My favourite era in the history of photography is the period between the wars.
The avant-garde photographers of the period were so inventive, challenging the act of looking through modern photographs featuring radical perspective, fragmentation, scale, concept, construction, colour, aesthetics, identity, gender, fashion, performance, photogram, photo collage, to name just a few.
Favourites include Germaine Krull (European, 1897-1985) and her magnificent book MÉTAL (1928) with its dissection of the Eiffel Tower; Florence Henri (Swiss born United States, 1893-1982) and her experimental compositions featuring mirrors and reflections; Claude Cahun (French, 1894-1954) and Marcel Moore (French, 1892-1972) and their subversion of gender norms; August Sander (German, 1876-1964) and his archetypal photographs from “People of the 20th Century”; Alexander Rodchenko (Russian, 1891-1956) and his revolutionary photographs; Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) revealing photographs of New York subway passengers; Jakob Tuggener’s (Swiss, 1904-1988) alchemical photographs picturing the world or work and industry; Helmar Lerski‘s(Swiss, 1871-1956) metamorphosis of the human face; and Margaret Bourke-White‘s (American, 1906-1971) modern industrial America to name, again, just a few.
There are so many fantastic photographers from this period, pushing the boundaries of what was possible in photography without loosing sight of the stories they wanted to tell, and the immediacy and presence of the photograph.
Paul Outerbridge Jr. is another from the period, a much under appreciated artist in the vanguard of experimental photography, “a bold innovator, transforming ordinary objects, such as milk bottles, collars, eggs, into fractured Cubist constructions of light and form…
Throughout his career, Outerbridge pursued abstraction as both a visual language and an artistic philosophy. His still lifes, nudes, and commercial commissions all demonstrate his preoccupation with fractured planes, geometric tension, and the transformation of the commonplace into the extraordinary.” (Press release)
That’s what I like about this man’s photographs: their bold but radical simplicity, clear visualisation of the pictorial statement, and formal abstracted beauty.
His photographs are, and will remain, a joy to be/hold.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Fahey/Klein Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Fahey/Klein Gallery is pleased to present Paul Outerbridge: Photographs, a landmark exhibition celebrating the visionary work of Paul Outerbridge (1896-1958), one of the most resourceful and provocative photographers of the twentieth century. This exhibition brings together a rare selection of Carbo prints, silver gelatin photographs, and platinum prints, tracing the evolution of a modernist whose daring vision helped redefine the possibilities of photography through Cubist experimentation and radical abstraction.
Outerbridge emerged in the 1920s as a bold innovator, transforming ordinary objects, such as milk bottles, collars, eggs, into fractured Cubist constructions of light and form. His platinum and silver gelatin prints reduced subjects to intersecting planes and geometric rhythms, revealing a structural beauty aligned with the avant-garde movements of his time. These works positioned him among artists and contemporaries such as Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, and Edward Steichen, and demonstrate his embrace of Cubism’s challenge: to fracture reality and reassemble it as pure abstraction.
In the 1930s, Outerbridge turned to the technically demanding Carbo process, creating some of the most vibrant and enduring color photographs of the era. Here too, abstraction was his guiding principle. Color became a tool not just for description, but for reimagining form, flattening, faceting, and animating planes into startling compositions that rival the abstract canvases of Picasso and Kandinsky. His photographs were hailed as both artistic and technical sensations. As Outerbridge observed:
“One very important difference between monochromatic and color photography is this: in black and white you suggest; in color you state.”
Outerbridge’s practice blurred the boundaries between fine art and commercial photography. His Ide Collar (1922), published in Vanity Fair, was more than an advertisement. It was celebrated as both functional and formally radical. A chessboard of fractured black-and-white squares disrupted by the crisp curve of a collar. Duchamp himself hung the photograph in his Paris studio, recognising its affinity with the readymade and its radical modernist edge.
Throughout his career, Outerbridge pursued abstraction as both a visual language and an artistic philosophy. His still lifes, nudes, and commercial commissions all demonstrate his preoccupation with fractured planes, geometric tension, and the transformation of the commonplace into the extraordinary.
Paul Outerbridge’s work appeared in Vanity Fair, Harper’s Bazaar, House Beautiful, and McCall’s, and in exhibitions worldwide. After relocating to Southern California in 1943, he continued to write about and practice photography until his death in 1958. Today, his technical virtuosity, daring subject matter, and relentless pursuit of beauty secure his place as a pioneer who expanded the medium’s expressive range.
Curators: Jim Ganz, senior curator of photographs at the Getty Museum in collaboration with Getty curators Mazie Harris, Virginia Heckert, Karen Hellman, Arpad Kovacs, Amanda Maddox, and Paul Martineau.
Imagine having these photographs in your collection!
My particular favourite is Hiromu Kira’s The Thinker (about 1930). For me it sums up our singular 1 thoughtful 2 imaginative 3 ephemeral 4 ether/real 5 existence.
“Aether is the fifth element in the series of classical elements thought to make up our experience of the universe… Although the Aether goes by as many names as there are cultures that have referenced it, the general meaning always transcends and includes the same four “material” elements [earth, air, water, fire]. It is sometimes more generally translated simply as “Spirit” when referring to an incorporeal living force behind all things. In Japanese, it is considered to be the void through which all other elements come into existence.” (Adam Amorastreya. “The End of the Aether,” on the Resonance website Feb 16, 2015 [Online] Cited 23/02/2020)
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the J. Paul Getty Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Carleton Watkins (American, 1829-1916) [Guadalupe Mill] 1860 Salted paper print Image (dome-topped): 33.8 × 41.6cm (13 5/16 × 16 3/8 in.) The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Hiromu Kira (1898-1991) was one of the most successful and well-known Japanese American photographers in prewar Los Angeles. He was born in Waipahu, O’ahu, Hawai’i on April 5, 1898, but was sent to Kumamoto, Japan, for his early education. When he was eighteen years old, he returned to the United States and settled in Seattle, Washington, where he first became interested in photography. In 1923, he submitted prints to the Seattle Photography Salon which accepted two of the photographs. In 1923, his work was accepted in the Pittsburg Salon and the Annual Competition of American Photography. He found work at the camera department of a local Seattle pharmacy and began meeting other Issei, Nisei and Kibei photographers such as Kyo Koike and joined the Seattle Camera Club.
In 1926, Kira moved to Los Angeles with his wife and two young children. Although he was never a member of the Japanese Camera Pictorialists of California, a group that was active in Los Angeles at that time, he developed strong friendships with club members associated with the pictorialist movement of the 1920s and ’30s such as K. Asaishi and T. K. Shindo. In 1928, Kira was named an associate of the Royal Photography Society, and the following year he was made a full fellow and began exhibiting both nationally and internationally. In 1929 alone, Kira exhibited ninety-six works in twenty-five different shows. In the late twenties, he worked at T. Iwata’s art store. In 1931, his photograph The Thinker, made while showing a customer how to use his newly purchased camera properly, appeared on the March 1931 issue of Vanity Fair magazine.
On December 5, two days before the attack on Pearl Harbor, Kira was selected to be included in the 25th Annual International Salon of the Camera Pictorialists of Los Angeles. Within a few months, he was forced to store his camera, photography books and prints in the basement of the Nishi Hongwanji Buddhist Temple in Little Tokyo, Los Angeles for the duration of World War II. He and his family were incarcerated at Santa Anita Assembly Center and the Gila River, Arizona concentration camp from 1942-1944, leaving the latter in April 1944.
Following his release, he lived briefly in Chicago before returning to Los Angeles in 1946, where he remained for the rest of his life. In Los Angeles, he worked as a photo retoucher and printer for the Disney, RKO and Columbia Picture studios but never exhibited again as he had before the war.
Text from the Hiromu Kira page on the Densho Encyclopedia website [Online] Cited 23/02/2020
Markéta Luskačová (born 1944) is a Czech photographer known for her series of photographs taken in Slovakia, Britain and elsewhere. Considered one of the best Czech social photographers to date, since the 1990s she has photographed children in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and also Poland…
In the 1970s and 1980s, the communist censorship attempted to conceal her international reputation. Her works were banned in Czechoslovakia, and the catalogues for the exhibition Pilgrims in the Victoria and Albert Museum were lost on their way to Czechoslovakia.
Luskačová started photographing London’s markets in 1974. In the markets of Portobello Road, Brixton and Spitalfields, she “[found] a vivid Dickensian staging”.
In 2016 she self-published a collection of photographs of street musicians, mostly taken in the markets of east London, under the title To Remember – London Street Musicians 1975-1990, and with an introduction by John Berger.
During the 1960s Nagano observed the period of intense economic growth in Japan, depicting the lives of Tokyo’s sarariman with some humour. The photographs of this period were only published in book form much later, as Dorīmu eiji and 1960 (1978 and 1990 respectively).
Nagano exhibited recent examples of his street photography in 1986, winning the Ina Nobuo Award. He published several books of his works since then, and won a number of awards. Nagano had a major retrospective at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography in 2000.
Nagano died two months short of his 94th birthday, on January 30, 2019.
A three-panel silkscreen print on glass, Succulent Screen depicts a detail view of one of the signature miter-cut windows of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Freeman House. The house was built in the Hollywood Hills in 1923, was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1971 as a California Historical Landmark and as Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument #247 in 1981; it was bequeathed to the USC School of Architecture in 1986.
The Getty Museum holds one of the largest collections of photographs in the United States, with more than 148,000 prints. However, only a small percentage of these have ever been exhibited at the Museum. To celebrate the 35th anniversary of the founding of the Department of Photographs, the Getty Museum is exhibiting 200 of these never-before-seen photographs and pull back the curtain on the work of the many professionals who care for this important collection in Unseen: 35 Years of Collecting Photographs, on view December 17, 2019 – March 8, 2020.
“Rather than showcasing again the best-known highlights of the collection, the time is right to dig deeper into our extraordinary holdings and present a selection of never-before-seen treasures. I have no doubt that visitors will be intrigued and delighted by the diversity and quality of the collection, whose riches will support exhibition and research well into the decades ahead,” says Timothy Potts, director of the J. Paul Getty Museum.
The exhibition includes photographs by dozens of artists from the birth of the medium in the mid-19th century to the present day. The selection also encompasses a variety of photographic processes, including the delicate cyanotypes of Anna Atkins (British, 1799-1871), Polaroids by Carrie Mae Weems (American, born 1953) and Mary Ellen Mark (American, 1940-2015) and an architectural photographic silkscreen on glass by Veronika Kellndorfer (German, born 1962).
Visual associations among photographs from different places and times illuminate the breadth of the Getty’s holdings and underscore a sense of continuity and change within the history of the medium. The curators have also personalised some of the labels in the central galleries to give voice to their individual insights and perspectives.
Growth of the collection
In 1984, as the J. Paul Getty Trust was in the early stages of conceiving what would eventually become the Getty Center, the Getty Museum created its Department of Photographs. It did so with the acquisition of several world-famous private collections, including those of Sam Wagstaff, André Jammes, Arnold Crane, and Volker Kahmen and Georg Heusch. These dramatic acquisitions immediately established the Museum as a leading center for photography.
While the founding collections are particularly strong in 19th and early 20th century European and American work, the department now embraces contemporary photography and, increasingly, work produced around the world. The collection continues to evolve, has been shaped by several generations of curators and benefits from the generosity of patrons and collectors.
Behind the scenes
In addition to the photographs on view, the exhibition spotlights members of Getty staff who care for, handle, and monitor these works of art.
