Curator: Britt Salvesen, Department Head and Curator of the Wallis Annenberg Photography Department and Prints and Drawings at LACMA
William Henry Fox Talbot (English, 1800-1877) Articles of China c. 1844 Calotype 5 3/8 x 7 1/8 in. (13.65 x 18.1cm) The Marjorie and Leonard Vernon Collection, gift of The Annenberg Foundation, acquired from Carol Vernon and Robert Turbin
It is a real joy to bring these beautiful images to you!
Frederick H. Evans A Sea Of Steps – Wells Cathedral(England, 1903, below) is one of my favourite photographs of all time, up there in my top 20 or so. But you wouldn’t knock back any of these for your collection, especially Imogen Cunningham’s Magnolia Blossom(1925, below) and Edward Steichen’s Three Pears & An Apple(1921, below).
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to The Los Angeles County 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.
Linnaeus Tripe (English, 1822-1902) The Elliot Marbles, Central Museum, Madras India, 1858 Albumen photograph 10 1/2 × 13 in. (26.67 × 33.02cm) The Marjorie and Leonard Vernon Collection, gift of The Annenberg Foundation, acquired from Carol Vernon and Robert Turbin
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) presents See the Light – Photography, Perception, Cognition: The Marjorie and Leonard Vernon Collection, an exhibition celebrating an extraordinary collection and exploring parallels between photography and the science of vision. Since the invention of photography in the late 1830s, the medium has evolved in relation to theories about vision, perception, and cognition. The exhibition takes a historical perspective, identifying correlations between photography and the science of vision during four chronological periods. See the Light is comprised of 220 works by more than 150 artists, including Ansel Adams, Julia Margaret Cameron, Imogen Cunningham, William Henry Fox Talbot, Edward Steichen, Edward Weston, Minor White, and many more.
The exhibition draws entirely from the Marjorie and Leonard Vernon Collection, a key collection within LACMA’s Wallis Annenberg Photography Department. Acquired in 2008, the collection represents the diversity of photographic processes from the medium’s invention in 1839 to the 21st century. See the Light is accompanied by a free mobile-phone multimedia tour featured on mobile.lacma.org with commentary by the Vernons’ daughter, Carol Vernon; curator Britt Salvesen; artist James Welling; expert in computational vision Pietro Perona; and others. A 208-page catalogue, published by LACMA and DelMonico Books / Prestel, includes an essay by Britt Salvesen with contributions from Todd Cronan, Antonio Damasio, Alan Gilchrist, Pietro Perona, Barbara Maria Stafford, and James Welling. A new web page features excerpts from LACMA’s Vernon Oral History Project, an ongoing series of interviews with prominent artists, curators, dealers, and scholars who worked closely with the Vernons.
“Photography is often approached from either the artistic or the technological point of view, but these two aspects of the medium have been intertwined since its invention,” said Britt Salvesen, Department Head and Curator of the Wallis Annenberg Photography Department. “As a scientific instrument, the camera operates as an infallible eye, augmenting physiological vision, and as an artist’s tool, it channels the imagination, recording creative vision. The Marjorie and Leonard Vernon Collection offers unparalleled scope to the spirit of both science and art.”
The Marjorie and Leonard Vernon Collection
Through a groundbreaking gift from Wallis Annenberg and the Annenberg Foundation, and with the support of Carol Vernon and Robert Turbin, LACMA acquired the Marjorie and Leonard Vernon Collection in 2008. Comprising of more than 3,600 prints by almost 700 artists, the Marjorie and Leonard Vernon Collection at LACMA constitutes one of the finest collections of photography spanning the 19th and 20th centuries. LACMA’s acquisition of this collection makes it possible for the museum to represent photography’s breadth in the context of its encyclopaedic collections.
Marjorie and Leonard Vernon were avid collectors in the Los Angeles and Southern California communities. The Vernons built their collection beginning around 1975, cultivating a group of works with global significance, with a special emphasis on West Coast photography of the early and mid-20th century. The collection grew over the years to include works by international photographers, with the earliest photographs dating from the 1840s and the latest to 2001.
Exhibition organisation
See the Light is organised thematically and traces the trajectory of advanced research on cognition and perception in relation to the art of photography. Four approaches within photography are identified: descriptive naturalism, subjective naturalism, experimental modernism, and romantic modernism.
Descriptive naturalism
Early advocates of photography (from the 1840s through around 1880) were eager to recruit the authority of science without sacrificing the romance of art. The notion that the camera could make a pure transcription of nature, undistorted by human error, took hold at precisely the moment with research in physiological optics revealed the complexities of the human visual system. The depiction of far-off landscapes was one of photography’s key functions in its descriptive naturalist phase, as in Carleton Watkins’s commanding views of the American West, which recorded the natural splendour of the landscape and its settlement.
