Léon & Lévy (French) Paris – Le Palais de Justice – La Façade c. 1901-1920 LL 802 of the theme France Levy Fils & Cie, Paris to verso Carte Postale
A selection of black and white postcards that I recently purchased in a secondhand shop. It was fun investigating the publishers and places, especially as three of them contain my surname (and probably ancestor), John Bunyan.
I particularly like the series by Raphael Tuck & Sons of the Guards Chapel at the bottom of the posting… and the fact that some of them state and guarantee: ‘This is a real photograph’.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Please click on the photograph for a larger version of the image.
Léon & Lévy (French) Dunkerque – L’Eglise Saint-Eloi c. 1901-1920 LL 10 of the theme France Carte Postale
Léon & Lévy was a French printer and a photograph editing company located in Paris. It was founded in 1864 and specialized in stereoscopic views and picture postcards of locations in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas. The trade mark of the enterprise was “L.L.” (“LL”). The firm was one of the most important postcard editors in France… Léon & Lévy was founded in 1864 by Isaac and his son-in-law Moyse Léon. Isaac was also known as “Georges Lévy” at that time (to increase profits, he is known as J. Lévy, 1833-1913) .
With Levy sons, Abraham Lucien and Gaspard Ernest, the company will resolutely move towards the market of the postcard: the brand “LL” is filed in 1901 – we often confuse it with the signature “L & L” studio Lehnert & Landrock which was created three years later in Tunis: Lévy publishes numerous clichés and uses the same recipes and the same patterns as Lehnert. But Levy became the second largest publisher of postcards in France, producing 40 to 50,000 snapshots.
Léon & Lévy (French) Amiens – Le Cathédrale – Vie de Saint-Jean-Baptiste c. 1901-1920 LL 194 of the theme France Levy Fils & Cie, Paris to verso Carte Postale
J. Valentine & Co. Ltd (British, 1825-1963) Inveraray Castle and Duniquaich Nd Valentine Series Lithograph post card
J. Salmon Ltd, Sevenoaks (British, 1880 -) The Moot Hall, Elstow, Nr. Bedford After 1912 Salmon Series Real Photo. Printed in England Post card
Caroline Amalie park is in everyday speech called “The Grove”. The park beautifully connects Horsens Museum and Horsens Art Museum. In the park, you can find the old water tower, designed by the known architect Viggo Norn. In the spring, a colour symphony of crocus sprouts through the grass, and later you can enjoy yourself in the shades of the beeches.
James Valentine, photographer (Scottish, 12 June 1815 – 19 June 1879) Rosslyn Castle and Chapel Nd Lithograph post card
H. Coates, Wisbech (British) The Derwent and Heights of Abraham, Matlock Bath Nd Lithograph post card
The Heights of Abraham, based in Matlock Bath, Peak District, offers stunning views of the surrounding landscape as well as providing a wonderful location for a family day out. The park first opened its gates in 1780 and boasts having the country’s first ‘Alpine Style’ cable car system, which was installed in 1984… The Heights of Abraham was named after the area of Quebec where Major General James P. Wolfe met his end during the Seven Years War, the British victory of which paved the way for the further expansion of the British Empire in Canada.
Originally designed as a Regency style ‘Savage Garden’ the park reflects the thoughts of the day from such as Shelley and Wordsworth, who extolled the virtues of promoting the wonderment of nature and the beauty of the environment. Even 200 years after opening the gates for the first time, many of the routes around the gardens remain as originally intended.
Unknown maker (British) Bedford. The Bunyan Meeting Nd This is a real photograph Post card
Dallaporte (Portugal) Batalha – Mosteiro, Fachada das Capelas Imperfeitas [Monastery of Batalha, façade of the Imperfect Chapels] Nd Colecçâo passaporte “LOTY” Photograph, post card
The Monastery of Batalha (Portuguese: Mosteiro da Batalha), literally the Monastery of the Battle, is a Dominican convent in the civil parish of Batalha, in the district of Leiria, in the Centro Region region of Portugal. Originally, and officially known, as the Monastery of Saint Mary of the Victory (Portuguese: Mosteiro de Santa Maria da Vitória), it was erected in commemoration of the 1385 Battle of Aljubarrota, and would serve as the burial church of the 15th-Century Aviz dynasty of Portuguese royals. It is one of the best and original examples of Late Gothic architecture in Portugal, intermingled with the Manueline style.
F. Frith & Co. Ltd., Reigate (British, 1959 – 1970) Old Sarum, Chapel Of St Nicholas at angle of Wall, Castle well in foreground 1913 Frith’s series, Negative 65298 Lithograph postcard
Francis Frith (British, 1822-1898)
Francis Frith (also spelled Frances Frith, 7 October 1822 – 25 February 1898) was an English photographer of the Middle East and many towns in the United Kingdom. Frith was born in Chesterfield, Derbyshire, attending Quaker schools at Ackworth and Quaker Camp Hill in Birmingham (c. 1828-1838), before he started in the cutlery business. Leaving in 1850 to start a photographic studio in Liverpool, known as Frith & Hayward. A successful grocer, and later, printer, Frith fostered an interest in photography, becoming a founding member of the Liverpool Photographic Society in 1853. Frith sold his companies in 1855 in order to dedicate himself entirely to photography. He journeyed to the Middle East on three occasions, the first of which was a trip to Egypt in 1856 with very large cameras (16″ x 20″). He used the collodion process, a major technical achievement in hot and dusty conditions…
When he had finished his travels in the Middle East in 1859, he opened the firm of Francis Frith & Co. in Reigate, Surrey, as the world’s first specialist photographic publisher. In 1860, he married Mary Ann Rosling (sister of Alfred Rosling, the first treasurer of the Photographic Society) and embarked upon a colossal project – to photograph every town and village in the United Kingdom; in particular, notable historical or interesting sights. Initially he took the photographs himself, but as success came, he hired people to help him and set about establishing his postcard company, a firm that became one of the largest photographic studios in the world. Within a few years, over two thousand shops throughout the United Kingdom were selling his postcards.
His family continued the firm, which was finally sold in 1968 and closed in 1970. Following closure of the business, Bill Jay, one of Britain’s first photography historians, identified the archive as being nationally important, and “at risk”. Jay managed to persuade Rothmans, the tobacco company, to purchase the archive to ensure its safety. Frith was re-launched in 1976 as The Francis Frith Collection by John Buck, a Rothmans executive, with the intention of making the Frith photographs available to as wide an audience as possible. In 1977, John Buck bought the archive from Rothmans and has continued to run it as an independent business since that time – trading as The Francis Frith Collection. The company website enables visitors to browse free of charge over 125,000 Frith photographs depicting some 7,000 cities, towns and villages.
Photochrom Co. Ltd., Tunbridge Wells, Kent (British) Ely Cathedral, Choir, East (front and verso) Nd Photograph, postcard 3826
Léon & Lévy (French) Carisbrooke Castle – King Charles I Window c. 1901-1920 LL 18 of the theme Britain Printed in France Lithograph post card
Léon & Lévy (French) Armentières – L’Eglise Saint Roch c. 1883-1916 LL 13 of the theme France Levy Fils & Cie, Paris to verso Carte Postale
According to a brochure published for the centenary of the Saint-Roch church, it was built in the heart of a working-class neighbourhood in 1883 and 1884, at the initiative of the Dean Berteloot, who also built the churches of the Sacred Heart (1879) and St. Joseph (1884), in other districts of Armentières workers; the land is given free by the contractor César Debosque-Donte; the construction of the church is financed by a family of textile industrialists, the Cardon; the building is due to the architect Paul Destombes Roubaix, who is also the author of the churches of St. Joseph and the Sacred Heart; Simple originally emergency church, it was erected in parish church from 1886. Devastated in 1916 by the bombings of World War II, it was rebuilt in 1930 on the same plane as that of the original church and within a similar style.
Luigi Grassi, Milano (Italian) Milano, Facciata della Cattedrale [Facade of Milan Cathedral] Nd Cartolina Postale, 07 19042 Lithograph post card
Unknown maker (F.W.H.) (British) Roof of Chancel, Rosslyn Chapel Nd Lithograph post card
L. Roisin, Barcelona (Lucien Édouard Roisin Besnard, Paris, 1876 – Paris or Barcelona, 1943) Gibraltar – Southport Gate Nd Lithograph post card, 53. 425
Edward Lucien Roisin Besnard (L. Roisin) (French, 1876-1943)
Edward Lucien Roisin Besnard (L. Roisin) (Paris, 1876 – Paris or Barcelona, 1943) French photographer and editor, based in Barcelona at the end of the First World War. Known in Spain for his trade postcards: La casa de la postal. Thanks to the high production work Roisin, it is possible to see the evolution of Spanish landscapes over thirty years. Most of his work is preserved with historical photographic archives of the Institute of Photographic Study of Catalonia.
His first Spanish postcards date from 1918. Roisin was not only in Barcelona, as in World War II, much of his family perished and our photographer was accompanied by two of his nephews, who held an important role in the family business and in the fate of the archives. His contract with Toldra finished he chose to remain on Spanish soil, and he acquires a local business in the Rambla de Santa Monica where he founded his magazine “the postal casa.” He specialises in postcards of a geographical nature. Accompanied by his nephew, they will make many trips by sharing tasks. Throughout the Spanish peninsula, Edward Lucien Roisin Besnard, with his urban experience, is responsible for photographing cities, shooting of the smallest villages and countryside and delegates to his nephew the task to photograph the inhabitants. The niece meanwhile will sell the cards in the family trade.
The beginning of the second war contributes to damage the health of Lucien Roisin Besnard who returns to France where he dies in 1943. At his death, his family continues to hold his stock until the year 1962. Roisin’s work then almost disappears even going for a short stay on the shelves of a secondhand store, to finally find refuge in the Institute’s archives Photographic Studies of Catalonia (it is not let less than 30,000 negatives, 77,000 photos or 40,000 postcards). The remaining shots are preserved in the National Archives of the Generalitat of Catalonia.
La casa de la postal
“The house of the postcard” was an eminently famous place whose reputation was well established and which featured prominently in all tourist guides. Roisin sold hundreds of thousands of postcards drawn from the photographs taken during his long wanderings through all Spain (Catalonia, Pontemeude, Andalusia, Malaga) over a period of more than twenty years. Roisin boasted to offer the public a comprehensive view, a complete inventory of sites and places of interest in all the Spanish provinces. The business was a success and at certain times over 10 vendors were recruited to deal with the request of a customer as well as local tourism. In the 1930s, “The postal casa”, always at the cutting edge, inaugurated the sale of completely innovative products such as postcard accordions which associated a choice of a dozen postcards and gathering views of the same subject taken from different angles. The counterfeiting phenomenon is not new, and to preserve [his copyright], Roisin was soon appear on its productions, a stamp that guaranteed its customers the authenticity of the products they were acquiring. The fame of Roisin was such that when a publication was published concerning Spain in the world, it was almost certain that the photographic credit the photo was derived from “the postal casa”.
Lilywhite Ltd., (British) Bunyan’s Door. Elstow Church. Bedford Nd Guaranteed Real Photo and British Manufacture Post card 28A
Unknown maker (British) Bunyan’s Chair and Prison Door Nd Photograph, post card
Unknown maker (Italian) Milano – Arco della Pace Nd Lithograph post card
Porta Sempione (“Simplon Gate”) is a city gate of Milan, Italy. The name “Porta Sempione” is used both to refer to the gate proper and to the surrounding district (“quartiere”), a part of the Zone 1 division (the historic city centre), including the major avenue of Corso Sempione.The gate is marked by a landmark triumphal arch called Arco della Pace (“Arch of Peace”), dating back to the 19th century, but its origins can be traced back to a gate of the Roman walls of Milan.
The Arch of Peace is a monument neoclassical Milan, located in the centre of the large area of Piazza Sempione. It was started in 1807 by Luigi Cagnola under the pressure of the town of Milan and of Napoleon. It was completed in 1838. The bronze chariot of Peace is by Abbondio Sangiorgio (1798-1879), the four wins equestrian bronze were made on the model of John Putti (1771-1847) while the marble sculptures are works of most representative neoclassical sculptors present in Milan in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, many of whom trained at the school of Camillo Pacetti (1758-1826); among these, we note the statues of History and Poetry of Louis Purchasing.
F. Frith & Co. Ltd., Reigate (British, 1959-1970) Windsor Castle, Long Walk, Copper Horse Nd Frith’s series Lithograph postcard
The R. A. (Postcards) Ltd., (British) The Guildhall, Worcester Nd The Seal of Excellence Series This is a Real Photograph Photograph, post card
Nels (Belgium, 1898 – ) S. A. des Grottes de Han-sur-Lesse et de Rochefort – Le Trophée [Caves of Han-sur-Lesse and Rochefort – The Trophy] Nd Lithograph post card
This publishing house was founded by Edward Nels in 1898. Their goal was to spread geographic knowledge while producing maps, guide books, and photographic and printed souvenirs. They soon became the largest producer of postcards in Belgium, and they also published many cards of the Congo and of Luxembourg. Though they produced a variety of card types, most were as collotypes, many of which were hand coloured in a dull pallet. Ernest Thill, who had ben the manager of the firm took over from Nels in 1913 and added his name to the company. In the 1960’s to 1975 they were purchased by a French firm, but they are now publishing postcards under their own name again, though for the most part they are now printed in Italy.
L. Caron (French, editor) B & G, Lyon (Publisher) Amiens – Cathedral Amiens et les environs – Cathédrale dans sous ses détails – Eglises et Châteaux de Picardie [Amiens and surrounding area – Cathedral detail – Churches and castles of Picardie] Nd 3000 Vues éditées par L. Caron, photo, a Amiens 3000 views edited by L. Caron, photo, in Amiens Lithograph post card
The Cairo Postcard Trust (Joseph Max Lichtenstern, Egypt) Heliopolis – Monument of the first Aviateur (Oseri) c. 1910 Serie 634 Lithograph post card
Joseph Max Lichtenstern moved to Egypt from Vienna in 1893 and took up permanent residence there in 1897. In 1899 he began publishing postcards under the name, Cairo Postcard Trust, but also issued black & white postcards under his own name. Two years later he teamed up with David Harari to form an importing business. They would also take up the publishing of postcards. Between 1904 and 1908 they seem to have taken on another partner, changing their name to Lichtenstern, Harari & Co., but they continued to use their original name, Lichtenstern & Harari on postcards. After Harari left in 1912 the firm was sold to Max H. Rudman, who had been a publisher from at least 1905. Lichtenstern continued to have some business dealings with Rudman, but after he returned to Vienna in 1914 for a visit, he ended up serving in the Austrian Army for the duration of World War One. There was a continuing relationship between this firm and the Cairo Postcard Trust but the specifics are uncertain.
Raphael Tuck & Sons (British) The Guard’s Chapel, West End (front and verso) Nd The Guard’s Chapel Series A Tuck’s Post Card Art publishers to their majesties the King and Queen and to H.R.H. The Prince of Wales Carte Postale Photogravure Postcard
Raphael Tuck & Sons
Raphael Tuck & Sons was a business started by Raphael Tuck and his wife in Bishopsgate in the City of London on October 1866, selling pictures and greeting cards, and eventually selling postcards, the latter being the most successful. Their business was one of the most well known in the ‘postcard boom’ of the late 1800s and early 1900s. Their contributions left a lasting effect on most of the artistic world. During The Blitz, the company headquarters, Raphael House, was destroyed including the originals for most of their series. The company never fully recovered.
Raphael was married to the former Ernestine Lissner in March 1848.She gave birth to seven children, four boys and three girls, all born in Prussia prior to their migration to England. As the family of seven children grew, the children provided more help to the business.Raphael sent out his sons, Herman, Adolph and Gustave to bring in more business. Herman and Adolph also went on selling trips, and at the end of the day they would check the results of the day’s work. The one with the higher sales would have the bigger egg next morning for breakfast. Three of the four sons participated in the firm established by their father. Their second son, Adolph, was chairman and managing director of Raphael Tuck and Sons, Ltd. until his death on 3 July 1926…
Raphael had received training in graphic arts in his home country; and, although he was not an artist himself, he had a flair for commercial art that prompted his interest in this new field. Upon coming to England, he caught the imagination of the public in such a way that he was able to create a new graphic arts business. He was so successful at it that, according to the The Times, he “opened up a new field of labor for artists, lithographers, engravers, printers, ink and paste board makers, and several other trade classes.”
Tuck’s continued to run very successful postcard competitions through the early 1900s with the focus changing to collectors of Tuck postcards rather than the artists whose work was depicted. The top part of the 1903 Tuck Exchange Register pictured above announces the second of Tuck’s prize competitions which began in 1900. The prize competitions aroused much interest. The first contest winner turned in a collection of 20, 364 cards over the 18-month duration of the contest. The second prize competition winner submitted 25, 239 cards. In 1914 the fourth prize competition was announced. The competitions were a novel and effective marketing technique.
Raphael Tuck & Sons (British) The Guard’s Chapel, The Font (front and verso) Nd The Guard’s Chapel Series B Tuck’s Post Card Art publishers to their majesties the King and Queen and to H.R.H. The Prince of Wales Carte Postale Photogravure Postcard
Raphael Tuck & Sons (British) The Guard’s Chapel, South East corner of Nave (front and verso) Nd The Guard’s Chapel Series B Tuck’s Post Card Art publishers to their majesties the King and Queen and to H.R.H. The Prince of Wales Carte Postale Photogravure Postcard
Raphael Tuck & Sons (British) The Guard’s Chapel, The Pulpit (front and verso) Nd The Guard’s Chapel Series A Tuck’s Post Card Art publishers to their majesties the King and Queen and to H.R.H. The Prince of Wales Carte Postale Photogravure Postcard
Raphael Tuck & Sons (British) The Guard’s Chapel, Roberts & Kitchener Memorials (front and verso) Nd The Guard’s Chapel Series B, South West Corner Tuck’s Post Card Art publishers to their majesties the King and Queen and to H.R.H. The Prince of Wales Carte Postale Photogravure Postcard
Raphael Tuck & Sons (British) The Guard’s Chapel, Nave Mosaics (front and verso) Nd The Guard’s Chapel Series A Tuck’s Post Card Art publishers to their majesties the King and Queen and to H.R.H. The Prince of Wales Carte Postale Photogravure Postcard
Raphael Tuck & Sons (British) The Guard’s Chapel, Credence Table and Pissina (front and verso) Nd The Guard’s Chapel Series A Tuck’s Post Card Art publishers to their majesties the King and Queen and to H.R.H. The Prince of Wales Carte Postale Photogravure Postcard
Raphael Tuck & Sons (British) The Guard’s Chapel, S. E. Wall of Sanctuary (front and verso) Nd The Guard’s Chapel Series A Tuck’s Post Card Art publishers to their majesties the King and Queen and to H.R.H. The Prince of Wales Carte Postale Photogravure Postcard
Raphael Tuck & Sons (British) The Guard’s Chapel, The East End (front and verso) Nd The Guard’s Chapel Series A Tuck’s Post Card Art publishers to their majesties the King and Queen and to H.R.H. The Prince of Wales Carte Postale Photogravure Postcard
Curators: Carol Jacobi, Curator, British Art 1850-1915, Tate Britain, Simon Baker, Curator, Photography and International Art, Tate, and Hannah Lyons, Assistant Curator, 1850-1915, Tate
“Salt prints are the very first photographs on paper that still exist today. Made in the first twenty years of photography, they are the results of esoteric knowledge and skill. Individual, sometimes unpredictable, and ultimately magical, the chemical capacity to ‘fix a shadow’ on light sensitive paper, coated in silver salts, was believed to be a kind of alchemy, where nature drew its own picture.”
These salted paper prints, one of the earliest forms of photography, are astonishing. The delicacy and nuance of shade and feeling; possessing a soft, luxurious aesthetic that is astounding today… but just imagine looking at these images at the time they were taken. The shock, the recognition, the delight and the romance of seeing aspects of your life and the world around you, near and far, drawn in light – having a physical presence in the photographs before your eyes. The aura of the original, the photograph AS referent – unlike contemporary media saturated society where the image IS reality, endlessly repeated, divorced from the world in which we live.
The posting has taken a long time to put together, from researching the birth and death dates of the artists (not supplied), to finding illustrative texts and biographies of each artist (some translated from the French). But the real joy in assembling this posting is when I sequence the images. How much pleasure does it give to be able to sequence Auguste Salzmann’sTerra Cotta Statuettes from Camiros, Rhodes followed by three Newhaven fishermen rogues (you wouldn’t want to meet them on a dark night!), and then the totally different feel of Fenton’s Group of Croat Chiefs. Follow this up with one of the most stunning photographs of the posting, Roger Fenton’s portrait Captain Mottram Andrews, 28th Regiment (1st Staffordshire) Regiment of Foot of 1855 and you have a magnificent, almost revelatory, quaternity/eternity.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Tate Britain for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Calvert Jones (Welsh, December 4, 1804 – November 7, 1877) The Fruit Sellers c. 1843 Photograph, salted paper print from a paper negative
David Hill (Scottish, 1802-1870)and Robert Adamson (Scottish, 1821-1848) Five Newhaven fisherwomen c. 1844 Photograph, salted paper print from a paper negative
David Hill (Scottish, 1802-1870) and Robert Adamson (Scottish, 1821-1848) The Gowan [Margaret and Mary Cavendish] c. 1843-1844 Photograph, salted paper print from a paper negative
Salt and Silver: Early Photography 1840-1860 is the first major exhibition in Britain devoted to salt prints, the earliest form of paper photography. The exhibition features some of the rarest and best early photographs in the world, depicting daily activities and historic moments of the mid 19th century. The ninety photographs on display are among the few fragile salt prints that survive and are seldom shown in public. Salt and Silver: Early Photography 1840-1860 opens at Tate Britain on 25 February 2015.
In the 1840s and 50s, the salt print technique introduced a revolutionary new way of creating photographs on paper. It was invented in Britain and spread across the globe through the work of British and international photographers – artists, scientists, adventurers and entrepreneurs of their day. They captured historic moments and places with an immediacy not previously seen, from William Henry Fox Talbot’s images of a modern Paris street and Nelson’s Column under construction, to Linnaeus Tripe’s dramatic views of Puthu Mundapum, India and Auguste Salzmann’s uncanny studies of statues in Greece.
In portraiture, the faces of beloved children, celebrities, rich and poor were recorded as photographers sought to catch the human presence. Highlights include Fox Talbot’s shy and haunting photograph of his daughter Ela in 1842 to Nadar’s images of sophisticated Parisians and Roger Fenton’s shell-shocked soldiers in the Crimean war.