“What the general public may not realise is that before a single photograph is hung on a wall, the object and its related data is managed by teams of professional conservators, registrars, curators, mount-makers, and many others,” says Jim Ganz, senior curator of photographs at the Getty Museum. “In addition to exposing works of art in the collection that are not well known, we wanted to shed light on the largely hidden activity that goes into caring for such a collection.”
Collecting Contemporary Photography
The department’s collecting of contemporary photography has been given strong encouragement by the Getty Museum Photographs Council, and a section of the exhibition will be dedicated to objects purchased with the Council’s funding. Established in 2005, this group supports the department’s curatorial program, especially with the acquisition of works made after 1945 by artists not yet represented or underrepresented in the collection. Since its founding, the Council has contributed over $3 million toward the purchase of nearly five hundred photographs by artists from Argentina, Australia, Canada, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, South Africa, and Taiwan, as well as Europe and the United States.
Looking ahead
The exhibition also looks towards the future of the collection, and includes a gallery of very newly-acquired works by Laura Aguilar (American, 1959-2018), Osamu Shiihara (Japanese, 1905-1974), as well as highlights of the Dennis Reed collection of photographs by Japanese American photographers. The selection represents the department’s strengthening of diversity in front of and behind the camera, the collection of works relevant to Southern California communities, and the acquisition of photographs that expand the understanding of the history of the medium.
“With this exhibition we celebrate the past 35 years of collecting, and look forward to the collection’s continued expansion, encompassing important work by artists all over the world and across three centuries,” adds Potts.
Unseen: 35 Years of Collecting Photographs is on view December 17, 2019 – March 8, 2020 at the Getty Center. The exhibition is organised by Jim Ganz, senior curator of photographs at the Getty Museum in collaboration with Getty curators Mazie Harris, Virginia Heckert, Karen Hellman, Arpad Kovacs, Amanda Maddox, and Paul Martineau.
Press release from the J. Paul Getty Museum [Online] Cited 09/20/2020
Julia Margaret Cameron (British born India, 1815-1879) [Spring] 1873 Albumen silver print 35.4 × 25.7cm (13 15/16 × 10 1/8 in.) The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Reverend William Ellis (British, 1794-1872) and Samuel Smith [Portrait of a Black Couple] about 1873 Albumen silver print 24.1 × 18.6cm (9 1/2 × 7 5/16 in.) The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Prince Roland Napoleon Bonaparte (French, 1858-1924) Jacobus Huch, 26 ans about 1888 Albumen silver print 15.9 × 10.9cm (6 1/4 × 4 5/16 in.) The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Underwood & Underwood (American, founded 1881, dissolved 1940s) Les Chiens du Front, eux-mems, portent des masques contre les gaz May 27, 1917 Rotogravure 22 × 20.4cm (8 11/16 × 8 1/16 in.) The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Munkácsi was a newspaper writer and photographer in Hungary, specialising in sports. At the time, sports action photography could only be done in bright light outdoors. Munkácsi’s innovation was to make sport photographs as meticulously composed action photographs, which required both artistic and technical skill.
Munkácsi’s break was to happen upon a fatal brawl, which he photographed. Those photos affected the outcome of the trial of the accused killer, and gave Munkácsi considerable notoriety. That notoriety helped him get a job in Berlin in 1928, for Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung, where his first published photo was a motorcycle splashing its way through a puddle. He also worked for the fashion magazine Die Dame.
More than just sports and fashion, he photographed Berliners, rich and poor, in all their activities. He traveled to Turkey, Sicily, Egypt, London, New York, and Liberia, for photo spreads in Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung.
The speed of the modern age and the excitement of new photographic viewpoints enthralled him, especially flying. There are aerial photographs; there are air-to-air photographs of a flying school for women; there are photographs from a Zeppelin, including the ones on his trip to Brazil, where he crossed over a boat whose passengers wave to the airship above.
On 21 March 1933, he photographed the fateful Day of Potsdam, when the aged President Paul von Hindenburg handed Germany over to Adolf Hitler. On assignment for Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung, he photographed Hitler’s inner circle, although he was a Jewish foreigner.
Munkácsi left for New York City… Munkácsi died in poverty and controversy. Several universities and museums declined to accept his archives, and they were scattered around the world.
Erwin Blumenfeld (American born Germany, 1897-1969)
Blumenfeld was born in Berlin on 26 January 1897. As a young man he worked in the clothes trade and wrote poetry. In 1918 he went to Amsterdam, where he came into contact with Paul Citroen and Georg Grosz. In 1933 he made a photomontage showing Hitler as a skull with a swastika on its forehead; this image was later used in Allied propaganda material in 1943.
He married Lena Citroen, with whom he had three children, in 1921. In 1922 he started a leather goods shop, which failed in 1935. He moved to Paris, where in 1936 he set up as a photographer and did free-lance work for French Vogue. After the outbreak of the Second World War he was placed in an internment camp; in 1941 he was able to emigrate to the United States. There he soon became a successful and well-paid fashion photographer, and worked as a free-lancer for Harper’s Bazaar, Life and American Vogue. Blumenfeld died in Rome on 4 July 1969.
Barbara Morgan (American, 1900-1992) City Shell 1938 Gelatin silver print 49.2 × 39.4cm (19 3/8 × 15 1/2 in.) Reproduced courtesy of the Barbara and Willard Morgan Photographs and Papers, Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Henry Holmes Smith (1909-1986) was an American photographer and one of the most influential fine art photography teachers of the mid 20th century. He was inspired by the work that had been done at the German Bauhaus and in 1937 was invited to teach photography at the New Bauhaus being founded by Moholy-Nagy in Chicago. After World War II, he spent many years teaching at Indiana University. His students included Jerry Uelsmann, Jack Welpott, Robert W. Fichter, Betty Hahn and Jaromir Stephany.
Smith was often involved in the cutting edge of photographic techniques: in 1931 he started experimenting with high-speed flash photography of action subjects, and started doing colour work in 1936 when few people considered it a serious artistic medium. His later images were nearly all abstract, often made directly (without a camera, i.e. like photograms), for instance images created by refracting light through splashes of water and corn syrup on a glass plate. However, although acclaimed as a photographic teacher, Holmes’ own photographs and other images did not achieve any real recognition from his peers.
Otto Steinert (German, 1915-1978) Schlammweiher 2 Negative 1953, print about 1960s Gelatin silver print 39.6 x 29.1cm (15 9/16 x 11 7/16 in.) The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles Courtesy Galerie Johannes Faber
Exhibition dates: 4th December, 2015 – 10th April, 2016
Curators: Dr. Shaune Lakin, Senior Curator of Photography at NGA with collaborator Anne O’Hehir, Curator of Photography at NGA
Man Ray (United States of America 1890 – France 1976) No title (Woman with closed eyes) c. 1928 Gelatin silver photograph Not signed, not dated. Stamp, verso, l.r., “Man Ray / 81 bis. Rue / Campagne Premiere / Paris / XIV”. Image: 8.9 x 12.8cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, purchased 1984
Despite a focus on the camera’s relationship to the beauty and pure form of the modern world – “the attraction and charm of the surface” – these photographs are more than just being skin deep. In their very straightforwardness the photographs propose a “rigorous sensitivity to form revealed patterns of beauty and order in the natural and man-made alike.” But more than the portrayal of something we would not see if it were not for the eye of the photographer, the lens of the camera, the speed of the film, the sensitivity of the paper, the design of the architect, the genetics of nature … is the mystery of life itself.
Modernist structures and mass-produced objects can never beat a good mystery. Just look at Man Ray’s Woman with closed eyes (c. 1928, above) or the look in the eyes of Robert Frank’s son, Pablo. You can never pin that down.
While form may be beauty, mystery will always be beautiful.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Please click on the photographs to view a larger version of the image.
Walker Evans (United States of America, 1903-1975) Graveyard and steel mill, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania 1935 Gelatin silver photograph Image: 19.1 h x 24.0cm Sheet: 20.2 x 25.2cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, purchased 1980
“The world is beautiful is an exhibition of photographs taken over the last 100 years from the National Gallery of Australia’s magnificent photography collection, including work by Diane Arbus, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Max Dupain, Bill Henson, Robert Mapplethorpe, Man Ray, Cindy Sherman and many more.
It draws its title from one of the twentieth-century’s great photographic moments, the publication of Albert Renger-Patzsch’s book The world is beautiful in 1928. Renger-Patzsch’s approach embodied his belief that ‘one should surely proceed from the essence of the object and attempt to represent it with photographic means alone’.
Inspired by this confidence in the medium, the exhibition looks at the way the camera interacts with things in the world. One of photography’s fundamental attributes is its capacity to adopt a range of relationships with its subject, based on the camera’s physical proximity to it. Indeed, one of the most basic decisions that a photographer makes is simply where he or she places the camera. The pictures in this exhibition literally take you on a photographic trip, from interior worlds and microscopic detail to the cosmic: from near to far away.
Together, these photographs capture some of the delight photographers take in turning their cameras on the world and re-imaging it, making it beautiful through the power of their vision and their capacity to help us see the world in new ways.”
Text from the National Gallery of Australia website
Near
Close up, the world can be surprising. There is an undeniable intensity and focus that comes with getting up close to people and objects. It is rude to stare, but photography has no such scruples.
Pioneers of the medium attempted to photograph organic forms through a microscope, making once-hidden worlds accessible. The pleasure photographers take in getting up close to their subject has followed the medium’s progress. This was especially the case during the twentieth century, when advances in photographic technology and profound shifts in our relationship to space brought about by events such as war often turned our attention away from the outside world.
For many photographers, the camera’s capacity to subject people and objects to close scrutiny has provided a way of paring back vision to its essence, to view the world unencumbered by emotion and sentiment. For others, getting up close is not just about physical proximity; it is also about psychological and emotional states that are otherwise difficult to represent. Experiences such as intimacy, love and emotional connection, as well as disquiet, anxiety and hostility, can all be suggested through the use of the close-up. Photographers have also used it literally to turn inwards, escaping into the imagination to create dreamworlds. The camera-eye really can see what the human eye cannot.
Text from the National Gallery of Australia website
Albert Renger-Patzsch (German, 1897-1966) Mantelpavian [Hamadryas Baboon] c. 1925 Gelatin silver photograph 23.8 x 16.8cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
“In photography one should surely proceed from the essence of the object and attempt to represent it with photographic terms alone.”
~ Albert Renger-Patzsch
Renger-Patzsch’s primary interest was in the object as a document, removed from its usual context and unencumbered with sentiment. Die Welt ist schön [The world is beautiful], published in Munich in 1928, is one of the great photographic books in the history of photography and its influence across the world was profound. It is an astounding study of the world, celebrating beauty wherever the photographer found it – in modernist structures and mass-produced objects or in plants and animals. The connection and continuity of industry to the natural world is conveyed by emphasising underlying structural and formal similarities. The Gallery has a major holding of works by Renger-Patzsch, including a copy of Die Welt ist schön and 121 vintage prints, most of which were reproduced in the book.
Renger-Patzsch was always firmly committed to the principle of the photograph as a document or record of an object. While the title for his most famous contribution to photography came from his publisher, he wanted his now-iconic 1928 book Die Welt ist schön (The world is beautiful) to be titled simply Die Dinge (Things). In 1937 he wrote that the images in his book, ‘consciously portray the attraction and charm of the surface’. Indeed, the power of these pictures resides in their straightforwardness.
“German photographer Albert Renger-Patzsch was a pioneering figure in the New Objectivity movement, which sought to engage with the world as clearly and precisely as possible.
Rejecting the sentimentality and idealism of a previous generation, Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) emerged as a tendency in German art, architecture and literature in the 1920s. Applying this attitude to the field of photography, Renger-Patzsch espoused the camera’s ability to produce a faithful recording of the world. ‘There must be an increase in the joy one takes in an object, and the photographer should be fully conscious of the splendid fidelity of reproduction made possible by his technique’, he wrote.