Subjective naturalism
In the late 19th century, experimental psychology, a newly defined scientific discipline, addressed the progression of sensation into interpretation. At the same time, champions of artistic photography introduced the possibilities of expression, ambiguous form, and abstraction into a medium previously valued for its descriptive functions. Heinrich Kühn’s mastery of painterly techniques, for example, led to the creation of photographs on par with paintings or charcoal drawings. Ultimately Kühn’s photographs depict dreams or memories as much as physical reality.
Experimental Modernism
After World War I, photography became a key tool for avant-garde artists determined to deploy technology in a positive rather than destructive manner, thus restoring balance within the individual psyche and within society at large. The abstract works of György Kepes, influenced by Gestalt psychology, represent a European version of this tendency, which he and other emigrés brought to the United States. A later heir to this tradition is Barbara Kasten, who uses photography to explore key interests including transparency, colour, light, and structure.
Romantic Modernism
Inspired by nature, romantic modernism isolated moments of direct personal contact with the world, and explored the specific capabilities of photography. Despite an apparent divergence of art and science following World War II, photography was a site of connection. Ansel Adams believed in the artist’s unique vision, while also advocating technical precision to realise it. Concurrently, scientists were focusing on contrast perception, the neurological mechanisms by which we distinguish objects and make sense of spatial arrangements. Scientists and photographers alike had to understand the visual system and its responses to black and white.”
William Henry Fox Talbot (England, 1800-1877) Lace 1841 Calotype 7 1/2 × 9 1/4 in. (19.05 × 23.5cm) The Marjorie and Leonard Vernon Collection, gift of The Annenberg Foundation and promised gift of Carol Vernon and Robert Turbin
Andrew Young (English, active 1870-1879) Plane at Aberdour, in Old Avenue Scotland, late 1870s Woodbury type 9 1/8 × 7 3/8 in. (23.18 × 18.73cm) The Marjorie and Leonard Vernon Collection, gift of The Annenberg Foundation, acquired from Carol Vernon and Robert Turbin
Jaroslav Rössler (Bohemia, Havlíčkův Brod, 1902-1990) Still Life with Small Bowl Czechoslovakia (now Czech Republic), 1923 Gelatin silver print 8 7/8 × 9 3/8 in. (22.54 × 23.81cm) The Marjorie and Leonard Vernon Collection, gift of The Annenberg Foundation and promised gift of Carol Vernon and Robert Turbin
Growing up in the 1960s we used to get taken to Butlins holiday camps (Billy Butlin founded the company, a chain of large holiday camps in the United Kingdom, to provide affordable holidays for ordinary British families). It was a great treat to be away from the farm, to be by the sea, even if the beach was made of stones. Looking back on it now you realise how seedy it was, how working class… but as a kid it was oh, so much fun!
Tony Ray-Jones photographed these environments (mainly the British at play by the sea) and their opposites – afternoon tea taken at Glyndebourne opera festival for example (Glyndebourne, 1967, below) – drawing on the tradition of great British social documentary photography by artists such as Bill Brandt. TRJ even pays homage to Brandt in one of his photographs, Dickens Festival, Broadstairs, c. 1967 (below) which echoes Brandt’s famous photograph Parlourmaid and Under-parlourmaid Ready to Serve Dinner, 1933 by changing “point of view” from up close, personal, oppressive and interior to distance, isolation, leisure/work and exterior.
Through his photographs Ray-Jones adds his own style and humour, using “a new conception of photography as a means of expression, over and above its accepted role as a recorder.” He does it all as an intimate expression of his own personality, his maverick, outsider, non-conformist self. I feel – and that is the key word with his art – that he had a real empathy with his subject matter. There is a twinkle in his eye that becomes embedded in his photographs. There is an honesty, integrity and respect for the people he is photographing, coupled with a wicked sense of humour and the most amazing photographic eye. What an eye he had!
To be able to sum up a scene in a split second, to previsualise (think), intuitively compose, frame and shoot in that twinkle of an eye, and to balance the images as he does is truly the most incredible gift, the quintessential British “decisive moment”. Look at the structural analysis of Location unknown, possibly Worthing (1967-1968, below) that I have presented in a slide show. This will give you a good idea of the visual complexity of Ray-Jones’ images… and yet he makes the sum of all components seem grounded (in this case by the man’s feet) and effortless. Devon Caranicas has observed that TRJ possessed a quick wit and adeptness for reducing a complex narrative into a single frame, the photographed subjects transformed into social actors of supreme stereotypes. The first part is insightful, but social actors of supreme stereotypes? I think not, because these people are not acting, this is their life, their humanity, their time out from the hum-drum of everyday working class life. They do not pose for TRJ, it’s just how they are. Look at the musicality of the first five images in the posting – how the line rises and falls, moves towards you and away from you. Only a great artist can do that, instinctively.
