I seen to have become a little smitten by Romy Schneider. What charisma!
Marcus
Many thankx to the Deutsche Kinemathek – Museum for Film and Television for allowing me publish the images in the posting. Please click on the images for a larger version.
The exhibition documents the eventful career of Romy Schneider, who by the late 1950s no longer wanted to be Sissi, and by the 1970s was a celebrated star of French cinema. A large number of unknown photographs of Romy Schneider, her film partners, and family from the 1950s and 1960s will be on display from the collections of the Deutsche Kinemathek. The exhibition will also present loans from private individuals and institutions from France and Austria …
The exhibition Romy Schneider. Wien – Berlin – Paris, which the Museum für Film und Fernsehen will present beginning on December 5th, documents the varied and wide-ranging career of Romy Schneider, who no longer wanted to be “Sissi” at the end of the 1950s and was celebrated as a star of French cinema in the 1970s.
Romy Schneider publicly bemoaned her roles in Germany and went to Paris to play women who did justice to her acting abilities and her expectations. She settled in France at the beginning of the 1970s, where she advanced to one of the biggest stars of French cinema. She won several awards and made films with nearly all the great directors and actors of that period. The paparazzi followed the actress at every turn, documenting her strokes of fate for the international popular press, and throughout her life Romy Schneider considered herself to be their victim. Romy Schneider died in Paris in May 1982. To this day, she is admired by millions of fans around the world as one of cinema’s international stars.
This homage, which can be seen in 450 sq. m. of exhibition space at the Filmhaus, treats both the diverse roles and changing image of the actress, as well as her representation in the media.
Pictures from films, the press and her private life are grouped according to recurring motifs and combined with film clips. Media installations show the interplay between projection and active self-promotion. Posters, costumes, correspondence and fan souvenirs will augment the presentation.
Numerous photographs from the 1950s and 1960s of Romy Schneider, her film partners and her family, largely unknown until now, originate from the collections of Deutsche Kinemathek. Loans from other institutions and private individuals will also be on view, for instance from the photographers F. C. Gundlach and Robert Lebeck, as well as from the personal archives of the film director Claude Sautet.
Press release from the Museum für Film und Fernsehen website [Online] Cited 25/05/2010 no longer available online
F. C. Gundlach (Franz Christian Gundlach) was a German photographer, gallery owner, collector, curator und founder. In 2000 he created the F.C. Gundlach Foundation, since 2003 he has been founding director of the House of Photography – Deichtorhallen Hamburg.
Alain Delon and Romy Schneider in La Piscine/Der Swimmingpool R- Jacques Deray, F/I 1969 Gelatin silver print Foto/Quelle: Filmarchiv Austria, Wien
Romy Schneider and Alain Delon in La Piscine/Der Swimmingpool R- Jacques Deray, F/I 1969 Gelatin silver print Foto/Quelle: Deutsche Kinemathek
Romy Schneider and Claude Sautet during the shooting of UNE HISTOIRE SIMPLE / A SIMPLE STORY 1978 Gelatin silver print Foto/Quelle: Yves Sautet, Paris
Claude Sautet
Claude Sautet (23 February 1924 – 22 July 2000) was a French author and film director. Born in Montrouge, Hauts-de-Seine, France, Sautet first studied painting and sculpture before attending a film university in Paris where he began his career and later became a television producer. He filmed his first movie, Bonjour Sourire, in 1955.
These are fascinating photographs (and in part, more than a little what? marginal, disturbing, poetic, beautiful, creepy, voyeuristic, misogynist).
Tichy’s camera is such an amazing construction (click on the image above to see a larger version).
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Jim Edwards and the Michael Hoppen Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting.
“Women are just a motif to me. The figure – standing, bending, or sitting. The movement, walking. Nothing else Interests me. The erotic is just a dream anyway. The world is only an illusion, our illusion.”
“Everything is decided by the earth, which is turning. You can only live as long as the earth keeps turning. That is predetermined.
The recently unknown photographic work of Czech artist Miroslav Tichý has become a noteworthy presence in the worlds of photography and contemporary art over the last few years. Timeless and uncategorisable, Tichý’s work captures the women of Kijov, from the artist’s native city in Moravia. On 28 April 2010, the Michael Hoppen Gallery will bring together unique photographs, previously unseen in the UK, created in the 1960’s by Tichý with his makeshift cameras and enlargers.
Marginal and exceptionally voyeuristic, in his methods Tichý could be described as an “art brut photographer” yet he is marked by many classical influences. Though his images are produced with poor-quality equipment and carelessly shot, they offer an idiosyncratic and almost hallucinatory vision of a fantastical, eroticised reality. With his endless return to the same subject and the volume and regularity of his production, Tichý’s work draws many parallels to certain practices of conceptual art during the same period.
For thirty years Tichý took up to one hundred photographs each day, pursuing his artistic obsession with the female form. Dressed in rags and using a homemade camera, Tichy captured the universe of the people in the small town of Brno in the Czech Republic. This discovery of photography saved him from madness and the claustrophobia of political dictatorship. Though his work today is widely exhibited, Tichý worked for years as an unknown artist in complete isolation on the periphery of the art world.
A student at the Academy of Arts in Prague, Tichý left following the communist overthrow of 1948. Unwilling to subordinate to the political system he spent some eight years in prison and psychiatric wards for no reason, other than he was ‘different’ and considered subversive. Upon his release he became an outsider, occupying his time by obsessively taking photographs of the women of his home town, using homemade cameras constructed from tin cans, children’s spectacle lenses, rubber bands, scotch tape and other junk found on the streets.
He captured images of their ankles, faces and torsos whilst out strolling or sunbathing, shop-girls behind the counter, mothers pushing prams, and any others who caught his eye, sometimes finding himself in trouble with the police. These small objects of obsession, which might appear to the casual viewer to be simply voyeurism, are simultaneously melancholic and poetic.
Tichý’s work surfaced in July 2005, when he won the ‘New Discovery Award’ at Arles. Within a year he had already been featured in two solo museum exhibitions, at the Wintertaur in Zurich and the Rudolfinum, Prague, and his work has been purchased by the Victoria & Albert Museum here in London. Tichý has now exhibited in museums from Holland to Canada, Finland to Ireland and Tokyo. In 2009, a seminal show was held at the Centre Pompidou in Paris where it received rave reviews. Since then, Tichý’s work has recently been on show at ICP in New York where The New York Times reviewed his work as … ‘intensely fascinating’. American artist Richard Prince wrote an essay for the catalogue. In his signature smart-aleck, red-blooded-male persona, Prince links Tichý to Bettie Page, Swanson’s TV dinners and the short stories of John Cheever.
 Tichý’s work will also appear at Tate Modern later this year as part of their Voyerism, Surveillance and Camera exhibition in May 2010.
Press release from the Michael Hoppen Gallery website [Online] Cited 21/05/2010 no longer available online
Miroslav Tichý (Czech, November 20, 1926 – April 12, 2011) was a photographer who from the 1960s until 1985 took thousands of surreptitious pictures of women in his hometown of Kyjov in the Czech Republic, using homemade cameras constructed of cardboard tubes, tin cans and other at-hand materials. Most of his subjects were unaware that they were being photographed. A few struck beauty-pageant poses when they sighted Tichý, perhaps not realising that the parody of a camera he carried was real.