This selection reflects the range of subjects that Renger-Patzsch returned to throughout his career. It includes his early wildlife and botanical studies, images of traditional craftsmen, formal studies of mechanical equipment, commercial still lifes, and landscape and architectural studies. His images of the Ruhr region, where he moved in 1928, document the industrialisation of the area in almost encyclopaedic detail. All of his work demonstrates his sustained interest in the camera’s relationship to the beauty and complexity of the modern world.
In 1928 Renger-Patzsch published The World is Beautiful, a collection of one hundred photographs whose rigorous sensitivity to form revealed patterns of beauty and order in the natural and man-made alike. Embodying a new, distinctly modern way of looking at the world, the book established Renger-Patzsch as one of the most influential photographers of the twentieth century.”
Text by Emma Lewis on the Tate website [Online] Cited 01/04/2016. No longer available online
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) No title (Guadalupe, Mexico, 1924): from “Edward Weston fiftieth anniversary portfolio 1902-1952” 1924 Gelatin silver photograph 20.7 x 17.8cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, purchased 1981
In 1923 Weston travelled from San Francisco to Mexico City with his son, Chandler and his model and lover, Tina Modotti. The photographs he made there represented a startling, revolutionary breakthrough. Everything got stripped down to its essence, with objects isolated against neutral backgrounds. For these heroic head shots, he moved out of the studio, photographing in direct sunlight, from below and with a hand-held camera. They are monumental but still full of life: Weston was excited by the idea of capturing momentary expressions, in people he found ‘intense and dramatic’.
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) Pablo 1959 Gelatin silver photograph Image: 20.8 x 31.0cm Sheet: 27.0 x 35.4cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, purchased 1980
Frank set out on a two-year road trip across the States in 1955. The images he made of race and class divisions, poverty, alienated youth and loneliness expose America’s dark soul. Others, such as this haunting image of his son, Pablo, were more personal. A selection appeared in The Americans, published in Paris in 1958 and in the States the following year. Many saw it as a bitter indictment of the American Dream, others saw an evocative, melancholic vision of humanity that is deeply moving. As Jack Kerouac commented in his introduction to the American edition, Frank ‘sucked a sad, sweet, poem out of America’
“I try to reveal something about people, because they are so separate, so isolated, maybe it’s a way of bringing people together I don’t want to exploit people. I care about them.”
~ Carol Jerrems, 1977
Carol Jerrems became prominent in the 1970s as part of a new wave of young photographers. Influenced by the counter-culture values of the 1960s, they used art to comment on social issues and engender social change. Jerrems photographed associates, actors and musicians, always collaborating with her subjects, thereby declaring her presence as the photographer. Vale Street raises interesting questions about what is artifice and what is real in photography. She deliberately set up this image, employing her aspiring actress friend and two young men from her art classes at Heidelberg Technical School. Vale Street has achieved an iconic status in Australian photography; the depiction of a confident young woman taking on the world is an unforgettable one. It is an intimate group portrait that is at once bold and vulnerable. In 1975 it was thought to be an affirmation of free love and sexual licence. The image also appears to be about liberation from society’s norms and taboos – ‘we are all three bare-chested, we have tattoos and so what?’
The implication that this scene is perfectly natural is reinforced by locating the figures in a landscape. The young woman is strong and unafraid of the judgement of the viewer. The necklace around her neck is an ankh – a symbol of the new spiritualty of the Age of Aquarius and a re-affirmation of the ancient powers of women.
Paul Outerbridge (United States of America, 1896-1958; Paris 1925-1928, Berlin and London 1928) Nude lying on a love seat c. 1936 Carbro colour photograph 30.2 x 41cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, purchased 1980
Like the Australian-born Anton Bruehl, Paul Outerbridge studied at the Clarence White School of Photography in New York. White was keen to see photography establish itself as a practical art that could be used in the service of the rapidly expanding picture magazine industry. Within a year of enrolling in the school, Outerbridge’s work was appearing in Vogue and Vanity Fair. During his lifetime, Outerbridge was known for his commercial work, particularly his elegant, stylish still-life compositions which show the influence of earlier studies in painting. He was also admired for the excellence of his pioneering colour work, which was achieved by means of a complicated tri-colour carbro process.
Much of Outerbridge’s fame now rests on work that he made following more private obsessions. His fetishistic nude photographs of women are influenced primarily by eighteenth-century French painters such as Ingres. Although the depiction of nudes was a genre pursued from the inception of photography, Outerbridge’s interest in breaking down taboos resulted in this material, if known at all, being passed over or vilified in his lifetime. Outerbridge sought to express what he described as an ‘inner craving for perfection and beauty’ through these often mysterious, languid and richly toned images.
Cindy Sherman (American, b. 1954) Untitled #92 1981 Type C colour photograph 61.5 x 123.4cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, purchased 1983
This is one of 12 Centerfolds made by Sherman in 1981. The Centerfolds present Sherman posing in a range of situations, each suggesting heightened emotional states and violent narratives; these associations are augmented by the uncomfortably tight framing and the panoramic format used by Sherman across the series. Initially commissioned for the art magazine Artforum, the Centerfolds were never published because they were deemed, with their apparently voyeuristic points of view, to reaffirm misogynist views of women.
William Eggleston (American, b. 1939) Greenwood, Mississippi 1973, printed 1979 Dye transfer colour photograph Image: 29.5 x 45.4cm Sheet: 40.2 x 50.8cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, purchased 1980
With its intense red, Eggleston’s picture of the spare room in a friend’s home is one of the most iconic of all colour photographs. Often called The red room, this photograph was intended to be shocking: Eggleston described the effect of the colour as like ‘red blood that is wet on the wall’. But the radicalness of the picture is not just in its juicy (and impossible to reproduce) redness; it is also found in the strange view it provides of a domestic interior, one that Eggleston has described as a ‘fly’s eye view’.
Imogen Cunningham (American, 1883-1976) Magnolia Blossom 1925 Gelatin silver photograph Image: 17.1 x 34.6cm Mount: 38.2 x 50.7cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, purchased 1978
During the 1920s, raising three young sons, Cunningham began to focus on her immediate surroundings. This restricted environment encouraged Cunningham to develop a new way of working, as she began to place her camera closer to the subject: to zebras on a trip to the zoo, to snakes brought to her by her sons, and perhaps most famously to the magnolia blossoms and calla lilies she grew in her garden. Observing what she termed the ‘paradox of expansion via reduction’, the intensity and focus attendant to this way of seeing flooded her work with sensuality and reductive power.
Olive Cotton (Australian, 1911-2003) Skeleton leaf 1964 Gelatin silver photograph Image: 50.4 x 40.8cm Sheet: 57.8 x 47.6cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, purchased 1987
This leaf skeleton – a leaf that has had its pulp removed with heat and soda – was probably photographed in front of a window in Cotton’s home near Cowra, NSW. Since the 1930s Cotton had been drawn to the close study of nature, and many of her best photographs feature close-ups of flowers, tufts of grass and foliage. This photograph is notable because it was taken in the studio, and reflects the austerity and simplicity that pervaded Cotton’s work in the decades after the Second World War.
Lee Friedlander (American, b. 1934) Nashville, 1963 1963 Gelatin silver photograph Image: 28.2 x 18.7cm Sheet: 35.3 x 27.8cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, purchased 1981
Middle distance
The further away we move from a subject, the more it and its story open up to us. While the close-up or compressed view tends to be very frontal (the camera presses up against the subject), the defining characteristic of much mid-century photography was its highly mobile relationship to space: its extraordinary capacity to survey and to organise the world.
The space between the camera and its subject can suggest impartiality and detachment. Documentary photographers and photojournalists, for example, open their cameras up to their subjects, as if to ‘let them speak’. But the depiction of the space between the camera and its subject, and the way that it is rendered through the camera’s depth of field, can also reflect decision making on the part of the photographer. By adjusting the camera’s settings, and thus choosing to render part of the subject in focus, the photographer can direct our focus and attention to certain parts of an image. In this way, photographers put forward an argument based on their world view. Photography can change the way we think about the world.
Text from the National Gallery of Australia website
Ilse Bing (Germany 1899 – United States of America 1998; France 1930-1941 United States from 1941) Eiffel Tower, Paris 1931 Gelatin silver photograph Signed and dated recto, l.r., pen and ink “Ilse Bing/ 1931” Image: 22.3 x 28.2cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, purchased 1989
Bing took up photography in 1928 and quickly developed a reputation as a photojournalist and photographer of modernist architecture. Inspired by an exhibition of modern photography and the work of Paris-based photographer Florence Henri, Bing moved to Paris 1930 and quickly became associated with the city’s photographic avant-garde. Bing worked exclusively with the fledgling Leica 35mm-format camera; her interest in the pictorial possibilities of the hand-held Leica can clearly be seen in this striking view of the Eiffel Tower.
Winogrand had a tremendous capacity to photograph people in public spaces completely unawares. This image records a group of visitors to the 1964 World’s Fair; it focuses on three young women – Ann Amy Shea, whispering into the ear of Janet Stanley, while their friend Karen Marcato Kiaer naps on Stanley’s bosom. The figures fill the space between the picture’s fore- and middle-grounds, to the extent of allowing the viewer to examine people’s expressions and interactions in close detail. This in turn allows us to encroach on the personal space of people we don’t know.
Diane Arbus (American, 1923-1971) Child with toy hand grenade, in Central Park, New York City 1962 Gelatin silver photograph Image: 20 x 17.2cm Sheet: 32.8 x 27.6cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, purchased 1980
During workshops with Lisette Model, Arbus was encouraged to develop a direct, uncompromising approach to her subjects. She did this using the square configuration of a medium-format camera which Arbus most usually printed full frame with no cropping. Model also convinced Arbus, who had been interested in myth and ritual, that the more specific her approach to her subjects, the more universal the message. In many ways this image of a boy caught hamming it up in Central Park, with his contorted body and grimacing face, captures and prefigures many of the anxieties of America during the sixties, a country caught in an unwinnable war in Vietnam and undergoing seismic social change.
Henri Cartier-Bresson (French, 1908-2004) Rue Mouffetard, Paris 1954, printed c. 1980 Gelatin silver photograph Image: 35.9 x 24.2cm Sheet: 39.4 x 29.6cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, purchased 1982
Helen Levitt (United States of America, 1913 – 2009) New York 1972 Dye transfer colour photograph Image: 23.9 x 36.2cm Sheet: 35.6 x 42.9cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, purchased 1984
“The streets of the poor quarters of the great cities are, above all, a theatre and a battleground.”
~ Helen Levitt
Inspired by seeing work by Walker Evans and Henri Cartier-Bresson in 1935, Levitt took to the streets. Children became her most enduring subject. Like Evans, Levitt was famously shy and self-effacing, seeking to shoot unobserved by fitting a prism finder on her Leica. Her approach eschews the sensational; instead she is interested in capturing small, idiosyncratic actions in the everyday. Her images were often shot through with a gentle, lyrical humour though a dark strangeness also surfaces at times.
Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009) New York 1972 Dye transfer colour photograph Image: 23.4 x 35.6cm Sheet: 35.4 x 42.9cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, purchased 1984
Ernst Haas (Austria 1921 – United States of America 1986; United States from 1951) Albuquerque, New Mexico 1969 Dye transfer colour photograph Image: 44.9 x 67.8cm Sheet: 52.3 x 75.7cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, purchased 2000
For Haas, colour photography represented the end of the grey and bitter war years and he started seriously working in the medium after moving to America in 1951. Work on his photoessay, Land of Enchantment and film stills assignments for The Misfits, The Bible and Little Big Man took Haas to the Southwest. The desert landscape of Albuquerque, located on Route 66, had been totally transformed by progress since the 1920s. Photographing the street after rain, Haas has signified that evolution by way of his distinctive ability to translate the world into shimmering energy.