I cannot express to you enough the utmost admiration I have for this man’s art. In my opinion he is one of greatest British photographers that has ever lived (Julia Margaret Cameron, William Henry Fox Talbot, Roger Fenton, Francis Bedford, Frederick H. Evans, Cecil Beaton, Peter Henry Emerson and Herbert Ponting would be but a few others that spring to mind). He photographed British customs and values at a time of change and pictured a real affection for the lives of ordinary working class people. Being one of the them, he will always hold a special place in my heart.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Media Space at Science Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“Although the entirety of the images from Only in England were shot throughout the politically and socially turbulent late 60’s and early 70’s both artists shy away from depicting the culture clashes that so often visually defined this period. Instead, they each opted to turn their lens onto the quintessential country side, and in doing so, pay homage to a traditional type of English life that was becoming a sort of sub-culture in itself – a way of living that was not yet touched by the encroaching globalisation, or “americanisation,” of the UK.”
Anonymous text on the ART WEDNESDAY website September 26th, 2013 [Online] Cited 05/03/2014. No longer available online
“Ray-Jones printed his black and white pictures small, in a dark register of tonally very dense prints. The National Media Museum has lots of these, and perhaps to devote the cavernous new space only to such small pictures would have been a mistake. Even backed up with a mass of supporting material, including the fascinating pages from Ray-Jones’ diaries, the prints would struggle to fill the space. So only the first section is devoted to about 50 beautiful little Ray-Jones vintage prints. Two whole sections have been added to the exhibition to flesh it out…
[Parr] has unfortunately chosen to print them [Ray-Jones prints] in a way quite alien to anything Ray-Jones ever made: they are printed in Parr’s own way, as larger, paler, more diffuse things in mid-tones that Ray-Jones would never have countenanced. They are printed, inevitably, by digital process…
Sadly, these Ray-Jones by Parr prints add up to an appropriation of the former by the latter: they are Martin Parr pictures taken from Tony-Ray Jones negatives, and it would have been better not to have shown them so. They are fine images, but they should have been seen in some other way: on digital screens, perhaps, or as modern post-cards. Anything to make quite explicit the clear break with Ray-Jones’ own prints. That the images they contain are very fine is not in doubt. But I take leave to question whether they “present a new way of thinking through creative use of the collections”. They are well labelled and for specialists there will be no difficulty in knowing that they are not by Ray-Jones. But for the public I am not so sure. Suddenly two-thirds of the show are in this larger, modern, digitally printed form, either by Parr himself or by Ray-Jones-through-Parr. It looks as if that is the dominant group…”
Extract from Francis Hodgson. “Two Exhibitions of Tony Ray-Jones – Two Ways of Giving Context to Photographs,” on the Photomonitor website, September 2013 Cited 05/03/2014. No longer available online. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Tony Ray Jones ‘Possibly Worthing’ picture analysis – horizontal linesTony Ray Jones ‘Possibly Worthing’ picture analysis – curved linesTony Ray Jones ‘Possibly Worthing’ picture analysis – ascending triangle with verticalsTony Ray Jones ‘Possibly Worthing’ picture analysis – scooter structureTony Ray Jones ‘Possibly Worthing’ picture analysis – car bonnet triangleTony Ray Jones ‘Possibly Worthing’ picture analysis – locus of imageTony Ray Jones ‘Possibly Worthing’ picture analysis – how it all comes together…
Tony Ray-JonesLocation unknown, possibly Worthing (1967-68) picture analysis by Dr Marcus Bunyan. Please click on the images to see the sequence
Fascinated by the eccentricities of English social customs, Tony Ray-Jones spent the latter half of the 1960s travelling across England, photographing what he saw as a disappearing way of life. Humorous yet melancholy, these works had a profound influence on photographer Martin Parr, who has now made a new selection including over 50 previously unseen works from the National Media Museum’s Ray-Jones archive. Shown alongside The Non-Conformists, Parr’s rarely seen work from the 1970s, this selection forms a major new exhibition which demonstrates the close relationships between the work of these two important photographers.
The first ever major London exhibition of work by British Photographer, Tony Ray-Jones (1941-1972) will open at Media Space on 21 September 2013. The exhibition will feature over 100 works drawn from the Tony Ray-Jones archive at the National Media Museum alongside 50 rarely seen early black and white photographs, The Non-Conformists, by Martin Parr (1952).
Between 1966 and 1969 Tony Ray-Jones created a body of photographic work documenting English customs and identity. Humorous yet melancholy, these photographs were a departure from anything else being produced at the time. They quickly attracted the attention of the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), London where they were exhibited in 1969. Tragically, in 1972, Ray-Jones died from Leukaemia aged just 30. However, his short but prolific career had a lasting influence on the development of British photography from the 1970s through to the present.
