron Johnson 1974
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Carol Jerrems (Australian, 1949-1980) 'Thancouple (Gloria Fletcher) and Carole Johnson' 1974 (installation view)

Carol Jerrems (Australian, 1949-1980)
Thancouple (Gloria Fletcher) and Carole Johnson (installation view)
1974
Gelatin silver print
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Gift of Mrs Joy Jerrems 1981
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Carol Jerrems (Australian, 1949-1980)
Ron Johnson
1974
Gelatin silver print
Museum of Australia Photography, City of Monash Collection donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program 2015
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition The basement: photography from Prahran College (1968-1981) at the Museum of Australian Photography, Wheelers Hill, Melbourne showing Carol Jerrem’s photographs at left, Esoteric personal (mini) recent exhibition 1976; at top right, Vale Street 1975; at bottom right, Juliet holding ‘Vale Street’ at Murray Road 1976
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Carol Jerrems (Australian, 1949-1980) 'Esoteric personal (mini) recent exhibition' 1976 (installation view)

Carol Jerrems (Australian, 1949-1980)
Esoteric personal (mini) recent exhibition (installation view)
1976
Gelatin silver prints
Private collection
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Carol Jerrems (Australian, 1949-1980) 'Vale Street' 1975 (installation view)

Carol Jerrems (Australian, 1949-1980)
Vale Street (installation view)
1975
Gelatin silver print
Museum of Australia Photography, City of Monash Collection donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program by Susan Hesse 2012
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Carol Jerrems (Australian, 1949-1980)
Vale Street
1975
Gelatin silver print
Museum of Australia Photography, City of Monash Collection donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program by Susan Hesse 2012

In 1975, Carol Jerrems made what would become her most famous photograph. Vale Street shows Jerrem’s friend Catriona Brown standing in front of Mark Lean and Jon Bourke, teenage boys from Heidelberg Technical School where Jerrems was teaching at the time. The photograph, taken in the back yard of a house at 52 Vale Street, St Kilda, comes from a series of pictures that show the three subjects socialising, smoking and, under the direction of Jerrems, gradually disrobing. Jerrems carefully set up and managed this no-iconic image, which quickly came to personify the optimism and ambitions of countercultural and feminist politics at the time

Wall text from the exhibition

Installation view of the exhibition The basement: photography from Prahran College (1968-1981) at the Museum of Australian Photography, Wheelers Hill, Melbourne showing Paul Cox’s photographs with at left, Age of Aquarius (Carol Jerrems, Jan Hurrell) 1970; at centre top, Elizabeth 1 1972; at centre bottom, Fantasy of divine illusion 1972; and at right, Prahran 2 1974
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Paul Cox (Australian born Netherlands, 1940-2016) 'Age of Aquarius (Carol Jerrems, Jan Hurrell)' 1970 (installation view)

Paul Cox (Australian born Netherlands, 1940-2016)
Age of Aquarius (Carol Jerrems, Jan Hurrell)
1970
Gelatin silver print
Museum of Australia Photography, City of Monash Collection donated by the artist through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Paul Cox played a pivotal role in the Photography Department at Prharan College, initially appointed part-time in February 1968, he transitioned to full-time position in 1970 and continued teaching photography and filmmaking until his departure in 1982. Younger than colleagues such as Cato and Shmith, Cox’s age helped him forge strong, personal connections with his students. Many alumni attribute their exposure to international photography luminaries to Cox’s influence. However, it was Cox’s own distinctive approach to photography that left a lasting impact on his students. Cox moved to Australia from the Netherlands in 1965 and although he was not formally trained as a teacher, he brought with him a European sensibility.

In 1973, Cox founded The Photographers’ Gallery and Workshop, alongside Ingeborg Tyssen, John F William and Rod McNicol, a groundbreaking space that played a crucial role in establishing photography as a respected art form in Australia and provided a vital platform for contemporary photographers.

Wall text from the exhibition

Paul Cox on the Prahran Legacy website

Paul Cox (Australian born Netherlands, 1940-2016) 'Age of Aquarius (Carol Jerrems, Jan Hurrell)' 1970

Paul Cox (Australian born Netherlands, 1940-2016) 'Fantasy of divine illusion' 1972 (installation view)

Paul Cox (Australian born Netherlands, 1940-2016)
Fantasy of divine illusion (installation view)
1972
Gelatin silver print
Museum of Australia Photography, City of Monash Collection donated by the artist through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Paul Cox (Australian born Netherlands, 1940-2016) 'Prahran 2' 1974 (installation view)