William Henry Fox Talbot unveiled this ground-breaking new process in 1839. He made the world’s first photographic prints by soaking paper in silver iodide salts to register a negative image which, when photographed again, created permanent paper positives. These hand-made photographs ranged in colour from sepia to violet, mulberry, terracotta, silver-grey, and charcoal-black and often had details drawn on like the swishing tail of a horse. Still lifes, portraits, landscapes and scenes of modern life were transformed into luxurious, soft, chiaroscuro images. The bold contrasts between light and dark in the images turned sooty shadows into solid shapes. Bold contrasts between light and dark turned shadows into abstract shapes and movement was often captured as a misty blur. The camera drew attention to previously overlooked details, such as the personal outline of trees and expressive textures of fabric.
In the exciting Victorian age of modern invention and innovation, the phenomenon of salt prints was quickly replaced by new photographic processes. The exhibition shows how, for a short but significant time, the British invention of salt prints swept the world and created a new visual experience.
Salt and Silver: Early Photography 1840 – 1860 is organised in collaboration with the Wilson Centre for photography. It is curated by Carol Jacobi, Curator, British Art 1850-1915, Tate Britain, Simon Baker, Curator, Photography and International Art, Tate, and Hannah Lyons, Assistant Curator, 1850-1915, Tate. ‘Salt and Silver’ – Early Photography 1840-1860 is published by Mack to coincide with the exhibition and will be accompanied by a programme of talks and events in the gallery.
Press release from the Tate website
William Henry Fox Talbot (British, 11 February 1800 – 17 September 1877) Scene in a Paris Street 1843 Photograph, salted paper print from a paper negative
By 1841, Talbot had dramatically reduced, from many minutes to just seconds, the exposure time needed to produce a negative, and on a trip to Paris to publicise his new calotype process he took a picture from his hotel room window, an instinctive piece of photojournalism. The buildings opposite are rendered in precise and exquisite detail, the black and white stripes of the shutters neat alternations of light and shade. In contrast to the solidity of the buildings are the carriages waiting on the street below; the wheels, immobile, are seen in perfect clarity, while the skittish horses are no more than ghostly blurs.
William Henry Fox Talbot (British, 11 February 1800 – 17 September 1877) Nelson’s Column Under Construction, Trafalgar Square 1844 Salted paper print from a glass plate negative
William Henry Fox Talbot (British, 11 February 1800 – 17 September 1877) Nelson’s Column Under Construction, Trafalgar Square 1844 Salted paper print from a glass plate negative
This is the first exhibition in Britain devoted to salted paper prints, one of the earliest forms of photography. A uniquely British invention, unveiled by William Henry Fox Talbot in 1839, salt prints spread across the globe, creating a new visual language of the modern moment. This revolutionary technique transformed subjects from still lifes, portraits, landscapes and scenes of daily life into images with their own specific aesthetic: a soft, luxurious effect particular to this photographic process. The few salt prints that survive are seldom seen due to their fragility, and so this exhibition, a collaboration with the Wilson Centre for Photography, is a singular opportunity to see the rarest and best early photographs of this type in the world.
“The technique went as follows: coat paper with a silver nitrate solution and expose it to light, thus producing a faint silver image. He later realised if you apply salt to the paper first and then spread on the silver nitrate solution the resulting image is much sharper. His resulting photos, ranging in colour from sepia to violet, mulberry, terracotta, silver-grey, and charcoal-black, were shadowy and soft, yet able to pick up on details that previously went overlooked – details like the texture of a horse’s fur, or the delicate silhouette of a tree.”
Priscilla Frank. “The First Paper Photographs Were Made With Salt, And They Look Like This,” on the Huffington Post website 03/06/2015 [Online] Cited 03/06/2015. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
William Henry Fox Talbot (British, 11 February 1800 – 17 September 1877) Cloisters, Lacock Abbey 1843
William Henry Fox Talbot (11 February 1800 – 17 September 1877)
William Henry Fox Talbot (11 February 1800 – 17 September 1877) was a British scientist, inventor and photography pioneer who invented the salted paper and calotype processes, precursors to photographic processes of the later 19th and 20th centuries. Talbot was also a noted photographer who made major contributions to the development of photography as an artistic medium. He published The Pencil of Nature (1844), which was illustrated with original prints from some of his calotype negatives. His work in the 1840s on photo-mechanical reproduction led to the creation of the photoglyphic engraving process, the precursor to photogravure. Talbot is also remembered as the holder of a patent which, some say, affected the early development of commercial photography in Britain. Additionally, he made some important early photographs of Oxford, Paris, Reading, and York.
John Beasly Greene (French-American, 1832-1856) El Assasif, Porte de Granit Rose, No 2, Thébes 1854 Salted paper print from a waxed plate negative
John Beasly Greene (French-American, 1832-1856)
A French-born archeologist based in Paris and a student of photographer Gustave Le Gray, John Beasly Greene became a founding member of the Société Française de Photographie and belonged to two societies devoted to Eastern studies. Greene became the first practicing archaeologist to use photography, although he was careful to keep separate files for his documentary images and his more artistic landscapes.
In 1853 at the age of nineteen, Greene embarked on an expedition to Egypt and Nubia to photograph the land and document the monuments and their inscriptions. Upon his return, Louis Désiré Blanquart-Evrard published an album of ninety-four of these photographs. Greene returned to Egypt the following year to photograph and to excavate at Medinet-Habu in Upper Egypt, the site of the mortuary temple built by Ramses III. In 1855 he published his photographs of the excavation there. The following year, Greene died in Egypt, perhaps of tuberculosis, and his negatives were given to his friend, fellow Egyptologist and photographer Théodule Devéria.
James Robertson (British, 1813-1888) and Felice Beato (Italian-British, 1832 – 29 January 1909) Pyramids at Giza 1857 Photograph, salted paper print from a glass plate negative
James Robertson (British, 1813-1888)
James Robertson (1813-1888) was an English photographer and gem and coin engraver who worked in the Mediterranean region, the Crimea and possibly India. He was one of the first war photographers.
Robertson was born in Middlesex in 1813. He trained as an engraver under Wyon (probably William Wyon) and in 1843 he began work as an “engraver and die-stamper” at the Imperial Ottoman Mint in Constantinople. It is believed that Robertson became interested in photography while in the Ottoman Empire in the 1840s.
In 1853 he began photographing with British photographer Felice Beato and the two formed a partnership called Robertson & Beato either in that year or in 1854 when Robertson opened a photographic studio in Pera, Constantinople. Robertson and Beato were joined by Beato’s brother, Antonio on photographic expeditions to Malta in 1854 or 1856 and to Greece and Jerusalem in 1857. A number of the firm’s photographs produced in the 1850s are signed Robertson, Beato and Co. and it is believed that “and Co.” refers to Antonio.
In late 1854 or early 1855 Robertson married the Beato brothers’ sister, Leonilda Maria Matilda Beato. They had three daughters, Catherine Grace (born in 1856), Edith Marcon Vergence (born in 1859) and Helen Beatruc (born in 1861). In 1855 Robertson and Felice Beato travelled to Balaklava, Crimea where they took over reportage of the Crimean War from Roger Fenton. They photographed the fall of Sevastopol in September 1855. Some sources have suggested that in 1857 both Robertson and Felice Beato went to India to photograph the aftermath of the Indian Rebellion, but it is more probable that Beato travelled there alone. Around this time Robertson did photograph in Palestine, Syria, Malta, and Cairo with either or both of the Beato brothers.
In 1860, after Felice Beato left for China to photograph the Second Opium War and Antonio Beato went to Egypt, Robertson briefly teamed up with Charles Shepherd back in Constantinople. The firm of Robertson & Beato was dissolved in 1867, having produced images – including remarkable multiple-print panoramas – of Malta, Greece, Turkey, Damascus, Jerusalem, Egypt, the Crimea and India. Robertson possibly gave up photography in the 1860s; he returned to work as an engraver at the Imperial Ottoman Mint until his retirement in 1881. In that year he left for Yokohama, Japan, arriving in January 1882. He died there in April 1888.
James Robertson (British, 1813-1888) Base of the Obelisk of Theodosius, Constantinople 1855 Salted paper print from a glass plate negative
Exhibition of intriguing images that charts the birth of photography
Another week, another photography show about death. It’s not officially about death, mind you; it’s officially about the years 1840 to 1860, when photographers made their images on paper sensitised with silver salts. The process was quickly superseded, but the pictures created this way have a beautiful artistic softness and subtlety of tone, quite apart from the fact that every single new photograph that succeeded represented a huge leap forward in the development of the medium. You see these early practitioners start to grasp the scope of what might be possible. Their subjects change, from ivy-covered walls and carefully posed family groups to more exotic landscapes and subjects: Egypt, India, the poor, war.
By the time you get to Roger Fenton’s portrait Captain Lord Balgonie, Grenadier Guards of 1855 you have an inkling of how photography is changing how we understand life, for ever. Balgonie is 23. He looks 50. His face is harrowed by his service in the Crimean War, his eyes bagged with fatigue, fear and what the future may hold. He survived the conflict, but was broken by it, dying at home two years after this picture was taken. That is yet to come: for now, he is alive.
This sense of destiny bound within a picture created in a moment is what is new about photography, and you start to see it everywhere, not just in the images of war. It’s in William Henry Fox Talbot’s The Great Elm at Lacock: a huge tree against a mottled sky, battered by storms. It’s in John Beasly Greene’s near-abstract images of Egyptian statuary, chipped, cracked, alien. And it’s in the portraits of Newhaven fisherwomen by DO Hill and Robert Adamson (their cry was ‘It’s not fish, it’s men’s lives’). In a world where death is always imminent, photography arrives as the perfect way to preserve life, and the perfect way to leave your mark, however fleeting.
Chris Waywell. “Salt and Silver: Early Photography 1840-1860,” on the Time Out London website 22 July 2015 [Online] Cited 18/12/2022. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Eugène Piot was a French journalist, art critic, art collector and photographer. His pen name was Nemo. Piot was born in Paris.
Paul Marés (French) Ox cart in Brittany c. 1857 Photograph, salted paper print from a paper negative
One of the most beautiful photographs in this exhibition is Paul Marès Ox Cart, Brittany, c. 1857. At first it seems a picturesque scene of bucolic tranquillity, the abandoned cart an exquisite study in light and tone. But on the cottage wall are painted two white crosses, a warning – apparently even as recently as the 19th century – to passers-by that the household was afflicted by some deadly disease. Photography’s ability to indiscriminately aestheticise is a dilemma that has continued to present itself ever since, especially in the fields of reportage and war photography.
Around 1850 Frénet meets in Lyon personalities involved in the nascent photography, and he has to discover this technique to reproduce the frescoes he painted in Ainay. Curious, he is passionate about this new medium that offers him a respite space in the setbacks he suffers with his painting.
Frénet applies the stereotyped views taken of the time involving heavy stagings and is one of the first to practice the instant, the familiar and intimate subject. Five years before Nadar he produces psychological portraits and engages in close-up. He sees photography as an art, the opinion which has emerged in the first issue of the magazine La Lumière (The Light), text of the young and ephemeral gravure company founded in 1851. Frénet open a professional practice photography in 1866 and 1867 in Lyon. Unknown to the general public, his photographic work was discovered in 2000 at the sale of his photographic collection, many parts were purchased by the Musée d’Orsay.
In June 1856, in the midst of his work at the Louvre, Baldus set out on a brief assignment, equally without precedent in photography, that was in many ways its opposite: to photograph the destruction caused by torrential rains and overflowing rivers in Lyon, Avignon, and Tarascon. From a world of magnificent man-made construction, he set out for territory devastated by natural disaster; from the task of re-creating the whole of a building in a catalogue of its thousand parts, he turned to the challenge of evoking a thousand individual stories in a handful of transcendent images. Baldus created a moving record of the flood without explicitly depicting the human suffering left in its wake. The “poor people, tears in their eyes, scavenging to find the objects most indispensable to their daily needs,” described by the local Courier de Lyon, are all but absent from his photographs of the hard-hit Brotteaux quarter of Lyon, as if the destruction had been of biblical proportions, leaving behind only remnants of a destroyed civilization.
Malcolm Daniel. “Édouard Baldus (1813-1889),” in Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000 [Online] Cited 16/12/2022. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Auguste Salzmann (French, 1824-1872) painter, photographer and archaeologist who pioneered the use of photography in the recording of historic sites. He excavated archaeological material in Rhodes in collaboration with Alfred Biliotti.
Roger Fenton (British, 28 March 1819 – 8 August 1869) Cossack Bay, Balaclava 1855
It is likely that in autumn 1854, as the Crimean War grabbed the attention of the British public, that some powerful friends and patrons – among them Prince Albert and Duke of Newcastle, secretary of state for war – urged Fenton to go the Crimea to record the happenings. He set off aboard HMS Hecla in February, landed at Balaklava on 8 March and remained there until 22 June. The resulting photographs may have been intended to offset the general unpopularity of the war among the British people, and to counteract the occasionally critical reporting of correspondent William Howard Russell of The Times.The photographs were to be converted into woodblocks and published in the less critical Illustrated London News. Fenton took Marcus Sparling as his photographic assistant, a servant known as William and a large horse-drawn van of equipment…
Despite summer high temperatures, breaking several ribs in a fall, suffering from cholera and also becoming depressed at the carnage he witnessed at Sebastopol, in all Fenton managed to make over 350 usable large format negatives. An exhibition of 312 prints was soon on show in London and at various places across the nation in the months that followed. Fenton also showed them to Queen Victoria and Prince Albert and also to Emperor Napoleon III in Paris. Nevertheless, sales were not as good as expected.
A woman who carries a canteen for soldiers; a vivandière.
Roger Fenton (British, 28 March 1819 – 8 August 1869) Captain Lord Balgonie, Grenadier Guards 1855 Photograph, salted paper print from a paper negative
Roger Fenton (British, 28 March 1819 – 8 August 1869) Captain Lord Balgonie, Grenadier Guards 1855 Photograph, salted paper print from a paper negative
If I had to choose a figure it would be the Franco-American, archaeological photographer John Beasly Greene. His career was short and dangerous, he died at 24, but he challenged the trend towards clarity that dominated his field. Instead, he used the limits of the medium – burn-out, shadow, halation and the beautiful grainy texture of the print itself – to explore the poetic ambiguity of Egyptian sites.
This revolutionary photographic process transformed subjects, still lifes, portraits, landscapes and scenes of daily life into images. It brings it’s own luxurious aesthetic, soft textures, matt appearance and deep rich red tones, the variations seen throughout this exhibition is fascinating to observe. It’s also an incredible opportunity to view the original prints in an exhibition format, which has never been done before on a scale like this before.
The process starts with dipping writing paper in a solution of common salt, then partly drying it, coating it with silver nitrate, then drying it again, before applying further coats of silver nitrate, William Henry Fox Talbot pioneered what became known as the salt print and the world’s first photographic print! The specifically soft and luxurious aesthetic became an icon of modern visual language.
The few salt prints that survive are rarely seen due to their fragility. This exhibition is extremely important to recognise this historical process as well as a fantastic opportunity to see the rarest and best up close of early photographs of this type in the world.
Anon. “Salt and Silver: Early Photography 1840-1860,” on the Films not dead website [Online] Cited 03/06/2015. No longer available online. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Tournachon’s nickname, Nadar, derived from youthful slang, but became his professional signature and the name by which he is best known today. Poor but talented, Nadar began by scratching out a living as a freelance writer and caricaturist. His writings and illustrations made him famous before he began to photograph. His keenly honed camera eye came from his successful career as a satirical cartoonist, in which the identifying characteristic of a subject was reduced to a single distinct facet; that skill proved effective in capturing the personality of his photographic subjects.
Nadar opened his first photography studio in 1854, but he only practiced for six years. He focused on the psychological elements of photography, aiming to reveal the moral personalities of his sitters rather than make attractive portraits. Bust- or half-length poses, solid backdrops, dramatic lighting, fine sculpturing, and concentration on the face were trademarks of his studio. His use of eight-by-ten-inch glass-plate negatives, which were significantly larger than the popular sizes of daguerreotypes, accentuated those effects.
At one point, a commentator said, “[a]ll the outstanding figures of [the] era – literary, artistic, dramatic, political, intellectual – have filed through his studio.” In most instances these subjects were Nadar’s friends and acquaintances. His curiosity led him beyond the studio into such uncharted locales as the catacombs, which he was one of the first persons to photograph using artificial light.
Lodoisch Crette Romet (1823-1872) A Lesson of Gustave Le Gray in His Studio [Antoine-Emile Plassan] 1850-1853 24.2 x 17.7cm Photograph, salted paper print from a paper negative
John S. Johnston (American, c. 1839 – December 17, 1899) One of Dr Kane’s Men [possibly William Morton] c. 1857
John S. Johnston was a late 19th-century maritime and landscape photographer. He is known for his photographs of racing yachts and New York City landmarks and cityscapes. Very little is known about his life. He was evidently born in Britain in the late 1830s, and was active in the New York City area in the late 1880s and 1890s. He died in 1899.
William Morton
“Belief in the Open Polar Sea theory subsided until the mid-1800s, when Elisha Kent Kane set forth on a number of expeditions north with hopes of finding this theorised body of water. On an 1850s expedition organised by Kane, explorer William Morton, believing he discovered the Open Polar Sea, described a body of water containing…
“Not a speck of ice… As far as I could discern, the sea was open… The wind was due N(orth) – enough to make white caps, and the surf broke in on the rocks in regular breakers.”
Morton, however, did not find the Open Polar Sea – he found a small oasis of water. Morton’s quote is likely tinged with a desire to raise the spirits of his boss, Kane, who saw the Polar Sea as a possible utopia, an area brimming with life amidst a harsh arctic world.”
Keith Veronese. “The Open Polar Sea, a balmy aquatic Eden at the North Pole?” on the Gizmodo website 4/20/12 [Online] Cited 03/06/2015. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
David Hill (Scottish, 1802-1870)and Robert Adamson (Scottish, 1821-1848) Thought to be Elizabeth Rigby c. 1844 Photograph, salted paper print from a paper negative
Jean-Baptiste Frénet (French – Lyon, 31 January 1814 – Charly, 12 August 1889) Thought to be a Mother and Son c. 1855 Photograph, salted paper print from a collodion negative transferred from glass to paper support
William Henry Fox Talbot (British, 11 February 1800 – 17 September 1877) The Photographer’s Daughter, Ela Theresa Talbot 1843-1844
Roger Fenton (British, 28 March 1819 – 8 August 1869) Portrait of a Woman c. 1854 Photograph, salted paper print from a glass plate negative
John Wheeley Gough Gutch (1809-1862) was a British surgeon and editor. He was also a keen amateur naturalist and geologist, and a pioneer photographer.
In 1851, Dr. Gutch gave up his medical practice to become a messenger for Queen Victoria, and he began photographing the many cities he visited on his diplomatic missions. During a trip to Constantinople, he became seriously ill, resulting in permanent partial paralysis that ended his public service career. While undergoing experimental treatments in Malvern, England, Dr. Gutch again turned to photography as a cure for his melancholy. His works were exhibited throughout London and Edinburgh from 1856-1861, and he became a frequent contributor to the Photographic Notes publication. Dr. Gutch’s camera of choice was Frederick Scott Archer’s wet-plate camera because he liked the convenience of developing glass negatives within the camera, which eliminated the need for a darkroom. However, the camera proved too cumbersome for him to handle, and had to be manipulated by one of his photographic assistants. His photographs were printed on salt-treated paper and were placed into albums he painstakingly decorated with photographic collages.
Dr. Gutch’s “picturesque” photographic style was influenced by artist William Gilpin. Unlike his mid-nineteenth century British contemporaries who recorded urban expansion, he preferred focusing on ancient buildings, rock formations, archaeological ruins, and tree-lined streams. In 1857, an assignment for Photographic Notes took him to Scotland, northern Wales, and the English Lake District, where he photographed the lush settings, but not always to his satisfaction. Two years’ later, he aspired to photograph and document the more than 500 churches in Gloucestershire, a daunting and quite expensive task. He fitted his camera with a Ross Petzval wide-angle lens and managed to photograph more than 200 churches before illness forced him to abandon the ambitious project. Fifty-three-year-old John Wheeley Gough Gutch died in London on April 30, 1862.
Anonymous text. “John Wheeley Gough Gutch,” on the Historic Camera website Nd [Online] Cited 03/06/2015. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987) Air France Jun 21 1982 Unique gelatin silver print 8 x 10 in. (20.3 x 25.4cm)
Andy Warhol being, well … Andy Warhol.
Artist, tourist, celebrity, poofter, man about town and spontaneous, thoughtful snapper. The photograph of the Prado at night is superb as are the multiple, stitched together photographs. Warhol certainly loved his high key, 35mm images.
Marcus
Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987) Cessna Plane c. 1977 Four stitched gelatin silver prints Each: 11 x 14 in. (27.9 x 35.6cm) Overall: 2 1 1/4 x 27 3/8 in. (54 x 69.5cm)
Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987) City View May 07 1984 Unique gelatin silver print 8 x 10 in. (20.3 x 25.4cm)
Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987) Houston Skyline c. 1979 Unique gelatin silver print 8 x 10 in. (20.3 x 25.4cm)
Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987) German Trolley Jun 23 1980 Unique gelatin silver print 8 x 10 in. (20.3 x 25.4cm)
Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987) Limousine Interior c. 1980 Unique gelatin silver print 8 x 10 in. (20.3 x 25.4cm)
Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987) Luxor Temple c. 1977 Two unique gelatin silver prints Each: 8 x 5 in. (20.3 x 12.7cm)
Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987) Luxor Temple (detail) c. 1977 Two unique gelatin silver prints Each: 8 x 5 in. (20.3 x 12.7cm)
Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987) Ocean Landscape 1986 Four stitched gelatin silver prints Each: 11 x 14 in. (27.9 x 35.6cm) Overall: 2 1/4 x 27 1/2 in. (54 x 69.9cm)
Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987) Statues Outside Musée D’Orsay c. 1980 Unique gelatin silver print 8 x 10 in. (20.3 x 25.4cm)
Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987) Monastery of Saint John of the Kings, Toledo Jan 24 1983 Unique gelatin silver print 8 x 10 in. (20.3 x 25.4 cm)
Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987) Museo del Prado Exterior, Madrid, Spain Jan 24 1983 Unique gelatin silver print 8 x 10 in. (20.3 x 25.4cm)
Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987) Spanish Portico Jan 24 1983 Unique gelatin silver print 8 x 10 in. (20.3 x 25.4cm)
Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987) Richard Coeur de Lion at Westminster c. 1980 Unique gelatin silver print 8 x 10 in. (20.3 x 25.4cm)
Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987) Pyramid c. 1977 Unique gelatin silver print 5 x 8 in. (12.7 x 20.3cm)
Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987) Street Scene c. 1982 Unique gelatin silver print 8 x 10 in. (20.3 x 25.4cm)
Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987) Riders from the Car c. 1979 Two unique polaroid prints mounted on board Each: 4 1/4 x 3 3/8 in. (10.8 x 8.6cm)
Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987) Unidentified Men c. 1980 Unique gelatin silver print 8 x 10 in. (20.3 x 25.4cm)
Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987) Venetian Canal 1977 Unique gelatin silver print 8 x 10 in. (20.3 x 25.4cm)
Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987) Table Setting c. 1980 Unique gelatin silver print 8 x 10 in. (20.3 x 25.4cm)
Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987) Beach Scene c. 1975 Unique polaroid print 4¼ x 3½ in. (10.8 x 8.8cm)
Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987) Place de la Concorde c. 1980 Unique gelatin silver print 10 x 8 in. (25.4 x 20.3cm)
Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987) Rockefeller Center c. 1984 Unique gelatin silver print 10 x 8 in. (25.4 x 20.3cm)
Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987) Sears Tower c. 1980 Unique gelatin silver print 10 x 8 in. (25.4 x 20.3cm)
Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987) Max Delys at the Saloon c. 1980 Unique polaroid print mounted on board 4 1/4 x 3/ 3/8 in. (10.8 x 8.5cm)
Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987) Union Square c. 1975 Unique polaroid print 4 1/4 x 3 3/8 in. (10.8 x 8.5cm)
Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987) Tunnel c. 1980 Unique gelatin silver print 8 x 10 in. (20.3 x 25.4cm)
My favourites: the weight of Weston’s Shipyard detail, Wilmington (1935, above); and the romanticism (Jean-François Millet-esque), sublime beauty of Boubat’s Lella, Bretagne, France (1947, below).