Photography has a long-standing interest in faraway places. In 1840, right in photography’s infancy, astronomical photography was launched when the first photograph of the moon was made. As photographic imaging technology has improved, so has the medium’s capacity to make faraway places accessible to us.
Photography can bring foreign places and people closer to home, or collect together images of places and structures that are located in different places. It can also attempt to give a picture to experiences that are otherwise difficult to grasp or represent, such as complex weather events or transcendental phenomena.
Against the odds, there are photographers who make images that are about what cannot be seen. Faraway is often used as a metaphor for thinking about the ineffable and the inexplicable. Science and spirit go hand-in-hand. ‘The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious’, Albert Einstein believed. Photographers can take us to new worlds.
Text from the National Gallery of Australia website
Ansel Adams (San Francisco, California, United States of America 1902 – Carmel, California, United States of America 1984) Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico 1941 Ansel Adams Museum Set Gelatin silver photograph Image: 38.6 x 49cm Mount: 55.6 x 71cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, purchased 1980
Adams became the most famous landscape photographer in the world on the back of his images of America’s West. While mass tourism was invading these wilderness areas, Adams’s photographs show only untouched natural splendour. His landscapes are remarkable for their deep, clear space, distinguishable by an uncanny stillness and clarity. The story of Moonrise is legendary: driving through the Chama River Valley toward Española, Adams just managed by a few seconds to catch this fleeting moment before the dying sunlight stopped illuminating the crosses in the graveyard. Through hours of darkroom manipulation and wizardry, Adams created an image of almost mystical unworldliness.
Tracey Moffatt (Australian, b. 1960) Up in the sky [Up in the sky – a set of 25 photolithographs] 1997 No. 8 in a series of 25 Photolithograph Image: 61.0 x 76.0cm Sheet: 72.0 x 102.0cm KODAK (Australasia) PTY LTD Fund 1997 National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Up in the sky is unusual in Moffatt’s oeuvre for being shot out of doors on location. Her photomedia practice is informed by an upbringing watching television, fascinated by film and pop culture. This series takes many of its visual cues from Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Accattone of 1961 as well as the Mad Max series – the references, twisted and re-imagined, are like half-forgotten memories. She addresses race and violence, presenting a loose narrative set against the backdrop of an outback town. The sense of unease is palpable: Moffatt here is a masterful manipulator of mood.
Laurence Aberhart (Aotearoa New Zealand, b. 1949) Taranaki, from Oeo Road, under moonlight, 27-28 September 1999 1999 Gelatin silver photograph 19.4 x 24.3cm Gift of Peter Fay 2005 National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
For four decades, Aberhart has photographed the Taranaki region of New Zealand’s North Island, including its settled landscape and its most distinctive feature, the sacred TeMounga (Mount) Taranaki. Using an 8 x 10-inch view camera, Aberhart has over time built up an important archive documenting the social geography and landscape of the Taranaki. Aberhart describes the conical mountain as a ‘great physical and spiritual entity’ and sees his photographs of it as a counterbalance to the countless images of the mountain that circulate on tea towels and postcards.
Exhibition dates: 8th February – 2nd November 2014
The Edward Steichen Photography Galleries, third floor
Curators: Organised by Quentin Bajac, The Joel and Anne Ehrenkranz Chief Curator, with Lucy Gallun, Assistant Curator, Department of Photography
Bruce Nauman (American, b. 1941) Composite Photo of Two Messes on the Studio Floor
1967
Gelatin silver print
40 1/2″ x 10′ 3″ (102.9 x 312.4cm)
Gift of Philip Johnson
Museum of Modern Art Collection
A bumper two part posting on this fascinating, multi-dimensional subject: photographic practices in the studio, which may be a stage, a laboratory, or a playground. The exhibition occupies all MoMA’s six photography galleries, each gallery with its own sub theme, namely, Surveying the Studio, The Studio as Stage, The Studio as Set, A Neutral Space, Virtual Spaces and The Studio, from Laboratory to Playground.
The review of this exhibition “When a Form Is Given Its Room to Play” by Roberta Smith on the New York Times website (6th February 2014) damns with faint praise. The show is a “fabulous yet irritating survey” which “dazzles but often seems slow and repetitive.” Smith then goes on to list the usual suspects: “And so we get professional portraitists, commercial photographers, lovers of still life, darkroom experimenters, artists documenting performances and a few generations of postmodernists, dead and alive, known and not so, exploring the ways and means of the medium. This adds up to plenty to see: around 180 images from the 1850s to the present by some 90 photographers and artists. The usual suspects here range from Julia Margaret Cameron to Thomas Ruff, with Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Lucas Samaras, John Divola and Barbara Kasten in between.” There are a few less familiar and postmodern artists thrown in for good measure, but all is “dominated by black-and-white images in an age when colour reigns.” The reviewer then rightly notes the paucity of “postmodern photography of the 1980s, much of it made by women, that did a lot to reorient contemporary photo artists to the studio. It is a little startling for an exhibition that includes so many younger artists dealing with the artifice of the photograph (Ms. Belin, for example) to represent the Pictures Generation artists with only Cindy Sherman, James Casebere and (in collaboration with Allan McCollum) Laurie Simmons” before finishing on a positive note (I think!), noting that the curators “had aimed for a satisfying viewing experience, which, these days, is something to be grateful for.”
SOMETHING TO BE GRATEFUL FOR… OH, TO BE SO LUCKY IN AUSTRALIA!
Just to have the opportunity to view an exhibition of this quality, depth and breadth of concept would be an amazing thing. Even a third of the number of photographs (say 60 works) that address this subject at any one of the major institutions around Australia would be fantastic but, of that, there is not a hope in hell.
Think Marcus, think… when was the last major exhibition, I mean LARGE exhibition, at a public institution in Australia that actually addressed specific ISSUES and CONCEPTS in photography (such as this), not just putting on monocular exhibitions about an artists work or exhibitions about a regions photographs? Ah, well… you know, I can’t really remember. Perhaps the American Dreams exhibition at Bendigo Art Gallery, but that was a GENERAL exhibition about 20th century photography with no strong investigative conceptual theme and it was imported from George Eastman House.
Here in Australia, all we can do is look from afar, purchase the catalogue and wonder wistfully what the exhibition actually looks like and what we are missing out on. MoMA sent me just 10 images media images. I have spent hours scouring the Internet for other images to fill the void of knowledge and vision (and then cleaning those sometimes degraded images), so that those of us not privileged enough to be able to visit New York may gain a more comprehensive understanding of what this exhibition, and this multi-faceted dimension of photography, is all about. It’s a pity that our venerable institutions and the photography curators in them seem to have had a paucity of ideas when it comes to expounding interesting critiques of the medium over the last twenty years or so. What a missed opportunity.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to MoMA for allowing me to publish six of the photographs in the posting. The rest of the images were sourced from the Internet. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Installation view of the exhibition A World of Its Own: Photographic Practices in the Studio at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York
Surveying the Studio
Uta Barth (American, b. 1958) Sundial (07.13) 2007
Chromogenic colour prints
each 30 x 28 1/4″ (76.2 x 71.8cm)
The Photography Council Fund
Museum of Modern Art Collection
Geta Brâtescu (Romanian, 1926-2018) The Studio. Invocation of the Drawing (L’Atelier. Invocarea desenului)
1979
Gelatin silver prints with tempera on paper
33 1/16 x 27 9/16″ (84 x 70cm)
Modern Women’s Fund
Museum of Modern Art Collection
Geta Brătescu was a Romanian visual artist with works in drawing, collage, photography, performance, illustration and film. In 2008, Brătescu received an honorary doctorate from the Bucharest National University of Arts for “her outstanding contributions to the development of contemporary Romanian art”. Brătescu was artistic director of literature and art magazine Secolul 21. A major retrospective of her work was held at the National Museum of Art of Romania in December 1999. In 2015 Brătescu’s first UK solo exhibition was held at the Tate Liverpool. In 2017, she was selected to represent Romania at the 57th Venice Biennale.
Man Ray (American, 1890-1976) Laboratory of the Future 1935
Gelatin silver print
9 1/16 x 7″ (23.1 x 17.8cm)
Gift of James Johnson Sweeney
Museum of Modern Art Collection
Charles Sheeler (American, 1883-1965) Cactus and Photographer’s Lamp, New York 1931
Gelatin silver print
9 1/2 x 6 5/8″ (23.5 x 16.6cm)
Gift of Samuel M. Kootz
Museum of Modern Art Collection
Bringing together photographs, films, videos, and works in other mediums, A World of Its Own: Photographic Practices in the Studio examines the ways in which photographers and artists using photography have worked and experimented within the four walls of the studio space, from photography’s inception to today. Featuring both new acquisitions and works from the Museum’s collection that have not been on view in recent years, A World of Its Own includes approximately 180 works, by approximately 90 artists, such as Berenice Abbott, Uta Barth, Zeke Berman, Karl Blossfeldt, Constantin Brancusi, Geta Brătescu, Harry Callahan, Robert Frank, Jan Groover, Barbara Kasten, Man Ray, Bruce Nauman, Paul Outerbridge, Irving Penn, Adrian Piper, Edward Steichen, William Wegman, and Edward Weston.
The exhibition considers the various roles played by the photographer’s studio as an autonomous space; depending on the time period, context, and the individual motivations (commercial, artistic, scientific) and sensibilities of the photographer, the studio may be a stage, a laboratory, or a playground. Organised thematically, the display unfolds in multiple chapters. Throughout the 20th century, artists have explored their studio spaces using photography, from the use of composed theatrical tableaux (in photographs by Julia Margaret Cameron or Cindy Sherman) to neutral, blank backdrops (Richard Avedon, Robert Mapplethorpe); from the construction of architectural sets within the studio space (Francis Bruguière, Thomas Demand) to chemical procedures conducted within the darkroom (Walead Beshty, Christian Marclay); and from precise recordings of time and motion (Eadweard Muybridge, Dr. Harold E. Edgerton) to amateurish or playful experimentation (Roman Signer, Peter Fischli / David Weiss). A World of Its Own offers another history of photography, a photography created within the walls of the studio, and yet as groundbreaking and inventive as its seemingly more extroverted counterpart, street photography.”
Text from the MoMA website
The exhibition is divided into 6 themes each with its own gallery space:
1/ Surveying the Studio
2/ The Studio as Stage
3/ The Studio as Set
4/ A Neutral Space
5/ Virtual Spaces
6/ The Studio, from Laboratory to Playground
The Studio as Stage
Unidentified photographer (French?) Untitled
c. 1855
Albumen silver print from a wet-collodion glass negative
9 3/16 × 6 1/8″ (23.4 × 15.5cm)
Gift of Paul F. Walter
Museum of Modern Art Collection
George Platt Lynes (American, 1907-1955) Untitled 1941
Gelatin silver print
7 5/8 x 9 5/8″ (19.2 x 24.4cm)
Anonymous gift
Museum of Modern Art Collection
Lucas Samaras (American born Greece, 1936-2024) Auto Polaroid 1969-1971
Eighteen black-and-white instant prints (Polapan), with hand-applied ink
Each 3 3/4 x 2 15/16″ (9.5 x 7.4cm)
Overall 14 5/8 x 24″ (37.2 x 61cm)
Gift of Robert and Gayle Greenhill
Museum of Modern Art Collection
Working in the digital realm long before it was associated with fine art, Samaras pioneered radical new modes of image making throughout his storied career, pushing and redefining the boundaries of portraiture and self-portraiture over the course of seven decades. Centering on the body and the psyche, Samaras’s autobiographical work across photography, painting, installation, assemblage, drawing, textile, and sculpture often meditates on the malleable, shapeshifting nature of selfhood. “I like remaking myself in photography,” the artist once said. …
In the late 1960s, Samaras began working with a Polaroid 360 camera, creating his iconic Auto Polaroids by altering hundreds of images, mostly self-portraits, with applications of ink by his own hand. In 1973, using a Polaroid SX-70, he took this collagist approach further by manipulating the wet emulsion of the film with a stylus or his fingertip before the chemicals set. The resulting distortions in his Photo-Transformations series took on abstract, otherworldly effects, which he would continue exploring amid the rise of other image making technologies in the following decades.