His soft focus, fleeting glimpses of the women of Kyjov are skewed, spotted and badly printed – flawed by the limitations of his primitive equipment and a series of deliberate processing mistakes meant to add poetic imperfections. Of his technical methods, Tichý has said, “First of all, you have to have a bad camera”, and, “If you want to be famous, you must do something more badly than anybody in the entire world.”
During the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia, Tichý was considered a dissident and was badly treated by the government. His photographs remained largely unknown until an exhibition was held for him in 2004. Tichý did not attend exhibitions, and lived a life of self-sufficiency and freedom from the standards of society. Tichý died on April 12, 2011 in Kyjov, Czech Republic. …
An essay in Artforum International describes Tichý as “practically reinventing photography from scratch”, rehabilitating the soft focus, manipulated pictorial photography of the late 1800s,
“… not as a distortion of the medium but as something like its essence. What counts for him is not only the image – just one moment in the photographic process – but also the chemical activity of the materials, which is never entirely stable or complete, and the delimitation of the results via cropping and framing.”
Director Radek Horacek of the Brno House of Art, which held an exhibition of Tichý’s photographs in 2006, describes them thus:
“They are all very careful observations of women from Kyjov and of everyday trivial activities. But soon you realise that these trivial situations such as someone sitting on a bench, women waiting for a bus, someone taking a T-shirt off at a swimming pool, are somehow extraordinary. Tichý managed to give this banality a feeling of exceptionality and rarity. Just part of a female body in his pictures can look very esoteric. There are so many magazines that offer much more nudity than Tichý but his photographs are different. A woman’s tights between a knee and a skirt or a swimming costume in his pictures look somehow mysterious.”
THE classic William Eggleston, the one and only. Feel the heat of sun on body. Look at the construction of the image plane, all angles and fractures. The slight movement of the woman’s hand as she sits on a cracked yellow wall. The distance between her body and the metal pole with wrapped chain and padlock, that ice/fire tension as Minor White would say. Man with gun vs melancholy monochromatic self portrait, the reverie of the lone thinker. Colour and light as emotional sounding board, “colour as a means of discovery and expression, and as a way to highlight aspects of life hidden in plain sight.” This is what Eggleston points his democratic camera at – life hidden in plain sight, revealed in all its intricacies, in all its mundanity and glory.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Chai Lee and the Art Institute of Chicago for allowing to me reproduce the photographs in this posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
The unconventional beauty and artistry of works by photographer William Eggleston will be showcased in a major exhibition opening at the Art Institute of Chicago this winter. William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961-2008 – on view from February 27 through May 23, 2010, in the Modern Wing’s Abbott Galleries (G182, G184) and Carolyn S. and Matthew Bucksbaum Gallery (G188) – is the most comprehensive retrospective to date of the Memphis-based contemporary photographer. The exhibition brings together more than 150 extraordinary images of familiar, everyday subjects with lesser-known, early black-and-white prints and provocative video recordings, all produced over a five-decade period.
Born in 1939 in Memphis, Tennessee, and raised on his family’s cotton plantation in Mississippi, William Eggleston held a casual interest in photography until 1959, when he came across photo books by Henri Cartier-Bresson and Walker Evans. Among his earliest pictures, made during stints at universities in Tennessee and Mississippi, were black-and-white scenes found in his native South, as well as portraits of friends and family members.
By the 1960s and early 1970s he had begun experimenting with colour film, and he eventually produced rich, vivid prints through the dye transfer process – prints that are created through the alignment of three separate matrices (cyan, magenta, and yellow) generated from three separate negatives (red, green, and blue filters). The resulting prints are known for the vividness and permanence of their colours. Hence, Eggleston is often credited for single-handedly ushering in the era of colour art photography.
Eager to show his work to a broader audience, Eggleston traveled to New York with a suitcase of slides and prints to meet with Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) curator John Szarkowski. This visit eventually yielded a controversial but revolutionary exhibition in 1976 – MoMA’s first solo show to feature colour photographs – and a classic accompanying book, William Eggleston’s Guide. At this point in his career, Eggleston had already distinguished himself by treating colour as a means of discovery and expression, and as a way to highlight aspects of life hidden in plain sight.
William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961-2008 demonstrates Eggleston’s “democratic” approach to his photographic subjects in both colour and black-and-white. Everything that happens in front of the camera is worthy of becoming a picture for the artist – no matter how seemingly circumstantial or trivial. Eggleston finds his motifs in everyday life, resulting in telling portrayals of American culture. His iconic images such as Elvis’s Graceland, a supermarket clerk corralling grocery carts in the afternoon sunlight, and a freezer stuffed with food proves that the photographer points his “democratic camera” at everything. Eggleston’s quiet, thoughtful pictures have profoundly impacted subsequent generations of photographers, filmmakers, and scholars.
The exhibition also includes Eggleston’s cult video work, Stranded in Canton. In the 1960s, Eggleston used film to document Fred McDowell, a well-known Delta blues musician, but ultimately abandoned the film project. Eggleston later acquired a video camera and began using video to shoot in bars and in people’s homes; sometimes he shot monologues friends delivered for his video camera, most often at night. The result, Stranded in Canton, recently restored and re-edited, is a portrait of a woozy subculture that adds dimension and texture to the world of Eggleston’s colour photographs.
Internationally acclaimed, Eggleston has spent the past four decades photographing around the world, responding intuitively to fleeting configurations of cultural signs and specific expressions of local colour. By not censoring, rarely editing, and always photographing even the seemingly banal, Eggleston convinces us completely of the idea of the democratic camera.
Press release from the Art Institute of Chicago website [Online] Cited 15/05/2010 no longer available online
Paul Ogier (Australia born New Zealand, b. 1974) Saint Stephen 2009 Courtesy of the artist
Mark Hislop from the Monash Gallery of Art (MGA) has asked me to post details of the William and Winifred Bowness Photography Prize 2010. More than happy too. To see the standard take a look at the 2009 Finalists online. Details on how to enter are posted below. Have a go, get your entries in, you never know who will win!
Many thankx to the MGA for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a large version of the image.
Simon Terrill (Australian, b. 1969) Bank of England 9AM 2009 Courtesy of the artist
The Monash Gallery of Art Foundation is pleased to announce the CALL FOR ENTRIES for the William and Winifred Bowness Photography Prize 2010.
The MGA Foundation will once again showcase the work of Australia’s best photographers in Australia’s most coveted photography award. Photographers from all over Australia are encouraged to submit entries to this year’s Bowness Photography Prize. Each year, finalists are drawn from the breadth of Australian photographic practice: editorial, commercial, street and fine art.
In recognition of the support shown the prize by Australian photographers, prize money for this year’s award has increased substantially. Last year, a record 459 photographers submitted entries in anticipation of the $20,000 non-acquisitive first prize. In 2010, photographers will be competing for $25,000 first prize and $1,000 People’s Choice Award.
The winner of the 2010 Bowness Photography Prize and Honourable Mentions will be announced on Thursday night 23 SEP 2010 during a cocktail party held at MGA. Winners and finalists will enjoy unprecedented visibility for their work. All finalists will be published on MGA’s flickr page and included in a substantial catalogue. The winner will receive the $25,000 first prize. And in recognition of the strength of the prize and MGA’s commitment to promoting the best of contemporary Australian photography, Honourable Mentions will have the opportunity to stage an exhibition at MGA.