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Cecil Stoughton (American, 1920-2008) Pres. John F. Kennedy’s Lincoln Continental 1963 Silver gelatin print
Cecil Stoughton (American, 1920-2008) Pres. John F. Kennedy’s Lincoln Continental 1963 Silver gelatin print
Cecil Stoughton (American, 1920-2008) Pres. John F. Kennedy’s Lincoln Continental 1963 Silver gelatin print
Cecil Stoughton (American, 1920-2008)
Cecil William Stoughton (January 18, 1920 – November 3, 2008) was an American photographer. Born in Oskaloosa, Iowa, Stoughton is best known for being President John F. Kennedy’s photographer during his White House years.
Stoughton took the only photograph ever published showing John F. Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe together. Stoughton was present at the motorcade at which Kennedy was assassinated, and was subsequently the only photographer on board Air Force One when Lyndon B. Johnson was sworn in as the next President. Stoughton’s famous photograph of this event depicts Johnson raising his hand in oath as he stood between his wife Lady Bird Johnson and a still blood-spattered Jacqueline Kennedy.
Max Yavno (American, 1911-1985) Garage Doors, San Francisco 1947 Silver gelatin print
Max Yavno (American, 1911-1985)
Max Yavno (1911-1985) was a photographer who specialised in street scenes, especially in Los Angeles and San Francisco, California.
He did photography for the Works Progress Administration from 1936 to 1942. He was president of the Photo League in 1938 and 1939. Yavno was in the U.S. Army Air Corps from 1942 to 1945, after which he moved to San Francisco and began specialising in urban-landscape photography. Photographer Edward Steichen selected twenty of Yavno’s prints for the permanent collection at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1950, and the next year Yavno won a Guggenheim fellowship.
History professor Constance B. Schulz said of him:
For financial reasons he worked as a commercial advertising photographer for the next twenty years (1954-75), creating finely crafted still lifes that appeared in Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. He returned to artistic landscape photography in the 1970s, when his introspective approach found a more appreciative audience.
Ralph Steiner (American, 1899-1986) American Rural Baroque 1929 Silver gelatin print
Ralph Steiner (American, 1899-1986)
Ralph Steiner (February 8, 1899 – July 13, 1986) was an American photographer, pioneer documentarian and a key figure among avant-garde filmmakers in the 1930s.
Born in Cleveland, Steiner studied chemistry at Dartmouth, but in 1921 entered the Clarence H. White School of Modern Photography. White helped Steiner in finding a job at the Manhattan Photogravure Company, and Steiner worked on making photogravure plates of scenes from Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North. Not long after, Steiner’s work as a freelance photographer in New York began, working mostly in advertising and for publications like Ladies’ Home Journal. Through the encouragement of fellow photographer Paul Strand, Steiner joined the left-of-centre Film and Photo League around 1927. He was also to influence the photography of Walker Evans, giving him guidance, technical assistance, and one of his view cameras.
In 1929, Steiner made his first film, H2O, a poetic evocation of water that captured the abstract patterns generated by waves. Although it was not the only film of its kind at the time – Joris Ivens made Regen (Rain) that same year, and Henwar Rodekiewicz worked on his similar film Portrait of a Young Man (1931) through this whole period – it made a significant impression in its day and since has become recognised as a classic: H2O was added to theNational Film Registry in December 2005. Among Steiner’s other early films, Surf and Seaweed (1931) expands on the concept of H2O as Steiner turns his camera to the shoreline; Mechanical Principles (1933) was an abstraction based on gears and machinery.
Wilson A. Bentley (American, 1865-1931) Snowflake c. 1920 Gold-chloride toned microphotographs from glass plate negatives
Andre de Dienes (Hungarian, 1913-1985) Erotic Nude 1950s Silver gelatin print
Andre de Dienes (Hungarian, 1913-1985)
Andre de Dienes (born Andor György Ikafalvi-Dienes) (December 18, 1913 – April 11, 1985) was a Hungarian-American photographer, noted for his work with Marilyn Monroe and his nude photography.
Dienes was born in Transylvania, Austria-Hungary, on December 18, 1913, and left home at 15 after the suicide of his mother. Dienes travelled across Europe mostly on foot, until his arrival in Tunisia. In Tunisia he purchased his first camera, a 35mm Retina. Returning to Europe he arrived in Paris in 1933 to study art, and bought a Rolleiflex shortly after.
Dienes began work as a professional photographer for the Communist newspaper L’Humanité, and was employed by the Associated Press until 1936, when the Parisian couturier Captain Molyneux noted his work and urged him to become a fashion photographer. In 1938 the editor of Esquire, Arnold Gingrich offered him work in New York City, and helped fund Dienes’ passage to the United States. Once in the United States Dienes worked for Vogue and Life magazines as well as Esquire.
When not working as a fashion photographer Dienes travelled the USA photographing Native American culture, including the Apache, Hopi, and Navajo reservations and their inhabitants. Dissatisfied with his life as a fashion photographer in New York, Dienes moved to California in 1944, where he began to specialise in nudes and landscapes.
George A. Tice (American, 1938-2025) Porch, Monhegan Island, Maine 1971 Selenium-toned silver print
George A. Tice (American, 1938-2025)
George Tice (b. 1938) is an American photographer best known for his large-format black-and-white photographs of New Jersey, New York, and the Amish. Tice was born in Newark, New Jersey, and self-trained as a photographer. His work is included in major museum collections around the world and he has published many books of photographs, including Fields of Peace: A Pennsylvania German Album (1970), Paterson, New Jersey (1972), Seacoast Maine: People and Places (1973), Urban Landscapes: A New Jersey Portrait (1975), “Lincoln” (1984), Hometowns: An American Pilgrimage (1988), Urban Landscapes (2002), Paterson II (2006), Urban Romantic (1982), and George Tice: Selected Photographs 1953-1999 (2001).
Auguste Salzmann (French, 1824-1872) Jerusalem, Sainte Sepulchre, Colonne du Parvis 1854 Blanquart-Evrard salted paper print from a paper negative
Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American, 1899-1968) Billie Dauscha and Mabel Sidney, Bowery Entertainers December 4, 1944 Silver gelatin print
Winston O. Link (American, 1914-2001) Luray Crossing, Luray, Virginia 1956 Silver gelatin print
Paul J. Woolf (American, 1899-1985) Looking down on Grand Central Station 1935 Silver gelatin print
Paul J. Woolf began his photographic career in London, taking pictures as a child. He attended the University of California, Berkeley and the Clarence White School of Photography. By 1942 he was established as a professional photographer who specialised in design and night-time photography. Woolf also maintained a practice as a clinical social worker while continuing his work as a photographer.
Henri Cartier-Bresson (French, 1908-2004) Alicante 1933 Silver gelatin print
Joel-Peter Witkin (American, b. 1939) Leda 1986 Silver gelatin print
Roman Vishniac (Russian-American, 1897-1990) Father taking his son to the first day of cheder 1937-1938 Silver gelatin print
Julia Margaret Cameron (British, 1815-1879) James Rogers 1867 Albumen print
Julia Margaret Cameron (British, 1815-1879) The Dream 1869 Albumen print
Lewis W. Hine (American, 1874-1940) An Albanian Woman from Italy at Ellis Island 1905 Silver gelatin print
Lewis W. Hine (American, 1874-1940) Italian laborer, Ellis Island 1905-1912 Silver gelatin print
Laure Albin-Guillot (French, 1879-1962) Opale c. 1930 Silver gelatin print
Cecil Beaton (British, 1904-1980) Virginia Cherrill 1930s Silver gelatin print
Édouard Boubat (French, 1923-1999) Lella, Bretagne, France 1947 Silver gelatin print
Édouard Boubat (French, 1923-1999)
Édouard Boubat (1923-1999) was a French photojournalist and art photographer.
Boubat was born in Montmartre, Paris. He studied typography and graphic arts at the École Estienne and worked for a printing company before becoming a photographer. In 1943 he was subjected to service du travail obligatoire, forced labour of French people in Nazi Germany, and witnessed the horrors of World War II. He took his first photograph after the war in 1946 and was awarded the Kodak Prize the following year. He travelled the world for the French magazine Réalités and later worked as a freelance photographer. French poet Jacques Prévert called him a “peace correspondent” as he was apolitical and photographed uplifting subjects.
Exhibition dates: 13th December, 2014 – 19th April, 2015
Exhibition coincides with the culmination of the Thomas Walther Collection Project, a four-year research collaboration between MoMA’s curatorial and conservation staff
Co-curators: Quentin Bajac, Chief Curator of Photography, MoMA, and Sarah Hermanson Meister, Curator in the Department of Photography, MoMA
Unknown photographer British ‘Chute Jumpers 1937 Gelatin silver print 5 15/16 x 6 15/16″ (15.1 x 17.6cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Thomas Walther
OMG, OMG, OMG if we had tele-transportation to travel around the world, I would be at this exhibition in an instant. Please MoMA, fly me to New York so that I can do a proper review of the exhibition!
Not only are there photographs from well known artists that I have never seen before – for example, the brooding mass of Boat, San Francisco (1925) by Edward Weston with the name of the boat… wait for it… ‘DAYLIGHT’ – there are also outstanding photographs from artists that I have never heard of before.
There is so much to like in this monster posting, from the glorious choreography of British ‘Chute Jumpers (1937) to the muscular symmetry and abstraction of Rodchenko’s Dive (1934); from the absolutely stunning light and movement of Riefenstahl’s Nocturnal Start of Decathlon 1,500m Race (August 1936) to the ecstatic, ghost-like swimming in mud apparitions of Kate Steinitz’s Backstroke (1930) – an artist who I knew nothing about (Kate Steinitz was a German-American artist and art historian affiliated with the European Bauhaus and Dadaist movements in the early 20th century. She is best known for her collaborative work with the artist Kurt Schwitters, and, in later life, her scholarship on Leonardo da Vinci). Another artist to flee Germany in the mid-1930s to evade the persecution of the Nazis.
In fact, when I looked through the checklist for this exhibition I observed the country of origin of the artist, and the date of their death. There are a lot of artists from Germany and France. Either they lived through the maelstrom of the Second World War and survived, escaped to America or England, or died during the war and their archive was lost (such as the artist Robert Petschow (German, 1888-1945). For some artists surviving the war was not enough either… trapped behind the Iron Curtain after repatriation, artists such as Edmund Kesting went unacknowledged in their lifetime. What a tough time it must have been. To have created this wonderful avant-garde art and then to have seen it dashed against the rocks of violence, prejudice and bigotry – firstly degenerate, then non-conforming to Communist ideals.
Out of the six sections of the exhibition (The Modern World, Purisms, Reinventing Photography, The Artist’s Life, Between Surrealism and Magic Realism, and Dynamics of the City) it would seem that the section ‘Reinventing Photography’ is the weakest – going from the checklist – with a lack of really memorable images for this section, hence only illustrated in this posting by one image. But this is a minor quibble. When you have images such as Anne W. Brigman’s A Study in Radiation (1924) or Edmund Kesting’s magnificent Glance to the Sun (Blick zur Sonne) (1928) who cares!
I just want to see them all and soak up their atmosphere.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
PS. There is an excellent website titled Object: Photo to accompany the exhibition. It contains sections that map and compare photographs, connect and map artists’ lives along with many more images from the collection, conservation analysis and essays about the works. Well worth a look.
Note: Images below correspond to their sections in the exhibition.
Gustav Klutsis (Latvian, 1895-1938) Postcard for the All Union Spartakiada Sporting Event 1928 Offset lithograph 5 3/4 x 4 1/8″ (14.1 x 10.5cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Gustav Klutsis (Latvian, 1895-1938) Postcard for the All Union Spartakiada Sporting Event 1928 Offset lithograph 5 3/4 x 4 1/8″ (14.1 x 10.5cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Gustav Klutsis (Latvian, 1895-1938) Postcard for the All Union Spartakiada Sporting Event 1928 Offset lithograph 5 3/4 x 4 1/8″ (14.1 x 10.5cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Gustav Klutsis (Latvian, 1895-1938)
Latvian painter, sculptor, graphic artist, designer and teacher, active in Russia. He was an important exponent of Russian Constructivism. He studied in Riga and Petrograd (now St Petersburg), but in the 1917 October Revolution joined the Latvian Rifle Regiment to defend the Bolshevik government; his sketches of Lenin and his fellow soldiers show Cubist influence. In 1918 he designed posters and decorations for the May Day celebrations and he entered the Free Art Studios (Svomas) in Moscow, where he studied with Malevich and Antoine Pevsner. Dynamic City (1919; Athens, George Costakis priv. col., see Rudenstine, no. 339) illustrates his adoption of the Suprematist style. In 1920 Klucis exhibited with Pevsner and Naum Gabo on Tver’skoy Boulevard in Moscow; in the same year Klucis joined the Communist Party. In 1920-21 he started experimenting with materials, making constructions from wood and paper that combined the geometry of Suprematism with a more Constructivist concern with actual volumes in space. In 1922 Klucis applied these experiments to utilitarian ends when he designed a series of agitprop stands based on various combinations of loudspeakers, speakers’ platforms, display units, film projectors and screens. He taught a course on colour in the Woodwork and Metalwork Faculty of the Vkhutemas (Higher Artistic and Technical Workshops) from 1924 to 1930, and in 1925 helped to organise the Soviet section at the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris. During the 1920s he became increasingly interested in photomontage, using it in such agitprop posters as ‘We will repay the coal debt to the country’ (1928; e.g. New York, MoMA). During the 1930s he worked on graphic and typographical design for periodicals and official publications. He was arrested and died during the purges in World War II.
Gustav Klutsis (Latvian, 1895-1938) Postcard for the All Union Spartakiada Sporting Event 1928 Offset lithograph 5 3/4 x 4 1/8″ (14.1 x 10.5cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Modern Photographs from the Thomas Walther Collection, 1909-1949, on view from December 13, 2014, to April 19, 2015, explores photography between the First and Second World Wars, when creative possibilities were never richer or more varied, and when photographers approached figuration, abstraction, and architecture with unmatched imaginative fervour. This vital moment is dramatically captured in the photographs that constitute the Thomas Walther Collection, a remarkable group of works presented together for the first time through nearly 300 photographs. Made on the street and in the studio, intended for avant-garde exhibitions or the printed page, these objects provide unique insight into the radical intentions of their creators. Iconic works by such towering figures as Berenice Abbott, Karl Blossfeldt, Alvin Langdon Coburn, El Lissitzky, Lucia Moholy, László Moholy-Nagy, Aleksandr Rodchenko, and Paul Strand are featured alongside lesser-known treasures by more than 100 other practitioners. The exhibition is organised by Quentin Bajac, the Joel and Anne Ehrenkranz Chief Curator of Photography, and Sarah Hermanson Meister, Curator, Department of Photography, MoMA.
The exhibition coincides with Object: Photo. Modern Photographs: The Thomas Walther Collection 1909-1949, the result of a four-year collaborative project between the Museum’s departments of Photography and Conservation, with the participation of over two dozen leading international photography scholars and conservators, making it the most extensive effort to integrate conservation, curatorial, and scholarly research efforts on photography to date. That project is composed of multiple parts including a website that features a suite of digital-visualisation research tools that allow visitors to explore the collection, a hard-bound paper catalogue of the entire Thomas Walther collection, and an interdisciplinary symposium focusing on ways in which the digital age is changing our engagement with historic photographs.
Modern Photographs from the Thomas Walther Collection, 1909-1949, is organised thematically into six sections, suggesting networks between artists, regions, and objects, and highlighting the figures whose work Walther collected in depth, including André Kertész, Germaine Krull, Franz Roh, Willi Ruge, Maurice Tabard, Umbo, and Edward Weston. Enriched by key works in other mediums from MoMA’s collection, this exhibition presents the exhilarating story of a landmark chapter in photography’s history.”
Press release from the MoMA website
The Collection
In the 1920s and ’30s photography underwent a period of exploration, experimentation, technical innovation, and graphic discovery so dramatic that it generated repeated claims that the true age of discovery was not when photography was invented but when it came of age, in this era, as a dynamic, infinitely flexible, and easily transmissible medium. The Thomas Walther Collection concentrates on that second moment of growth. The Walther Collection’s 341 photographs by almost 150 artists, most of them European, together convey a period of collective innovation that is now celebrated as one of the major episodes of modern art.
The Project
Our research is based on the premise that photographs of this period were not born as disembodied images; they are physical things – discrete objects made by certain individuals at particular moments using specific techniques and materials. Shaped by its origin and creation, the photographic print harbours clues to its maker and making, to the causes it may have served, and to the treatment it has received, and these bits of information, gathered through close examination of the print, offer fresh perspectives on the history of the era. “Object: Photo” – the title of this study – reflects this approach.
In 2010, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation gave the Museum a grant to encourage deep scholarly study of the Walther Collection and to support publication of the results. Led by the Museum’s Departments of Photography and Conservation, the project elicited productive collaborations among scholars, curators, conservators, and scientists, who investigated all of the factors involved in the making, appearance, condition, and history of each of the 341 photographs in the collection. The broadening of narrow specialisations and the cross-fertilisation between fields heightened appreciation of the singularity of each object and of its position within the history of its moment. Creating new standards for the consideration of photographs as original objects and of photography as an art form of unusually rich historical dimensions, the project affords both experts and those less familiar with its history new avenues for the appreciation of the medium. The results of the project are presented in multiple parts: on the website, in a hard-bound paper catalogue of the entire Thomas Walther Collection (also titled Object: Photo), and through an interdisciplinary symposium focusing on the ways in which the digital age is changing our engagement with historic photographs.
Historical Context
The Walther Collection is particularly suited to such a study because its photographs are so various in technique, geography, genre, and materials as to make it a mine of diverse data. The revolutions in technology that made the photography of this period so flexible and responsive to the impulse of the operator threw open the field to all comers. The introduction of the handheld Leica in 1925 (a small camera using strips of 35mm motion-picture film), of enlargers to make positive prints from the Leica’s little negatives, and of easy-to-use photographic papers – each of these was respectively a watershed event. Immediately sensing the potential of these tools, artists began to explore the medium; without any specialised training, painters such as László Moholy-Nagy and Aleksandr Rodchenko could become photographers and teachers almost overnight. Excitedly and with an open sense of possibility, they freely experimented in the darkroom and in the studio, producing negative prints, collages and photomontages, photograms, solarisations, and combinations of these. Legions of serious amateurs also began to photograph, and manufacturers produced more types of cameras with different dimensions and capacities: besides the Leica, there was the Ermanox, which could function in low light, motion-picture cameras that could follow and stop action, and many varieties of medium- and larger-format cameras that could be adapted for easy transport. The industry responded to the expanding range of users and equipment with a bonanza of photographic papers in an assortment of textures, colours, and sizes. Multiple purposes also generated many kinds of prints: best for reproduction in books or newspapers were slick, ferrotyped glossies, unmounted and small enough to mail, while photographs for exhibition were generally larger and mounted to stiff boards. Made by practitioners ranging from amateurs to professional portraitists, journalists, illustrators, designers, critics, and artists of all stripes, the pictures in the Walther Collection are a true representation of the kaleidoscopic multiplicity of photography in this period of diversification.
Text from the MoMA website
Willi Ruge (German, 1882-1961) Photo of Myself at the Moment of My Jump (Selbstfoto im Moment des Abspringens) 1931 Gelatin silver print 5 9/16 × 8 1/16″ (14.2 × 20.4cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Thomas Walther
Willi Ruge (German, 1882-1961) With My Head Hanging Down before the Parachute Opened . . . (Mit dem Kopf nach unten hängend, bei ungeöffnetem Fallschirm . . .) 1931 Gelatin silver print 5 1/2 × 8″ (14 × 20.3cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Thomas Walther
Willi Ruge (German, 1882-1961) Seconds before Landing (Sekunden vor der Landung) From the series I Photograph Myself during a Parachute Jump (Ich fotografiere mich beim Absturz mit dem Fallschirm) 1931 Gelatin silver print 8 1/16 × 5 9/16″ (20.4 × 14.1cm) (irreg.) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Thomas Walther
Willi Ruge (German, 1882-1961) Seconds before Landing (Sekunden vor der Landung) (detail) From the series I Photograph Myself during a Parachute Jump (Ich fotografiere mich beim Absturz mit dem Fallschirm) 1931 Gelatin silver print 8 1/16 × 5 9/16″ (20.4 × 14.1cm) (irreg.) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Thomas Walther
Robert Petschow (German, 1888-1945) Lines of Modern Industry: Cooling Tower (Linien der modernen Industrie: Kühlturmanlage) 1920-29 Gelatin silver print 3 3/8 × 4 1/2″ (8.5 × 11.5cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Albert Renger-Patzsch, by exchange
Robert Petschow (German, 1888-1945) The Course of the Mulde with Sand Deposits in the Curves (Der Lauf der Mulde mit Versandungen in den Windungen) 1920-33 Gelatin silver print 3 3/8 × 4 1/2″ (8.5 × 11.5cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Albert Renger-Patzsch, by exchange
Robert Petschow (German, 1888-1945)
Robert Petschow was studying in Danzig as a free balloon pilot in the West Prussian air force. During the First World War Petschow was a balloon observer with the rank of lieutenant in Poland, France and Belgium. Maybe it was the work of a balloon observer which led him to photography, in which he was worked freelance from 1920. His images appeared in the prestigious photographic yearbook The German photograph in which he was presented with photographers such as Karl Blossfeldt, Albert Renger-Patzsch Chargesheimer and Erich Salomon. The book Land of the Germans, which was published in 1931 by Robert Diesel and includes many photographs of Petschow went on to be published in four editions. In 1931 he journeyed with the airship LZ 127, the “Graf Zeppelin” to Egypt. He participated as an unofficial member of the crew to document the trip photographically. In 1936, at the age of 48 years, Petschow joined the rank of captain in the Air Force and ended his work as a senior editor at the daily newspaper The West, a position he held from 1930. For the following years, there is no information to Petschow.