Lucas Samaras (American, 1936-2024) Auto Polaroid (details) 1969-1971
Eighteen black-and-white instant prints (Polapan), with hand-applied ink
Each 3 3/4 x 2 15/16″ (9.5 x 7.4cm)
Overall 14 5/8 x 24″ (37.2 x 61cm)
Gift of Robert and Gayle Greenhill
Museum of Modern Art Collection
Julia Margaret Cameron (British, 1815-1879) Madonna with Children 1864
Albumen silver print
10 1/2 x 8 5/8″ (26.7 x 21.9cm)
Gift of Shirley C. Burden
Museum of Modern Art Collection
Julia Margaret Cameron (British, 1815-1879) Untitled (Mary Ryan?) c. 1867
Albumen silver print
13 3/16 x 11″ (33.5 x 27.9cm)
Gift of Shirley C. Burden
Museum of Modern Art Collection
Nadar (Gaspard-Félix Tournachon) (French, 1820-1910) Adrien Tournachon (French, 1825-1903) Pierrot Surprised 1854-1855
Albumen silver print
11 1/4 x 8 3/16″ (28.6 x 20.8cm)
Suzanne Winsberg Collection. Gift of Suzanne Winsberg
Museum of Modern Art Collection
Maurice Tabard (French, 1897-1984) Untitled 1929
Gelatin silver print
6 9/16 x 6 1/2″ (16.7 x 16.5cm)
Gift of Robert Shapazian
Museum of Modern Art Collection
Edward Steichen (American born Luxembourg, 1879-1973) Anna May Wong 1930
Gelatin silver print
16 9/16 x 13 7/16″ (42.1 x 34.1cm)
Gift of the artist
Museum of Modern Art Collection
“Taking people away from their natural circumstances and putting them into the studio in front of a camera did not simply isolate them, it transformed them. Sometimes the change was subtle; sometimes it was great enough to be almost shocking. But always there was transformation.”
~ Irving Penn 1974
Cindy Sherman (American, b. 1954) Untitled #131 1983
Chromogenic colour print
35 x 16 1/2″ (89 x 41.9cm)
Joel and Anne Ehrenkranz Fund
Museum of Modern Art Collection
The Studio as Set
Barbara Kasten (American, b. 1936) Construct I-F 1979
Colour instant print (Polaroid Polacolor)
9 1/2 x 7 1/2″ (24.0 x 19.0cm)
Acquired through the generosity of Wendy Larsen
Museum of Modern Art Collection
Barbara Kasten (American, b. 1936) Construct NYC 17 1984
Silver dye bleach print
29 3/8 x 37 1/16″ (74.7 x 94.1cm)
Gift of Foster Goldstrom
Museum of Modern Art Collection
James Casebere (American, b. 1953) Subdivision with Spotlight 1982
Gelatin silver print
14 13/16 x 18 15/16″ (37.6 x 48.1cm)
Purchase
Museum of Modern Art Collection
Francis Bruguière (American, 1879-1945) Light Abstraction c. 1925
Gelatin silver print
9 15/16 x 7 15/16″ (25.2 x 20.2cm)
Gift of Arnold Newman
Museum of Modern Art Collection
Francis Joseph Bruguière (15 October 1879 – 8 May 1945) was an American photographer.
Francis Bruguière was born in San Francisco, California, to Emile Antoine Bruguière (1849-1900) and Josephine Frederikke (Sather) Bruguière (1845-1915). He was the youngest of four sons born into a wealthy banking family and was privately educated. His brothers were painter and physician Peder Sather Bruguière (1874-1967), Emile Antoine Bruguiere Jr. (1877-1935), and Louis Sather Bruguière (1882-1954), who married wealthy heiress Margaret Post Van Alen. He was also a grandson of banker Peder Sather. His mother died in the 1915 sinking of the British ocean liner SS Arabic by a German submarine.
In 1905, having studied painting in Europe, Bruguière became acquainted with photographer and modern art promoter Alfred Stieglitz (who accepted him as a Fellow of the Photo-secession), and set up a studio in San Francisco, recording in a Pictorialist style images of the city after the earthquake and fire; some of them were reproduced in a book called San Francisco in 1918. He co-curated the photographic exhibition at the 1915 Panama-California Exposition in San Diego, and nine of his photographs were included in The Evanescent City (1916) by George Sterling.
In 1918, following the decline of the family fortune, he moved to New York City where he made his living by photographing for Vanity Fair, Vogue, and Harper’s Bazaar. Soon he was appointed the official photographer of the New York Theatre Guild. In this role he photographed the British stage actress Rosalinde Fuller, who was debuting in What’s in a Name? (1920), and she partnered him for the rest of his life.
Throughout his life, Bruguière experimented with multiple-exposure, solarization (years ahead of Man Ray), original processes, abstracts, photograms, and the response of commercially available film to light of various wavelengths. Until his one-man show at the Art Centre of New York in 1927, he showed this work only to friends. In the mid-1920s, he planned to make a film called The Way, depicting stages in a man’s life, to be played by Sebastian Droste with Rosalinde doing all the female parts. To obtain funding, Bruguière took photographs of projected scenes, but Droste died before filming started; so we are left with only the still pictures.
In 1927 they moved to London, where Bruguière co-created the first British abstract film, Light Rhythms, with Oswell Blakeston. Long thought to have been lost, it has now been recovered. During World War II, he returned to painting.
Jaromír Funke (1 August 1896 – 22 March 1945) was a leading Czech photographer during the 1920s and 1930s.
Funke was recognised for his “photographic games” using mirrors, lights, and insignificant objects, such as plates, bottles, or glasses, to create unique works. In his still life imagery he created abstracts of forms and shadows reminiscent of photograms. His work was regarded as logical, original and expressive in nature. A typical feature of Funke’s work would be the “dynamic diagonal.”
Paul Outerbridge (American, 1896-1958) Images de Deauville 1936
Tri-colour carbro print
15 3/4 x 12 1/4″ (40 x 31.1cm)
Gift of Mrs. Ralph Seward Allen
Museum of Modern Art Collection
Elad Lassry (Israeli, b. 1977) Nailpolish 2009
Chromogenic colour print
14 1/2 x 11 1/2″ (36.8 x 29.2cm)
Fund for the Twenty-First Century
Museum of Modern Art Collection
The Museum of Modern Art 11 West 53 Street
New York, NY 10019 Phone: (212) 708-9400
Opening hours:
10.30am – 5.30pm
Open seven days a week
Curators: Felicity Grobien, curatorial assistant, Modern Art Department, Städel Museum; Dr Felix Krämer, head of the Modern Art Department at the Städel Museum
Roger Fenton (British, 1819-1869) London: The British Museum
1857
Albumen print mounted on cardboard
32.2 x 43cm
Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main Photo: Städel Museum – ARTOTHEK
There are some absolutely stunning images in this posting. It has been a great pleasure to put the posting together, allowing me the chance to sequence Roger Fenton’s elegiac London: The British Museum (1857, below) next to Werner Mantz’s minimalist masterpiece Cologne: Bridge (c. 1927, below), followed by Carlo Naya’s serene Venice: View of the Marciana Library (c. 1875, below) and Albert Renger-Patzsch’s sublime but disturbing (because of the association of the place) Buchenwald in November (c. 1954, below). What four images to put together – where else would I get the chance to do that? And then to follow it up with the visual association of the Royal Prussian Institute of Survey Photography’s Cologne: Cathedral (1889, below) with Otto Steinert’s Luminogram (1952, below). This is the stuff that you dream of!
The more I study photography, the more I am impressed by the depth of relatively unknown Eastern European photographers from countries such as Hungary, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Bulgaria and Turkey. In this posting I have included what details I could find on the artists Václav Jíru, Václav Chochola and the well known Czech photographer František Drtikol. The reproduction of his image Crucified (before 1914. below) is the best that you will find of this image on the web.
I would love to do more specific postings on these East European photographers if any museum has collections that they would like to advertise more widely.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
PS. Lichtbilder = light images.
Many thankx to the Städel Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Installation view of the exhibition Lichtbilder. Photography at the Städel Museum from the Beginnings to 1960 at the Städel Museum, Frankfurt
Installation view of the exhibition Lichtbilder. Photography at the Städel Museum from the Beginnings to 1960 at the Städel Museum, Frankfurt showing Nadar’s George Sand (1864, below)
Nadar [Gaspard Félix Tournachon] (French, 1820-1910) George Sand (Amandine-Aurore-Lucile Dupin)
c. 1864
Installation view of the exhibition Lichtbilder. Photography at the Städel Museum from the Beginnings to 1960 at the Städel Museum, Frankfurt showing
(left)
August Sander (German, 1876-1964) Country girls 1925
(right)
August Sander (German, 1876-1964) Portrait of Anton Räderscheidt 1927
Otto Steinert (1915-1978) Ein-Fuß-Gänger (installation view)
1950
The Subjective Gaze
After the Second World War a young generation took an innovative approach to the medium of photography. Distancing themselves from the propaganda and heroic photography of the National Socialist era, they looked at the avant grade photography of the 1900s. Among those innovators were the six photographers who founded the fotoform group in 1949: Peter Keetman, Siegfried Lauterwasser, Wolfgang Reisewitz, Toni Schneiders, Otto Steinert and Ludwig Windstosser. Emphasising formal issues they focused on the artist potential of photography and a free and experimental way of working. Abstract and minimal images as well as de-familiarised and dreamlike compositions were the results.
Otto Steinert, who taught art photography initially in Saarbrücken and later in Essen, was soon perceived as the key figure of the movement. In the years to come his exhibitions and publications stood for ‘subjective photography’. He underlined the photographer’s role as artist. By arguing that the camera is inevitably handled by a subjective and calculating author, Steinert weakened the notion of photographic objectivity.