This year’s entries will be judged by Gael Newton, Senior Curator of Photographs, National Gallery of Australia, Max Pam, Australian photographer, and Shaune Lakin, Director of MGA.
About the BOWNESS Photography Prize
Established in 2006 to promote excellence in photography, the annual non-acquisitive William and Winifred Bowness Photography Prize is an initiative of the MGA Foundation. The Bowness Photography Prize has quickly become Australia’s most coveted photography prize. It is also one of the country’s most open prizes for photography. In the past, finalists have included established and emerging photographers, art and commercial photographers. All film-based and digital work from amateurs and professionals is accepted. There are no thematic restrictions.
The 2009 Bowness Prize recipient was Paul Knight. Since winning the Prize, Knight has received an Australia Council for the Arts Skills and Development Grant and is currently presenting new work at the prestigious international artfair Art Cologne.
Jane Burton (Australian, b. 1966) Ivy # 3 2009 Courtesy of the artist and Karen Woodbury Gallery, Melbourne
Owen Leong (Australian, b. 1979) Justin 2009 Courtesy of the artist and Anna Pappas Gallery, Melbourne
Paul Knight (Australian, b. 1976) 14 months # 01 2008 Courtesy of the artist and Neon Parc, Melbourne Winner of the William and Winifred Bowness Photography Prize 2009
Monash Gallery of Art 860 Ferntree Gully Road Wheelers Hill Victoria 3150 Phone: +61 3 8544 0503
Frederick H. Evans (British, 1853-1943) Kelmscott Manor: Attics 1896 Platinum print Image and sheet: 6 1/16 × 7 7/8 inches (15.4 × 20cm) Philadelphia Museum of Art Gift of the artist, 1932
Attics often serve as metaphors for the space where memories reside. Here Frederick Evans captures the warm glow, the simple, rough-hewn timbers, and the striking geometry of the attic at Kelmscott Manor, the beloved summer retreat of designer William Morris (British, 1834-1896).
Morris, the leader of the Arts and Crafts movement – which valued Britain’s craft tradition and rejected its industrial revolution – drew inspiration from the architecture and workmanship of Kelmscott, designed and constructed in the 1500s. In 1896 Morris invited Evans to photograph the home, which he felt embodied the memory of Britain’s aesthetic past.
Platinum prints always have such luminosity. A Sea of Steps by Fredrick H. Evans (1903, below) is a knockout. I remember some beautiful platinum prints many years ago (1989) up in Sydney at the Museum of Contemporary Art in the touring exhibition Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Moment that were an absolute knockout as well. Pity he didn’t print them himself but they were still superlative!
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Shen Shellenberger and the Philadelphia Museum of Art for allowing me to publish the last five images in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Frederick H. Evans (British, 1853-1943) Kelmscott Manor 1896 Platinum print Image and sheet: 7 3/8 × 4 1/4 inches (18.7 × 10.8cm) Philadelphia Museum of Art Purchased with funds contributed by Dorothy Norman and with the Director’s Discretionary Fund, 1968
Frederick H. Evans (British, 1853-1943) Angers: Prefecture, Sculptured Arches of 11th-12th Century c. 1906-1907 Platinum print Image and sheet: 9 11/16 × 7 7/8 inches (24.6 × 20 cm) Philadelphia Museum of Art Purchased with funds contributed by Dorothy Norman and with the Director’s Discretionary Fund, 1968
Frederick H. Evans (British, 1853-1943) Southwell Cathedral, Chapter House Capital 1898 Platinum print Philadelphia Museum of Art
Frederick H. Evans (British, 1853-1943) View across the nave to the transept at York Minster 1901 Platinum print Philadelphia Museum of Art
Frederick H. Evans (British, 1853-1943) Durham Cathedral: West End Nave 1912 Platinum print Image and sheet: 9 1/2 × 4 13/16 inches (24.1 × 12.3cm) Philadelphia Museum of Art Purchased with funds contributed by Dorothy Norman, 1973
Frederick H. Evans (British, 1853-1943) Ancient crypt cellars in Provins 1910 Platinum print Philadelphia Museum of Art
Frederick H. Evans (British, 1853-1943) Westminster Abbey: North Transept: East Side 1911 Platinum print Image and sheet: 9 7/16 × 6 inches (23.9 × 15.3cm) Philadelphia Museum of Art Purchased with the Lola Downin Peck Fund, 1969
Frederick H. Evans (British, 1853-1943) Westminster Abbey: Staircase in Confessor’s Chapel 1911 Platinum print Image and sheet: 9 1/2 × 6 1/8 inches (24.2 × 15.6cm) Philadelphia Museum of Art Purchased with the Lola Downin Peck Fund, 1969
Frederick H. Evans (British, 1853-1943) Westminster Abbey: From the South Transept 1911 Platinum print Image and sheet: 9 1/2 × 7 7/16 inches (24.2 × 18.9cm) Philadelphia Museum of Art Purchased with the Lola Downin Peck Fund, 1969
Frederick H. Evans (British, 1853-1943) Westminster Abbey: East Ambulatory 1911 Platinum print Image and sheet: 9 5/16 × 6 11/16 inches (23.7 × 17cm) Purchased with the Lola Downin Peck Fund, 1969
Frederick H. Evans (British, 1853-1943) Westminster Abbey: 12th-Century Mosaic Floor at the Sanctuary 1911 Platinum print Image and sheet: 7 5/16 × 8 7/8 inches (18.6 × 22.6 cm) Philadelphia Museum of Art Purchased with the Lola Downin Peck Fund, 1969
Although Evans indicated that this mosaic floor was created in the twelfth century, the surface surrounding the High Altar of Westminster Abbey was in fact laid in 1268. King Henry III (1207-1272) commissioned the mosaic from Roman craftsmen who specialised in the opus sectile, or “cut work” technique, commonly called “Cosmati” after a well-known Italian family of mosaic artists. Materials used here include blue, red, and turquoise glass as well as yellow limestone, purple porphyry, green serpentine, and onyx. Evans’s unusual composition privileges the floor, drawing attention to the intricate and abstract design of squares, rectangles, and roundels.
Frederick H. Evans (British, 1853-1943) Westminster Abbey: East End, North Ambulatory 1911 Platinum print Image and sheet: 9 3/8 × 7 1/2 inches (23.8 × 19.1cm) Philadelphia Museum of Art Purchased with the Lola Downin Peck Fund, 1969
Frederick H. Evans (British, 1853-1943) Westminster Abbey: Apse from Choir 1911 Platinum print Image and sheet: 9 7/16 × 7 1/2 inches (23.9 × 19.1cm) Philadelphia Museum of Art Purchased with the Lola Downin Peck Fund, 1969
Country Life magazine commissioned Evans to photograph the interior of London’s Westminster Abbey in 1911, while the church was closed to worshipers in preparation for the coronation of King George V (1865-1936) and Queen Mary (1867-1953). Although the construction and removal of temporary facilities relating to the coronation regularly disrupted Evans’s work, the more than fifty photographs in the resulting portfolio reveal only the timeless beauty and grandeur of the Gothic structure that has hosted thirty-eight royal coronations since the year 1066.