Robert Petschow died at the age of 57 years on 17 October 1945 in Haldensleben after he had to leave his apartment in Berlin-Steglitz due to the war. He left there a picture archive with about 30,000 aerial photographs, which fell victim of the war. His contemporaries describe Petschow as a humorous person and a great raconteur.
Translated from the German Wikipedia website by Google Translate
Aleksandr Rodchenko (Russian, 1891-1956) Dive (Pryzhok v vodu) 1934 Gelatin silver print 11 11/16 x 9 3/8″ (29.7 x 23.8cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Shirley C. Burden, by exchange
Aleksandr Rodchenko (Russian, 1891-1956) Dive (Pryzhok v vodu) 1934 Gelatin silver print 11 3/4 × 9 5/16″ (29.9 × 23.6cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Shirley C. Burden, by exchange
Leni Riefenstahl (German, 1902-2003) Nocturnal Start of Decathlon 1,500m Race (Nächtlicher Start zum 1500-m-Lauf des Zehnkampfes) August 1936 Gelatin silver print 9 5/16 x 11 3/4″ (23.7 x 29.8cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Abbott-Levy Collection funds, by exchange
Leni Riefenstahl (German, 1902-2003) Untitled 1936 Gelatin silver print 9 3/16 x 11 5/8″ (23.4 x 29.5cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Abbott-Levy Collection funds, by exchange
Kate Steinitz (American born Germany, 1889-1975) Backstroke (Rückenschwimmerinnen) 1930 Gelatin silver print 10 1/2 × 13 7/16″ (26.6 × 34.1cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Thomas Walther
The Modern World
Even before the introduction of the handheld Leica camera in 1925, photographers were avidly exploring fresh perspectives, shaped by the unique experience of capturing the world through a lens and ideally suited to express the tenor of modern life in the wake of World War I. Looking up and down, these photographers found unfamiliar points of view that suggested a new, dynamic visual language freed from convention. Improvements in the light sensitivity of photographic films and papers meant that photographers could capture motion as never before. At the same time, technological advances in printing resulted in an explosion of opportunities for photographers to present their work to ever-widening audiences. From inexpensive weekly magazines to extravagantly produced journals, periodicals exploited the potential of photographs and imaginative layouts, not text, to tell stories. Among the photographers on view in this section are Martin Munkácsi (American, born Hungary, 1896-1963), Leni Riefenstahl (German, 1902-2003), Aleksandr Rodchenko (Russian, 1891-1956), and Willi Ruge (German, 1882-1961).
Anne W. Brigman (American born Hawaii, 1869-1950) A Study in Radiation 1924 Gelatin silver print 7 11/16 × 9 3/4″ (19.6 × 24.8cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Mrs. B. S. Sexton and Mina Turner, by exchange
Bernard Shea Horne (American, 1867-1933) Untitled 1916-17 Platinum print 8 1/16 × 6 1/8″ (20.5 × 15.5cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Thomas Walther
Bernard Shea Horne (American, 1867-1933) Design 1916-1917 Platinum print 7 15/16 x 6 1/8″ (20.2 x 15.5cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Thomas Walther
Bernard Shea Horne (American, 1867-1933)
Bernard Shea Horne was the son of Joseph Horne, who built a legendary department store in Pittsburgh. The younger Horne retired from the family business when he was in his thirties and moved to northern Virginia to pursue his interests in golf and photography. In 1916 he enrolled at the Clarence H. White School of Photography, in New York, and became friends with one of its teachers, the avant-garde painter Max Weber. Horne produced numerous Weber-inspired design exercises, which he compiled into albums of twenty Platinum prints each. The four prints in the Thomas Walther Collection belonged to an album that he gave to Weber.
In 1917 Horne was elected president of the White School’s alumni association, a post he retained until 1925. In 1918 instructor Paul L. Anderson left the school, and Horne took his place as teacher of the technique class, a job he held until 1926. That a middle-aged man of independent means commuted to the school several days a week from Princeton, New Jersey, where he then lived with his two sons, suggests Horne’s devotion to White and his Pictorialist aims. During these years, Horne played a major role in the White School’s activities. In 1920 he was given a one-person show in the exhibition room of the school’s new building, a show that the alumni bulletin described as “interesting and varied in subject and technique, rich in bromoils, strong in design.” Supportive of the practical applications of artistic photography, in 1920 White joined his school to other institutions, including the American Institute of Graphic Arts and the Art Directors Club, to form The Art Center in New York. In 1926 Horne was given a one-person show at The Art Center, which marked the end of his active association with the school.
Abbaspour, Mitra, Lee Ann Daffner, and Maria Morris Hambourg
Jarislav Rössler (Czech, 1902-1990) Untitled 1924 Pigment print 9 1/16 × 9 1/16″ (23 × 23 cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Horace W. Goldsmith Fund through Robert B. Menschel
Jarislav Rössler (Czech, 1902-1990)
Jaroslav Rössler (1902-1990) was one of the Czech avant-garde photographers of the first half of the twentieth century whose work has only recently become known outside Eastern Europe. Czech photography in the twenties and thirties produced radical modernist works that incorporated principles of abstract art and constructivism; Jaroslav Rossler was one of the most important and distinctive artists of the period. He became known for his fusing of different styles, bringing together elements of Symbolism, Pictorialism, Expressionism, Cubism, Futurism, Constructivism, New Objectivity, and abstract art. His photographs often reduced images to elementary lines and shapes that seemed to form a new reality; he would photograph simple objects against a stark background of black and white, or use long exposures to picture hazy cones and spheres of light. From 1927 to 1935 he lived and worked in Paris, producing work influenced by constructivism and new objectivity. He used the photographic techniques and compositional approaches of the avant-garde, including photograms, large details, diagonal composition, photomontage, and double exposures, and experimented with colour advertising photographs and still lifes produced with the carbro print process. After his return to Prague, he was relatively inactive until the late 1950s, when he reconnected with Czech artistic and photographic trends of that period, including informalism. This book documents each stage of Rossler’s career with a generous selection of duotone images, some of which have never been published before. The photographs are accompanied by texts by Vladimir Birgus, Jan Mlcoch, Robert Silverio, Karel Srp, and Matthew Witkovsky.
Manuel Álvarez Bravo (Mexican, 1902-2002) A Fish Called Sierra (Un pez que llaman sierra) 1944 Gelatin silver print 9 1/2 x 7 1/4″ (24.1 x 18.4cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection Edward Steichen Estate and gift of Mrs. Flora S. Straus, by exchange
Manuel Alvarez Bravo (Mexican, 1902-2002) Somewhat Gay and Graceful (Un poco alegre y graciosa) 1942 Gelatin silver print 6 5/8 × 9 1/2″ (16.9 × 24.2cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Grace M. Mayer Fund
Manuel Alvarez Bravo (Mexican, 1902-2002) Day of Glory (Día de gloria) 1940s Gelatin silver print 6 3/4 × 9 1/2″ (17.2 × 24.2cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Grace M. Mayer Fund
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Steel: Armco, Middletown, Ohio October 1922 Palladium print 9 1/16 × 6 7/8″ (23 × 17.4cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Thomas Walther
In Edward Weston’s journals, which he began on his trip to Ohio and New York in fall 1922, the artist wrote of the exhilaration he felt while photographing the “great plant and giant stacks of the American Rolling Mill Company” in Middletown, Ohio. He then went to see the great photographer and tastemaker Alfred Stieglitz. Were he still publishing the magazine Camera Work, Stieglitz told him, he would have reproduced some of Weston’s recent images in it, including, in particular, one of his smokestacks. The photograph’s clarity and the photographer’s frank awe at the beauty of the brute industrial subject seemed clear signs of advanced modernist tendencies.
In moving away from the soft focus and geometric stylisation of his recent images, such as Attic of 1921 (MoMA 1902.2001), Weston was discovering a more straightforward approach, one of considered confrontation with the facts of the larger world much like that of his close friend Johan Hagemeyer, who was photographing such modern subjects as smokestacks, telephone wires, and advertisements. Shortly before his trip east, Weston had met R. M. Schindler, the Austrian architect, and had been excited by his unapologetically spare, modern house and its implications for art and design. Weston was also reading avant-garde European art magazines full of images and essays extolling machines and construction. Stimulated by these currents, Weston saw that by the time he got to Ohio he was “ripe to change, was changing, yes changed.”
The visit to Armco was the critical pivot, the hinge between Weston’s Pictorialist past and his modernist future. It marked a clear leave-taking from his bohemian circle in Los Angeles and the first step toward the cosmopolitan connections he made in New York and in Mexico City, where he moved a few months later to live with the Italian actress and artist Tina Modotti. The Armco photographs went with him and became talismans of the sea change, emblematic works that decorated his studio in Mexico, along with a Japanese print and a print by Picasso. When he sent a representation of his best work to the Film und Foto exhibition in Stuttgart in 1929, one of the smokestacks was included.
In the midst of such transformation, Weston maintained tried-and-true darkroom procedures. He had used an enlarger in earlier years but had abandoned the technique because he felt that too much information was lost in the projection. Instead he increasingly favoured contact printing. To make the smokestack print, Weston enlarged his 3 ¼ by 4 ¼ inch (8.3 by 10.8 centimetre) original negative onto an 8 by 10 inch (20.3 by 25.4 centimetre) interpositive transparency, which he contact printed to a second sheet of film in the usual way, creating the final 8 by 10 inch negative. Weston was frugal; he was known to economise by purchasing platinum and palladium paper by the roll from Willis and Clements in England and trimming it to size. He exposed a sheet of palladium paper to the sun through the negative and, after processing the print, finished it by applying aqueous retouching media to any flaws. The fragile balance of the photograph’s chemistry, however, is evinced in a bubble-shaped area of cooler tonality hovering over the central stacks. The print was in Modotti’s possession at the time of her death in Mexico City, in 1942.
Lee Ann Daffner, Maria Morris Hambourg
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Boat, San Francisco 1925 Gelatin silver print 9 5/16 x 7 9/16″ (23.7 x 19.2cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Grace M. Mayer Fund
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Tina January 30, 1924 Gelatin silver print 9 1/16 x 6 7/8″ (23 x 17.5cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Grace M. Mayer Fund and The Fellows of Photography Fund, by exchange
Karl Blossfeldt (German, 1865-1932) Acanthus mollis (Acanthus mollis [Akanthus, Bärenklau. Deckblätter, die Blüten sind entfernt, in 4facher Vergrößerung]) 1898-1928 Gelatin silver print 11 3/4 × 9 3/8″ (29.8 × 23.8cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Thomas Walther
Purisms
The question of whether photography ought to be considered a fine art was hotly contested from its invention in 1839 into the 20th century. Beginning in the 1890s, in an attempt to distinguish their efforts from hoards of Kodak-wielding amateurs and masses of professionals, “artistic” photographers referred to themselves as Pictorialists. They embraced soft focus and painstakingly wrought prints so as to emulate contemporary prints and drawings, and chose subjects that underscored the ethereal effects of their methods. Before long, however, most avant-garde photographers had come to celebrate precise and distinctly photographic qualities as virtues. On both sides of the Atlantic, photographers were making this transition from Pictorialism to modernism, while occasionally blurring the distinction. Exhibition prints could be made with precious platinum or palladium, or matte surfaces that mimicked those materials. Perhaps nowhere is this variety more clearly evidenced than in the work of Edward Weston, whose suite of prints in this section suggests the range of appearances achievable with unadulterated contact prints from his large-format negatives. Other photographers on view include Karl Blossfeldt (German, 1865-1932), Manuel Álvarez Bravo (Mexican, 1902-2002), Jaromír Funke (Czech, 1896-1945), Bernard Shea Horne (American, 1867-1933), and Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946).
Alvin Langdon Coburn (American, 1882-1966) Vortograph 1916-17 Gelatin silver print 11 1/8 x 8 3/8″ (28.2 x 21.2cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Grace M. Mayer Fund
Vortograph
The intricate patterns of light and line in this photograph, and the cascading tiers of crystalline shapes, were generated through the use of a kaleidoscopic contraption invented by the American / British photographer Alvin Langdon Coburn, a member of London’s Vorticist group. To refute the idea that photography, in its helplessly accurate capture of scenes in the real world, was antithetical to abstraction, Coburn devised for his camera lens an attachment made up of three mirrors, clamped together in a triangle, through which he photographed a variety of surfaces to produce the results in these images. The poet and Vorticist Ezra Pound coined the term “vortographs” to describe Coburn’s experiments. Although Pound went on to criticise these images as lesser expressions than Vorticist paintings, Coburn’s work would remain influential.
Reinventing Photography – Here Comes New Photographer
In 1925, László Moholy-Nagy articulated an idea that became central to the New Vision movement: although photography had been invented 100 years earlier, it was only now being discovered by the avant-garde circles for all its aesthetic possibilities. As products of technological culture, with short histories and no connection to the old fine-art disciplines – which many contemporary artists considered discredited – photography and cinema were seen as truly modern instruments that offered the greatest potential for transforming visual habits. From the photogram to solarisation, from negative prints to double exposures, the New Vision photographers explored the medium in countless ways, rediscovering known techniques and inventing new ones. Echoing the cinematic experiments of the same period, this emerging photographic vocabulary was rapidly adopted by the advertising industry, which appreciated the visual efficiency of its bold simplicity. Florence Henri (Swiss, born America, 1893-1982), Edward Quigley (American, 1898-1977), Franz Roh (German, 1890-1965), Franciszka Themerson and Stefan Themerson (British, born Poland, 1907-1988 and 1910-1988), and František Vobecký (Czech, 1902-1991) are among the numerous photographers represented here.
André Kertész (American born Hungary, 1894-1985) Magda, Mme Beöthy, M. Beöthy, and Unknown Guest, Paris 1926-1929 Gelatin silver print 3 1/8 × 3 7/8″ (7.9 × 9.8cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Thomas Walther
André Kertész (American born Hungary, 1894-1985) Mondrian’s Glasses and Pipe 1926 Gelatin silver print 3 1/8 × 3 11/16″ (7.9 × 9.3cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Grace M. Mayer Fund
Unknown Photographer White Party, Dessau (Weißes Fest, Dessau) March 20, 1926 Gelatin silver print 3 x 1 15/16″ (7.6 x 5cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Acquired through the generosity of Howard Stein
Iwao Yamawaki (Japanese, 1898-1987) Lunch (12-2 p.m.) (Mittagessen [12-2 Uhr]) 1931 Gelatin silver print 6 7/16 × 4 5/8″ (16.3 × 11.7cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Abbott-Levy Collection funds, by exchange
Gertrud Arndt (German, 1903-2000) At the Masters’ Houses (An den Meisterhäusern) 1929-1930 Gelatin silver print 8 7/8 x 6 1/4″ (22.6 x 15.8cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Thomas Walther
Gertrud Arndt (German, 1903-2000)
Gertrud Arndt (née Hantschk; 20 September 1903 – 10 July 2000) was a photographer associated with the Bauhaus movement.She is remembered for her pioneering series of self-portraits from around 1930.
Arndt’s photography, forgotten until the 1980s, has been compared to that of her contemporaries Marta Astfalck-Vietz and Claude Cahun.Over the five years when she took an active interest in photography, she captured herself and her friends in various styles, costumes and settings in the series known as Masked Portraits. Writing for Berlin Art Link, Angela Connor describes the images as “ranging from severe to absurd to playful.”Today Arndt is considered to be a pioneer of female self-portraiture, long predating Cindy Sherman and Sophie Calle.
Text from the Wikipedia website
Iwao Yamawaki (Japanese, 1898-1987) Untitled 1931 Gelatin silver print 8 11/16 x 6 1/2″ (22 x 16.5cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Abbott-Levy Collection funds, by exchange
Hajo Rose (German, 1910-1989) Untitled (Self-Portrait) 1931 Gelatin silver print 9 7/16 × 7 1/16″ (23.9 × 17.9cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Thomas Walther
Hajo Rose (German, 1910-1989)
‘Finally – a house made of steel and glass!’ This was the enthusiastic reaction of Hajo Rose (1910-1989) to the Bauhaus building in Dessau when he began his studies there in 1930. Rose promoted the methods of the Bauhaus throughout his lifetime: as a lecturer at universities in Amsterdam, Dresden and Leipzig, and also as an artist and photographer.
Hajo Rose experimented with a wide variety of materials and techniques. The photomontage of his self-portrait combined with the Dessau Bauhaus building (c. 1930), the surrealism of his photograph Seemannsbraut (Sailor’s Bride, 1934), and the textile print designs that he created with a typewriter (1932) are examples of the extraordinary creativity of this artist. He also contributed to an advertising campaign for the Jena Glass Company: the first heat-resistant household glassware stood for modern product design and is still regarded as a kitchen classic today.
Shortly before the Bauhaus was closed, Hajo Rose was one of the last students to receive his diploma. Subsequent periods in various cities shaped his biography, which is a special example of the migratory experience shared by many Bauhaus members after 1933. After one year as an assistant in the Berlin office of László Moholy-Nagy, Hajo Rose immigrated to The Netherlands together with Paul Guermonprez, a Bauhaus colleague, in 1934. He worked there as a commercial artist and taught at the Nieuwe Kunstschool in Amsterdam. At the 1937 World Exposition in Paris, he won an award for his poster ‘Amsterdam’. After the Second World War, Rose worked as a graphic designer, photographer and teacher in Dresden and Leipzig. He continued to advocate Bauhaus ideas in the GDR, even though the Bauhaus was regarded in East Germany as bourgeois and formalistic well into the 1960s. Rose resigned from the Socialist Unity Party (SED) – in spite of the loss of his teaching position as a consequence. From that time, he worked as one of the few freelance graphic designers in the GDR. Hajo Rose died at the age of 79 – shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Edward Steichen (American born Luxembourg, 1879-1973) Gertrude Lawrence 1928 Gelatin silver print 9 7/16 × 7 9/16″ (24 × 19.2cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Edward Steichen Estate and gift of Mrs. Flora S. Straus, by exchange
The Artist’s Life
Photography is particularly well suited to capturing the distinctive nuances of the human face, and photographers delighted in and pushed the boundaries of portraiture throughout the 20th century. The Thomas Walther Collection features a great number of portraits of artists and self-portraits as varied as the individuals portrayed. Additionally, the collection conveys a free-spirited sense of community and daily life, highlighted here with photographs made by André Kertész and by students and faculty at the Bauhaus. When the Hungarian-born Kertész moved to Paris in 1925, he couldn’t afford to purchase photographic paper, so he would print on less expensive postcard stock. These prints, whose small scale requires that the viewer engage with them intimately, function as miniature windows into the lives of Kertész’s bohemian circle of friends. The group of photographs made at the Bauhaus in the mid-1920s, before the medium was formally integrated into the school’s curriculum, similarly expresses friendships and everyday life captured and printed in an informal manner. Portraits by Claude Cahun (French, 1894-1954), Lotte Jacobi (American, born Germany, 1896-1990), Lucia Moholy (British, born Czechoslovakia, 1894-1989), Man Ray (American, 1890-1976), August Sander (German, 1876-1964) and Edward Steichen (American, born Luxembourg, 1879-1973) are among the highlights of this gallery.
Aenne Biermann (German, 1898-1933) Summer Swimming (Sommerbad) 1925-1930 Gelatin silver print 7 x 7 7/8″ (17.8 x 20cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Bequest of Ilse Bing, by exchange
Aenne Biermann (German, 1898-1933)
Aenne Biermann (March 8, 1898 – January 14, 1933), born Anna Sibilla Sternfeld, was a German photographer of Ashkenazi origin. She was one of the major proponents of New Objectivity, a significant art movement that developed in Germany in the 1920s.
Biermann was a self-taught photographer. Her first subjects were her two children, Helga and Gershon.The majority of Biermann’s photographs were shot between 1925 and 1933. Gradually she became one of the major proponents of New Objectivity, an important art movement in the Weimar Republic. Her work became internationally known in the late 1920s, when it was part of every major exhibition of German photography.
Major exhibitions of her work include the Munich Kunstkabinett, the Deutscher Werkbund and the exhibition of Folkwang Museum in 1929. Other important exhibitions include the exhibition entitled Das Lichtbild held in Munich in 1930 and the 1931 exhibition at the Palace of Fine Arts (French: Palais des Beaux Arts) in Brussels.Since 1992 the Museum of Gera has held an annual contest for the Aenne Biermann Prize for Contemporary German Photography, which is one of the most important events of its kind in Germany.
Text from the Wikipedia website
Helmar Lerski (Swiss born Germany, 1871-1956) Metamorphosis 601 (Metamorphose 601) 1936 Gelatin silver print 11 7/16 × 9 1/16″ (29 × 23cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. The Family of Man Fund
Helmar Lerski (Swiss, born Germany 1871-1956)
There can hardly be another name in the international history of photography whose work has been so frequently misunderstood and so controversially evaluated as that of Helmar Lerski (1871-1956). “In every human being there is everything; the question is only what the light falls on”. Guided by this conviction, Lerski took portraits that did not primarily strive for likeness but which left scope for the viewer’s imagination, thus laying himself open to the criticism of betraying the veracity of the photographic image.
… Lerski’s pictures were only partly in line with the maxims of the New Photography, and they questioned the validity of pure objectivity. The distinguishing characteristics of his portraits included a theatrical-expressionistic, sometimes dramatic use of lighting inspired by the silent film. Although his close-up photographs captured the essential features of a face – eyes, nose and mouth –, his primary concern was not individual appearance or superficial likeness but the deeper inner potential: he emphasised the changeability, the different faces of an individual. Lerski, who sympathised with the political left wing, thereby infiltrated the photography of types that was practised (and not infrequently misused for racist purposes) by many of Lerski’s contemporaries.
… Helmar Lerski’s attitude was at its most radical in his work entitled Metamorphosis. This was completed within a few months at the beginning of 1936 in Palestine, to where Lerski and his second wife Anneliese had immigrated in 1932. In Verwandlungen durch Licht (this is the second title for this work), Lerski carried his theatrical talent to extremes. With the help of up to 16 mirrors and filters, he directed the natural light of the sun in constant new variations and refractions onto his model, the Bernese-born, at the time out-of-work structural draughtsman and light athlete Leo Uschatz. Thus he achieved, in a series of over 140 close-ups “hundreds of different faces, including that of a hero, a prophet, a peasant, a dying soldier, an old woman and a monk from one single original face” (Siegfried Kracauer). According to Lerski, these pictures were intended to provide proof “that the lens does not have to be objective, that the photographer can, with the help of light, work freely, characterise freely, according to his inner face.” Contrary to the conventional idea of the portrait as an expression of human identity, Lerski used the human face as a projection surface for the figures of his imagination. We are only just becoming aware of the modernity of this provocative series of photographs.