Wall text from the exhibition
Otto Steinert (German, 1915-1978) Ein-Fuß-Gänger
1950
Gelatin silver print
28.5 × 39cm
Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main Photo: Städel Museum – ARTOTHEK
Installation view of the exhibition Lichtbilder. Photography at the Städel Museum from the Beginnings to 1960 at the Städel Museum, Frankfurt
Rudolf Koppitz(Austrian, 1884-1936) Head of a Man with Helmet (installation view)
c. 1929 Carbon print, printed c. 1929
49.8 × 48.4cm
Städel Museum, Frankfurt a. M., donated by Annette and Rudolf Kicken 2013
Installation view of the exhibition Lichtbilder. Photography at the Städel Museum from the Beginnings to 1960 at the Städel Museum, Frankfurt showing at right, Otto Steinert’s La Comtesse de Fleury (1952, below)
In 1845, the Frankfurt Städel was the first art museum in the world to exhibit photographic works. The invention of the new medium had been announced in Paris just six years earlier, making 2014 the 175th anniversary of that momentous event. In keeping with the tradition it thus established, the Städel is now devoting a comprehensive special exhibition to European photo art – Lichtbilder. Photography at the Städel Museum from the Beginnings to 1960 – presenting the photographic holdings of the museum’s Modern Art Department, which have recently undergone significant expansion. From 9 July to 5 October 2014, in addition to such pioneers as Nadar, Gustave Le Gray, Roger Fenton and Julia Margaret Cameron, the show will feature photography heroes of the twentieth century such as August Sander, Albert Renger-Patzsch, Man Ray, Dora Maar or Otto Steinert, while moreover highlighting virtually forgotten members of the profession. While giving an overview of the Städel’s early photographic holdings and the acquisitions of the past years, the exhibition will also shed light on the history of the medium from its beginnings to 1960.
“Even if we think of the presentation of artistic photography in an art museum as something still relatively new, the Städel already began staging photo exhibitions in the mid 1840s. We take special pleasure in drawing attention to this pioneering feat and – with the Lichtbilder exhibition – now, for the first time, providing insight into our collection of early photography, which has been decisively expanded over the past years through new purchases and generous gifts,” comments Städel director Max Hollein. Felix Krämer, one of the show’s curators, explains: “With Lichtbilder we would like to stimulate a more intensive exploration of the multifaceted history of a medium which, even today, is often still underestimated.”
The first mention of a photo exhibition at the Städel Museum dates from all the way back to 1845, when the Frankfurt Intelligenz Blatt – the official city bulletin – ran an ad. This is the earliest known announcement of a photography show in an art museum worldwide. The 1845 exhibition featured portraits by the photographer Sigismund Gerothwohl of Frankfurt, the proprietor of one of the city’s first photo studios who has meanwhile all but fallen into oblivion. Like many other institutions at the time, the Städel Museum had a study collection which also included photographs: then Städel director Johann David Passavant began collecting photos for the museum in the 1850s. In addition to reproductions of artworks, the photographic holdings comprised genre scenes, landscapes and cityscapes by such well-known pioneers in the medium as Maxime Du Camp, Wilhelm Hammerschmidt, Carl Friedrich Mylius or Giorgio Sommer. An 1852 exhibition showcasing views of Venice launched a tradition of presentations of photographic works from the Städel’s own collection.
Whereas the photos exhibited in the Städel in the nineteenth century were contemporary works, the show Lichtbilder will focus on the development of artistic photography. The point of departure will be the museum’s own photographic holdings, which were significantly expanded through major acquisitions from the collections of Uta and Wilfried Wiegand in 2011 and Annette and Rudolf Kicken in 2013, and which continue to grow today through new purchases. The exhibition’s nine chronologically ordered sections will span the history of the medium from the beginnings of paper photography in the 1840s to the photographic experiments of the fotoform Group in the 1950s.
In the entrance area to the show, the visitor will be greeted by a selection of Raphael reproductions presented by the Städel in exhibitions in 1859 and 1860. They feature full views and details of the cartoons executed by Raphael to serve as reference images for the Sistine Chapel tapestries. The art admirer was no longer compelled to travel to London to marvel at the Raphael cartoons at Hampton Court, but could now examine these masterworks in large-scale photographs right at the Städel. The following exhibition room is devoted to the pioneers of photography of the 1840s to ’60s. No sooner had the invention of the new medium been announced in 1839 than enthusiasts set about conquering the world with the photographic image. The aspiration of the bourgeoisie for self-representation in accordance with aristocratic conventions soon rendered photographic portraiture a lucrative business; to keep up with the growing demand, the number of photo studios in the European metropolises steadily increased. Works of architecture and historical monuments, art treasures and celebrities were all recorded on film and made available to the public. Quite a few photographers – for example Édouard Baldus, the Bisson brothers, Frances Frith, Wilhelm Hammerschmidt and Charles Marville – set out on travels to take pictures of the cultural-historical sites of Europe and the Near East, and thus to capture these testimonies to the past on film.
Among the most successful exponents of this genre was Georg Sommer, a native of Frankfurt who emigrated to Italy in 1856 and made a name for himself there as Giorgio Sommer. The second section of the show will revolve around the image of Italy as a kind of paradise on Earth characterised by the Mediterranean landscape and the legacy of antiquity. That image, however, would not be complete without views of the simple life of the Italian population. These genre scenes – often posed – were popular as souvenirs because they fulfilled the travellers’ expectations of encountering a preindustrial, and thus unspoiled, way of life south of the Alps. Faced with the challenges presented by the climate, the long exposure times and the complex photographic development process, photographers were constantly in search of technical improvements – as illustrated in the third section of the presentation. Léon Vidal and Carlo Naya, for example, experimented with colour photography, Eadweard Muybridge with capturing sequences of movement, and the Royal Prussian Photogrammetric Institute with large-scale “mammoth photographs.”
While the pictorial language of professional photography hardly advanced, increasing emphasis was placed over the years on its technical aspects. The section of the show on artistic photography demonstrates how, at the end of the nineteenth century, enthusiastic amateur photographs worked to develop the medium with regard to aesthetics as well. Whereas until that time, professional photographers had given priority to genre scenes and other motifs popular in painting, the so-called Pictorialists set out to strengthen photography’s value as an artistic medium in its own right. Atmospheric landscapes, fairy-tale scenes and stylised still lifes were captured as subjective impressions. While Julia Margaret Cameron very effectively staged dialogues between sharp and soft focus, Heinrich Kühn employed the gum bichromate and bromoil techniques to create painterly effects.
After World War I, a new generation of photographers emerged who questioned the standards established by the Pictorialists. Their works are highlighted in the following room. Rather than intervening in the photographic development process, the adherents to this new current – who pursued interests analogous to those of the New Objectivity painters – devoted themselves to austere pictorial design and sought to establish a “new way of seeing.” The gaze was no longer to wander yearningly into the distance, but be confronted directly and immediately with the realities of society. The prosaic and rigorous images of August Sander and Hugo Erfurth satisfy the demands of this artistic creed. The exhibition moreover directs its attention to early photojournalism and the development of the mass media. Apart from documentary photographs by the autodidact Erich Salomon, Heinrich Hoffmann’s portraits of Adolf Hitler – purchased for the Städel collection in 2013 – will also be on view. Although it was Hitler himself who had commissioned them, he later prohibited the portraits’ reproduction. For in actuality, Hoffmann’s images expose the hollowness of the dictator’s demeanour. The show devotes a separate room to the work of Albert Renger-Patzsch, whose formally rigorous scenes are distinguished by uncompromising objectiveness in the depiction of nature and technology.
The photographers inspired by Surrealism pursued interests of a wholly different nature, as did the representatives of the Czech photo avant-garde – the focusses of the following two exhibition rooms. In the section on Surrealist photography, the works oscillate between fiction and reality, and photographic experiments unveil the world’s bizarre sides. Employing strange effects or unexpected motif combinations, artists such Brassaï, André Kertész, Dora Maar, Paul Outerbridge and Man Ray sought the unusual in the familiar. The Czech photographers of the interwar period, for their part, explored the possibilities of abstract and constructivist photography. Their works, many of which exhibit a symbolist tendency, are concerned with the aestheticisation of the world.
The final section of the show is dedicated to Otto Steinert and the fotoform Group. It sheds light on how Steinert and the members of the artists’ group took their cues from the experiments of the photographic vanguard of the 1920s, while at the same time dissociating themselves from the propagandistic and heroising use of photography during the National Socialist era. The six photographers who joined to found the fotoform Group in 1949 – Peter Keetman, Siegfried Lauterwasser, Wolfgang Reisewitz, Toni Schneiders, Otto Steinert and Ludwig Windstosser – coined the term “subjective photography” and emphasised the photographer’s individual perspective.
The show augments the joint presentation of photography, painting and sculpture practised at the Städel Museum since its reopening in 2011 and also to be continued during and after Lichtbilder. The aim of this exhibition mode is to convey the decisive role played by photography in art-historical pictorial tradition since the medium’s very beginnings. The presentation is being accompanied by a catalogue which – like the exhibition architecture – foregrounds the specific “palette” of photography as a medium conducted in black and white. The subtle tones of grey are mirrored not only in the works’ reproductions, but also in the colour design of the individual catalogue sections. When the visitor enters the exhibition space, he is surrounded by an architecture that is grey to the core, while at the same time making clear that no one shade of grey is like another. In the words of curator Felicity Grobien: “The exhibition reveals how multi-coloured the prints are, for in them – contrary to what we expect from black-and-white photography – we discover a vast range of subtle colour nuances that emphasise the prints; distinctiveness.
Press release from the Städel Museum
Édouard Baldus (French, 1813-1889) Orange: The Wall of the Théâtre antique
1858
Albumen print mounted on cardboard
43.4 x 33.4cm
Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main Photo: Städel Museum – ARTOTHEK
Werner Mantz began his career as a portrait and advertising photographer, later becoming known for his architectural photographs of the modernist housing projects in Cologne during the 1920s. This portfolio of photographs was selected by the artist towards the end of his life as representative of his finest work. These rare prints reveal Mantz’s mastery in still-life and architecture photography, and are considered some of the most influential works created in the period.
Carlo Naya (Italian, 1816-1882) Venice: View of the Marciana Library, the Campanile and the Ducal Palace
c. 1875
Albumen print mounted on cardboard
41.3 x 54.1cm
Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main Photo: Städel Museum – ARTOTHEK
Carlo Naya (1816, Tronzano Vercellese – 1882, Venice) was an Italian photographer known for his pictures of Venice including its works of art and views of the city for a collaborative volume in 1866. He also documented the restoration of Giotto’s frescoes at the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua. Naya was born in Tronzano di Vercelli in 1816 and took law at the University of Pisa. An inheritance allowed him to travel to major cities in Europe, Asia, and northern Africa. He was advertising his services as portrait photographer in Istanbul in 1845,and opened his studio in Venice in 1857. He sold his work through photographer and optician Carlo Ponti. Following Naya’s death in 1882, his studio was run by his wife, then by her second husband. In 1918 it was closed and publisher Osvaldo Böhm bought most of Naya’s archive.
Royal Prussian Institute of Survey Photography (est. 1885) Cologne: Cathedral
1889
Gelatin silver prints mounted on cardboard
79.8 x 64.5cm
Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main Photo: Städel Museum – ARTOTHEK
Julia Margaret Cameron (British born India, 1815-1879) Mrs Herbert Duckworth
1867
Albumen print mounted on cardboard
35 x 27.1cm
Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main Photo: Städel Museum – ARTOTHEK
Giorgio Sommer (European, 1834-1914) Naples: Delousing
c. 1870
Albumen print mounted on cardboard
25.5 x 20.6cm
Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main Photo: Städel Museum – ARTOTHEK
Lewis Carroll (English, 1832-1898) Alexandra “Xie” Kitchin as Chinese “Tea-Merchant” (on Duty)
1873
Albumen print
19.8 x 15.2cm
Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main Photo: Städel Museum – ARTOTHEK
Additional images
Albert Renger-Patzsch (German, 1897-1966) Tropical Orchis, cattleya labiata c. 1930
Gelatin silver print, printed c. 1930
Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main Photo: Städel Museum – ARTOTHEK
Václav Jíru (Czech, 1910-1980) Untitled (Sunbath) 1930s
Gelatin silver print
Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main
Acquired in 2013 as a gift from Annette and Rudolf Kicken
Jíru started to shoot as an amateur photographer, and since 1926 published photos and articles. He first exhibited in 1933 and collaborated with the Theatre Vlasta Burian, photographed in the Liberated Theatre, was devoted to advertising photography, and became well known in the international press (London News, London Life, Picture Post, Sie und Er, Zeit im Bild).