Frederick H. Evans (British, 1853-1943) Westminster Abbey: Henry VII Chapel, Detail of Henry VII Tomb 1911 Platinum print Image and sheet: 8 1/16 × 7 3/16 inches (20.4 × 18.2cm) Philadelphia Museum of Art Purchased with the Lola Downin Peck Fund, 1969
Frederick H. Evans (British, 1853-1943) Westminster Abbey: Tomb of Edward III, Mary and William 1911 Platinum print Image and sheet: 8 11/16 × 6 5/8 inches (22.1 × 16.9cm) Philadelphia Museum of Art Purchased with the Lola Downin Peck Fund, 1969
Frederick H. Evans (British, 1853-1943) York Minster – In Sure and Certain Hope 1903 Platinum print Philadelphia Museum of Art
Frederick H. Evans (British, 1853-1943) A Sea of Steps – Stairs to Chapter House – Wells Cathedral 1903 Platinum print Philadelphia Museum of Art
Frederick H. Evans (British, 1853-1943) Wells Cathedral: North Transept c. 1903 Platinum print Image and sheet: 7 1/4 × 5 7/16 inches (18.4 × 13.8cm) Purchased with funds contributed by Dorothy Norman, 1973
Frederick H. Evans (British, 1853-1943) Ely Cathedral: Octagon into Nave Aisle c. 1899 Platinum print Image and sheet: 7 15/16 × 6 1/8 inches (20.2 × 15.6cm) Philadelphia Museum of Art Purchased with funds contributed by Dorothy Norman, 1973
Frederick H. Evans (British, 1853-1943) Fr: Sec: Spine of Echinus x. 40 c. 1887 Platinum print Image and sheet: 4 3/4 × 4 5/8 inches (12 × 11.8cm) Philadelphia Museum of Art Purchased with funds contributed by Dorothy Norman, 1973
Unlike many beginning photographers of the nineteenth century who experimented with straightforward portrait or landscape compositions, Evans’s earliest trials with photography involved minute organic matter and required the use of a microscope. His complicated “photo-microgram” process allowed him to capture the intricate structures of objects including a water beetle’s eye, tiny sea shells, and this section of a sea urchin’s spine. Although classified as scientific rather than artistic imagery by the Photographic Society of Great Britain, this photo-microgram demonstrates Evans’s ability to delineate the magnificence of organic patterns and presage his photographs that depict the structural beauty of cathedrals.
Frederick H. Evans (British, 1853-1943) Berberis: Plant Study c. 1908 Platinum print Image and sheet: 9 3/8 × 7 1/16 inches (23.8 × 17.9cm) Philadelphia Museum of Art Purchased with funds contributed by Dorothy Norman and with the Director’s Discretionary Fund, 1968
Frederick H. Evans (British, 1853-1943) Redlands Woods c. 1908 Platinum print Image and sheet: 6 × 4 3/16 inches (15.3 × 10.6cm) Philadelphia Museum of Art Purchased with funds contributed by Dorothy Norman and with the Director’s Discretionary Fund, 1968
Frederick H. Evans (British, 1853-1943) An English Glacier: Near Summit of Scafell c. 1905 Platinum print Image and sheet: 9 3/4 × 6 1/2 inches (24.8 × 16.5 cm) Philadelphia Museum of Art Purchased with funds contributed by Dorothy Norman and with the Director’s Discretionary Fund, 1968
Exhibition Highlights the Exceptional Beauty of the Platinum Process in Photography
A cornerstone of photographic practice during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the platinum print is revered by photographers and viewers alike as one of the most beautiful forms of photography, with subtle and lustrous shades that range from the deepest blacks to the most delicate whites. The Philadelphia Museum of Art will present an exhibition of more than 50 works from the late 19th century to the present, showcasing outstanding prints largely drawn from the Museum’s collection of photographs. The Platinum Process: Photographs from the Nineteenth to the Twenty-First Century, on view February 27 – May 23 in the Julien Levy Gallery at the Museum’s Perelman Building, will include images by early masters of the process including Frederick H. Evans (British, 1853-1943) and Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946), as well as works by skilled contemporary practitioners such as Lois Conner (American, born 1951) and Andrea Modica (American, born 1960), who continue to engage in this historic and painstaking process in an era noted for electronic imaging.
“The exhibition offers an opportunity to share this exceptionally beautiful form of photography with our visitors, some of whom may be seeing it for the first time,” Curator of Photographs Peter Barberie said, adding “the Museum is fortunate to have a particularly strong and varied collection of work by some of the truly great practitioners of this process.”
Unlike standard silver printing, in which particles are suspended in gelatin, platinum is brushed directly onto the paper, allowing artists to create a matte image with an exceptionally wide tonal range. Introduced in 1873, the process was enthusiastically embraced by the group of photographers known as the Pictorialists, who believed that fine art photography should emulate the aesthetic values of painting. The group included Evans, whose beautifully rendered images of Britain’s Westminster Abbey, York Minster Abbey and Ely Cathedral are included in the exhibition, and Stieglitz (American, 1876-1946), who is represented in the show by a portrait of his wife, the artist Georgia O’Keeffe (American, 1887-1986), as well as a landscape that foreshadows his Equivalents series.
While encompassing works spanning many dates and styles, The Platinum Process highlights one of the Museum’s treasures, the 1915 masterpiece “Wall Street” by Paul Strand (1890-1976, see above), whose work was at the forefront of the modernist aesthetic developing in New York during the early 20th century. Strand used the subtlety of the platinum print in this work to emphasise abstract patterns in the long shadows cast by figures that walk before a succession of monumental windows.
Reserves of platinum were appropriated for military use during World War I, and its high cost led manufacturers to cease production of commercial platinum paper by the 1930s. As photographers became more engaged in social concerns, documentation and realism, the process fell into disuse. It was not until the early 1960s when Irving Penn, then a successful photographer for Vogue magazine, began to experiment with the long-forgotten technique and took the first steps toward its revival. A meticulous craftsman, Penn was delighted by the luminous prints and lavish tonal range he could achieve using platinum and began to make new photographs with this process in the 1970s. Penn and many of the other contemporary artists on view including Thomas Shillea and Jennette Williams followed Strand’s example, using platinum not for idealised pictures, but to capture nuances of modern experience.