In 1970, Martin Parr, a photography student at Manchester Polytechnic, had been introduced to Ray-Jones. Inspired by him, Parr produced The Non-Conformists, shot in black and white in Hebden Bridge and the surrounding Calder Valley. This project started within two years of Ray-Jones death and demonstrates his legacy and influence.
The exhibition will draw from the Tony Ray-Jones archive, held by the National Media Museum. Around 50 vintage prints will be on display alongside an equal number of photographs which have never previously been printed. Martin Parr has been invited to select these new works from the 2700 contact sheets and negatives in the archive. Shown alongside these are Parr’s early black and white work, unfamiliar to many, which has only ever previously been exhibited in Hebden Bridge itself and at Camerawork Gallery, London in 1981.
Tony Ray-Jones was born in Somerset in 1941. He studied graphic design at the London School of Printing before leaving the UK in 1961 to study on a scholarship at Yale University in Connecticut, US. He followed this with a year long stay in New York during which he attended classes by the influential art director Alexey Brodovitch, and became friends with photographers Joel Meyerowitz and Garry Winogrand. In 1966 he returned to find a Britain still divided by class and tradition. A Day Off – An English Journal, a collection of photographs he took between 1967-1970 was published posthumously in 1974 and in 2004 the National Media Museum held a major exhibition, A Gentle Madness: The Photographs of Tony Ray-Jones.
Martin Parr was born in Epsom, Surry in 1952. He graduated from Manchester Polytechnic in 1974 and moved to Hebden Bridge in West Yorkshire, where he established the ‘Albert Street Workshop’, a hub for artistic activity in the town. Fascinated by the variety of non-conformist chapels and the communities he encountered in the town he produced The Non-Conformists. In 1984 Parr began to work in colour and his breakthrough publication The Last Resort was published in 1986. A Magnum photographer, Parr is now an internationally renowned photographer, filmmaker, collector and curator, best-known for his highly saturated colour photographs critiquing modern life.
Only in England: Photographs by Tony Ray-Jones and Martin Parr will run at Media Space, Science Museum from 21 September 2013 – 16 March 2014. The exhibition will then be on display at the National Media Museum from 22 March – 29 June 2014. The exhibition is curated by Greg Hobson, curator of Photographs at the National Media Museum, and Martin Parr has been invited to select works from the Tony Ray-Jones archives.
Greg Hobson, curator of Photographs at the National Media Museum says, “The combination of Martin Parr and Tony Ray-Jones’ work will allow the viewer to trace an important trajectory through the history of British photography, and present new ways of thinking about photographic histories through creative use of our collections.” Martin Parr says, “Tony Ray-Jones’ pictures were about England. They had that contrast, that seedy eccentricity, but they showed it in a very subtle way. They have an ambiguity, a visual anarchy. They showed me what was possible.”
The Tony Ray-Jones archivecomprises of approximately 700 photographic prints, 1700 negative sheets, 2700 contact sheets, 600 boxes of Ektachrome / Kodachrome transparencies. It also includes ephemera such as notebooks, diary pages, and a maquette of England by the Sea made by Tony Ray-Jones.
Media Space is a collaboration between the Science Museum (London) and the National Media Museum (Bradford). Media Space will showcase the National Photography Collection of the National Media Museum through a series of exhibitions. Alongside this, photographers, artists and the creative industries will respond to the wider collections of the Science Museum Group to explore visual media, technology and science.
Félix Thiollier (French, 1842-1914) Emma Thiollier painting on top of one of the towers of Notre Dame, photographed by her father Félix Thiollier 1907
“Why is the price of justice so high?”
Maheude, Germinal
“Beneath the blazing of the sun, in that morning of new growth, the countryside rang with song, as its belly swelled with a black and avenging army of men, germinating slowly in its furrows, growing upwards in readiness for harvests to come, until one day soon their ripening would burst open the earth itself.”
Émile Zola. Germinal (1885)
This is the biggest collection of photographs by the French photographer Félix Thiollier available on the Internet. I spent hours cleaning up the photographs to a presentable standard (mixing them with appropriate paintings by Corot and Francois-Auguste Ravier which are not in the exhibition), so I hope you enjoy the posting.
While the bucolic photographs of ruins, pastoral landscapes and shepherdess (bucolic – via Latin from Greek boukolikos, from boukolos ‘herdsman’) are relatively straight forward, it is Thiollier’s sensitive portrayal of the “industrial image” – of the mines and factories of Forez – that hold weight here. Thiollier emphasises the theatrical aspects of the landscape (he loved shooting at dusk), finding new subject matter among the photogenic nature of industrial sites “his last images… extolling these new “worthless” locations that included scrapheaps, wasteland and abandoned pitheads, such were the ruins of modern Forez, that met his melancholy and clear-sighted gaze.”