Peter Pfrunder Fotostiftung Schweiz
Max Burchartz (German, 1887-1961) Lotte (Eye) (Lotte [Auge]) 1928 Gelatin silver print 11 7/8 x 15 3/4″ (30.2 x 40cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Acquired through the generosity of Peter Norton
Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (Polish, 1885-1939) Anna Oderfeld, Zakopane 1911-1912 Gelatin silver print 6 11/16 × 4 3/4″ (17 × 12.1cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Mrs. Willard Helburn, by exchange
Edmund Kesting (German, 1892-1970) Glance to the Sun (Blick zur Sonne) 1928 Gelatin silver print 13 1/16 x 14 1/2″ (33.2 x 36.8cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Thomas Walther
Edmund Kesting (German, 1892-1970)
Edmund Kesting (27 July 1892, Dresden – 21 October 1970, Birkenwerder) was a German photographer, painter and art professor. He studied until 1916 at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts before participating as a soldier in the First World War, upon returning his painting teachers were Richard Müller and Otto Gussmann and in 1919 he began to teach as a professor at the private school Der Weg. In 1923 he had his first exposition in the gallery Der Sturm in which he showed photograms. When Der Weg opened a new academy in Berlin in 1927, he moved to the capital.
He formed relations with other vanguardists in Berlin and practiced various experimental techniques such as solarisation, multiple images and photograms, for which reason twelve of his works were considered degenerate art by the Nazi regime and were prohibited. Among the artists with whom he interacted are Kurt Schwitters, László Moholy-Nagy, El Lissitzky and Alexander Archipenko. At the end of World War II he formed part of a Dresden artistic group known as Künstlergruppe der ruf – befreite Kunst (Call to an art in freedom) along with Karl von Appen, Helmut Schmidt-Kirstein and Christoph Hans, among others. In this city he made an experimental report named Dresdner Totentanz (Dance of death in Dresden) as a condemnation of the bombing of the city. In 1946 he was named a member of the Academy of Art in the city.
He participated in the controversy between socialist realism and formalism that took place in the German Democratic Republic, therefore his work was not realist and could not be shown in the country between 1949 and 1959. In 1955 he began to experiment with chemical painting, making photographs without the use of a camera and only with the use of chemical products such as the developer and the fixer and photographic paper, for which he made exposures to light using masks and templates. Between 1956 and 1967 he was a professor at the Academy of Cinema and Television of Potsdam.
His artistic work was not recognised by the authorities of the German Democratic Republic until 1980, ten years after his death.
Maurice Tabard (French, 1897-1984) Am I Beautiful? (Suis-je belle?) 1929 Gelatin silver print 9 5/16 × 6 15/16″ (23.6 × 17.7cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Shirley C. Burden, by exchange
Between Surrealism and Magic Realism
In the mid-1920s, European artistic movements ranging from Surrealism to New Objectivity moved away from a realist approach by highlighting the strange in the familiar or trying to reconcile dreams and reality. Echoes of these concerns, centred on the human figure, can be found in this gallery. Some photographers used anti-naturalistic methods – capturing hyperreal, close-up details; playing with scale; and rendering the body as landscape – to challenge the viewer’s perception. Others, in line with Sigmund Freud’s definition of “the uncanny” as an effect that results from the blurring of distinctions between the real and the fantastic, offered visual plays on life and the lifeless, the animate and the inanimate, confronting the human body with surrogates in the form of dolls, mannequins, and masks. Photographers influenced by Surrealism, such as Maurice Tabard, subjected the human figure to distortions and transformations by experimenting with photographic techniques either while capturing the image or while developing it in the darkroom. Additional photographers on view include Aenne Biermann (German, 1898-1933), Jacques-André Boiffard (French, 1902-1961), Max Burchartz (German, 1887-1961), Helmar Lerski (Swiss, 1871-1956), and Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (Polish, 1885-1939)
Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) Daily News Building, 220 East 42nd Street, Manhattan November 21, 1935 Gelatin silver print 9 5/8 × 7 1/2″ (24.4 × 19.1cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Abbott-Levy Collection funds, by exchange
Marjorie Content (American, 1895-1984) Steamship Pipes, Paris Winter 1931 Gelatin silver print 3 13/16 × 2 11/16″ (9.7 × 6.8cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Andreas Feininger, by exchange
Marjorie Content (American, 1895-1984)
Marjorie Content (1895-1984) was an American photographer active in modernist social and artistic circles. Her photographs were rarely published and never exhibited in her lifetime, but have become of interest to collectors and art historians. Her work has been collected by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Chrysler Museum of Art; it has been the subject of several solo exhibitions. (Wikipedia)
Marjorie Content (1895-1984) was a modest and unpretentious photographer who kept her work largely to herself, never published or exhibited. Overshadowed by such close friends as Georgia O’Keefe and Alfred Stieglitz, she was more comfortable as a muse and source of encouragement for others, including her fourth husband, poet Jean Toomer. This text presents her beautiful, varied photographs and provides a glimpse into her life. Her pictures portray a variety of images including: New York’s frenetic cityscape distilled to essential patterns and rhythms; the Southwestern light and heat along with the strength and dignity of the Taos pueblo culture; and cigarettes and other everyday items arranged in jewel-like compositions. The discovery of the quality and extent of her work is proof that an artist’s determination can surmount a lack of recognition in her lifetime.
Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) Votive Candles, New York City 1929-1930 Gelatin silver print 8 1/2 x 6 15/16″ (21.6 x 17.7cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Willard Van Dyke and Mr. and Mrs. Alfred H. Barr, Jr., by exchange
Georgii Zimin (Russian, 1900-1985) Untitled 1926 Gelatin silver print 3 11/16 x 3 1/4″ (9.4 x 8.3cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Thomas Walther
Georgii Zimin (Russian, 1900-1985)
Georgii Zimin was born in Moscow in 1900, where he lived and worked for his entire life. Before the Russian Revolution he enrolled as a student at the Artistic-Industrial Stroganov Institute, known after 1918 as SVOMAS (Free state art studios). Zimin continued his studies at VKhUTEMAS (Higher state artistic and technical studios), which replaced SVOMAS in 1920. It was during his time at the school that he published the portfolio Skrjabin in Lukins Tanz (Scriabin in Lukin’s dance), in an edition of one hundred. This set of Cubo-Futurist lithographs from 1922 features costumed dancers in erotic poses, complementing a ballet choreographed by Lev Lukin. This work garnered Zimin acknowledgment by the Academy of Arts and Sciences and marked his affiliation with the Russian Art of Movement group. Throughout the 1920s he showed regularly at Art of Movement exhibitions at GAKhN (State academy for artistic sciences), in Moscow. Zimin also experimented with photography in the late 1920s and early 1930s, producing photograms akin to those made by László Moholy-Nagy and others at the time. Later in life, he served as Art Director of Exhibitions at the Department of Trade and held a post at the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition.
~ Ksenia Nouril
Umbo (Otto Umbehr) (German, 1902-1980) Mystery of the Street (Mysterium der Strasse) 1928 Gelatin silver print 11 7/16 x 9 1/4″ (29 x 23.5cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Shirley C. Burden, by exchange
Umbo (Otto Umbehr) (German, 1902-1980)
Trained at the Bauhaus under Johannes Itten, a master of expressivity, Berlin-based photographer Umbo (born Otto Umbehr) believed that intuition was the source of creativity. To this belief, he added Constructivist structural strategies absorbed from Theo Van Doesburg, El Lissitzky, and others in Berlin in the early twenties. Their influence is evident in this picture’s diagonal, abstract construction and its spatial disorientation. It is also classic Umbo, encapsulating his intuitive vision of the world as a resource of poetic, often funny, ironic, or dark bulletins from the social unconscious.
After he left the Bauhaus, Umbo worked as assistant to Walther Ruttmann on his film Berlin, Symphony of a Great City 1926. In 1928, photographing from his window either very early or very late in the day and either waiting for his “actors” to achieve a balanced composition or, perhaps, positioning them as a movie director would, Umbo exposed three negatives. He had an old 5 by 7 inch (12.7 by 17.8 centimetre) stand camera and a 9 by 12 centimetre (3 9/16 by 4 3/4 inch) Deckrullo Contessa-Nettle camera, but which he used for these overhead views is not known, as he lost all his prints and most negatives in the 1943 bombing of Berlin. The resulting images present a world in which the shadows take the active role. Umbo made the insubstantial rule the corporeal and the dark dominate the light through a simple but inspired inversion: he mounted the pictures upside down (note the signature in ink in the lower right) .
In 1928-29, Umbo was a founding photographer at Dephot (Deutscher Photodienst), a seminal photography agency in Berlin dedicated to creating socially relevant and visually fascinating photoessays, an idea originated by Erich Solomon. Simon Guttmann, who directed the business, hired creative nonconformists, foremost among them the bohemian Umbo, who slept in the darkroom; Umbo in turn drew the brothers Lore Feininger and Lyonel Feininger to the agency, which soon also boasted Robert Capa and Felix H. Man. Dephot hired Dott, the best printer in Berlin, and it was he who made the large exhibition prints, such as this one, ordered by New York gallerist Julien Levy when he visited the agency in 1931. Umbo showed thirty-nine works, perhaps also printed by Dott, in the 1929 exhibition Film und Foto, and he put Guttmann in touch with the Berlin organizer of the show; accordingly, Dephot was the source for some images in the accompanying book, Es kommt der neue Fotograf! (Here comes the new photographer!). Levy introduced Umbo’s photographs to New York in Surréalisme (January 1932) and showcased them again at the Julien Levy Gallery, together with images by Herbert Bayer, Jacques-André Boiffard, Roger Parry, and Maurice Tabard, in his 1932 exhibition Modern European Photography.
Maria Morris Hambourg, Hanako Murata
Umbo (Otto Umbehr) (German, 1902-1980) Six at the Beach (Sechs am Strand) 1930 Gelatin silver print 9 3/8 × 7 1/8″ (23.8 × 18.1cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Shirley C. Burden, by exchange
Alvin Langdon Coburn (American, 1882-1966) The Octopus 1909 Gelatin silver print 22 1/8 × 16 3/4″ (56.2 × 42.6cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Thomas Walther
Dynamics of the City – Symphony of a Great City
In his 1928 manifesto “The Paths of Contemporary Photography,” Aleksandr Rodchenko advocated for a new photographic vocabulary that would be more in step with the pace of modern urban life and the changes in perception it implied. Rodchenko was not alone in this quest: most of the avant-garde photographers of the 1920s and 1930s were city dwellers, striving to translate the novel and shocking experience of everyday life into photographic images. Equipped with newly invented handheld cameras, they used unusual vantage points and took photos as they moved, struggling to re-create the constant flux of images that confronted the pedestrian. Reflections in windows and vitrines, blurry images of quick motions, double exposures, and fragmentary views portray the visual cacophony of the metropolis. The work of Berenice Abbott (American, 1898- 1991), Alvin Langdon Coburn (American, 1882-1966), Germanie Krull (Dutch, born Germany, 1897-1985), Alexander Hackenschmied (Czech, 1907-2004), Umbo (German, 1902-1980), and Imre Kinszki (Hungarian, 1901-1945) is featured in this final gallery.
The Museum of Modern Art 11 West 53 Street New York, NY 10019 Phone: (212) 708-9400
Opening hours: 10.30 am – 5.30 pm Open seven days a week
Co-curators: Elizabeth Siegel, Associate Curator of Photography, and Sarah Kelly Oehler, Gilda and Henry Buchbinder Associate Curator of American Art at the Art institute of Chicago
Again, I am drawn to these impressive avant-garde works of art. I’d have any of them residing in my flat, thank you very much. The Dalí, Delaunay and Léger in painting and drawing for me, and in photography, the muscular Ilse Bing, the divine Umbo and the mesmeric, disturbing can’t take your eyes off it, Witkiewicz self-portrait.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Art Institute of Chicago for allowing me to publish the art works in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“Everything had broken down in any case, and new things had to be made out of the fragments.”
Luis Buñuel (Spanish, 1900-1983) and Salvador Dalí (Spanish, 1904-1989) Un Chien Andalou 1929
Director – Luis Buñuel Writers – Salvador Dali, Luis Buñuel Cast – Simone Mareuil, Pierre Batcheff
Un Chien Andalou (An Andalusian Dog) is a 1929 Franco-Spanish silent surrealist short film by Spanish director Luis Buñuel and artist Salvador Dalí. Buñuel’s first film, it was initially released in a limited capacity at Studio des Ursulines in Paris, but became popular and ran for eight months.
Un Chien Andalou has no plot in the conventional sense of the word. With disjointed chronology, jumping from the initial “once upon a time” to “eight years later” without events or characters changing, it uses dream logic in narrative flow that can be described in terms of the then-popular Freudian free association, presenting a series of tenuously related scenes.
Ballet Mécanique (1923-1924) is a Dadaist post-Cubist art film conceived, written, and co-directed by the artist Fernand Léger in collaboration with the filmmaker Dudley Murphy (with cinematographic input from Man Ray). It has a musical score by the American composer George Antheil. However, the film premiered in silent version on 24 September 1924 at the Internationale Ausstellung neuer Theatertechnik (International Exposition for New Theater Technique) in Vienna presented by Frederick Kiesler. It is considered one of the masterpieces of early experimental filmmaking.
Ballet mécanique (1924) | MoMA
Ballet mécanique, conceived by painter Fernand Léger and photographed by filmmaker Dudley Murphy (possibly with some involvement from Man Ray), is a rhythmic interplay between human and object. Affected by his experience of fighting in World War I, and in particular by the mustard gas attack that left him hospitalised for a year, Léger became fascinated with mechanical technology, which would feature heavily in his post-1917 art. Ballet mécanique, his only film, is an example of this juxtaposition of man and machine: gears and pendulums vs. eyes and mouths, pistons pumping vs. a woman’s endless climb up the stairs, clocks vs. legs. A kaleidoscopic combination of faces and kitchen utensils, Ballet mécanique was completely unlike contemporary commercial movies, and would pave the way for other revolutionary films like Metropolis and Limite.
If you were to see Ballet mécanique installed in one of our galleries or projected in one of our theaters, it would look a little different than it does here – the frameline would be stabilised and the edges of the picture would either be cropped or camouflaged with masking around the screen. However, we are presenting this version the way a scholar visiting the Film Study Center would see it on a flatbed viewing machine, with a slight bounce to the image and the sprocket holes visible, and without live musical accompaniment. (The score, composed by George Antheil and usually performed as a separate concert piece, was finished several years after Ballet mécanique premiered and is significantly longer than the film.)
MoMA text from the YouTube website
Claude Cahun (French, 1894-1954) Object 1936 The Art Institute of Chciago Through prior gift of Mrs. Gilbert W. Chapman
A century ago, society and life were changing as rapidly and radically as they are in today’s digital age. Quicker communication, faster production, and wider circulation of people, goods, and ideas – in addition to the outbreak of World War I – produced a profoundly new understanding of the world, and artists in the early years of the 20th century responded to these issues with both exhilaration and anxiety. Freeing themselves from the restraints of tradition, modern artists developed groundbreaking pictorial strategies that reflect this new shift in perception.
Shatter Rupture Break, the first exhibition in The Modern Series, explores the manifold ways that ideas of fragmentation and rupture, which permeated both the United States and Europe, became central conceptual and visual themes in art of the modern age. Responding to the new forms and pace of the metropolis, artists such as Robert Delaunay and Gino Severini disrupted traditional conventions of depth and illusionism, presenting vision as something fractured. Kurt Schwitters and George Grosz explored collage, using trash and bits and pieces of printed material in compositions to reflect social and political upheaval and produce something whole out of fragments. In the wake of new theories of the mind as well as the literal tearing apart of bodies in war, artists such as Hans Bellmer, Salvador Dalí, and Stanisław Witkiewicz produced photographs and objects revealing the fractured self or erotic dismemberment. The theme of fragmentation was ubiquitous as inspiration for both the formal and conceptual revolutions in art making in the modern age.
Shatter Rupture Break unites diverse objects from across the entire holdings of the Art Institute – paintings, sculpture, works on paper, photographs, decorative arts and designed objects, textiles, books, and films – to present a rich cacophony that exemplifies the radical and generative ruptures of modern art.
The Modern Series
A quintessentially modern city, Chicago has been known as a place for modern art for over a century, and the Art Institute of Chicago has been central to this history. The Modern Series exhibitions are designed to bring together the museum’s acclaimed holdings of modern art across all media, display them in fresh and innovative ways within new intellectual contexts, and demonstrate the continued vitality and relevance of modern art for today.
Text from the Art Institute of Chicago website
Robert Delaunay (French, 1885-1941) Champs de Mars: The Red Tower 1911/1923 The Art Institute of Chicago Joseph Winterbotham Collection
Stuart Davis (American, 1892-1964) Ready-to-Wear 1955 The Art Institute of Chicago Restricted gift of Mr. and Mrs. Sigmund W. Kunstadter; Goodman Endowment
Designed by Ruben Haley Made by Consolidated Lamp and Glass Company “Ruba Rombic” Vase 1928/1932 Art Institute of Chicago Raymond W. Garbe Fund in honor of Carl A. Erikson; Shirley and Anthony Sallas Fund
The Art Institute of Chicago is introducing an innovative new series of exhibitions that presents works from the museum’s acclaimed collection of modern art in reimagined ways that demonstrate the continued vitality and significance these works have today.
The Modern Series debuts with Shatter Rupture Break, opening Sunday, February 15, in Galleries 182 and 184 of the museum’s Modern Wing. The exhibition unites such diverse objects as paintings, sculpture, works on paper, photographs, decorative arts and designed objects, textiles, books, and films.
“We wanted to explore how the idea of rupture permeated modern life in Europe and the Americas,” said Elizabeth Siegel, Associate Curator of Photography, who, with Sarah Kelly Oehler, the Gilda and Henry Buchbinder Associate Curator of American Art, took the lead in organising the first exhibition. “It served as an inspiration for revolutionary formal and conceptual developments in art making that remain relevant today.”
A century ago, society was changing as rapidly and radically as it is in today’s digital age. Quicker communication, faster production, and wider circulation of people, goods, and ideas – in addition to the outbreak of World War I – produced a profoundly new understanding of the world, and artists responded with both anxiety and exhilaration. Freeing themselves from the restraints of tradition, modern artists developed groundbreaking pictorial strategies that reflected this new shift in perception.
Responding to the new forms and pace of cities, artists such as Robert Delaunay (French, 1885-1941) and Gino Severini (Italian, 1883-1966) disrupted traditional conventions of depth and illusionism, presenting vision as something fractured. Delaunay’s Champs de Mars: The Red Tower fragments the iconic form of the Eiffel Tower, exemplifying how modern life – particularly in an accelerated urban environment – encouraged new and often fractured ways of seeing. Picturesque vistas no longer adequately conveyed the fast pace of the modern metropolis.
The human body as well could no longer be seen as intact and whole. A devastating and mechanised world war had returned men from the front with unimaginable wounds, and the fragmented body became emblematic of a new way of understanding a fractured world. Surrealists such as Hans Bellmer (German, 1902-1975), Claude Cahun (French, 1894-1954) and Salvador Dalí (Spanish, 1904-1989) fetishised body parts in images, separating out eyes, hands, and legs in suggestive renderings. A more literal representation of the shattered body comes from Chicago’s own Ivan Albright, who was a medical draftsman in World War I. In his rarely shown Medical Sketchbook, he created fascinatingly gruesome watercolours that documented injured soldiers and the x-rays of their wounds.
Just as with the body, the mind in the modern era also came to be seen as fragmented. Stanislaw Witkiewicz (Polish, 1885-1939) produced a series of self-portraits as an act of psychological exploration. His work culminated in one stunning photograph made by shattering a glass negative, which he then reassembled and printed, thus conveying an evocative sense of a shattered psyche. The artistic expression of dreams and mental imagery perhaps reached a pinnacle not in a painting or a sculpture, but in a film. Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí’s film Un chien andalou (An Andalusian Dog) mystified viewers with its dreamlike narrative, dissolves from human to animal forms, dismembered body parts, and shockingly violent acts in an attempt to translate the unconscious mind onto a celluloid strip.
Kurt Schwitters (German, 1887-1948) and George Grosz (German, 1893-1959) explored collage, which took on new importance for avant-garde artists thanks to the aesthetic appeal and widespread availability of mass-produced media. Schwitters used the ephemera of German society to create what he called Merz, an invented term signifying an artistic practice that included collage, assemblage, painting, poems, and performance. The Art Institute owns a significant group of these collages by Schwitters, and six will appear in the exhibition. The use of thrown-away, ripped up, and scissored-out pieces of paper, divorced from their original meaning and reassembled with nails and glue into new objects, was an act that exposed the social and political disruptions of a German society that seemed broken and on the edge of collapse in the aftermath of World War I.
Shatter Rupture Break is unusual in that it unites objects from across the entire museum – from seven curatorial departments as well as the library. This multiplicity is significant because modern artists did not confine themselves to one medium, but explored different visual effects across a variety of media. As well, the show prominently features the voices of artists, writers, scientists, and other intellectuals of the period. The goal is to create a dynamic space that evokes the electrifying, disruptive, and cacophonous nature of modern art at the time.
“We hope to excite interest in the modern period as a crucial precursor to the changes of our own time, to show how what might seem old now was shockingly fresh then,” said Oehler.
Considered one of the finest and most comprehensive in the world, the Art Institute’s collection of modern art includes nearly 1,000 works by artists from Europe and the Americas. The museum was an early champion of modern artists, from its presentation of the Armory Show in 1913 to its early history of acquiring major masterpieces. This show highlights some recent acquisitions of modern art, but also includes some long-held works that have formed the core of the modern collection for decades. Shatter Rupture Break celebrates this history by bringing together works that visitors may know well, but have never seen in this context or with this diverse array of objects.”
Florence Henri is rapidly becoming one of my favourite photographers, an artist who emerged during one of the golden periods of photography, the avant-garde of the 1920s-30s. While we have seen some of these photographs before in a previous posting, there are some new and delightful images to enjoy here.
If you believe the text by Priscilla Frank, “Meet Florence Henri, The Under-Acknowledged Queen Of Surrealist Photography,” on the Huffington Post website [02/20/2015], you could be forgiven for thinking that her photography is based on Surrealist themes. Nothing could be farther from the truth. There is nothing about Henri’s photographs to suggest that they are based on the creative potential of the unconscious mind exemplified by the irrational juxtaposition of images. Henri’s photographs are quite logical and ordered, being an investigation into space, time and object using the “extension of the formal and structural aesthetics of Cubism, Purism and Constructivism.”