Press release from The Philadelphia Museum of Art website [Online] Cited 25/07/2019. No longer available online
Robert S. Redfield (American, 1849-1923) Heloise Redfield at Mount Washington 1889 Platinum print Image and sheet: 6 5/16 × 8 1/4 inches (16 × 21cm) Philadelphia Museum of Art Gift of Alfred G. Redfield, 1985
F. Holland Day (American, 1864-1933) Untitled 1905 Platinum prints mounted to paper Image and sheet (overall): 10 1/16 × 7 1/2 inches (25.6 × 19.1cm) Philadelphia Museum of Art From the Collection of Dorothy Norman, 1970
Katharine Steward Stanbery (American, 1870-1928) Untitled (Two Girls Playing Jacks) 1907 Platinum print Image and sheet: 8 15/16 x 4 11/16 inches (22.7 x 11.9cm) Philadelphia Museum of Art 125th Anniversary Acquisition. Purchased with the Lola Downin Peck Fund, the Alice Newton Osborn Fund, and with funds contributed by The Judith Rothschild Foundation, 2002
Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976) City Hall Park, New York 1915 Platinum print Sheet: 13 7/8 x 7 3/4 inches (35.2 x 19.7cm) Philadelphia Museum of Art Gift of the artist, 1972
Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976) Washington Heights, New York 1915 (negative); 1915 (print) Platinum print Image and sheet: 9 3/8 x 11 7/8 inches (23.8 x 30.2cm) Philadelphia Museum of Art The Paul Strand Retrospective Collection, 1915-1975, gift of the estate of Paul Strand, 1980
Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976) Wall Street 1915 (negative); 1915 (print) Platinum print Image: 9 3/4 × 12 11/16 inches (24.8 × 32.2cm) Philadelphia Museum of Art The Paul Strand Retrospective Collection, 1915-1975, gift of the estate of Paul Strand, 1980
Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976) Man in a Derby, New York 1916 Platinum print Image: 12 13/16 x 9 15/16 inches (32.5 x 25.2cm) Mat: 22 11/16 x 19 7/16 inches (57.6 x 49.4cm) Philadelphia Museum of Art The Paul Strand Retrospective Collection, 1915-1975, gift of the estate of Paul Strand, 1980
Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976) The Italian, New York 1916 (negative); 1916 (print) Platinum print Image and sheet: 13 × 9 5/16 inches (33 × 23.7cm) Philadelphia Museum of Art The Paul Strand Retrospective Collection, 1915-1975, gift of the estate of Paul Strand, 1980
Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976) Rebecca, New York 1922 (negative); 1922 (print) Palladium print Image: 9 3/4 x 7 13/16 inches (24.8 x 19.8cm) Philadelphia Museum of Art The Paul Strand Collection, purchased with funds contributed by Mr. and Mrs. Robert A. Hauslohner (by exchange), 1985
Alvin Langdon Coburn (British, born United States, 1882-1966) George Seeley c. 1902-1903 Platinum print Image and sheet: 11 x 8 9/16 inches (27.9 x 21.7cm) Philadelphia Museum of Art Purchased with the Lola Downin Peck Fund, the Alice Newton Osborn Fund, and with funds contributed by The Judith Rothschild Foundation in honour of the 125th Anniversary of the Museum, 2002
Gertrude Käsebier (American, 1852-1934) The Two Families c. 1910 Platinum print Image and sheet: 5 3/8 × 11 5/16 inches (13.6 × 28.8cm) Philadelphia Museum of Art Gift of William Innes Homer, 1986
Käsebier’s family members and close friends served as her earliest photographic subjects, and familial themes remained paramount in the images she produced throughout her career. This photograph of Käsebier’s two daughters and their families, taken in Woburn, Massachusetts, is a dynamic portrait of a multigenerational gathering. Curiously, Käsebier manipulated this print to emphasise the act of photography. In the original scene, the young boy and seated woman at right look downward at a wire-mesh food cover resting on a plate. These objects have been removed from this print, replaced by the considerably more fascinating camera.
Gertrude Käsebier (American, 1852-1934) Mrs. F. H. Evans c. 1900 Platinum print Image and sheet: 7 1/2 × 5 1/4 inches (19.1 × 13.4 cm) Philadelphia Museum of Art Purchased with funds contributed by Dorothy Norman, 1973
In 1889, at the age of thirty-seven, Käsebier enrolled at Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute to study portrait painting. Although the art school did not teach photography, Käsebier began using a camera at home to document her growing children, eventually favoring photography over other mediums. She established a commercial portrait studio in New York City in 1897, working to “bring out in each photograph the essential personality that is variously called temperament, soul, humanity.” This portrait features Ada Emily Longhurst, wife of photographer Frederick H. Evans, whom Käsebier befriended while on a trip to England in 1901.
Timothy H. O’Sullivan (American, 1840-1882) Sand Dunes, Carson Desert, Nevada 1867 Albumen print Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division
The photograph shows O’Sullivan’s photographic wagon in which he developed his glass plates.
O’Sullivan died at the age of forty two but what photographs he left us! The human scales the sublime, literally; figures in the descriptive landscape. The last photograph is, if you will forgive the colloquialism, a doozy.
Marcus
“If the world is unfair or beyond our understanding, sublime places suggest it is not surprising things should be thus. We are the playthings of the forces that laid out the oceans and chiselled the mountains. Sublime places acknowledge limitations that we might otherwise encounter with anxiety or anger in the ordinary flow of events. It is not just nature that defies us. Human life is as overwhelming, but it is the vast spaces of nature that perhaps provide us with the finest, the most respectful reminder of all that exceeds us. If we spend time with them, they may help us to accept more graciously the great unfathomable events that molest our lives and will inevitably return us to dust.”
Alain de Botton. The Art of Travel. London: Penguin, 2002, pp. 178-179.
Many thankx to Laura Baptiste and the Smithsonian American Art Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Timothy H. O’Sullivan (American, 1840-1882) Lake in Conejos Cañon, Colorado 1874 Albumen print Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division
Timothy H. O’Sullivan (American, 1840-1882) Black Cañon, Colorado River, From Camp 8, Looking Above 1871 Albumen print Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division
Timothy H. O’Sullivan (American, 1840-1882) Buttes near Green River City, Wyoming 1872 Albumen print Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division
Timothy H. O’Sullivan (American, 1840-1882) Cañon de Chelle, Walls of the Grand Canon about 1200 feet in height 1873 Albumen print Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase from the Charles Isaacs Collection made possible in part by the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen Endowment
Framing the West: The Survey Photographs of Timothy H. O’Sullivan is the first major exhibition devoted to this remarkable photographer in three decades. The exhibition is on view at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., from Feb. 12 through May 9. The museum is the only venue for the exhibition.
Marcus
“Framing the West” – a collaboration between the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Library of Congress – offers a critical reevaluation of O’Sullivan’s images and the conditions under which they were made, as well as an examination of their continued importance in the photographic canon. It features more than 120 photographs and stereo cards by O’Sullivan, including a notable group of King Survey photographs from the Library of Congress that have rarely been on public display since 1876. The installation also includes images and observations by six contemporary landscape photographers that comment on the continuing influence of O’Sullivan’s photographs. Toby Jurovics, curator of photography, is the exhibition curator.
“Timothy H. O’Sullivan is widely recognised as an influential figure in the development of photography in America, so I am delighted that we have partnered with our colleagues at the Library of Congress to present this new assessment of his work and to expose a new generation to his forceful images,” said Elizabeth Broun, The Margaret and Terry Stent Director of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
“In the years following the Civil War, the West was fertile ground for American photographers, but Timothy H. O’Sullivan has always stood apart in his powerful and direct engagement with the landscape,” said Jurovics. “Almost a century and a half after their making, his photographs still speak with an unparalleled presence and immediacy.”
O’Sullivan was part of a group of critically acclaimed 19th-century photographers – including A.J. Russell, J.K. Hillers and William Bell – who went west in the 1860s and 1870s. O’Sullivan was a photographer for two of the most ambitious geographical surveys of the 19th century. He accompanied geologist Clarence King on the Geologic and Geographic Survey of the Fortieth Parallel and Lt. George M. Wheeler on the Geographical and Geological Surveys West of the 100th Meridian. During his seven seasons (1867-1874) traversing the mountain and desert regions of the Western United States, he created one of the most influential visual accounts of the American interior.