His photographs of the “black city” are atmospheric, vivid and powerful. Post-Romantic lyricism is still present in these images but is now coupled with a unique vision that has more earthy, psychological overtones. The anonymous figures of workers or coal pickers toiling away in oppressive landscapes are never better realised than in the line of figures silhouetted against the dying light in Mining Landscape, Saint-Etienne (1895-1910, below); the solitary figure caught in the rising dust on the side of the hill in Mining Landscape, Saint-Etienne (1895-1910, below – enlarge the image to see the figure). The desolation of an industrial revolution mining town is also perfectly captured in Mining Landscape, The Chatelus Pit at Saint-Etienne (1907-1912, below).
All three images remind me of the epic film Germinal staring Gerard Depardieu, based on the novel of the same name by Émile Zola.
I’m sure that Thiollier would have been familiar with the book, it being a sensation upon original publication (1885). The book may well have appealed to Thiollier because he was a wealthy man, an industrialist who had reinvented himself as a gentleman farmer, who finally leaves the picturesque behind to photograph, “atmospheric phenomena studies, the architectural and mineral landscape created by the hard work of men, and how the human figure related to this.” In all its hope and misery.
Thiollier becomes so much more than an amateur photographer. His impressions of a dark, hidden drama beating at the heart of industrial, fin de siècle France provided him with the opportunity to become a progenitor of modernism, “ten years before the photogenic nature of industrial sites would be elevated into a credo of photographic modernism.” (Fin de siècle has connotations of both the closing and onset of an era, as the end of the 19th century was felt to be a period of degeneration, but at the same time a period of hope for a new beginning).
Finally, despite his willingness to remain on the sidelines, Thiollier may well be getting the approbation he deserves.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Émile Zola (French, 1840-1902) Germinal Title page of the 1885 edition
Although the talent of photographer Félix Thiollier was still unrecognised twenty years ago, this is mainly because it never occurred to him to seek recognition as such. When, at the age of 35, he decided to live off his private income, this ribbon manufacturer from Saint-Étienne intended to devote himself to art and archaeology. But feeling restricted in his role as scholar of the local area, Thiollier very quickly started publishing illustrated books. This enterprise, intended to promote both the rich natural environment and cultural heritage of Forez and the work of his artist friends, seemed to take up most of his energy, when he was not otherwise involved with initiatives to protect the local heritage of Saint-Étienne or promote the culture of the area.
It was his activities in these two latter fields that brought him both regional and national recognition, and until recently his reputation was based on these activities alone. Today, his resolute determination to remain on the fringes of the photographic circles of his time seems consistent with Thiollier’s passion for this medium that he would practise continuously for over half a century. In addition to showing the rich variety of subjects that inspired him, this exhibition seeks to give the viewer an appreciation of the originality of an approach based wholly on an inexhaustible passion for the picturesque: guiding his photographical machine, this mechanics of looking would lead him from bucolic landscapes and scenes of rural life to sensitive images of an industrial environment largely ignored by the amateur photographers at the turn of the 20th century.
“At an age when I deluded myself into believing that it was possible to combine the picturesque and archaeology…”
Thiollier’s intellectual and aesthetic background was typical of that section of the provincial elite in the 19th century who took a keen interest in art and archaeology, and had a great love of books. When, at the end of the 1850s, senior figures encouraged him to take photographs of notable sites and monuments in the Forez area, they already had a project in mind to produce a book about this ancient province which, celebrated by Honoré d’Urfé in L’Astrée (1607-1627), extended right across the department of the Loire into parts of the Haute-Loire and Puy-de-Dôme. They were all steeped in the Romantic tradition of the illustrated picturesque book, a tradition that would flourish in the second half of the century through many regional publications, like many local responses in this search for the identity of the regions of France. Illustrated with his early and more recent photographs, Thiollier’s Le Forez pittoresque et monumental, published in 1889, is one of the last and most outstanding examples of these.
Perpetuating the rustic ideal
In leaving the town and his activities as an industrialist, Thiollier did not just move closer to the monuments and landscapes he had undertaken to describe. Having acquired two modest country estates – a hunting lodge near the ponds around Précivet, and the former commandery of the Order of Saint John of Jerusalem at Verrières – he also reinvented himself as a gentleman farmer in the heart of this arcadian Forez countryside, which, in his view, was under threat. Heavily influenced by the example of the Barbizon artists whose paintings he collected along with those of his naturalist painter friends, he never tired of capturing the disappearing traces of traditional skills and ways of life with the eye of a painter. However, it required a certain poetic detachment for photographs to complete this grief. This was usually achieved with the loyal help of his daughter, who appeared in his photographs whenever he wanted to draw attention to the timeless nature of peasant genre scenes.