Paul Cox (Australian born Netherlands, 1940-2016)
Prahran 2 (installation view)
1974
Gelatin silver print
Museum of Australia Photography, City of Monash Collection donated by the artist through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Wall text from the exhibition The basement: photography from Prahran College (1968-1981) at the Museum of Australian Photography, Wheelers Hill, Melbourne
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation views of the exhibition The basement: photography from Prahran College (1968-1981) at the Museum of Australian Photography, Wheelers Hill, Melbourne with artefacts in a vitrine, showing a poster for an exhibition by Tod McNicol and Carol Jerrems at Brummels Gallery of Photography, August – September 1978; two letters from Carol Jerrems including at bottom a letter to William (Bill) Heimerman (1950-2017) co-director at the time of The Photographers’ Gallery and Workshop; and two gelatin silver prints by Carol Jerrems
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition The basement: photography from Prahran College (1968-1981) at the Museum of Australian Photography, Wheelers Hill, Melbourne showing at far left a photograph by Paul Cox, at second and third left photographs by Athol Shmith and at centre, photographs by John Cato
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition The basement: photography from Prahran College (1968-1981) at the Museum of Australian Photography, Wheelers Hill, Melbourne showing at left, Paul Cox’s Portrait of Athol Shmith 2 1983; and at right, Athol Shmith’s Anamorphic image No. 17 and Anamorphic image No. 1 both 1973
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Athol Shmith is widely known for his commercial portraiture and fashion photography. His style became emblematic of an era that was transitioning from the more formal rigid photographic style of the early 20th century to something more dramatic. His portraits are highly polished, sophisticated and capture the essence of the post-war era’s glamour.

Shmith’s sale was characterised by a strong focus on lighting and composition, often using dramatic lighting setups to create bold, striking images. As Head of the Photography Department from 1972 to 1979 Art Prahran College, Shmith brought a high level of technical expertise.

Shmith created his Anamorphic series while teaching at Prahran College, and exhibited the series at Realities Gallery in 1973. Student Suzanne Budds recalls being a model for one of the images in this series.

Wall text from the exhibition

Athol Shmith Lecturer profile on the Prahran Legacy website

Paul Cox (Australian born Netherlands, 1940-2016) 'Portrait of Athol Shmith 2' 1983 (installation view)

Paul Cox (Australian born Netherlands, 1940-2016)
Portrait of Athol Shmith 2 (installation view)
1983
Gelatin silver print
Museum of Australia Photography, City of Monash Collection donated by the artist through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program 2000
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition The basement: photography from Prahran College (1968-1981) at the Museum of Australian Photography, Wheelers Hill, Melbourne showing from left, John Cato’s photographs Seawind 1871-1975; Tree – a journey 1971-1973; and Tree – a journey #13 1971-1973 from the series Essay I: landscape in a figure 1971-1979
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

John Cato (Australian, 1926-2011) 'Tree - a journey' 1971-1973 (installation view)

John Cato (Australian, 1926-2011)
Tree – a journey (installation views)
1971-1973
Gelatin silver print
Museum of Australian Photography, City of Monash Collection donated by the Cato Estate 2021

John Cato (Australian, 1926-2011)
Tree – a journey
1971-1973
Gelatin silver print
Museum of Australian Photography, City of Monash Collection donated by the Cato Estate 2021

John Cato began his informal studies in photography with his father, the photographer Jack Cato, in 1938. He worked as a commercial photographer from 1947 to 1974, including a notable stint as a press photographer for The Argus from 1947 to 1950. Over the course of his career, Cato collaborated with Athol Shmith for more than two decades, before shifting away from commercial photography in 1974 to focus on his own fine art practice. That same year, Cato also embarked on his career as a photography educator, taking a teaching position at Prahran College, eventually succeeding Shmith as Head of the Photography Department in 1980.

Cato was known for his mystical and spiritual approach to photography, a philosophy that deeply influenced both his teaching style and his own photographic work. His method was unconventional, emphasising not just technical skill, but the creation of images with a deeper, almost transcendent resonance. Many of Cato’s works are minimalist, capturing quiet, still moments in nature, where form and texture take precedence over literal representation. These images often have an abstract quality, inviting the viewer to engage with the landscape on a more introspective, emotional level. Cato’s photography was not just about capturing a scene, it was about evoking a deeper connection to the transformative power of the natural world.