His assignments with the King and Wheeler surveys gave O’Sullivan the freedom to record the Western landscape with a visual and emotional complexity that was without precedent. His photographs illustrated geologic theories and provided information useful to those settling in the West, but they also were a personal record of his encounter with a landscape that was challenging and inspiring.
Of all his colleagues, O’Sullivan has maintained the strongest influence on contemporary practice. The formal directness and lack of picturesque elements in his work appealed to a later generation of photographers who, beginning in the 1970s, turned away from a romanticised view of nature to once again embrace a clear, unsentimental approach to the landscape. Observations about his images by Thomas Joshua Cooper, Eric Paddock, Edward Ranney, Mark Ruwedel, Martin Stupich and Terry Toedtemeier appear in the exhibition and the catalog.
O’Sullivan (1840-1882) was born in Ireland. He emigrated to the United States with his family at the age of two, eventually settling in Staten Island, N.Y. Biographical details about O’Sullivan are spare, yet he is thought to have had his earliest photographic training in the New York studio of portrait photographer Mathew Brady. He is believed to have accompanied Alexander Gardner to Washington, D.C., to assist in opening a branch of the Brady studio in 1858, and when Gardner opened his own studio in Washington in 1863, O’Sullivan followed. O’Sullivan first gained recognition for images made during the Civil War, particularly those from the Battle of Gettysburg, and 41 of his images were published in Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the War. O’Sullivan’s experience photographing in the field helped earn him the position as photographer for King’s survey. After his survey work, he held brief assignments in Washington with the U.S. Geological Survey and the U.S. Treasury. O’Sullivan died of tuberculosis on Staten Island at the age of 42.
Timothy H. O’Sullivan (American, 1840-1882) Green River Cañon, Colorado 1872 Albumen print Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division
Timothy H. O’Sullivan (American, 1840-1882) Horse Shoe Cañon, Green River, Wyoming 1872 Albumen print Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division
Timothy H. O’Sullivan (American, 1840-1882) Summit of Wahsatch Range, Utah (Lone Peak) 1869 Albumen print Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division
Timothy H. O’Sullivan (American, 1840-1882) Shoshone Falls, Snake River, Idaho, View Across Top of Falls 1874 Albumen print Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division
Timothy H. O’Sullivan (American, 1840-1882) The Pyramid & Domes, Pyramid Lake, Nevada 1867 Albumen print Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division
Smithsonian American Art Museum 8th and F Streets, N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20004
Featuring Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk by Andrea Fraser (USA) as well as works from the collections of Hany Armanious, Liv Barrett, Polly Borland (UK), Steve Carr (NZ), Lane Cormick, Chantal Faust, Marco Fusinato, Tony Garifalakis, Matthew Griffin, Irene Hanenbergh, Christopher Hanrahan, Hotham Street Ladies, the Kingpins, Paul Knight, Andrew Liversidge, Rob McLeish, Callum Morton, Nat & Ali, Geoff Newton, Martin Parr (UK), Stuart Ringholt, David Rosetzky, Darren Sylvester, Christian Thompson, Lyndal Walker and Caroline Williams.
Curated by Mark Feary, this is a deliciously ironic exhibition that asks the audience to question the social and political construction of the blockbuster exhibitions regularly held by large museums around Australia; to question the role of the curator in assembling such exhibitions; and to question the cultural value of permanent collections of ‘Masterpieces’. Autumn Masterpieces displays work that is anything but permanent and undermines the process whereby museums construct frameworks for social understanding. The work, displayed in a roped off space on plinths of various heights, in cheap frames and at skew-whiff angles, seems ephemeral and transitory all the more to contradict both main tenants of the title of the exhibition: masterpiece and permanence.
Sitting on plinths that are adorned with plastic gold name plaques emblazoned with the condition of the possibility of the works existence, “From the collection of …” , the untitled works reinforce the conceptual thrust of the exhibition. In one sense the content of the specific images seemed almost irrelevant; in another the collective dialectical argument of the images deconstructs normative interpretations of the masterpiece. ‘Instructions for the Tourist’ and ‘Rules for How to use the playground’ sit next to photographs of dejected clowns; ‘Confusion & Reversals’ sit next to ambiguous photographs of events and actions: people doing ‘normal’ things displayed though Polaroids, newspaper clippings, snapshots, photographs from albums, black and white and colour, framed and in museological glass cases.
The highlight of the exhibition for me was the guffaw inducing DVD Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk (1989) by American artist Andrea Fraser. Where Mark Feary found this post-cultural gem is beyond me but I am so glad he did! I stood transfixed as the narrator / curator takes us on a virtual tour of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, along the way pointing out the magnificence and subliminal beauty of the objects in the museum. She stresses the decorum of the institution, it’s tradition in measured, ordered, dignified arrangements that are fine and simple while addressing a water fountain. Oh the deliciousness! She continues with the exultation of the institution, that is to develop an appreciation of values – true / false, better / worse, right / wrong, what is good for you / what is good for society – standards that should be adopted by a discriminating public, while addressing a broom cupboard. The piece subverts an approach “in which visitors’ individual meanings are only validated by the extent to which they concord with the conclusions intended by exhibition-makers or to which they conform to some predetermined and fixed standard truth.”1 And so it goes in an ever so serious, side-splitting soliloquy, critiquing the functions of art, linking the aspirations of humanity with the highest privileges of wealth and leisure. Wonderful!
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ Hein, George E. Learning in the Museum. London: Routledge, 1998 quoted in Sandell, Richard. “Reframing conversations,” in Museums, Prejudice and the Reframing of Difference. London and New York: Routledge, p. 179.
Installation views of the exhibition Autumn Masterpieces: Highlights from the Permanent Collection at the Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Courtesy of the collection of Tony Garifalakis
Courtesy of the collection of Irene Hanenbergh
Courtesy of the collection of Hany Armanious
Andrea Fraser (American, b. 1965) Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk 1989 DVD (colour video with sound. 29′) Courtesy of the artist and Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York
Many thankx to the Blanton Museum of Art for allowing me to reproduce images from the exhibition in the post. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Marcus
Olaf Breuning (Swiss, b. 1970) Brian 2008 C-print 60 x 70 inches Courtesy the artist and Metro Pictures, New York
Glenn Ligon (American, b. 1960) Lest We Forget 1998 Series including cast aluminium or bronze plaques, colour photographs of plaques on site Courtesy the artist and Luhring Augustine Gallery, New York
Valeska Soares (Brazilian, b. 1957) Duet 2008 Hand-carved white marble Installation dimensions variable Private Collection
Tracey Emin (English, b. 1963) You Should Have Loved Me 2008 Warm white neon Courtesy of Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York
This February, The Blanton Museum of Art at The University of Texas at Austin investigates the notion of desire in an exhibition of the same name. Curated by Annette DiMeo Carlozzi, Blanton curator of American and contemporary art and director of curatorial affairs, the exhibition features over fifty works from an international group of contemporary artists working in all media, including Glenn Ligon, Marilyn Minter, Petah Coyne, Bill Viola, Tracey Emin, Isaac Julien and many others. The accompanying illustrated catalogue will contain texts by art critics, fiction writers, poets, performing and visual artists, all written in direct response to the works of art in the exhibition.