Her geometric abstractions “exploited the dialogue between realism and abstraction… and she explored spatial extension and fragmentation in her utter modern vocabulary. Her still life and abstract compositions achieved by balancing abstraction with a pure and essential subject were created in the spirit of the machine age. She viewed space as if it were elastic, distorting figure and ground and altering planes through the use of mirrors and lenses.”
Through attention and attentiveness to subject, Henri achieved her results by using created space to investigate the fragmentation and distortion of the world. Her art is not about the production of phenomena (the spectacle), but about the creation of volumes that are in an of space itself. As Donald Judd’s observes of his created volumes in 1981: “… familiar objects, objects as we habitually perceive them, assume physical neutrality because they and their environment are deactivated: “They are points in space, and space is an empty surround. Instead, what is needed is a created space, space made by someone, space that is formed as a solid, the two the same, with the space and the solid defining each other.” Objects in and of space, the two the same: this was the crux. Judd did more than set new solids into existing voids. He formed solids and their correlative spaces as an integrated operation, as if he were establishing an architecture from the ground up, creating the entire environment, intensifying it, saturating it with its own sensation.”1
In a photographic sense, Henri can be seen as a precursor to Judd’s volumes, creating her own worlds from the ground up, creating the entire environment where the space and the object are one and the same thing… only to then record and flatten that space into the essential nature of the photograph, its physicality. Her sensory affects “remain fixed in the concatenation of materials, structure and placement that generates it. They are the lived equivalent of those conditions, experienced as continuous in time – hence, timeless – remaining wholly the same until interrupted.”2 How appropriate for Henri’s photographs for they do indeed have a timeless “air”, a transcendence of the time and place they were taken, a transcendence of the space which her volumes inhabit. Objects in and of space, the two the same.
As Judd observes, “Time and space don’t exist [as idealised abstractions]; they are made by events and positions. Time and space can be made and don’t have to be found like stars in the sky or rocks on a hillside.” Time and space are grounded in being human: they exist when someone experiences them.”3 Here is the nub of the matter, for it matters that we experience Henri’s photographs each in its definite time and space. Henri’s being is immersed in these volumes and they hold our interest because the created environments are saturated with her own sensations.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Footnotes
1/ Donald Judd quoted in Richard Shiff. “Sensous Thoughts,” in Marianne Stockebrand (ed.,). Donald Judd. The Multicolored Works. Yale University Press, 2014, p. 106
2/ Ibid.,
3/ Ibid., p. 107.
Many thankx to the Jeu de Paume for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“With photography, what I really want to do is compose the image, as I do in painting. The volumes, lines, shadows and light should submit to my will and say what I would like them to say. All of this under the strict control of the composition, because I do not claim to be able to explain the world or to explain my own thoughts.”
Florence Henri in an interview with Attilio Colombo, “Specchio, essenzialità, geometría,” in ‘Florence Henri’ (Milan: Gruppo Editoriale Fabbri, 1983)
“Henri soon recognised the medium’s capacity as a pictorial language and outlet for creative expression. Upon returning to France [from the Bauhaus], Henri began to develop a large body of photographic work based upon her Bauhaus experience and an extension of the formal and structural aesthetics of Cubism, Purism and Constructivism. These non-objective principles forged an alternative to the then-dominant French art movement Surrealism. Henri transcended the avant-garde of one art form to that of another…
Henri’s greatest experimentation with geometric abstraction occurred during the period between 1929-1930… In the photographic work, Florence Henri exploited the dialogue between realism and abstraction, but always maintained a recognisable subject. She was concerned with transparency and movement, and she explored spatial extension and fragmentation in her utter modern vocabulary.
Her still life and abstract compositions achieved by balancing abstraction with a pure and essential subject were created in the spirit of the machine age. She viewed space as if it were elastic, distorting figure and ground and altering planes through the use of mirrors and lenses.”
Lynne Warren. ‘Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Photography’, 3-Volume set. Routledge, 2005, p. 691.
Florence Henri. Mirror of the avantgarde illustrates the desire of the Jeu de Paume to highlight the important role played by women photographers from the 1920s to the 1950s, and follows on from previous exhibitions devoted to Claude Cahun, Kati Horna, Eva Besnyö, Berenice Abbott, Lisette Model, Laure Albin Guillot and indeed, Lee Miller.
The exhibition brings together, for the first time in France, over 130 vintage prints by Florence Henri, as well as rare documents and publications, revealing the artist’s photographic production. Influenced by Constructivism, Cubism and Surrealism, Florence Henri’s work is part of the exciting creative tenor of the period, during which, photography, like cinema or architecture, embodied a spirit of innovation and progress, as well as a certain unconventionality in terms of the dominant visual order.
Familiar with Bauhaus, Florence Henri was one of the figures of the European artistic intelligentsia of the time. Her friendship with Fernand Léger, the Delaunays, Hans Arp, László Moholy-Nagy and Theo van Doesburg would have a profound influence on her work. In 1929, Florence Henri opened a photography studio in Paris. It soon rivalled that of Man Ray’s. Her classes were very well-attended and her talents as a portrait photographer were quickly recognised.
It is not so much the image alone as the constant research that brings Florence Henri’s work to life. Lines and geometric compositions are recurring elements in her photographs. Over the years, she made her compositions increasingly complex through the use of mirrors, industrial and natural objects, or through collage and superposition. The exhibition attempts to both decipher and highlight the work of Florence Henri in terms of reflections, perspective, the depth of field and photomontage – key technical experimentations in the history of modern photography.
“All that I know, and how I know this, is primarily made up of abstract elements: spheres, planes, and grids whose parallel lines provide numerous opportunities, without taking into account the mirrors I use, to present the same object from several different angles within a single photograph, in order to yield, in the same way, different visions that complement and complete each other, and which when taken as a whole, are better able to explain it. Essentially, all of this is much more difficult to explain than to do.”
Florence Henri in an interview with Attilio Colombo, “Specchio, essenzialità, geometría,” in ‘Florence Henri’ (Milan: Gruppo Editoriale Fabbri, 1983)
Florence Henri (New York 1893 – Compiègne (France) 1982) was a multi-faceted artist, who was first known for her paintings before making a name for herself as a major figure in avant-garde photography between the end of the 1920s and the beginning of the 1940s. She lived in Silesia, Munich, Vienna, Rome and above all Berlin, before finally settling in Paris in 1924 and devoting herself to photography. This medium enabled her to experiment new relationships with space, in particular by the use of mirrors and other objects in her compositions.
The Jeu de Paume is presenting a vast panorama of Florence Henri’s photographic production from 1927 to 1940, including her self-portraits, abstract compositions, portraits of artists, nudes, photomontages, photocollages, as well as documentary photos taken in Rome, Paris and Brittany. The exhibition comprises vintage prints, various documents and published material.
When she was young, Florence Henri studied music and painting in England and Germany. In 1919, when she was a student at the Berlin Academy of Arts, she made the acquaintance of writer and art historian Carl Einstein and became friends with several figures of the avant-garde, including Hans Arp, Adrian Ludwig Richter, John Heartfield and Lázló Moholy-Nagy. She took classes with Paul Klee and Vassily Kandinsky at the Bauhaus in Weimar. In 1924 she moved to Paris, where she followed classes at the Académie Montparnasse, whose director was André Lhote, then at the Académie moderne (founded by Fernand Léger and Amédée Ozenfant). In 1927, after a visit to Bauhaus in Dessau, she abandoned painting in favour of photography. It was at this time that she produced her famous self-portraits in mirrors and her still lifes; the result of her first steps in the spatial research that she would carry out through the medium of photography.
Between the end of the 1920s and the beginning of the 1930s, three mythical exhibitions in terms of the history of European photography took place in Germany: “Fotografie der Gegenwart” at the Folkwang Museum in Essen (1929); “Film ind Foto” (Fifo) organised the same year by the Deutscher Werkbund in Stuttgart and “Das Lichtbild” held in Munich (1931). These exhibitions bore witness to the rapid expansion of new photographic concepts and a rupture with tradition. Fifo marked the zenith of the Neues Sehen (New Vision) movement of which László Moholy-Nagy was an exponent and “Das Lichtbild” marked the triumph of Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), whose leading representative was Albert Renger-Patzsch.
Florence Henri was invited to show an important number of prints at these three exhibitions in recognition of her photographic production during this fundamental period that saw the photography used to free our vision and open out onto new experiences.
Florence Henri’s studio rivalled that of Man Ray, even if she had also opened a school of photography where Lisette Model and Gisèle Freund, amongst others, would enrol. In fact, despite the central position that her oeuvre occupied in avant-garde photography at the end of the 1920s, her reputation as a portraitist in Paris, and the fact that her photos had been published in many of the period’s illustrated magazines such as Arts et Métiers and Lilliput etc, Florence Henri’s body of work remains largely unknown.
László Moholy-Nagy’s* comments are a perfect illustration of Florence Henri’s position: “With Florence Henri’s photos, photographic practice enters a new phase, the scope of which would have been unimaginable before today. Above and beyond the precise and exact documentary composition of these highly defined photos, research into the effects of light is tackled not only through abstract photograms, but also in photos of real-life subjects. The entire problem of manual painting is taken onboard by the photographic process and is manifestly given a whole new depth thanks to this new optical instrument. Reflections and spatial relationships, superposition and intersections are just some of the areas explored from a totally new perspective and viewpoint.”
*László Moholy-Nagy, “Zu den Fotografien von Florence Henri”, i10, No 17-18, Amsterdam, December 20, 1928.
Her most well-known work is a self-portrait, in which Henri sits before a mirror, dolled up almost as if in drag. Two silver balls lay reflected up against the mirror, equivocal symbols of both testicles and breasts. Henri, influential in both her artistic style and personal styles, toyed with gender binaries, using her personal appearance to emphasise the performative nature of gender. The artist was married to a Swiss house servant, but went on to have other relationships with both men and women, including a longtime affair with artist and model Margarete Schall.
Henri established herself as a formidable photographer, and remained consistent in her work up until World War II. Then her work declined considerably, both due to lack of materials and the prohibitions imposed under the Nazi occupation. Henri briefly returned to painting, but her central period of output remained in the 1920s and 1930s. Her compositions, simultaneously warm, playful, clever and inquisitive, set the stage for future explorations into the limits of photography, or lack thereof.
Her earliest compositions introduce an element that would be fundamental for her artistic investigations, namely the mirror. Using a very limited number of elements, Henri created extremely complex images characterised by the fragmentation of space and the use of multiple viewpoints. They include one of her best-known works, the self-portrait looking in the mirror with two metal spheres, which may be said to embody the spirit of freedom typical of that period, conveying the image of a modern and emancipated female artist, one who failed to conform to the societal status traditionally assigned to women.
Multiple exposure
Florence Henri uses methods such as multiple exposures when shooting, or a combination of several negatives, some inverted, to obtain abstract images, in which she manages to bestow static objects with a sense of dynamism. Florence Henri’s output during this early phase can be described as a perfect synthesis between abstract geometrical painting and the innovations of New Vision photography.
“Florence Henri’s work lured me to come to Paris in 1929. I wanted to live in a place where images were made that coincided with my own concepts.”
~ Ilse Bing, quoted in Gisèle Freund’s preface to Ilse Bing 1929/1955: Femmes de l’enfance à la vieillesse
Advertising photography
In the field of professional photography, Florence Henri stands out for her very personal approach to advertising photography. Indeed, her images are the natural extension of her photographic experimentation and investigations using objects and mirrors.
Collages
She quickly substitutes industrial objects with natural elements in her compositions. In addition, she introduces a new tool in her work: collage. She makes them with fragments of prints, and then reproduces them to create the final print. She also introduces a new technique into her work – collage – thereby underlining her interest in autonomous images that move away from a simple reproduction of reality, all the while emphasising the conceptual work of the artist.
Shadows
Her quest for experimentation leads Florence Henri to work on the shadows passing vertically through the frame, creating a dark gap that interrupts and fragments the continuity of the image.
Nu composition
Their aesthetic characteristics clearly place the works grouped under the title Nu composition as part of the formal research Florence Henri carried out from the early 1930s, where the mastery of the composition obviously remains the central concern of her work.
Here, the camera is positioned at a slight distance in order to capture the sensuality of the female form, while natural objects – hyacinths and shells – or other more enigmatic elements, such as a comb or cards, also appear in the frame.
Rome
In late 1931 and early 1932, Florence Henri visits Rome where she takes a series of photographs, notably at the Roman Forum, but also at Saint Peter’s Square, which she uses, upon her return to Paris, as material for numerous collages, developing the technique she had already used in certain of her still lifes.
Portrait composition
The series Portrait Composition, is characterised by the tight framing of the central figurer – though some are models, most are her friends, including Grete Willers, Sonia Delaunay, Woty Werner, Kurt Wilhelm-Kästner, Fernand Léger, and Tulia Kaiser. The artist often makes use of harsh lighting, which marks the traits or make-up of her subjects with a diagonal composition or even distorts the image.
Brittany
The photographs taken in Brittany, which at first glance could be seen as purely documentary, reveal a very carefully considered attention to structure. In some of the more general shots, Florence Henri inserts a blurred, graphic element between the lens and the landscape, thereby going against the idea of photography as merely capturing reality, and once again, reinforcing the notion of composition.
Store windows
When Florence Henri strolls through Paris with her camera, her images reveal a very different preoccupation to that of other photographers. Faithful to her attention to structure, in the reflections of store windows she finds the same spirit that brings life to her studio compositions using mirrors. In 1936, Florence Henri moves to the Rue Saint-Romain in Montparnasse, where she makes use of the terrace to work in natural light, and to pursue her study of the fragmentation of the image through the use of shadows and reflections. She also returns to her self-portrait work.
Curator: Clare Williamson, with specialist advice from historian Dr. Tony Moore
Unknown photographer Members of the Ishmael Club c. 1900 Gelatin silver photograph State Library Victoria
Definition
Bohemianism is the practice of an unconventional lifestyle, often in the company of like-minded people, with few permanent ties, involving musical, artistic, or literary pursuits. In this context, Bohemians may be wanderers, adventurers, or vagabonds. (Wikipedia)
A Bohemian is a person, as an artist or writer, who lives and acts free of regard for conventional rules and practices.
This is a fantastic exhibition at the State Library of Victoria, one of the best I have seen so far in Melbourne this year. I have seen it three times and each time it has been a thoroughly rewarding experience.
~ Visually and intellectually stimulating, with a plethora of artefacts, texts and photographs
~ Excellent curatorship, with the exhibition logically structured in order to cohesively display the history, characters and stories, and strands of creativity and rebellious spirit that make up Melbourne’s cultural life
~ A great hang, with disparate elements and mediums all informing each other, pithy quotes, unique film footage, video, music
~ Not too big, just the right size to indulge your senses and brain power
One downside was that the exhibition needed a book or exhibition catalogue to flesh out the themes. Hopefully this will eventuate down the track. Also, it would have been nice to see more of what I would call ‘vernacular bohemianism’ – not just the famous people in each era, but the people that lived the life out on the streets, that supported the subcultures that sprung up from the 1950s onwards, but in a small exhibition it is understandable that there was not enough space.
Another perspective is that, in ordering such a diverse group of people who don’t want to be classified, who lived on the edge of society – you remove their cultural and historical ability to be transgressive, to cross moral and social taboos. By naming them as “bohemian” you seek to classify and order their existence and bring them within a frame of reference that is about control, power and visibility. This disciplinary power, Michel Foucault maintains, relies on surveillance to transform the subjects and the exhibition taxonomy is just that… a form of surveillance of the subject as well as a form of ordering it. Under this phenomena of power, dissonance / dissidence is neutralised and human beings are made subjects: through ‘the systematic linking of the categories of power and knowledge to form a hybrid, power-knowledge.’ (Hirst, 1992, “Foucault and Architecture,” in AA Files, No. 26, Autumn, pp. 52-60)
As John Tagg notes in his book The Burden of Representation (and this is what this exhibition does, it ‘represents’ a particular construction of identity as seen from the viewpoint of the establishment, the institution), “when Foucault examines power he is not just examining a negative force operating through a series of prohibitions … We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms – as exclusion, censorship, concealment, eradication. In fact, power produces. It produces reality. It produces domains of objects, institutions of language, rituals of truth.” (Tagg, John. The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988, p. 87)
Ultimately, that is what this exhibition does, it produces a reality that many of these bohemians would not have bought into, for they lived outside the fold. It produces domains of objects, institutions of language, rituals of truth that, through their naming, seek to classify and negate the transgressive and subversive nature of many of these people and groups. These people lived in opposition to the tenants and morals of everyday society and that is why we still love them – for their creativity, their individuality, their thoughts and above all their panache, stepping outside the orthodoxies and regi/mentality of everyday life. Against the system, for life.
“The mania of young artists to wish to live outside of their time, with other ideas and other customs, isolate them from the world, render them strange and bizarre, puts them outside the law, banished from society. These are today’s bohemians.”
Félix Pyat (French, 1810-1889)
Artist, rebel, hippie, hipster?
Revealing Melbourne’s enduring counter-cultures, Bohemian Melbourne celebrates a who’s who of creative free spirits through their art and the bohemian legacy that has shaped the character of this city. The exhibition shines a light on Melbourne’s cultural bohemians from 1860 to today, tracing individuals who have pushed against convention in their lives and art, from Marcus Clarke, Albert Tucker and Mirka Mora to Barry Humphries, Vali Myers and Nick Cave.
Venture into history’s backstreets and smoky salons to discover the stories of the daring poets, artists, visionaries, rebels and rock stars who changed Melbourne forever.
Text from the State Library of Victoria website
Marcus Clarke: “A Punk in the Age of Steam”
Marcus Clarke, writer, journalist and later a librarian at the Melbourne Public Library, is generally celebrated as the father of Bohemian Melbourne – although he was more its wild child. After a privileged start in a wealthy English family, which allowed him to cultivate the life of a young dandy and to indulge his passion for the writings of Honoré de Balzac and others, a 16-year-old Clarke suddenly found himself in colonial Melbourne in 1863, thanks to a turn in the family fortune.
Determined to maintain a semblance of the life to which he had become accustomed, Clarke was soon to be found strolling the streets of Melbourne as a flâneur, an observer of the city spectacle. A short-lived post as a bank clerk was followed by a stint on the land as a jackaroo, but by the age of 21 he was back in Melbourne and working as a journalist for the Argus newspaper.
Clarke’s bohemian ways soon attracted other young journalists and writers, and they began to congregate at various Melbourne watering holes, in particular the Cafe de Paris establishing the Yorick Club, the early members of which included fellow writers Henry Rendall, George Gordon McCrae and Adam Lindsay Gordon. The Yorick had a human skull for a mascot and rules that parodied the gentleman’s clubs of establishment Melbourne. Its members gathered in rooms adjoining the office of Melbourne Punch to smoke clay pipes, drink from pewter mugs, recite poetry and generally engage in horseplay. Bohemian society had found a Melbourne home and a creative community was born.
Wall text from exhibition
Unknown photographer Marcus Clarke 1866 Albumen silver photograph State Library Victoria
Bohemian culture in marvellous Melbourne
Marvellous Melbourne, which arose out of the egalitarianism of the gold rushes, gave birth to a strong bohemian culture. Marcus Clarke, the London-born journalist, writer, librarian and professional bohemian, joined the Athenaeum Club and founded in 1868 the Yorrick Club, Australia’s first bohemian club, which became a magnet for men of letters.
He was a dressed-up dandy, a flâneur and a heavy drinker, but had a touch of genius with his novel, For the Term of His Natural Life (1874/75), one of the classics of Australian colonial literature. He was dead by the age of 35, with suicide rumoured but rejected by his actress wife, Marian Dunn, the mother of his six children. Clarke in his behaviour and creative achievement became a model for other Australian bohemians to follow.
Unknown photographer Marcus Clarke (detail) 1866 Albumen silver photograph State Library Victoria
In 1863, when the young Marcus Clarke arrived in Melbourne, he could have slipped easily into what passed for mannered society in the booming gold-rush city. His uncle was a County Court judge, his cousin a politician, and Clarke himself was granted honorary membership of the elite Melbourne Club. But he chose to turn his back on the bunyip aristocracy. “I am a bohemian,” declared the man who would go on to write the first great Australian novel. “I live, I walk, I eat, drink and philosophise.”
All of which sounds perfectly normal – except, perhaps, for the philosophising – but in reality, Marcus Clarke’s life was far from average. He became a celebrated satirist of Marvellous Melbourne, by turns outraging and titillating 19th-century sensibilities in Australia’s modern metropolis. He befriended fellow intellectuals and bon vivants to form underground literary clubs that didn’t so much turn their backs on as raise an insulting finger to colonial mores. He was a poet and a playwright, a journalist and a novelist, a jackaroo, a wastrel and, above all, quite the tremendous wit.
Clarke’s most enduring gift is his writing, particularly the classic convict novel For The Term Of His Natural Life. But a new exhibition at the State Library of Victoria pays tribute to his other major legacy – that of Australia’s first bona fide bohemian.
“Clarke was an iconoclast, dangerous to know and a dandy about town,” explains historian Dr Tony Moore, author of Dancing With Empty Pockets: Australia’s Bohemians…
“Most people think of him as a venerable old Victorian gentleman, but I characterise him as a punk in the age of steam.” [Marcus: I don’t know why a venerable old Victorian gentleman – he was dead at 35]
Moore, who is a Monash University academic and passionate chronicler of unconventional Australians, was an adviser to the exhibition and worked alongside curator Clare Williamson to create this retrospective of radicals. Melbourne’s roaming free spirits have been corralled together for the first time using material – some of it never previously displayed in public – drawn from State Library archives and borrowed from public and private collections. Viewed en masse, they comprise a rogues’ gallery of some of the country’s most indelible cultural icons…
His [Clarke’s] image adorns the exhibition posters, a larger-than-life bohemian in breeches and knee-high boots with a cabbage-tree hat perched jauntily above his broad, handsome face. Melbourne’s original radical would be thrilled to see that his notoriety lives on, more than a century after his death.
Extract from Kendall Hill. “Bohemian Melbourne: Exhibition” on the Qantas Travel Insider website [Online] Cited 03/02/2015. No longer available online. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Installation views of the exhibition Bohemian Melbourne at the State Library of Victoria, Melbourne Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Wall text from the exhibition Bohemian Melbourne at the State Library of Victoria, Melbourne Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Justus Jörgensen (Australian, 1893-1975) Fifteen of the Founders (installation view) 1944 Oil on canvas and gauze mounted on panel Collection of the Montsalvat Trust Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Montsalvat is the result of Justus Jörgensen’s vision for a collective experience of art and life. Jörgensen had trained in architecture and then in painting with earlier bohemian Max Meldrum. His studio in Queen Street, the Mitre Tavern and the Latin and Chung Wah restaurants were sites for lively discussions in which Jörgensen put forward his philosophies of art, the revival of medieval craftsmanship and communal living. This vision began to take shape in 1934 when he and his wife, Lily, brought land at Eltham; with the assistance of friends and followers, he built Montsalvat, an artists’ colony of studios, workshops and the communal Great Hall.