Wall text from the exhibition

Read my Vale to Dr John Cato (1926-2011)

John Cato on the Prahran Legacy website

John Cato (Australian, 1926-2011) 'Tree - a journey #13' 1971-1973 (installation view)

John Cato (Australian, 1926-2011)
Tree – a journey #13 (installation views)
1971-1973
Gelatin silver print
Museum of Australian Photography, City of Monash Collection donated by the artist
Acquired 1981

John Cato (Australian, 1926-2011)
Tree – a journey #13
1971-1973
Gelatin silver print
Museum of Australian Photography, City of Monash Collection donated by the artist
Acquired 1981

“Thanks are due to…. Phil Quirk, Peter Leiss, and the now deceased Jon Conte, who started finding alumni (starting with those of 1968-1972) in 2012; Colin Abbott who encouraged Photonet gallery (now MAGNET) in 2014 to put on a show of 1 sample each of student-era and contemporary work of most of the 1974-1976 cohort; Colin has generously part-funded the book that MAPh has produced; designer and archivist Mimmo Cozzolino has contributed beautifully preserved ephemera from his College years, as well as donating his design skills to the ongoing project. Peter Leiss, assisted by Nicholas Nedelkopoulos, produced fine video interviews with alumni… a labour of love!

James McArdle joined the project in 2017. Merle Hathaway, who accepted an invitation to work with the team in 2021, has been an invaluable and key driver of the project in getting this exhibition (and future showings). Merle has secured upcoming shows of contemporary work by 1968-1991 alumni for MAGNET (through May 2025), the BIFB (August 2025) and elsewhere…

Above all, MAPh curators, Angela Connor and Stella-Loftus-Hills, have been extraordinary in their enthusiasm for the concept, and their realisation of it through their expertise and hard work and is beyond our wildest expectations. To have contributing writers of the calibre of Gael Newton, Helen Ennis, Daniel Palmer, Adrian Danks et al. is an honour and a further tribute to MAPh organisation and thoroughness.”

Associate Professor James McArdle

For more information please see The Prahran Photography website which upholds the legacy of Prahran College 1970s photography through posts on profiles of the alumni (an ongoing project). The site was initiated by James McArdle, who graduated in 1977 with a Diploma of Art and Design from Prahran College and Merle Hathaway, who coined the title, and who joins James in writing some of the posts.

Making film

Required to collaborate on a class film or create one of their own, photography students often took on multiple roles in each other’s projects. Paul Cox frequently cast his students as actors in his films, forging relationships that continued long after they graduated from college. In Cox’s productions, students also filled essential technical roles such as stills photographer and cinematographer. As well as developing their skills, this collaborative environment fostered a sense of community among aspiring filmmakers.

Paul Cox is known for his distinctive, often introspective films that explore human relationships, emotions, and existential themes. His work, while not always mainstream, is highly regarded in the Australian film industry and internationally for its emotional depth and unique storytelling style.

Mirka is a short film that features French-Australian visual artist Mirka Mora, a key figure in the Melbourne art scene. Mora gained recognition for her distinctive and colourful works, and her blend of surrealism, fantasy and personal experiences. The film explores her journey as an artist and her personal life, showcasing her experiences and her unique approach to art. The film offers a personal perspective into her world and is a rare glimpse into the life of one of Australia’s most beloved and influential artists.

Mirka was a collaborative project, directed by Paul Cox with the assistance of several Prahran students.

Student life

The students at Prahran College were part of a vibrant and dynamic environment that nurtured creativity, experimentation and community. Many drew inspiration from their immediate circles – friends and acquaintances – for their class assignments. They actively participated in exhibitions, showcasing their work to the public and their peers. Students presented their works in critique sessions that played a vital role in the learning process, providing a forum for discussion, debate and critical feedback.

Assignments often revolved around chosen topics such as fashion, portraiture or family, and sometimes involved field trips out into the landscape or excursions to places like hospitals, factories and the beach. Taking advantage of a ‘free assignment’ in 1976 a group of rebellious students got together to produce images of themselves dressed as revolutionaries, wearing clothes sourced from local opportunity shops and carrying real guns.

The images of students from Prahran College in the 1970s serve as visual documents of the bohemian spirit and encapsulate the idealism of the time. The way students were photographed, often in unposed and relaxed settings, captures the free-spirited nature of the College, with the camera becoming a tool for exploring vulnerability and personal expression, rather than just recording events or situations.

The legacy of the bohemian spirit that was cultivated at Prahran College during the 1970s is still evident in the work of contemporary Australian artists today, many of whom continue to embrace self-expression, individuality and alternative narratives.