Carlozzi states, “”Desire” is a complex human emotion and a driving force in our lives from childhood through old age. We all can recall examples of literature, film, and music that are rife with expressions of physical desire, but how do contemporary visual artists portray it, and all its attendant psychological states – anticipation, arousal, longing, regret, and so on? “Desire” assembles a really broad range of compelling works that together present a surprisingly diverse portrait of the experience.”
One provocative aspect of the exhibition is not its imagery, per se, but the manner by which many of the works translate intimate experiences into art a public expression. Marilyn Minter’s Crystal Swallow would seem to capture a private moment of visceral response, yet in such detail and exaggerated scale that it becomes a grotesque advertisement for arousal. Glenn Ligon’s series, Lest We Forget, commemorates those flickers of romantic fantasy that sometimes occur while people watching. And Tracey Emin’s You Should Have Loved Me is an accusation from a lover scorned, created with the neon light of public signage as if to broadcast raw feeling to an uncaring world.
Works by Kalup Linzy, William Villalongo, Olaf Breuning, James Drake, Petah Coyne, Gajin Fugita, Georganne Deen, Adam Pendleton, Peter Saul, Valeska Soares, Danica Phelps, Miguel Angel Rojas, Mads Lynnerup, Rochelle Feinstein, Richard Prince, Laurel Nakadate, Jesse Amado, Isabell Heimerdinger, Alejandro Cesarco, Eve Sussman, Robert Kushner, Luisa Lambri, Chris Doyle, and a dozen others, provide an engaging multi-generational exploration of desire. In addition, an informed selection of works of art from The Blanton’s print collection will add a historic counterpoint to the contemporary works on view.
Will Villalongo (American, b. 1975) The Last Days of Eden 2009 Cut velour paper Courtesy the artist and Susan Inglett Gallery, New York
William Villalongo (born December 14, 1975 in Hollywood, Florida) is an American artist working in painting, printmaking, sculpture, and installation. Currently based in Brooklyn, New York, Villalongo is also a professor at the Cooper Union School of Art in New York.
Villalongo typically focuses in his works on the politics of historical erasure, with a particular focus on the artistic reassessment of Western, American, and African Art histories. The artist states that his intention toward these reassessments evolves in part from the West’s histories of “taking African art objects and placing them on the side of the sofa to decorate, although that is not their purpose. We are obsessed with fitting a narrative, a story.”
His works engage with the black body, examining the influences of socialisation, history, occupation, dress, and speech on it. In many of his portraits, bodies emerge from “a tumult of white negative space cut out of black velour paper,” in ways that evoke leaves, branches, feathers, or slashes.
Villalongo is also influenced by Pablo Picasso, who incorporated African masks into his primitivist works, and Aaron Douglas who he credits as inspiring him. Villalongo reexamines the power dynamics of history and representation in his own pieces. “It’s problematic and interesting, and I wanted to think about how to use it and tell a story.”
Petah Coyne (American, b. 1953) Untitled #1103 (Daphne) 2002-2003 Mixed media 77 x 83 x 86 inches Collection of Julie and John Thornton
Petah Coyne (born 1953) is an American sculptor and photographer. She is known for her large-scale sculptures composed of unconventional, and often organic, materials, such as clay, silk, wax, and hair.
Bill Viola (American, 1951-2024) Becoming Light (still) 2005 Colour High-Definition video on plasma display mounted on wall 47.6 in x 28.5 in x 4 in (121 x 72.5 x 10.2cm) Performers: John Hay, Sarah Steben Photo: Kira Perov Courtesy Bill Viola Studio
Marilyn Minter (American, b. 1948) Crystal Swallow 2006 Enamel on metal Promised gift of Jeanne and Michael Klein, 2007
Blanton Museum of Art MLK at Congress (200 East MLK) Austin, Texas 78701
Many thankx to the MKG for allowing me to publish the photographs in this post. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Marcus
Kusakabe Kimbei (Japanese, 1841-1934) Sumo wrestlers c. 1880
Gerhard Riebicke (German, 1878-1957) Couple Performing German Dance c. 1930 Gelatin silver print 11.6 x 16.2 cm Bodo Niemann and Münchner Stadtmuseum
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Gerhard Riebicke spent his childhood in Switzerland. He studied in Tübingen, worked as a tutor in Poznan, and appropriated the technique of self taught photographer. In 1909 he was a press photographer in Berlin. Gradually, his focus shifted to the sports and nudity culture photography (ball games, jumps, dance or bathing scenes).
T.W. Salomon (attributed) Female Nude in Armchair c. 1935 Gelatin silver print 27.5 x 27.4cm Münchner Stadtmuseum
T.W. Salomon was a notable German photographer best known for his “Revuegirls” series from 1935. He was a contemporary of Erich Salomon, another influential German photographer, but there is no direct connection between the two.
Jan Mutsu Japanese Man with Tattoo c. 1955 Gelatin silver print 20.2 x 25.7cm Münchner Stadtmuseum
Josef Breitenbach (German-American, 1896-1984) Nude from the series This beautiful landscape 1963 Gelatin silver print 27.5 x 35.3cm Breitenbach Trust USA and Munchner Stadtmuseum
An exhibition with more than 250 original photos, books and folders with studies from the nude, including masterpieces from each period.
The representation of the unclothed human body has exuded a great fascination ever since time began. The exhibition Nude Visions invites visitors to embark on a journey through a collection of depictions of the human body spanning 150 years. More than 250 original photos, books and folders with studies from the nude will be on view, including masterpieces from each period: from photographs dating from the 19th century which seek their models in Classical Antiquity and the Renaissance, up to Surrealistic experiments and fashion and lifestyle photography. The exhibition illustrates changing ideals of beauty and moral perceptions, and reveals once again the constant attempt to balance between educational openness, titillation and curiosity.
“Without any doubt, there is nothing which draws the attention of the observer to it so much as the naked human body.” This comment of the journalist and photographer Kurt Freytag in1909 is as true today as it was then. The exhibition turns this fact to its advantage and deals with the historical, aesthetic and ideological development of images of the human body in photography. The show is divided into seven chapters devoted to the meaning and function of the unclothed human body in photography, and tracing the history of the medium: “Academies and Exotic Pictures in the 19th century,” “Art photography around 1900 (Pictorialism),” “Avant-gardes of the 20s and 30s,” “Artistic positions after 1945,” “Naturism,” “The Male Nude” and “Glamourous Nudes.” The first coloured Daguerreotypes of curvaceous ladies with blushing cheeks dating from 1855 meet the unflatteringly in-your-face and voyeuristic self-portrait of the photographer Frank Stürmer from 2004. These two photos mark the two ends of the spectrum covered by the exhibition, which illustrates the evolution of nude photography over sixteen decades by the example of more than 250 eminent works.