“Stylistic Landscapes”
Although Thiollier had nursed an ambition to become a landscape photographer before he met Ravier in 1873, it is essential to recognise the influence of this painter from Morestel – who had been practising photography since the 1850s – in order to understand why Thiollier moved towards a more committed, if unrevealed, artistic approach to the medium. After many sessions spent “photographicking” together, their shared vision is expressed in the resulting images of autumnal and winter landscapes, which, devoid of any human presence, offer many light-filled variations on the handful of motifs chosen by the painter: still pools or the banks of streams, solitary outlines of dead trees, undergrowth and country paths, it is a complete repertoire of images of the Dauphiné region that stimulated Thiollier’s desire to extol the natural beauty of the Forez. Although he had to include riverscapes and mountain panoramas to reflect the true variety of this beautiful area, he almost always concentrate on the sky and studies of clouds, ideally enhanced by reflections playing on the still water.
The range of effects Thiollier developed, although intended in part to transpose the Post-Romantic lyricism which, in Ravier’s work, was conveyed through blazing colours and highly skilful brush- work, nonetheless indicates that his images of the countryside were produced with a perfect understanding of his medium. In pushing for a rapprochement with contemporary artistic photography, the main feature of his style was thus the expressiveness of the contrasts in values. It is this preference for representing nature in monochrome that partly explains his liking for snowscapes, and also prompted him to undertake almost systematic research into contre-jour, the most appropriate effect for both synthesising his motifs and revealing the theatrical aspects of the landscape. Indeed, the all-revealing clarity of broad daylight was far less of an inspiration to Thiollier than the atmosphere of solitude and silence that came with the dusk. As he often noted in his descriptions, it was when the shadows were at their most dramatic that the countryside cast its strongest spell over him.
Territories of intimacy
Alongside the search for effects that so often excited this landscape photographer, Thiollier’s solitary wanderings too were a source of more physical, more earthy themes that reveal a personal shift in the sensitive approach towards the territory. Although the traditional picturesque approach, which he had adopted until the 1880s, had been fuelled by Romanticism, it was also partly because it implied a way of considering the environment as a spectacle and thus relied heavily on the subjectivity of the first viewer that chose to depict it.
It was this look at the landscape that Thiollier now seems to stage, finding that this, far more than the self-portrait, offered him a way to incorporate himself into the landscape that he claimed as his own, and in doing so, into his work. Admittedly, the natural world he shows us is always uninhabited, but this makes it now all the better to fill with the presence of the photographer: the bleaker his selected locations, in relation to the accepted picturesque aesthetic, the more personal these choices turn out to be. Swept along by the rapid improvements in photographic techniques, the snap shot practitioner was freed from the pictorial tradition that restricted him to this side of Alberti’s “window”: his images are those of someone taking a stroll into the heart of the countryside, or more precisely, pausing at some point, seized by the desire to capture forever the emotion that had prompted him to set up his equipment right in the middle of the pathway, or, as often happened, in a quiet corner of his garden.
The picturesque as developer: the photogeneity of the black city
Forty years after having made the first important choices of his life, learning photography at the same time when he renounced a career as a mine engineer, the former ribbon manufacturer discovered a photographic passion for Saint-Étienne, “a lively and animated city (…) to which the local industries brought a special picturesque character”. It was not easy to break away from a code of aesthetic appreciation, which, at a deeper level, was also a way of recognising the world.
The mines and factories in the cradle of the first French industrial revolution were, moreover, particularly appropriate subjects for what came to absorb him more than ever: atmospheric phenomena studies, the architectural and mineral landscape created by the hard work of men, and how the human figure related to this. It was as if the anonymous figures of workers or coal pickers had come just at the right moment, not only to enhance that “impression (…) of a sort of hidden drama” that best reveals the continuing influence of Ravier in his work, but also to fuel his inexhaustible desire for the picturesque. Besides, how could the poor people of this black town have concealed the exotic charm of their poverty from the lens of this bourgeois citizen who, in spite of himself, was still Thiollier?
Although Thiollier’s interest in photography gradually developed until eventually it became much more than the project to promote the natural and archaeological treasures of the area, it was perhaps because this industrialist turned gentleman farmer had realised intuitively that “machine art” (Delacroix) could be the way to resolve, in images, this tension between two worlds that lived side by side – the rural and traditional on one side and the industrial and contemporary on the other – and he belonged to both. The union of the picturesque and photography was sealed and could not be broken until his project as the editor of Le Forez pittoresque et monumental was completed, and this meant the aesthetic appropriation of the mental and identitarian territory of Forez as he saw it, reconciled with itself in the context of the “industrial image”. The choice of medium, precisely because Thiollier officially refused to give it any artistic legitimacy, would not however be made without consequences.