In 1940 he was arrested by the Gestapo for resistance activities, and sentenced to life in prison by the end of the war. In the book Six Spring, where there are pictures taken shortly after liberation, he described his experience of prison and concentration camps. After the war he became a member of the Union of Czechoslovak Journalists and in 1948 a member of the Association of Czechoslovak Artists. He continued shooting, but also looking for new talented photographers. In 1957, he founded and led four languages photographic Revue Photography. By the end of his life he organised a photographic exhibition and served on the juries of photographic competitions.
The photographs of Václav Jírů, especially in the pre-war stage, was very wide: sports photography, theatrical portrait, landscape, nude, social issues, report. After the war he concentrated on the cycles of nature, landscapes and cities. A frequent theme of his photographs was Prague, which unlike many other photographers he photographed in its unsentimental everyday life (Prague mirrors, walls Poetry Prague, Prague ghosts).
Václav Chochola (Czech, 1923-2005) Kolotoc-Konieci (merry-go-round horse) c. 1958
Gelatin silver print
Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main
Acquired in 2013 as a gift from Annette and Rudolf Kicken
Chochola (January 31, 1923 in Prague – August 27, 2005) was a Czech photographer, known for classic Czech art and portrait photography. He began photography while studying at grammar school in Prague-Karlin. After leaving the photographer taught and studied at the School of Graphic Arts. He was a freelance photographer, photographed at the National Theatre and has collaborated with many other scenes. Chochol created a series of images using non-traditional techniques, creating photograms, photomontage and roláže.
In his extensive work Chochol was devoted to candid photographs, portraits of celebrities (famous for his portrait of Salvador Dali), acts or sports photography. His documentary images from the Prague uprising in May 1945 are invaluable. In 1970 Chochol spent a month in custody for photographing the grave of Jan Palach. He died after a brief serious illness in Motol Hospital in Prague.
Text translated from Czech Wikipedia website
Jde užasle světem, o kterém jako kluk na předměstí snil a od něhož byl vždy oddělen červenou šňůrou, a do něhož má najednou přístup. Skutečnost, že v tomto světě nikdy nebyl úplně doma, dokázal proměnit v nepřehlédnutelnou přednost: zbystřilo mu to oko a zahlédl detaily, které my oslněni jinými cíli ani nevidíme.
He walks in amazement through the world he dreamed of as a boy in the suburbs, and from which he was always separated by a red cord, and to which he suddenly has access. He was able to turn the fact that he was never quite at home in this world into an unmissable advantage: it sharpened his eye and he saw details that we, dazzled by other goals, don’t even see.
František Drtikol (3 March 1883, Příbram – 13 January 1961, Prague) was a Czech photographer of international renown. He is especially known for his characteristically epic photographs, often nudes and portraits.
From 1907 to 1910 he had his own studio, until 1935 he operated an important portrait photostudio in Prague on the fourth floor of one of Prague’s remarkable buildings, a Baroque corner house at 9 Vodičkova, now demolished. Jaroslav Rössler, an important avant-garde photographer, was one of his pupils. Drtikol made many portraits of very important people and nudes which show development from pictorialism and symbolism to modern composite pictures of the nude body with geometric decorations and thrown shadows, where it is possible to find a number of parallels with the avant-garde works of the period. These are reminiscent of Cubism, and at the same time his nudes suggest the kind of movement that was characteristic of the futurism aesthetic.
He began using paper cut-outs in a period he called “photopurism”. These photographs resembled silhouettes of the human form. Later he gave up photography and concentrated on painting. After the studio was sold Drtikol focused mainly on painting, Buddhist religious and philosophical systems. In the final stage of his photographic work Drtikol created compositions of little carved figures, with elongated shapes, symbolically expressing various themes from Buddhism. In the 1920s and 1930s, he received significant awards at international photo salons.
Exhibition dates: 10th November 2013 – 19th January 2014
André Kertész (American born Hungary, 1894-1985) Leger’s Studio
1926-1927
Gelatin silver print Image: 3 1/8 x 4 1/4in. (8 x 10.8cm)
The New Orleans Museum of Art
Museum purchase, Women’s Volunteer Committee Fund
There are some rare and beautiful photographs in this posting. I have never seen the Kertész (Leger’s Studio 1926-1927) with its wonderful structure and tonality nor the unusual Mapplethorpe (Staircase, 1140 Royal 1982). I particularly like the Bellocq (Bedroom Mantel, Storyville c. 1911-1913) with its complex medley of shapes and images.
Marcus
Many thankx to The New Orleans Museum of Art for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Lee Friedlander (American, b. 1934) Untitled (Self-Portrait Reflected in Window, New Orleans) c. 1965
Gelatin silver print Image: 7 x 10 3/4 in. (17.6 x 27.2cm) Mount: 11 x 14 in. (27.9 x 35.5cm)
The New Orleans Museum of Art
Museum purchase through the National Endowment for the Arts Grant
Robert Frank (American, 1924-2019) Canal Street, New Orleans
1955
Gelatin silver print Image: 11 x 13 4/5 in. (28 x 35.2cm)
The New Orleans Museum of Art
Museum purchase through the National Endowment for the Arts and Museum Purchase Funds
Henri Cartier-Bresson (French, 1908-2004) Louisiana 1947, printed c. 1975
Gelatin silver print Image: 9 5/8 x 14 3/16 in. (24.4 x 36cm) Paper: 12 x 16 in. (30.3 x 40.4cm)
The New Orleans Museum of Art
Museum purchase, General Acquisition Fund
Theodore Lilienthal (American, 1829-1894) Charles Hotel, New Orleans c. 1867
Albumen print Image: 10 3/4 x 13 13/16 in. (27.2 x 35.1cm) Mount: 17 x 22 1/4 in. (43.3 x 56.6cm)
The New Orleans Museum of Art
Museum Purchase
Featuring masterworks by photographers Edward Weston, William Henry Fox Talbot, André Kertész, Robert Mapplethorpe, and many more, the New Orleans Museum of Art’s upcoming exhibition, Photography at NOMA, explores the Museum’s rich permanent photography collection through a selection of some of its finest works from the early 1840s to the 1980s.
The first comprehensive presentation of works from NOMA’s collection since the 1970s, the exhibition includes over 130 of the most important photographs in the Museum’s collection and presents rare and unusual examples from throughout photography’s history. On view November 10, 2013 through January 19, 2014, the exhibition highlights the tremendous depth and breadth of the Museum’s collection and includes photographs made as works of art as well as advertising images, social documents, and more. The photographers featured in the exhibition range from some of the most recognisable names in the field, including Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Frank, and Lewis Hine, to unknown photographers – reflecting the vast spectrum of photographic activity since the medium’s inception in the 19th century.
“NOMA began collecting photographs seriously in the early 1970s when photography was not commonly found in American art museum collections. Today our holdings include nearly 10,000 works, representing a broad range of creative energy and achievement,” said Susan Taylor, NOMA’s Director. “Our collection has strong roots in New Orleans history. Our city has long been an epicentre for the work of established and emerging photographers and we are delighted to share this aspect of New Orleans history with our audiences.”
“Since its origins, photography has infiltrated every aspect of modern life, from art to war, and religion to politics and many of these applications are represented in NOMA’s extensive collection,” said Russell Lord, Freeman Family Curator of Photographs. “Despite the collection’s long history, it remains one of the best kept secrets in this country. Photography at NOMA is an opportunity to re-examine and bring to the fore the diverse range of works found in the collection.”
Since the 1970s, NOMA has built an extensive collection of photographs that represents a wide range of achievement in that medium from the 1840s to the present. Today the collection comprises nearly 10,000 works with images by some of the most significant photographic artists including Berenice Abbott, Ansel Adams, Diane Arbus, Ilse Bing, and Edward Steichen, among many others. The collection includes examples that reflect photography’s international scope, from an 1843 view from his hotel window in Paris by William Henry Fox Talbot to a view of Mount Fuji by Kusakabi Kimbei, but it is also strong in photographs made in and around New Orleans by regional and national photographers such as E. J. Bellocq, Walker Evans, Clarence John Laughlin, and Robert Polidori.
Photography at NOMA features works by Berenice Abbott, Ansel Adams, Diane Arbus, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Robert Mapplethorpe, William Henry Fox Talbot, and Edward Weston, among many others.
Press release from the NOMA website
Felix Moissenet (American, b. circa 1814) Freeman c. 1855
Sixth plate daguerreotype Image: 3 1/4 x 2 3/4 in. (8 x 6.8cm) Case (open): 3 5/8 x 6 3/8 in. (9.2 x 16.1cm)
The New Orleans Museum of Art
Museum purchase
Thomas Augustine Malone (British, 1823-1867) Demonstration of the Talbotype December 11, 1848
Calotype (Talbotype) negative
7 3/8 x 9 2/16 in. (18.8 x 23.3cm)
The New Orleans Museum of Art
Museum purchase
Robert Mapplethorpe (American, 1946-1989) Staircase, 1140 Royal 1982
Gelatin silver print Image: 15 1/5 x 15 1/5 in. (38.5 x 38.5cm) Paper: 20 x 16 in. (50.6 x 40.4cm)
The New Orleans Museum of Art
Promised gift from H. Russell Albright, MD
William Henry Fox Talbot (British, 1800-1877) View of the Paris Boulevards from the First Floor of the Hôtel de Louvais, Rue de la Paix 1843
Salted paper print from a paper negative Image: 6 3/8 x 6 3/4 in. (16.2 x 17.1cm) Paper: 7 1/2x 9 in. (19 x 23cm)
The New Orleans Museum of Art
Museum purchase, 1977 Acquisition Fund Drive
Morton Schamberg (American, 1881-1918) Cityscape 1916
Gelatin silver print Image: 9 1/2 x 7 1/2 in. (24 x 19cm) Mount: 15 3/4 x 13 in. (40 x 33cm)
The New Orleans Museum of Art
Museum purchase, Women’s Volunteer Committee Fund
Clarence John Laughlin (American, 1905-1985) A Mangled Staircase (No. 2) 1949
Gelatin silver print Image: 13 1/2 x 10 13/16 in. (34.2 x 27.5cm) Mount: 17 x 14 in. (43 x 35.5cm)
The New Orleans Museum of Art
Bequest of Clarence John Laughlin
E. J. Bellocq (American, 1873-1949) Bedroom Mantel, Storyville c. 1911-1913
Glass negative Plate: 10 x 8 in. (25.2 20.2cm)
Museum purchase
Lewis Hine (American, 1874-1940) [Mechanic and Steam Pump]
c. 1930
Gelatin silver print Image: 9 1/2 x 7 in. (24.3 x 17.6cm) Paper: 10 x 8 in. (25.2 x 20.3cm)
The New Orleans Museum of Art
Museum Purchase
The New Orleans Museum of Art
One Collins Diboll Circle, City Park
New Orleans, LA 70124 Phone: (504) 658-4100
Paul Outerbridge (American, 1896-1958) Women by Car, Laguna Beach, California c. 1950 Pigment dyed digital print 16″ x 20″
“Art is life seen through man’s inner craving for perfection and beauty – his escape from the sordid realities of life into a world of his imagining. Art accounts for at least a third of our civilization, and it is one of the artist’s principal duties to do more than merely record life or nature. To the artist is given the privilege of pointing the way and inspiring towards a better life.”