Nude photography is always, too, a process of negotiation between revealing and concealing. This exhibition makes clear the ambivalence of what is visible and what is unseen, of shame and curiosity, of legitimation and provocativeness. How nakedness is treated is closely bound up with the specific social context in which it occurs, the ideas of morality and the aesthetic ideal of an era. The motif of the nude is always influenced here both by the historical artistic tradition and reactions to contemporary impulses, which are interpreted by the photographer. Thus the movement for women’s emancipation, for instance, led to new ways of looking at both the female and the male body, as seen for example in the work of Herlinde Koelbl. Images which were still regarded as being scandalous at the beginning of the 20th century, triggering moral misgivings and controversy about a subject perceived as being delicate, would hardly bring a blush to the face of anyone living today. It is not only the motifs which have moved on, but also the reproducibility of the images and the extent of their media coverage impact on the awareness and significance of nakedness in society.
The origins of the history of nude photography lie in the so-called “academies,” which provided painters, graphic artists and sculptors with study objects in the 19th century and which followed the historical artistic models of Classical Antiquity and the Renaissance. Nude photography soon increasingly became emancipated from being a mere model for painting and sculpture, and developed artistic ambitions of its own: photographers discovered in the art of the fin de siècle, with its debt to Symbolism, the nude as a reflection of emotional states and yearnings. In the outgoing 19th century, with its bias towards the exact sciences, the human body served as an object for the study of movement, such as in the celebrated series shots by Eadweard Muybridge showing the sequence of motions in human movement.
Whereas historically staged scenes and compositions are still created in the sheltered environment of the atelier at the beginnings of photography, we find the first open-air nudes after 1870. Wilhelm von Gloeden, Guglielmo Plüschow and others took advantage of the light in the Mediterranean South to stage their visions of an earthly Arcadia. As a feature of the Lebensreform back-to-nature movement which gained ground from the turn of the century onwards, especially in Germany, nude photography became a torchbearer of the Naturist movement. The ornamentally arranged groupings of naked dancers which Gerhard Riebicke for example photographs, mainly in the German countryside, became a symbol for the liberation from the moral constraints of civilisation and industrialisation. The aesthetic of athletic bodies engaged in sporting activities or dancers in motion was taken up in the heroic physical ideal of the National Socialists and can later still be found in the cult of bodybuilding.
The depiction of the naked torso is shrouded in an aura of scandal and has always been a political bone of contention, whereby images of the bare human body send signals which differ according to their historical context: the photographic artists of the 1970s, working within the framework of body art and performance events, declared the directness of their own physical experience to be a political necessity. In retrospect, their work can be seen as a last desperate attempt to grapple with the vanishing concept of the subjective personality before the transition to the post-modern age. The private spaces of life too are meanwhile also illuminated in a quite different way than 25 years ago. The photographer Thomas Ruff deals in his works, which he imbues with a diffuse haziness by digital means, with the theme of the exhibitionism which can go as far as pornographic exposure of one’s own and others’ nakedness in internet forums. Nude Visions shows that the representation of the naked human body always also has something to do with the quest for insight into what human beings (and one’s own self) really are and what role they play in society.
Press release from the MKG website [Online] Cited 15/04/2010. No longer available online
Lehnert & Landrock was a photographic studio run by Rudolf Franz Lehnert and Ernst Heinrich Landrock active in Tunisia and Egypt in the early 20th century, noted for producing Orientalist images. Rudolf Franz Lehnert and Ernst Heinrich Landrock produced images of North African people, landscapes, and architecture for a primarily European audience. These images were mainly distributed in monographs, though also as original prints, photogravures, and lithographic postcards.
Around 1900, photography increasingly established itself as an artistic medium, with proponents like Frank Eugene attempting to conceal its true character through soft-focus lenses, gauze curtains, and post-processing of the image.
Herbert List (German, 1903-1975) Arab Boy with Desert Candles 1935 Gelatin silver print 29.7 x 22.5cm Herbert List-inheritance, Hamburg and Munchner Stadtmuseum
Exhibition dates: 11th February – 24th April, 2010
Alexey Titarenko (American born Soviet Union, b. 1962) #1 Untitled (Boy) 1993 Gelatin silver print
Many thankx to the Nailya Alexander Gallery for allowing me to reproduce the images in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Alexey Titarenko (American born Soviet Union, b. 1962) #3 Untitled (Crowd 1) 1992 Gelatin silver print
Alexey Titarenko (American born Soviet Union, b. 1962) #7 Untitled (Three Women Selling Cigarettes) 1992 Gelatin silver print
Alexey Titarenko (American born Soviet Union, b. 1962) #11 Untitled (Begging Woman) 1999 Gelatin silver print
Nailya Alexander Gallery is pleased to announce Alexey Titarenko: Saint Petersburg in Four Movements opening on February 11th, in her new space at the Fuller Building, 41 E 57th Street, Suite 704. The reception for the artist will be from 6-8pm. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 10am-6pm and by appointment.
This will be Alexey Titarenko’s first major exhibition in New York that features his entire St. Petersburg series (1991-2009). The four underlying sequences, or movements – to borrow a term from the vocabulary of music, which features prominently in the artist’s mind, are The City of Shadows, The Anonymous, The Light of Saint Petersburg and Unfinished time. Like music, the expression of time is a presence in Titarenko’s art, associated with literature and in particular, the works of Marcel Proust.
This majestic and history-laden city, where Titarenko was born in 1962, is the central subject of his photography, or to be more accurate it is the soul of the city and therefore that of Russia. As the artist himself explains:
“It would be en error to consider my photographs within the context of the values now fashionable in the arts in general and photography in particular. To align them with such and such a trend, without taking into account that their very purpose in existing is defined by the past. Even the most factual of them are not reportage, but a novel. The principal motivation for their creation is, in fact, always the same: Russia’s history throughout the 20th century, which is an unending series of tragedies of ever more baffling dimensions, whether you consider the wars, the famines or the so-called times of peace. The history of Russia … but in the form of rather contemporary images, made in a single location, a single city – St. Petersburg. Rather than the city (which is mostly only vaguely visible), these images represent emotion – the range of emotions forming the deep inner character of the people who lived in this country and endured all these disasters, people who were usually only represented from outside. And it is therefore these emotions which, in themselves, are quite general and have remained unchanged in the course of the century, like the emotions aroused by the music of Shostakovich, for example, or by the novels of Solzhenitsyn, which are the true subject of my photographs, and my goal would be to convey them to the viewer, to make him or her feel them … understand, to feel compassion and love.”
Titarenko was able to develop a form of expression reminiscent of Dostoyevsky’s stories, inspired by the moods and rhythms of the music of Shostakovich. Often, the city, veiled in winter’s shadows or bright with summer’s dazzle, is inhabited by nearly transparent phantoms. They dwell in its streets, cross its courtyards: crowds on the move, spreading over a vast square like a wave, their individual identities blurred and indistinct. Nevertheless, sometimes a few isolated, improbable figures emerge from the crowd. This photographic technique, involving relatively slow shutter speeds, confirms a taste for randomness and makes each image a unique adventure, a potential source of surprise. The approach also bespeaks Titarenko’s long-standing interest in 19th-century landscape photographers, especially those who operated in cities. In addition to this style of representation, which eschews any temptation to be objective and is finally quite impressionistic, the darkroom technique Titarenko uses transforms the black-and-white print into a composition endowed with subtle, suggestive hues and ever-differing nuances of gray. Titarenko never reproduces exactly the same rendering of light and shadow from one print to the next.
Art Blart _ art and cultural memory archive 
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