By admitting the creative superiority of the eye over the hand, the mechanised tool for reproducing images would gradually enable him to establish an independent vision, with a boldness that would burst into colour: ten years before the photogenic nature of industrial sites would be elevated into a credo of photographic modernism, his last images were extolling these new “worthless” locations that included scrapheaps, wasteland and abandoned pitheads, such were the ruins of modern Forez, that met his melancholy and clear-sighted gaze.
Text from the Musée d’Orsay website
Félix Thiollier (French, 1842-1914) 4 am Roche-La-Moliere, Forez (4H du matin vers Roche-La-Moliere, Forez) c. 1870
Félix Thiollier (French, 1842-1914) Landscape with Ruin c. 1870
Biography
1842 Maurice Félix Thiollier is born in Saint-Étienne into a wealthy family of ribbon manufacturers who espouse the values of social Catholicism.
1847 The Thiollier family moves to Paris. A French priest, l’abbé Paul Lacuria, is engaged as a tutor for Félix’s older brothers.
1851-52
The Thiollier family returns to Saint-Étienne. Félix Thiollier goes to school at the Collège Saint-Thomas d’Acquin in Oullins near Lyon.
1858 Eligible to take the competitive entrance test for the École des Mines de Saint-Étienne, Félix Thiollier chooses to train at the ribbon factory. He takes up photography, and possibly receives technical advice at this time from Stéphane Geoffray, a photographer from Roanne.
1867
At the age of 25, he sets up his own ribbon factory in Saint-Étienne.
1869 Through the painter Henri Baron, his father’s cousin, he is offered a place in the studio of the painter Louis Français, which he turns down for family reasons.
1870 Marries Cécile Testenoire-Lafayette, daughter of Claude-Philippe Testenoire-Lafayette, a lawyer and local scholar from Saint-Étienne, and president of La Diana – the Historical and Archaeo-logical Society of Forez (1870-1879).
1873
Meets the Dauphinois painter Auguste Ravier and soon gives up hope of becoming a professional painter.
1879 Decides to live off his private income. Becomes a member of La Diana.
1881
Publication of the first book to be illustrated with his photographs, Le Poème de l’âmeby his friend the painter Louis Janmot.
1885 First exhibition of his photographs, presented in the great hall belonging to La Diana in Montbrison, on the occasion of the 52nd congress of the Société Française d’Archéologie. Becomes a member of this society, which awards him its silver medal.
1886 Publication of Château de la Bastie d’Urfé et ses seigneurs.
1889 Publication of Forez pittoresque et monumental. Receives a silver medal for his illustrated books at the universal exhibition in Paris.
1894 Becomes a non-resident member of the Committee for Historic and Scientific Works at the Ministry for Public Instruction.
1895 Receives the Légion d’Honneur for his work as a photographer.
1897 Receives the title of honorary curator of the Saint-Étienne Museum of Art and Industry.
1900 Receives another silver medal for his illustrated books at the universal exhibition in Paris.
1902 Publication of L’Histoire de Saint-Etienne by Claude-Philippe Testenoire Lafayette, illustrated with photographs by Félix Thiollier.
1914 Death of Félix Thiollier on 12 May at Saint-Étienne.
1917 Publication of his biography by Sébastien Mulsant.
Musée d’Orsay 62, rue de Lille 75343 Paris Cedex 07 France
Simon Harsent (British, b. 1965) Melt #028a 2008 Archival Pigment Print 58.5 x 86cm Edition of 25
A solid exhibition by Simon Harsent to open the year at Edmund Pearce Gallery, Melbourne.
Things I felt and observed
~ Harsent shows me sculptural photographs of icebergs as I have never seen them before
~ The photographs are well printed and framed, have great colour variation and work at both sizes the images are presented at
~ The horizon line of the sea rises and falls throughout the series, allowing the viewer to levitate and drop as you walk around the gallery
~ The ecological component of the exhibition, while inherent, is not overpowering. Which is a good thing
~ The non-chronological hang benefits the exhibition immensely. If the exhibition had been hung from large to small iceberg, the effect would have been too didactic
~ The Brancusi-esque forms held more interest for me, such as Melt #029, Melt #036 and Melt #039 (seen with a photograph of Brancusi’s The Newborn 1920, below), together with the intense, close-up abstract forms such as Melt #014 and Melt #023. These are superb!