While Justus Jörgensen rarely exhibited, his great love was painting. This multi-panelled work comprises portraits by Jörgensen of 15 significant figures from the early years of Montsalvat. They are, from top to bottom, left to right:
Ian Robertson – student of Jorgensen who also ran an antiques shop Leo Brierley – businessman and backer of Mervyn Skipper’s Pandemonium journal Helen (Nell) Lempriere – niece of Dame Nellie Melba, painter, sculptor, and an earl student of Jorgensen Norman Porter – friend and student of Jorgensen and lecturer in philosophy Mervyn Skipper – author, journalist and Melbourne editor of the Bulletin Helen Skipper – Mervyn’s first daughter, Jorgensen’s partner for many years, and mother of Sebastian and Sigmund Jorgensen Justus Jorgensen – founder and architect of Montsalvat, painter, assistant to artist Max Meldrum and teacher. Sonia Skipper – second daughter of Mervyn Skipper, and painter and teacher Arthur Munday – law student, sculptor and stonemason trained by Jorgensen William (Bill) Cook – teacher, philosophy and president of the Victorian Rationalist Society Norman Radcliffe – student and friend of Jorgensen, and philosopher Ray Grant – student of Jorgensen and philosopher Edward Goll – internationally renowned pianist and teacher at Melbourne Conservatorium of Music Arthur (George) Chalmers – pharmacist, student of Jorgensen, stonemason and carver, who also planted the first vineyard at Montsalvat
(Label texts)
Montsalvat is an artist colony in Eltham, Victoria, Australia, established by Justus Jörgensen in 1934. It is home to over a dozen buildings, houses and halls set amongst richly established gardens on 48,562 m2 (12 acres) of land.The colony of Montsalvat has a detailed history that reflects the life of Jörgensen and his friends and family; there is also a legend behind its name, while its buildings and gardens are steeped in the art and culture of Melbourne and its surroundings.
Visitors can pay a small fee to walk throughout the colony’s historical gardens, artists’ houses/workshops and explore the surrounding buildings. All of the buildings on the site were designed and built by residents with locally available materials, from various sources. The Great Hall offers an extensive network of spaces from extravagant halls and vast exhibition spaces, to small corridors and tiny balconies overlooking the gardens.
Percy Grainger (Australian, 1882-1961) Ella Grainger (Australian, 1889-1979) Towelling tunic, shirt, leggings, belt, shoes worn by Percy Grainger (installation view) c. 1934 Cotton bath towels, plastic, leather and metal Grainger Museum collection, University of Melbourne Photo: Marcus Bunyan
“In 1932 or 1933 my wife and I took up again this idea of clothing made of towelling and when in Australia in 1934 and 1935 we were amazed by the beauty of the bath towels on sale in Australia – some imported from England, Czechoslovakia and America, but most of them (and among them the most beautiful ones) manufactured in Australia. Here was a chance to show what could be done with the beauty born of machinery – a beauty as rich and subtle, in its own way, as anything made by hand or loom.”
Percy Grainger, c. 1955-1956
Unknown photographer, New York Percy Grainger wearing a towelling clothes outfit at his home in White Plains 1936 Silver gelatin print Grainger Museum collection, University of Melbourne
Installation photograph of the exhibition Bohemian Melbourne at the State Library of Victoria February 2015, including at left Albert Tucker, Self-portrait with Joy Hester, 1939 (see below) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Albert Tucker (Australian, 1914-1999) Self-portrait with Joy Hester 1939 Gelatin silver photograph State Library Victoria
Albert Tucker Interview with an Australian Artist – Heide Museum
An Interview with Albert Tucker conducted by Justin O’Brien in 1997.
Albert expands on his many insights,during the time he spent with John and Sunday Reed and other artists at Heide during the1940’s. An intimate insight into a unique man.
Unknown photographer Opening of Mirka Café 1954 Gelatin silver photograph Courtesy of Heide Museum of Modern Art and William Mora Galleries
Unknown photographer Opening of Mirka Café (detail) 1954 Gelatin silver photograph Courtesy of Heide Museum of Modern Art and William Mora Galleries
These clips features home movie footage taken by Gertie Anschel (c. 1953-1954) with audio commentary by film director Philippe Mora.
Part 1 of 3 features scenes of Melbourne, The Mirka Café and Joy Hester and Gray Smith’s property. Philippe reflects on his childhood and identifies key figures of the Melbourne art scene.
Part 2 of 3 features the property of Roger de Stoop, artist friends and Arthur Boyd at work on his 1956 Melbourne Olympic statue. Philippe reflects on his childhood identifies key figures of the Melbourne art scene.
Part 3 of 3 features the Moras, the art gang at a balcony party and late American actor Melvyn Douglas. Philippe reflects on his childhood, parents and identifies key figures of the Melbourne art scene.
Making Your Own Fun in the 50s
On the surface at least, Melbourne in the 1950s was a rather dour affair. For some non-conformists, such as Vali Myers and Barry Humphries, it was a place to escape rather than a place to be. For others, however, it was a site for creating underground cultures that were largely invisible to the mainstream.
This was no more so than in the case of gay and lesbian, or ‘camp’, culture, as it was known at the time. Homosexuality was illegal in Victoria until 1960, and in the 1950s it was sensationalised in the tabloid press as a subject for mockery if not horror. As a result, homosexual men and women developed alternative bohemian cultures and communities, with their own covert venues, house parties, secret languages and dress codes.
The gala costume arts balls that raised money for mainstream theatre and other arts charities were grand exceptions to the generally underground clubs and private parties. They offered rare moments in which camp culture could be expressed in public without fear for reprisal. Theatres and dance companies provided employment for many, and bars, such as the one nicknamed the Snake Pit at the Hotel Australia, and restaurants such as Val’s Coffee Lounge, provided opportunities for the camp community to meet and to mix with others who were outside the establishment.
Norman Ikin (Australian, 1925-1962) Vali Myers c. 1949 Gelatin silver photograph State Library Victoria
Mark Strizic (Australian, 1928-2012) Barry Humphries in Melbourne 1969 Exhibition print from flexible-base negative State Library of Victoria Courtesy of the Estate of the artist
A never seen on broadcast TV programme with Barry Humphries as Dame Edna Everage made in 1975. Barry Humphries was promoting his film ‘Barry McKenzie holds his own’. Films clips were provided officially by EMI. The interviewer trying to hold things together is Mark Caldwell. The programme was made in black and white.
Wall text from the exhibition Bohemian Melbourne at the State Library of Victoria, Melbourne Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation photograph of the exhibition Bohemian Melbourne at the State Library of Victoria February 2015 with, in the distance, Henry Talbot Portraits of actor Frank Thring 1963, with Thring’s jewellery box and contents in the foreground Photo: Marcus Bunyan
It has been said of Frank Thring that he could make most stages or foyers seem small. His larger-than-life personality was almost matched by his frame, often decked out in imposing black and with flamboyant jewellery. Son of Frank Thring snr, founder of Efftee Films and 3XY Radio, Thring jnr earned fame as an actor in London’s West End and in Hollywood films such as Ben Hur, often playing sinister or decadent characters. In the 1950s, he would recite poems laden with innuendo and hold court at the ‘head table’ at Val’s Coffee Lounge. To be welcome at his table was a sign one was part of the ‘in’ crowd.
Label text
Unknown photographer Arts Ball, Palais de Danse – John Anderson as Sun God c. 1963-1964 Gelatin silver photograph Australian Lesbian and Gay Archives
John Anderson was first-prize winner at a number of arts balls in the 1960s. His costume shown here reflects the creativity and effort that many put into their outfits. Costumes and headdresses were sometimes so large that Anderson and others regularly hired furniture vans to take them to the ball. One year the van that was transporting Anderson broke down and he completed the journey strapped upright on the back of a ute. His Sun God costume wowed new audiences when he was invited to take part in a pageant on ice base on the theme of The Kind and I – with Anderson as the King – at the Southland shopping centre ice rink around 1970.
Label text
But you will go to the ball, you will sweetie!
Richard Walsh (editor) The Review, Vol. 22, No. 22 Melbourne incorporated Newsagencies Co., March 1972 State Library of Victoria Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Before editing the irreverent Melbourne weekly The Review (Nation Review from July 1972, Richard Walsh edited counter-cultural Oz magazine with Richard Neville and Martin Sharp. Contributors to Nation Review included Max Harris, Bob Ellis, Phillip Adams, Michael Leunig and Germaine Greer. Greer had been part of the Drift in Melbourne, a loose association of artists, students and graduates. Enrolling in a Masters degree at Sydney University, in 1962 she becomes a leading light in the Sydney libertarian Push, an intellectual bohemia of larrikin anarchists. Gaining her PhD at Cambridge University, Greer then published her groundbreaking book The Female Eunuch.
Label text
Ashley Mackevicius (Australian, b. 1958) Nick Cave 1973 Gelatin silver photograph National Portrait Gallery, Canberra Gift of the artist 2006
Installation photograph of the exhibition Bohemian Melbourne at the State Library of Victoria February 2015 with artist Ponch Hawkes’ work at right Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Vali Myers (Australian, 1930-2003) Passions 1981-1982 Pen, black ink, sepia, burnt sienna and watercolour Vali Myers Art Gallery Trust
Vali Myers discovered a love of drawing at an early age. Over the years it became her primary mode of artistic expression in place of contemporary dance. She dedicated her life to her art and would spend up to two years creating each of her intricately drawn artworks. Passions contains many elements that symbolically represent aspects of Vali Myers’ art and life. These include a fox (referencing her pet Foxy), ravens (Edgar Allan Poe’s The Ravenbeing one of her favourite poems, a gypsy-like figure playing a violin and, at the centre of it all, a woman with flaming red hair.
Label text
Liz Ham (Australian born England, b. 1975) Vali Myers in her studio in the Nicholas Building 1997 Gelatin silver photograph State Library Victoria
Ed van der Elsken “Vali” 1972
Australian artist Vali Myers moved to Paris from Australia at age 19 where she lived on the streets, danced in cafes, met Satre, Cocteau, Genet and Django Reinhardt. She moved to New York, tattooed Patti Smith’s knee, befriended Salvador Dali and met Andy Warhol and Tennessee Williams.
Vali was a great influence on lots of famous people Tennessee Williams, Jean Cocteau, Mick Jagger, Marianne Faithfull, Debbie Harry, Patti Smith, Jean Genet and Kate Bush.
Installation photograph of the exhibition Bohemian Melbourne at the State Library of Victoria February 2015 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Howard Arkley
Australian artist Howard Arkley interviewed by ABC television shortly before his untimely death in 1999.
Howard Arkley (Australian, 1951-1999) The Ritual 1986 Synthetic polymer paint on canvas State Library of Victoria
Howard Arkley is recognised as one of Australia’s most significant 20th-century artists. He is unique in embracing not only urban culture but also life in suburbia, a space generally shunned or scorned by bohemians, with exception of that other flaneur of suburbia, Barry Humphries. Like many bohemians before him, Arkley lived on the edge and experimented with mind-altering substances, and, like a good proportion of them, his life was tragically cut short as a result. Despite its large scale, comic-book style and pop colours, The Ritualis as much a cool and judgment-free study in composition and the human form as it is in the rituals or ‘habits’ associated with drug use.
Label text
State Library of Victoria 328 Swanston St, Melbourne VIC 3000 Phone: (03) 8664 7000
Curators: Claudia Zevi and Meret Meyer (Chagall’s granddaughter)
Marc Chagall (French born Russia, 1887-1985) Figura davanti alla volta blu 1911 Gouache on paper
A bumper posting on this glorious artist – another who, too late, realised the threat of Nazi Germany and only survived deportation and death by the skin of his teeth. It would have been a sad loss, for he possesses an unbridled passion for life. Social conscience, mythology, iconography, place, identity, race, religion, beauty, war and tragedy. And the exemplary use of colour in his metaphysical, fantastical scenes. But above all…. MAGIC!
Marcus
Many thankx to the Palazzo Reale for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“If I create from the heart, nearly everything works; if from the head, almost nothing.”
Marc Chagall
“Chagall a pioneer of modern art and one of its greatest figurative painters… [who] invented a visual language that recorded the thrill and terror of the twentieth century…
On his canvases we read the triumph of modernism, the breakthrough in art to an expression of inner life that … is one of the last century’s signal legacies. At the same time Chagall was personally swept up in the horrors of European history between 1914 and 1945: world wars, revolution, ethnic persecution, the murder and exile of millions. In an age when many major artists fled reality for abstraction, he distilled his experiences of suffering and tragedy into images at once immediate, simple, and symbolic to which everyone could respond.”
Wullschlager, Jackie. Chagall: A Biography. Knopf, 2008. p. 4
Marc Chagall (French born Russia, 1887-1985) Daphnis and Cloe 1911 Watercolour 16.5 x 21cm Private collection
Marc Chagall (French born Russia, 1887-1985) The Blue House 1917 Oil on canvas 66 x 96.8cm Musée des Beaux-Arts, Liège, France
Marc Chagall (French born Russia, 1887-1985) Matrimonio (Wedding) 1918 Oil on canvas 100 x 119cm Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, Russia
Marc Chagall (French born Russia, 1887-1985) Modello di grande scena per “Mazeltov” di Scholem Aleichem (Model of great scene for “Mazeltov” Scholem Aleichem) 1919 Oil and black pencil on paper pasted on cardboard Private Collection
Marc Chagall (French born Russia, 1887-1985) Composizione con cerchi e capra (Teatro d’arte ebraica) (Composition with circles and goat (Jewish Theatre Art)) 1920 Oil on cardboard laid on wood agglomerate Private Collection
Marc Chagall (French born Russia, 1887-1985) Angelo cadente (The Falling Angel) 1923 Oil on canvas 148 x 189cm Private collection
Marc Chagall (French born Russia, 1887-1985) The Red Circus 1956-1960 Oil on canvas
Marc Chagall (French born Russia, 1887-1985) Big Sun 1958 Oil on canvas
Marc Chagall (French born Russia, 1887-1985) War (Guerra) 1964 Oil on canvas 163 x 231cm Kunsthaus Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland
Marc Chagall (French born Russia, 1887-1985) The Players (i giocatori) 1968 Oil no canvas 150 x 160cm Private collection
Marc Chagall (French born Russia, 1887-1985) The Grand Parade 1979 Oil on canvas 119 x 132cm Private collection
“Will the hurried men of today be able to penetrate her work, her world?” is the question asked by Marc Chagall in 1947 in the postface to the memoirs of his wife Bella, who left him “in the shadows” following her sudden death three years earlier. However, this question could also be asked about his own work, the work of an artist who speaks such a universal language that he is loved by everyone alike, both young and old, men and women, scholars and men on the street. Chagall is an artist who is known and recognised by everyone and, out of all the 20th-century artists, was one of the few to remain faithful to himself despite living through a century of wars, catastrophes, political and technological upheavals.
The exhibition narrative has arisen from a question and a need: on the one hand, the attempt to understand the strength that an enabled an artist who experimented with the styles of all the avant-garde movements, to remain so consistent to himself, always curious about the world around him, developing a style that can be recognised immediately by people of any age and any social status; on the other, the need to study Chagall’s work in order to identify the secret behind the poetry of this fragile man who was yet able to keep faith with his traditions and with his humanity, despite living in a world shaken to the core by indescribable and until then unimaginable catastrophes.
The exhibition opened on 17 September at the Palazzo Reale in Milan and is the biggest retrospective ever devoted to Marc Chagall in the last 50 years in Italy, with over two hundred and twenty works – mainly paintings from 1908 onwards, when Chagall painted his first work Le Petit Salon, right up to his final, monumental works of the 1980s – which guide visitors through the artistic career of Marc Chagall. Works from the collections of his heirs, some of which have not been exhibited to the public before, feature alongside masterpieces from the world’s most important museums, including the MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the National Gallery in Washington, the State Russian Museum in St Petersburg, the Centre Pompidou, and over fifty public and private collections that have so generously collaborated. The exhibition theme therefore focuses on a new interpretation of the language of Chagall, whose poetic vein developed throughout the 20th century out of a blend of the best western European traditions: from his original Jewish culture to the Russian culture and his encounter with French avant-garde painting.
“The exhibition features a comprehensive chronological narrative, which is divided into sections, starting with his earliest works painted in Russia; his first visit to France and his subsequent return to Russia where he stayed until 1921; the second period of his exile, opened by the autobiography written by Chagall when he left Russia forever, living firstly in France and then, in the 1940s running away from Nazism, in America where he endured the tragedy of the death of his beloved wife Bella; his return to France and his decision to settle permanently on the Cote d’Azur, where Chagall rediscovered his most relaxed poetic language, calmed by the colours and atmosphere of the south.
The exhibition provides visitors with an understanding of how, despite living in perennial exile, Chagall never lost hold of the thread that kept the child he used to be in his heart; how, over the years and throughout the terrible events that marred his existence, he succeeded in preserving his sense of amazement, joy and wonder inspired by nature and humanity, as well as his strong faith that led him to believe in the possibility of a better world and seek to build it in all possible ways. Visitors will also discover his highly original poetic language, born out of the assimilation of the three cultures to which he belonged: Jewish culture (the visual tradition of its ornate manuscripts inspired the expressive, non-perspectival and sometimes mystic elements of his work); Russian culture (evident both in the folk images of the luboks and the religious images of the icons); western culture (in which he assimilates the great artists of tradition, from Rembrandt to the avant-garde artists whom he frequented so assiduously). They will also observe his sense of wonder at nature and the amazement inspired by living creatures that places him closer to mediaeval sources than 20th-century ones.
Flowers and animals are a constant presence in his paintings, enabling him on the one hand to overcome the Jewish interdiction of human depiction, while on the other becoming metaphors for a possible world in which all living beings can live in peace as in Russian mediaeval culture. In the words of Giovanni Arpino: “The soul of Chagall is a bleating soul, as mild as it is invincible because it escapes the horrors, the snares, the outrages … His paradise is an earthly Otherworld that encompasses the simulacra of life, a physical place that becomes metaphysical precisely because we have all killed it during daily life.” His art constitutes a sort of metissage [mix] between cultures and traditions. The fundamental key to his modernity lies in his desire to transform contamination into a value, a work of art into a language able to ask questions that have as yet been left unanswered by mankind.
After Milan the exhibition will travel to the prestigious Musees royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique / Koninklike Musea voor Schone Kunsten van Belgie, Bruxelles.
Marc Chagall (French born Russia, 1887-1985) The Soldier Drinks (Soldato che beve) 1911 Oil on canvas 109.8 x 94.7cm Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
Marc Chagall (French born Russia, 1887-1985) Bride with fan (Sposa con ventaglio) 1911 Oil on canvas Private Collection
Marc Chagall (French born Russia, 1887-1985) I and the Village 1911 Oil on canvas 192.1 x 151.4cm Museum of Modern Art, New York
Marc Chagall (French born Russia, 1887-1985) Nude with comb (Nuda con pettine) 1911-1912 Black ink and gouache on paper
Marc Chagall (French born Russia, 1887-1985) The Fiddler 1912 Oil on canvas 188 x 158cm Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam
Marc Chagall (French born Russia, 1887-1985) Soldiers 1912 Private collection 38.1 x 32.4cm
Marc Chagall (French born Russia, 1887-1985) The Old Jew (il vecchio ebreo) 1912 Oil on canvas
Marc Chagall (French born Russia, 1887-1985) Self-portrait in profile 1914 Oil on cardboard 34 x 27.9cm Private collection
Marc Chagall (French born Russia, 1887-1985) Blue Lovers 1914 Tempera on paper pasted on cardboard 49 x 44cm Private collection
Marc Chagall in his studio of Saint-Paul de Vence Nd
Marc Chagall (French born Russia, 1887-1985) Red Jew 1915 Oil on cardboard Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia
Marc Chagall (French born Russia, 1887-1985) Mondo rosso e nero o Sole rosso (Red and black world) 1951 Gouache, watercolour, pastel on paper pasted on canvas Private collection
Marc Chagall (French born Russia, 1887-1985) Il trionfo della musica – Maquette per il murale Metropolitan Opera, Lincoln Art Center, New York (The triumph of music – Maquette for the mural Metropolitan Opera, Lincoln Art Center, New York) 1966 Tempera, gouache and collage on paper Private collection
Olivo Barbieri (Italian; lives and works in Modena, Italy) Philip-Lorca diCorcia (American; lives and works in New York) Jason Evans (British; lives and works in London) Paul Graham (British; lives and works in New York) Mark Lewis (Canadian; lives and works in London) Jill Magid (American; lives and works in New York) James Nares (American; lives and works in New York) Barbara Probst (German; lives and works in New York) Jennifer West (American; lives and works in Los Angeles) Michael Wolf (German; lives and works in Paris and Hong Kong)
Installation view by Rob Deslongchamps
Watching the watcher watching…
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Cincinnati Art Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“Some of the artists in ‘Eyes on the Street’ made their work at street level; others sought higher vantage points. Some sharpen our appreciation for individuals, while others underscore universal urban traits. Some work with still images, while others create films and videos. What links them, and binds them to the historical tradition of street photography, is the quality of attention they give these bustling environments. They are watchful. What distinguishes them from the twentieth-century street-photography tradition, however, is that these artists are also acutely conscious of the active roles cameras play in making urban public places today. They know they are part of a greater system of watching.”
Brian Sholis, Associate Curator of Photography, Cincinnati Art Museum
Installation view by Rob Deslongchamps
Barbara Probst (German, b. 1964) Exposure #106: N.Y.C., Broome & Crosby Streets, 04.17.13, 2:29 p.m. 2013 Ultrachrome ink on cotton paper in twelve parts Each 29 x 44 inches Courtesy of the artist and Murray Guy, New York
On January 7, 2000, Barbara Probst first deployed a photographic technique that has become her signature and which she is still fruitfully exploring. On that night she used a remote-control device to synchronise the shutters of twelve cameras, creating as many perspectives on the same scene. In that work, and the more than one hundred that have followed, Probst dissects the photographic moment. Take, for example, the twelve-panel Exposure #106, exhibited here, which combines colour and black-and-white film, multiple photographic genres, staged and unscripted elements, and a patchwork of vantage points. One can’t help but “read” these individual images sequentially, creating a false sense of narrative momentum from a collection of pictures taken in the same instant. One likewise builds, as Probst has called it, a “sculpture in the mind” by piecing together a three-dimensional scene from two-dimensional fragments. The process is never perfect, underscoring, as does all of Probst’s work, the incompleteness and partiality of any photograph.
“Probst forcefully deconstructs the notion of photographic truth, not by specifically questioning that photographic truth but merely by pointing out its necessary incompleteness.
~ Jens Erdman Rasmussen, Dutch curator.