Text from the Museum of Australian Photography website

Gallery three

Installation view of the exhibition The basement: photography from Prahran College (1968-1981) at the Museum of Australian Photography, Wheelers Hill, Melbourne
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition The basement: photography from Prahran College (1968-1981) at the Museum of Australian Photography, Wheelers Hill, Melbourne showing at left, Andrew Wittner’s photograph John Cato leading a group on a photographic expedition, Steve Lojewski using a film camera 1975; and at right, George Volakos’ Rye back beach 1 1972
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Andrew Wittner (Australian, b. 1955) 'John Cato leading a group on a photographic expedition, Steve Lojewski using a film camera' 1975, printed 2024 (installation view)

Andrew Wittner (Australian, b. 1955)
John Cato leading a group on a photographic expedition, Steve Lojewski using a film camera (installation view)
1975, printed 2024
Gelatin silver print
Collection of the artist
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

George Volakos (Australian born Greece, b. 1948) 'Rye back beach 1' 1972, printed 2024 (installation view)

George Volakos (Australian born Greece, b. 1948)
Rye back beach 1 (installation view)
1972, printed 2024
Gelatin silver print
Collection of the artist
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition The basement: photography from Prahran College (1968-1981) at the Museum of Australian Photography, Wheelers Hill, Melbourne showing photographs by Richard Muggleton, George Volakos, Colin Abbott, Graham Howe, Philip Quirk, Jim McFarlane, Greg Neville, Andrew Wittner, Peter Bowes, and an unknown photographer
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Julie Higginbotham (Australian, b. 1953)
Mirka film
1973
Pigment ink-jet print
Courtesy of the artist

Installation view of the exhibition The basement: photography from Prahran College (1968-1981) at the Museum of Australian Photography, Wheelers Hill, Melbourne showing photographs by Philip Quirk, Peter Leiss, and Peter Bowes including at centre left, Peter Leiss’ Untitled [Bill Heimerman (right) and Ian Lobb (left) at the rear of The Photographers’ Gallery] c. 1975-1980 (below); and at centre Peter Leiss’ Jean-Marc Le Pechoux 1976
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Ian Lobb was co-director of The Photographers’ Gallery and Workshop with Bill Heimerman. Jean-Marc Le Pechoux was editor of the important Light Vision: Australia’s international photography magazine launched in September 1977.

Read my Vale Ian Lobb (1948-2023), photographer
Read my Vale William Heimerman (1950-2017)

Peter Leiss (Australian born England, b. 1951)
Untitled [Bill Heimerman and Ian Lobb at the rear of the Photographers’ Gallery]
c. 1975-1980
Silver gelatin print

Greg Neville (Australian, b. 1950)
'Tutorial: lecturers and students [back row L–R Derrick Lee, Bryan Gracey, Athol Shmith, Paul Cox, Elizabeth Tainsh]' c. 1971 (installation view)

Greg Neville (Australian, b. 1950)
Tutorial: lecturers and students [back row L–R Derrick Lee, Bryan Gracey, Athol Shmith, Paul Cox, Elizabeth Tainsh] (installation view)
c. 1971
Pigment ink-jet print
Collection of the artist
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Greg Neville alumni profile on the Prahran Legacy website

Greg Neville (Australian, b. 1950)
Tutorial: lecturers and students [back row L–R Derrick Lee, Bryan Gracey, Athol Shmith, Paul Cox, Elizabeth Tainsh]
c. 1971
Pigment ink-jet print
Collection of the artist

Unidentified students with lecturers editing 35mm transparencies on a light box.

Summary of Bill Henson’s opening speech for The basement exhibition, 1st March, 2025

Internationally acclaimed photographer Bill Henson delivered a characteristically personal, challenging and reflective speech to mark the opening of The Basement.

He began his address by reminiscing about his time at Prahran in the mid-1970s – a period he remembered as unconventional and formative, despite his own intermittent attendance. “The only catch in my experience there is that I never went,” he quipped to rising laughter from the audience. Henson recalled how his interactions with lecturers such as John Cato and Athol Shmith shaped his artistic philosophy more than technical instruction ever could. “They were setting a moral example, an ethical example, an example of empathy,” he said, emphasising the profound impact their mentorship had on him.

Henson fondly and colourfully described Shmith, a glamorous portraitist who photographed Hollywood stars, and Cato, a figure of quiet wisdom, conjuring their style as an “imperious insouciance” – a blend of grandeur and carefree independence. He emphasised that, unlike today’s art educators who have to navigate academic formalities, these lecturers were practicing artists who brought hard-won experience into the classroom.

“They hadn’t gone through a professional teaching career,” Henson explained. “They weren’t like the kind of lecturer that I seem to see in art schools now, who have to go and get a ‘doctorate of painting’ to keep their job,” but were decidedly “outlandish” and unorthodox.