Paul Outerbridge
If Outerbridge only photographed intermittently after 1943, then what photographs they are. Perhaps some of the most important colour photographs of their generation were made after he moved to California influencing the next generation of colour photographers (as noted below in the press release). What else can one say – his aesthetic sensibility is sensational, so far ahead of his time, so prescient of future colour spaces in photography. I know how “no regular income” feels as an artist, but he still had the courage and vision to make the work. I am in awe of the man: the visual complexity but eloquent simplicity of his photographs is simply amazing, simply… his own.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Downtown Central Library for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Recently discovered colour images of California and Mexico taken during the 1940s and 1950s by the late visionary photographer Paul Outerbridge, who was considered “a master of colour photography,” will be exhibited at the Central Library’s First Floor Galleries, 630 W. Fifth St., downtown, from March 28 through June 28 2009.
Paul Outerbridge (American, 1896-1958) Balboa Beach, California c. 1950 Pigment dyed digital print 16″ x 20″
“[Outerbridge] was a designer and illustrator in New York before turning to photography in the 1920s. In 1925, having established himself as an innovative advertising photographer and graphic designer, he moved to Paris and worked for the French edition of Vogue magazine. There he met Edward Steichen, with whom he developed a friendly rivalry. Around 1930, having returned to New York, Outerbridge began to experiment with colour photography, in particular the carbro-colour process. He focused primarily on female nudes – striking, full-colour images that were ahead of their time. The growing popularity of the dye transfer process lead to cheaper color photographs and Outerbridge, who stuck fast to the carbro process as superior in its richness and permanence, saw his commercial work dry up, leaving him without a regular source of income. In 1943 Outerbridge moved to California, where he photographed only intermittently.”
Text from the Getty Museum website [Online] Cited 14/04/2009. No longer available online
Paul Outerbridge (American, 1896-1958) Reclining Nude c. 1937 Pigment dyed digital print
Paul Outerbridge (American, 1896-1958) Motel Bar, Mazatlán, Mexico c. 1948 Dye transfer print 16″ x 20″
Paul Outerbridge (American, 1896-1958) Hotel Lobby, Mazatlán, Mexico c. 1950 Pigment dyed digital print 16″ x 20″
As one of America’s earliest masters of colour photography, Paul Outerbridge established his reputation by making virtuoso carbro-colour prints of nudes and still-lives in the 1930s. As pictures, they are as brilliant and innovative today as when they earned their place as classics in the history of photography.
Outerbridge left New York in the 1940s, choosing to settle in California, and eventually taking up residency in the Mediterranean-style ocean side town of Laguna Beach. Little is known of Outerbridge’s last body of work in the 8 years preceding his death in 1958. But Outerbridge’s recently printed transparencies from the 1950s affirms that he fully understood the possibilities inherent in colour photography despite it being the early days of its use in photographic art. Outerbridge went on to make a body of work that presaged the style and imagery of colour photographers working a full quarter of a century later.
Employing a 35mm camera rather than the large-format equipment of the studio, Outerbridge captured vivid pictures while on the fly. His images were composed using the same precision of form and colour that characterised his 1930s studio work, but, in this series, Outerbridge applied his earlier techniques to the energetic world of the street. This was a new landscape for Outerbridge, who, seeing in the new spectrum of colour, depicted the people and places from his adopted Southern California, and, with great relish and sensitivity, from the Mexican towns just south of the border. In the tradition of such photographers as Edward Weston, Paul Strand, Anton Bruehl, and Henri Cartier-Bresson, all of whom made significant photographic forays into Mexico, Outerbridge ventured south from Laguna. In his 1949 black Cadillac, Outerbridge frequented the seaport towns along the Baja peninsula. One of his favourite stops was Mazatlan, on Mexico’s western coast, where he took particular pleasure in surveying the urban architecture, absorbing – and documenting – the city streets teeming with people, the brightly coloured topography.
Among the scenes Outerbridge etched onto film: carnival carriages with passengers dressed and bound for a grand party; a group of fashionable men relaxing in an outdoor hotel lobby drinking Cokes and beer while a small orchestra plays on in the afternoon sun; and a lone girl in a lime-green dress and white sweater walking past a gas station whose painted-red details add vibrant flourishes to the scene. Outerbridge was keenly aware that the beauty of everyday objects was also tied to the larger meanings anchored in the social landscape, but he cared less for this fact than for the expression of pure colour and form as seen through and by the lens.
These extraordinary pictures recall the 1970s photographs of William Eggleston and Stephen Shore, who strove to codify these same formal and subjective aesthetics into a bold definition of the new colour vocabulary. Paul Outerbridge: New Color Photographs from California and Mexico will bring a heretofore undiscovered and unrecognised sequence of photographs that bridges the formal gap between the past and the present. Outerbridge’s visionary handling of colour confirmed that he had instinctively known the potential of the colour medium, and, luckily for us, he created an astounding body of photographs to prove it.
Text from the Curatorial Assistance website [Online] Cited 19/01/2019
Paul Outerbridge (American, 1896-1958) Gas Station, Mazatlán, Mexico c. 1950 Dye transfer print 16″ x 20″
Paul Outerbridge (American, 1896-1958) Self-portrait on Lounge, Oceanside Resort, California c.1950 Pigment dyed digital print 16″ x 20″
“Outerbridge, who died in 1958, built his reputation in the early 1920s in New York and Paris making elegant black and white photo abstractions primarily of nudes and still lifes that rivalled those of his peers, Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, and Edward Weston. In the 1930s, Outerbridge mastered the exquisite tri-carbro-colour print process and went on to make some of the most important colour photographs in art and advertising of that time.
Moving to California in 1943 and taking up residence in Laguna Beach, Outerbridge made his last important body of work throughout California and Mexico. Between 1948 and until his death in 1958 he codified a new language in colour photographs that anticipated the work of William Eggleston, Stephen Shore, Joel Sternfeld and others known for their “New Color” work in the 1970s.
“The curious position of prosperous American tourists amid the daily poverty experienced by some Mexicans is one of the recurring themes in the work, but with Outerbridge there is no political polemic,” says co-curator Phillip Prodger. “Outerbridge was thinking of his photographs as jig-saw puzzles made up of many different highly coloured pieces, each placed with meticulous care.”
Among Outerbridge’s subjects are carnival carriages with passengers dressed and headed for a grand party; a group of fashionable men relaxing in an outdoor hotel lobby drinking Coke and beer while a small orchestra plays; a girl in a lime-green dress and white sweater walking past a gas station whose painted-red details add a vibrant flourish to the scene.”
Text from the Downtown Central Library press release [Online] Cited 14/04/2009. No longer available online
Paul Outerbridge (American, 1896-1958) Model with Satin Dress, Laguna Beach, California c. 1950 Tricolor carbon print 20″ x 16″
Paul Outerbridge (American, 1896-1958) Party, Laguna Beach c. 1950 Tricolor carbon print 20″ x 16″
Los Angeles Central Library 630 W. 5th St., Los Angeles, CA 90071 Phone: (213) 228-7000
![Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American born Austria, 1899-1968) '[Calypso]' about 1944; before 1946 from the exhibition Exhibition: 'Unseen: 35 Years of Collecting Photographs' at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Dec 2019 - March 2020](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/gm_04305501_2000x2000.jpg "Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American born Austria, 1899-1968) '[Calypso]' about 1944; before 1946 from the exhibition Exhibition: 'Unseen: 35 Years of Collecting Photographs' at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Dec 2019 - March 2020")
![Carleton Watkins (American, 1829-1916) '[Guadalupe Mill]' 1860 from the exhibition Exhibition: 'Unseen: 35 Years of Collecting Photographs' at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Dec 2019 - March 2020](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/gm_06196501_2000x2000.jpg "Carleton Watkins (American, 1829-1916) '[Guadalupe Mill]' 1860 from the exhibition Exhibition: 'Unseen: 35 Years of Collecting Photographs' at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Dec 2019 - March 2020")
![Marinus Jacob Kjeldgaard (Danish, 1884-1964, active Paris, France late 1930s - late 1940s) '[Collage: Balance of Powers]' about 1939](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/gm_05085801_2000x2000.jpg "Marinus Jacob Kjeldgaard (Danish, 1884-1964, active Paris, France late 1930s - late 1940s) '[Collage: Balance of Powers]' about 1939")
![Paul Outerbridge (American, 1896-1958) '[Egg in Spotlight]' 1943](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/gm_32105401_2000x2000.jpg "Paul Outerbridge (American, 1896-1958) '[Egg in Spotlight]' 1943")
![Shigeichi Nagano (Japanese, 1925-2019, active Tokyo, Japan) '[Tokyo, Aobadai (Nishi Saigoyama Park), Meguro Ward]' 1988](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/gm_30687901_2000x2000.jpg "Shigeichi Nagano (Japanese, 1925-2019, active Tokyo, Japan) '[Tokyo, Aobadai (Nishi Saigoyama Park), Meguro Ward]' 1988")
![Julia Margaret Cameron (British born India, 1815-1879) '[Spring]' 1873](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/gm_06520801_2000x2000.jpg "Julia Margaret Cameron (British born India, 1815-1879) '[Spring]' 1873")
![Reverend William Ellis (British, 1794-1872) and Samuel Smith. '[Portrait of a Black Couple]' about 1873](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/gm_133436t1v1_2000x2000.jpg "Reverend William Ellis (British, 1794-1872) and Samuel Smith. '[Portrait of a Black Couple]' about 1873")
![László Moholy-Nagy (American born Hungary, 1895-1946) '[The Law of the Series]' 1925](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/gm_05309301_2000x2000.jpg "László Moholy-Nagy (American born Hungary, 1895-1946) '[The Law of the Series]' 1925")
![Paul Wolff (German, 1887-1951) and Dr Wolff & Tritschler OHG (German, founded 1927, dissolved 1963) '[Dog at the beach]' 1936](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/gm_041552t1v1_2000x2000-1.jpg "Paul Wolff (German, 1887-1951) and Dr Wolff & Tritschler OHG (German, founded 1927, dissolved 1963) '[Dog at the beach]' 1936")
![Walker Evans (American, 1903 - 1975) '[Two Giraffes, Circus Winter Quarters, Sarasota]' 1941](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/gm_05269601_2000x2000.jpg "Walker Evans (American, 1903 - 1975) '[Two Giraffes, Circus Winter Quarters, Sarasota]' 1941")
![Myoung Ho Lee (South Korean, b. 1975) '[Tree #2]' 2006](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/gm_31977201_2000x2000.jpg "Myoung Ho Lee (South Korean, b. 1975) '[Tree #2]' 2006")
![Albert Renger-Patzsch (German, 1897-1966) 'Mantelpavian [Hamadryas Baboon]' c. 1925 from the exhibition 'The world is beautiful: photographs from the collection' at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, Dec 2015 - April 2016](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/albert-renger-patzsch-baboon-web.jpg "Albert Renger-Patzsch (German, 1897-1966) 'Mantelpavian [Hamadryas Baboon]' c. 1925 from the exhibition 'The world is beautiful: photographs from the collection' at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, Dec 2015 - April 2016")
![Nadar [Gaspard Félix Tournachon] (French, 1820-1910) 'George Sand (Amandine-Aurore-Lucile Dupin)' c. 1864](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/nadar-george-sand.jpg "Nadar [Gaspard Félix Tournachon] (French, 1820-1910) 'George Sand (Amandine-Aurore-Lucile Dupin)' c. 1864")
![Lewis Hine (American, 1874-1940) '[Mechanic and Steam Pump]' c. 1930](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/79-84-hine-web.jpg "Lewis Hine (American, 1874-1940) '[Mechanic and Steam Pump]' c. 1930")
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