Jason Evans (Welsh, b. 1968) Untitled from the series NYLPT 2008 Gelatin silver print 24 x 24 inches Courtesy of the photographer
Jason Evans is a street photographer who, in his words, simply likes to “walk around and look at things, follow people, and get lost.” The series exhibited here, NYLPT, was made between 2005 and 2012 in New York, London, Paris, and Tokyo. Evans would expose a roll of 35-mm black-and-white film in one of these cities, then rewind and set aside the roll until his travels brought him to another. There, he would reload the film and re-expose the frames, doing so up to five times without knowing what the results would look like. Sometimes a fragment of language or familiar landmark reveals where part of the picture was made. More often, however, the textures, shapes, and surreal combinations of built environments come together to connote urbanness as a category of experience. Aware that people consume images in myriad ways, Evans not only developed the photographs in a darkroom, but also worked closely with a book publisher and digital programmers to create versions of the series specific to different mediums.
Olivo Barbieri (Italian, b. 1954) site specific_Istanbul #4 2011 Archival pigment print 45 x 61 inches Courtesy of the artist and Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York
Between 2003 and 2013, the Italian artist Olivo Barbieri photographed more than forty of the world’s cities from low-flying helicopters. Fascinated by the expanding megalopolises, Barbieri sought a new visual language to present their shifting forms. He hit upon the idea of using a tilt-shift lens – normally used to correct the apparent convergence of parallel lines in pictures of buildings – to render sections of his images out of focus. By also slightly overexposing the photographs, Barbieri created a diorama-like effect; the people and places he captured seemed to inhabit miniature worlds. His pictures contained enormous amounts of information yet placed some of it tantalisingly out of focus.
This visual effect became so popular that Barbieri sought other ways to push photography’s language in response to the cities that inspired him. In recent years he has adopted a wide array of digital post-production techniques to modify his images, all in service of representing the dizzying state of cities today.
“Captivated by a vision of the twenty-first-century city as a kind of site-specific installation – temporary, malleable, and constantly in flux – [Barbieri] sought a photographic corollary for the radical mutations of urban form that he saw taking place.”
~ Christopher S. Phillips, curator
Installation view by Rob Deslongchamps
Cameras are an integral part of our lives, and the Cincinnati Art Museum’s new exhibition, Eyes on the Street, on view Oct. 11, 2014 – Jan. 4, 2015, examines how they can be used in public spaces. Through a collection of photographs, films and videos by 10 internationally renowned artists – most of whom have never previously exhibited in Cincinnati – the exhibition reimagines street photography and reveals how cameras shape perceptions of cities. Eyes on the Street is the Art Museum’s contribution to the region-wide FotoFocus festival and is a celebration of street photography in the twenty-first century.
“Street photography is a perennial subject of museum exhibitions, but by emphasising the role cameras’ technical capabilities play in making these artworks, I hope to broaden our understanding of the genre,” said Brian Sholis, associate curator of photography. “At the same time, it’s important to recognise that we are not merely subject to faceless surveillance, but can use cameras to amplify the invigorating aspects of city life.”
Eyes on the Street reimagines the genre of street photography and demonstrates how cameras shape our perceptions of cities. It features ten internationally renowned artists who work in photography, film, and video, each of whom deliberatively uses the camera’s technical capabilities to reveal new aspects of the urban environment. Through high-speed and high-definition lenses, multiple or simultaneous exposures, “impossible” film shots, and appropriated surveillance-camera footage, these artists breathe new life into the genre and remind us that urban public places are sites of creative and imaginative encounters.
The exhibition title comes from influential urban theorist Jane Jacobs, who wrote, in her classic treatise The Death and Life of Great American Cities, of “eyes on the street” being crucial to urban neighbourhoods’ vitality – and their ability to accommodate different people and activities. Today, discussion of cameras in public spaces often revolves around surveillance tactics or battles over first-amendment rights. Eyes on the Street reflects the diversity of urban experience and shows us how cameras can help us comprehend the complex urban environment.
The show includes artworks made in New York, San Francisco, Paris, Beirut, Tokyo, Istanbul, and elsewhere by artists who have exhibited widely and have received numerous grants, fellowships, and prizes. Most have never before exhibited in the Cincinnati area.
Press release from the Cincinnati Art Museum
Philip-Lorca diCorcia (American, b. 1951) Head #23 2001 Fujicolor Crystal Archive print 48 x 60 inches Courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner, New York/London
To make the photographs exhibited in Eyes on the Street, Philip-Lorca diCorcia affixed a powerful strobe flash to construction scaffolding above a sidewalk in Times Square. He placed his camera some distance away, so as to remain unnoticed, and photographed unwitting strangers bathed in a halo of light. This outdoor “studio” married control and chance, isolating people from their busy surroundings. Their pensive faces reveal complex interior lives it would be easy to miss if we passed them on a busy street.
The resulting series, Heads, comprises a few dozen photographs chosen from the thousands that diCorcia made between 1999 and 2001. Erno Nussenzweig, the subject of Head #13, discovered the photograph of him in 2005. He sued the photographer for using his image without permission. The case went to the New York Court of Appeals, where judges ruled that diCorcia’s images qualify as art, not as advertising, thereby exempting him from privacy protections afforded by law. The case has become an important precedent for artists who wish to take pictures in public places.
Jill Magid (American, b. 1973) Control Room 2004 Still from a two-channel digital video, ten minutes Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Yvon Lambert, Paris
For more than a decade artist Jill Magid has deliberately worked with institutions of authority to create videos, books, installations, and other artworks. For a series made in Liverpool in 2004, Magid spent thirty-one days in the English port city – the length of time footage from its Citywatch surveillance system is stored. Wearing a red trench coat, she aimed “to use the CCTV system as a film crew, to act as the protagonist, and to be saved in [its] evidence locker.”
During the project she developed relationships with the camera operators. In the video Trust, Magid closes her eyes and allows a CCTV operator to verbally guide her safely through the city’s busy streets. She has described the interaction as one of the most intimate she has experienced, and wrote the Subject Access Request Forms, used to obtain the footage, in the form of love letters. As she later said, “Only by being watched, and influencing how I was watched, could I touch the system and become vulnerable to it.”
Installation view of James Nares’s film Street. Photo by Rob Deslongchamps.
James Nares Street
James Nares moved to New York during the 1970s and joined the experimental music and art scenes as a filmmaker, painter, sculptor, musician, and performer. Today he is perhaps best known for his beautiful abstract paintings, but he has made still- and moving-image work throughout his career. His 2012 film STREET has drawn renewed attention to his work with cameras. STREET uses the remarkable clarity offered by a high-speed, high-definition camera to mesmerising effect. Shot from the window of a car, “the camera is moving in one line at a constant speed,” he has said. “I take small fragments of time and extend them. […] I just wanted to see the drama in small things that happen all the time, everywhere, the little dramas that become big along the way.”
STREET is an unscripted 61-minute high definition video filmed by artist James Nares over one week in September 2011. The final video is a mesmerising experiment in the nuance and beauty of everyday people and people-watching; providing a global view that extends beyond the streets of New York where it was filmed: from Battery Park to the furthest reaches of Upper Broadway, and West Side to East Side in Nares’ personal homage to actualité films. In Nares’ words, “I wanted the film to be about people. All it needed were magical moments, and there are enough of those happening every moment of any given day.”
The scenes are drawn from more than sixteen hours of material and accompanied by a guitar soundtrack performed by Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth.
Eyes on the Street
Brian Sholis
Associate Curator of Photography Cincinnati Art Museum
The title of this exhibition comes from the architecture writer and urban activist Jane Jacobs, who, in her classic 1961 treatise The Death and Life of Great American Cities, wrote of eyes on the street being crucial to the vitality of urban neighbourhoods, in particular their ability to accommodate different people and activities. She was celebrating her Greenwich Village neighbours, “allies whose eyes help us natives keep the peace of the street,” the “lucky possessors of a city order that makes it relatively simple to keep the peace.” She was quick to add, “there is nothing simple about that order itself, or the bewildering number of components that go into it.” Fifty years later the elements that make urban life vibrant and challenging are even greater in number, and the omnipresence of cameras is one of the greatest changes to the ways we manage a city’s order. Today, discussion of cameras in public places often concentrates on issues of surveillance, personal privacy, and first-amendment rights. As the writer Tom Vanderbilt asked in a 2002 essay that touches on Jacobs’s legacy, “Why is a police surveillance camera on a public street any more intrusive than a patrolman stationed on the corner? […] The real question in all of this is motive, not means: who’s doing the watching, and for what purpose?” The artworks brought together in Eyes on the Street offer ways to think about the social, political, legal, and architectural implications of these questions.
The photographs, films, and videos exhibited here also offer ways to reimagine the genre of street photography, which art historians typically associate with Jacobs’s mid-twentieth-century era. At the time she was drafting the ideas quoted above, photographers like Robert Frank, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Garry Winogrand prowled Western cities, 35-mm cameras in hand, taking pictures of the daily sidewalk ballet. They worked tirelessly, often photographing rapidly and without introducing themselves to their subjects, whom they corralled into rectangular compositions that expressed some of the dynamism of the passing parade. By contrast, the artists in Eyes on the Street, all working in the twenty-first century, respond to the changed conditions of the city in part by using more deliberative strategies to capture their subjects. They recognise the pervasive influence of cameras on the urban environment by employing their own cameras’ special capabilities to show things our eyes may not see or our minds might not notice. For photographers working half a century ago, the lens was a natural extension of their hands and a relatively simple conduit of their artistic sensibilities. The artists in Eyes on the Street work more self-consciously to disclose the forces conditioning the urban environment and to acknowledge cameras’ active role in that process. In so doing, they create stunning still- and moving-image artworks that show us such places as New York, Shanghai, Beirut, Paris, Chicago, and Istanbul as we’ve never seen them before.
Faces in the Crowd
Writing more than a century ago, German sociologist Georg Simmel diagnosed the mental life of people living in rapidly modernising cities, suggesting that our psychological survival depended upon separating ourselves from the many stimulations of the urban environment. The influence of Simmel’s thinking upon the social sciences has been profound, but scholars today increasingly identify an inversion of his theory as true: for the survival of the metropolis, we must overcome narrow individualism to empathise with others who share it with us. However, one’s capacity to relate to others is necessarily limited, and this cosmopolitan ethics can be difficult to maintain. James Nares’s 2012 film Street uses the remarkable clarity offered by a high-speed, high-definition camera to offset the potentially numbing effect of so many encounters. By slowing down his footage of New York sidewalks, taken from the window of a car moving thirty miles per hour, Nares isolates small vignettes unspooling on the sidewalk. Peoples’ movements are picked out in fine detail, their individual gestures and expressions heightened into a slow-motion monumentality. A similar effect characterises the photographs in Philip-Lorca diCorcia’s series Heads (1999-2001). To make these works, diCorcia, affixed a flash strobe to construction scaffolding on a sidewalk in Times Square. Placing his camera far enough away to be unnoticed, he pre-focused his lens on the spot illuminated by the flash and captured unwitting strangers bathed in a halo of light. His improvised outdoor studio married control and chance, isolating people from their busy surroundings and catching them in moments of inwardness. Their pensive faces reveal complex interior lives it would be all too easy to ignore should we be strolling past them. The quality of attention afforded by Nares and diCorcia’s cameras results in the humanism of their work and grants the dignity we can read in these faces. As the critic Ken Johnson observed of Street, what results is an update of “Walt Whitman’s poetic embrace of humanity. The camera gazes at all with the same equanimity and finds each person, in his or her own way, dignified, loveable, and even beautiful.”
In his series NYLPT, photographer Jason Evans reverses this penchant for individuation. The acronym stands for “New York London Paris Tokyo.” Working over a period of eight years, Evans would expose a roll of 35-mm black-and-white film in one of these cities, then rewind and set aside the roll until his travels brought him to another. There, he would reload the film and re-expose the frames, sometimes doing so up to five times without knowing what the results would look like. As he has said, “The ‘decisive moment’ was no longer out there waiting to be hunted down,” as with traditional street photography. Instead, “it had moved behind the lens, onto the film plane.” Sometimes a fragment of language or familiar landmark reveals where part of the picture was made. More often, however, the textures, shapes, and surreal combinations of built environments come together to connote urbanness as a category of experience.
Jennifer West (American, b. 1966) One Mile Film (5,280 feet of 35mm film negative and print taped to the mile-long High Line walk way in New York City for 17 hours on Thursday, September 13th, 2012 with 11,500 visitors – the visitors walked, wrote, jogged, signed, drew, touched, danced, parkoured, sanded, keyed, melted popsicles, spit, scratched, stomped, left shoe prints of all kinds and put gum on the filmstrip – it was driven on by baby stroller and trash can wheels and was traced by art students – people wrote messages on the film and drew animations, etched signs, symbols and words into the film emulsion lines drawn down much of the filmstrip by visitors and Jwest with highlighters and markers – the walk way surfaces of concrete, train track steel, wood, metal gratings and fountain water impressed into the film; filmed images shot by Peter West – filmed Parkour performances by Thomas Dolan and Vertical Jimenez – running on rooftops by Deb Berman and Jwest – film taped, rolled and explained on the High Line by art students and volunteers) 2012 Still from 35-mm film transferred to high-definition video Commissioned and produced by Friends of the High Line and the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation Courtesy of the artist and Marc Foxx, Los Angeles
Jennifer West is resolutely experimental in her approach to film, and is known in particular for the ways she treats her film stock: submerging it in seawater, bathing it in chemicals, or exposing it to different types of radiation, usually to psychedelic effect. Her One Mile Film … (2012), commissioned by and for the High Line, an elevated park in New York, documents free-running practitioners – athletes who explore environments without limitations of movement – climbing, jumping, and exploring the park and its environs. Here, though, her “treatment” is an alternative method of recording people in this public space. Once she had completed filming, West affixed her film stock to the High Line’s footpaths, inviting park visitors – some 11,500 of them – to walk on, roll over, draw on, and otherwise imprint their presence upon her work. The finished film appears semi-abstract but is in fact a trace of the people who passed through that particular place on that September 2012 day, like the rubbings people make of manholes and headstones.
Michael Wolf (German, 1954-2019) Night #20 2007 Digital c-print 48 x 60 inches Courtesy of the artist and Bruce Silverstein Gallery, New York
The number of both people and buildings tucked into Hong Kong’s small landmass inspired Michael Wolf to express the verticality and compactness of that unique place. His series Architecture of Density emphasises the repetition inherent to most large-scale construction by zeroing in on building facades and eliminating the ground, the sky, and all other elements that might reveal the picture’s scale. The residential towers seem to stretch on forever; the only variation comes from small human elements, such as laundry hung out to dry. The buildings depicted in the series Transparent City, made in 2007 and 2008 in Chicago, are not quite as close together, and Wolf subsequently created looser compositions. He likewise took advantage of a 300-mm lens and the buildings’ glass curtain-wall construction to peer through the windows at the life inside. “I became acutely aware of being a voyeur,” Wolf said.
Mark Lewis (Canadian, b. 1958) Beirut 2011 Still from a high-definition video, 8 minutes 11 seconds Courtesy of the artist and Daniel Faria Gallery, Toronto
In his short films, Mark Lewis repeatedly isolates the fundamental gestures of cinema, exaggerating a zoom or a tracking shot to reveal the constructedness of a seemingly natural scene. Without sacrificing beauty or mystery, Lewis’s meticulously planned works uncover the kinds of artifice that big-budget popular movies aim to conceal. In his eight-minute film Beirut (2011), Lewis crafts a Steadicam shot to explore the multiple cultures and tangled histories represented on a Lebanese street. In a remarkable single take, the camera rounds a corner, proceeds down the street, then lifts magically into the air, floating above roofline to situate these histories in the larger urban fabric. And the end of this short film reminds us of the life that continues around us even as we focus only at street level.
Cincinnati Art Museum 953 Eden Park Drive Cincinnati, Ohio 45202 Phone: (513) 721-ARTS (2787)
![Dallaporte (Portugal) 'Batalha – Mosteiro, Fachada das Capelas Imperfeitas [Monastery of Batalha, façade of the Imperfect Chapels]' Nd](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/batalha-web.jpg "Dallaporte (Portugal) 'Batalha – Mosteiro, Fachada das Capelas Imperfeitas [Monastery of Batalha, façade of the Imperfect Chapels]' Nd")
![Luigi Grassi, Milano (Italian) 'Milano, Facciata della Cattedrale [Facade of Milan Cathedral]' Nd](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/milan-catherdral-web.jpg "Luigi Grassi, Milano (Italian) 'Milano, Facciata della Cattedrale [Facade of Milan Cathedral]' Nd")
![Nels (Belgium, 1898 - ) 'S. A. des Grottes de Han-sur-Lesse et de Rochefort - Le Trophée [Caves of Han-sur-Lesse and Rochefort - The Trophy]' Nd](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/grottes-de-han-web.jpg "Nels (Belgium, 1898 - ) 'S. A. des Grottes de Han-sur-Lesse et de Rochefort - Le Trophée [Caves of Han-sur-Lesse and Rochefort - The Trophy]' Nd")
![David Hill (Scottish, 1802-1870) and Robert Adamson (Scottish, 1821-1848) 'The Gowan [Margaret and Mary Cavendish]' c. 1843-1848](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/david-hill-and-robert-adamson-the-gowan-margaret-and-mary-cavendish-c-1843-1848-web.jpg "David Hill (Scottish, 1802-1870) and Robert Adamson (Scottish, 1821-1848) 'The Gowan [Margaret and Mary Cavendish]' c. 1843-1848")
![John S. Johnston (American, c. 1839 - December 17, 1899) 'One of Dr Kane’s Men [possibly William Morton]' c. 1857](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/john-s-johnston-one-of-dr-kanes-men-possibly-william-morton-c-1857-web.jpg "John S. Johnston (American, c. 1839 - December 17, 1899) 'One of Dr Kane’s Men [possibly William Morton]' c. 1857")
![Karl Blossfeldt (German, 1865-1932) 'Acanthus mollis' (Acanthus mollis [Akanthus, Bärenklau. Deckblätter, die Blüten sind entfernt, in 4facher Vergrößerung]) 1898-1928](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/karl-blossfeldt-german-1865e280931932-acanthus-mollis-web.jpg "Karl Blossfeldt (German, 1865-1932) 'Acanthus mollis' (Acanthus mollis [Akanthus, Bärenklau. Deckblätter, die Blüten sind entfernt, in 4facher Vergrößerung]) 1898-1928")
![Iwao Yamawaki (Japanese, 1898-1987) 'Lunch (12-2 p.m.)' (Mittagessen [12-2 Uhr]) 1931](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/iwao-yamawaki-japanese-1898e280931987-lunch-12e280932-p-m-web.jpg "Iwao Yamawaki (Japanese, 1898-1987) 'Lunch (12-2 p.m.)' (Mittagessen [12-2 Uhr]) 1931")
![Max Burchartz (German, 1887-1961) 'Lotte (Eye)' (Lotte [Auge]) 1928](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/max-burchartz-lotte-eye-1928-web.jpg "Max Burchartz (German, 1887-1961) 'Lotte (Eye)' (Lotte [Auge]) 1928")
![Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (Polish, 1885-1939) 'Self-Portrait, Zakopane [Broken Glass]' 1910](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/witkiewicz_self-portrait-zakopane-web.jpg "Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (Polish, 1885-1939) 'Self-Portrait, Zakopane [Broken Glass]' 1910")
![Florence Henri (New York 1893 - Compiègne 1982) 'Composition abstraite [Still-life composition]' 1929](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/florencehenri_08_compositionabstraite-web.jpg "Florence Henri (New York 1893 - Compiègne 1982) 'Composition abstraite [Still-life composition]' 1929")
![Florence Henri (New York 1893 - Compiègne 1982) 'Mannequin de tailleur [Tailor's mannequin]' 1930-1931](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/florencehenri_05__mannequindetailleur-web.jpg "Florence Henri (New York 1893 - Compiègne 1982) 'Mannequin de tailleur [Tailor's mannequin]' 1930-1931")
![Florence Henri (New York 1893 - Compiègne 1982) 'Composition Nature morte [Still-life composition]' 1931](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/florencehenri_10_compositionnaturemorte-web.jpg "Florence Henri (New York 1893 - Compiègne 1982) 'Composition Nature morte [Still-life composition]' 1931")
![Florence Henri (New York 1893 - Compiègne 1982) 'Pont [Bridge]' 1930-1935](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/florencehenri_21_pont-web.jpg "Florence Henri (New York 1893 - Compiègne 1982) 'Pont [Bridge]' 1930-1935")
![Florence Henri (New York 1893 - Compiègne 1982) 'Autoportrait [Self-portrait]' 1928](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/florencehenri_01_autoportrait-web.jpg "Florence Henri (New York 1893 - Compiègne 1982) 'Autoportrait [Self-portrait]' 1928")
![Florence Henri (New York 1893 - Compiègne 1982) 'Femme aux cartes [Woman with cards]' 1930](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/florencehenri_11_femmeauxcartes-web.jpg "Florence Henri (New York 1893 - Compiègne 1982) 'Femme aux cartes [Woman with cards]' 1930")
![Florence Henri (New York 1893 - Compiègne 1982) 'Fenêtre [Window]' 1929](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/florencehenri_06_fenetre-web.jpg "Florence Henri (New York 1893 - Compiègne 1982) 'Fenêtre [Window]' 1929")
![Florence Henri (New York 1893 - Compiègne 1982) 'Composition Nature morte [Still-life composition]' 1931](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/florencehenri_09_compositionnaturemorte-web.jpg "Florence Henri (New York 1893 - Compiègne 1982) 'Composition Nature morte [Still-life composition]' 1931")
![Florence Henri (New York 1893 - Compiègne 1982) 'Composition Nature morte [Still-life composition]' c. 1933](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/florencehenri_17_compositionnaturemorte-web.jpg "Florence Henri (New York 1893 - Compiègne 1982) 'Composition Nature morte [Still-life composition]' c. 1933")
![Florence Henri (New York 1893 - Compiègne 1982) 'Robert Delaunay' c. 1935 'Bretagne [Brittany]' 1937-1940](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/florencehenri_19_bretagne-web.jpg "Florence Henri (New York 1893 - Compiègne 1982) 'Robert Delaunay' c. 1935 'Bretagne [Brittany]' 1937-1940")
![Florence Henri (New York 1893 - Compiègne 1982) 'Structure (intérieur du Palais de l'Air, Paris, Exposition Universelle) [Structure (Interior of the Palais de l'Air, Paris, World's Fair)]' 1937](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/florencehenri_20_structure-web.jpg "Florence Henri (New York 1893 - Compiègne 1982) 'Structure (intérieur du Palais de l'Air, Paris, Exposition Universelle) [Structure (Interior of the Palais de l'Air, Paris, World's Fair)]' 1937")
![Florence Henri (New York 1893 - Compiègne 1982) 'Autoportrait [Self-portrait]' 1938](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/florencehenri_18_autoportrait-web.jpg "Florence Henri (New York 1893 - Compiègne 1982) 'Autoportrait [Self-portrait]' 1938")
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