Their focus was not on rigid curricula but on fostering creativity and curiosity. “They were very generous with their comments,” Henson noted, recalling how they encouraged him to pursue his own path. He would disappear for months at a time, working on his own projects before returning with a bundle of photographs to share with his lecturers; “John would turn around and say, ‘Fuck, we thought you’d left!'” Despite his absences, they were formative in shaping his artistic independence, Shmith advised him to “just piss off and do your own work.”

Henson also shared anecdotes that highlighted the camaraderie and spontaneity of those years. One memorable moment was when Shmith surprised Henson by arranging for his work to be shown at the National Gallery of Victoria – a gesture that underscored his pride in his students’ potential. “That was as big a shock for me as anyone else,” Henson admitted.

Henson advised aspiring young artists to “try to be true to yourself, and don’t… stop… working!” Also important was intergenerational dialogue in art; he urged young people to seek wisdom from older artists before their insights are lost. Drawing on his own friendships with figures like Barry Humphries, Leo Schofield and Marc Newson, he highlighted how such exchanges enrich both parties through shared experiences and perspectives.

Beyond personal anecdotes, Henson used his speech to reflect on broader themes in art education and practice. He lamented what he sees as the increasing politicisation of contemporary art, which he believes has shifted focus away from aesthetics toward “box-ticking exercises” driven by ideology. While acknowledging that political movements such as feminism were present among Prahran’s students in the 1970s – “there were the feminists; there were little groups doing their social diligence” – he noted that these stances did not overshadow the college’s overarching emphasis on beauty and creative exploration. “There wasn’t this righteousness, this indignation, this kind of territorial thing about issues,” he said. In contrast was an openness and enthusiasm that defined Prahran during his time there – a place where beauty and creativity were paramount. Quoting Plato, he remarked, “Beauty is the splendour of truth,” positioning this ideal as central to artistic endeavour.

In opening The Basement exhibition Henson’s speech served not only as a tribute to Prahran College’s legacy – the enduring influence of its educators and alumni on Australia’s photographic landscape – but also as a call to preserve the values of curiosity, independence, and beauty in art.

Bill Henson opening speech summarised in James McArdle. “Opening!” on the On This Date in Photography website, 1st March, 2025 [Online] Cited 18/04/2025

Many thankx to James McArdle for allowing me to reproduce this text.

Julie Millowick (Australian, b. 1948)
'John Cato, PCAE basement, Prahran' 1976 (installation view)

Julie Millowick (Australian, b. 1948)
John Cato, PCAE basement, Prahran (installation view)
1976
Gelatin silver print
Museum of Australian Photography, City of Monash Collection donated by Julie Millowick 2024
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Julie Millowick (Australian, b. 1948)
John Cato, PCAE basement, Prahran
1976
Gelatin silver print
Museum of Australian Photography, City of Monash Collection donated by Julie Millowick 2024
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Peter Leiss (Australian born United Kingdom, b. 1951) 'Robert Besanko and Nanette Carter at The Photographers' Gallery, Punt Road' 1976 (installation view)

Peter Leiss (Australian born United Kingdom, b. 1951)
Robert Besanko and Nanette Carter at The Photographers’ Gallery, Punt Road (installation view)
1976
Gelatin silver print
Collection of the artist
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Peter Leiss alumni profile on the Prahran Legacy website

Stella Sallman (Australian, b. 1956)
'Peter Leiss' 1976 (installation view)

Stella Sallman (Australian, b. 1956)
Peter Leiss (installation view)
1976
Gelatin silver print
Private collection
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Carol Jerrems (Australian, 1949-1980) 'Rennie Ellis and Robert Ashton'
1976 (installation view)

Carol Jerrems (Australian, 1949-1980)
Rennie Ellis and Robert Ashton (installation view)
1976
Gelatin silver print
Private collection
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

In the early 1970s, advertising photographer and photojournalist Rennie Ellis with deputy director Robert Ashton reopened the space as Brummels Gallery of Photography. Assisted with two Arts Council grants, it was non-profit, and the first privately run art gallery in the country to be devoted specifically to photography…

The gallery closed in January 1980, the month before the premature death of its inaugural exhibitor, Carol Jerrems. Having run for eight years, the gallery had advanced the standing of photography as art and the careers of many Australian photographers including Warren Breninger, Godwin Bradbeer, Ponch Hawkes, David Moore, Gerard Groeneveld, Peter Leiss, Steven Lojewski, Rod McNicol, Wesley Stacey, Robert Ashton, Ian Dodd, Sue Ford, George Gittoes, Ashe Venn, John Williams, Jon Rhodes, Geoff Strong, Jean-Marc Le Pechoux and Henry Talbot.

“Brummels Gallery,” on the Wikipedia website