Things I wanted to feel and observe
~ When viewing the series I didn’t feel Harsent’s metaphorical reflection upon his own mortality. Only in two images, Melt #042 and Melt #09 (where the sunlight hits the top of the iceberg deliciously) did I feel an anthropomorphic link to humanity
~ I didn’t feel the grandeur of these icebergs. Perhaps just one image at the largest size possible would have shook me from my reverie
~ I didn’t feel the personality of each iceberg in its own journey. In the exhibition I never knew which large iceberg had metamorphosed into which smaller iceberg. Therefore I was unsure of each iceberg’s life-span and story. For that reason these are not ontological portraits concerned with the nature and relations (the relation of one photograph and the next) of being
~ Finally, I wanted the images to push forward, to take me further on the journey. Taking the adage that two-thirds of the iceberg is always below water, I never really felt the psychological power of these objects, something dark that is hidden beneath the sea. All the icebergs are photographed in clear, calm weather. Some photographed in storms, in mist or fog, or at night would have added ineffably to the atmosphere
These are not sublime photographs. I never got that feeling from viewing the work. They come nowhere close to Alain de Botton’s wonderful prose on the significance of sublime places:
“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.”(de Botton, Alain. The Art of Travel. London: Penguin, 2002, p. 178-179.)
I never felt that the photographs transported the viewer on an emotional journey that furthers our understanding of the fragility of life both of the planet and of ourselves. And that is the one thing I wished they had of done.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Edmund Pearce Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Simon Harsent (British, b. 1965) Melt #026 2008 Archival Pigment Print 58.5 x 86cm Edition of 25
Simon Harsent (British, b. 1965) Melt #029 2008 Archival Pigment Print 110 x 160cm Edition of 10
Simon Harsent (British, b. 1965) Melt #039 2008 Archival Pigment Print 58.5 x 86cm Edition of 10
Simon Harsent (British, b. 1965) Melt #036 2008 Archival Pigment Print 58.5 x 86cm Edition of 25
Used under conditions of fair use for the purpose of art criticism
Simon Harsent (British, b. 1965) Melt #037 2008 Archival Pigment Print 58.5 x 86cm Edition of 25
Simon Harsent (British, b. 1965) Melt #042 2008 Archival Pigment Print 58.5 x 86cm Edition of 25
After successful exhibitions in Australia and abroad, Simon Harsent’s sublime photographic series Melt: Portrait of an Iceberg makes its Melbourne premiere at Edmund Pearce this February. The exhibition and accompanying monograph present portraits of icebergs as they travel Greenland’s Ilulissat Icefjord. The ecological story is self-evident; more sections are breaking away from the arctic ice cap and melting faster due to global warming. But the chronicle of the iceberg is, for the artist, a metaphorical reflection upon his own mortality.
Harsent states; “Seeing them first overpowering in grandeur and then, later, about to be absorbed back into the flux from which they came, is both beautiful and humbling: a metamorphosis that endows them with a life-span, each with its own personality, each with its own story.”
Born in England Simon Harsent studied photography at Watford College before moving to Australia in 1988 to establish himself as one of the country’s leading photographers. Currently based in New York, Harsent’s career has seen him win numerous national and international awards including, Cannes Lions, One Show, Clio, D&AD, and Australia’s first Cannes Grand Prix – making him one of the most awarded photographers in the world. His work is included in the permanent collection of the Queensland Art Gallery and The Powerhouse Museum. Melt: Portrait of an Iceberg was published in late 2009 to critical acclaim, reinforced by its inclusion in the prestigious D&AD and PDN Photo Annuals.
Text from the Edmund Pearce Gallery website
Simon Harsent (British, b. 1965) Melt #023 2008 Archival Pigment Print 58.5 x 86cm Edition of 25
Simon Harsent (British, b. 1965) Melt #014 2008 Archival Pigment Print 58.5 x 86cm Edition of 25
Simon Harsent (British, b. 1965) Melt #021 2008 Archival Pigment Print 58.5 x 86cm Edition of 25
Simon Harsent (British, b. 1965) Melt #010 2008 Archival Pigment Print 58.5 x 86cm Edition of 25
Simon Harsent (British, b. 1965) Melt #09 2008 Archival Pigment Print 58.5 x 86cm Edition of 25
Simon Harsent (British, b. 1965) Melt #020 2008 Archival Pigment Print 58.5 x 86cm Edition of 25
Simon Harsent (British, b. 1965) Melt #05 2008 Archival Pigment Print 58.5 x 86cm Edition of 25
Simon Harsent (British, b. 1965) Melt #03 2008 Archival Pigment Print 58.5 x 86cm Edition of 25
Simon Harsent (British, b. 1965) Melt #07 2008 Archival Pigment Print 110 x 160cm Edition of 10
Research experience on the charles marville photographs at the state library of victoria further update
Dear readers
An interesting email arrived from the Collection Services Manager further questioning why I actually want to see the Marville prints in the State Library’s Collection.
In part the email says, and I precis: the prints are fragile and very rare; the Library has digitised all the prints and provided high resolution images available for free download from our website; the careful storage of the original prints and the provision of digital files is the Library’s standard approach to achieve that delicate balance between access and preservation. The email goes on to ask, “I would be interested to understand more about your research needs with this collection and why it is important for you to view the original prints out of their protective enclosures.”
They still don’t get it do they?
Vintage prints have to be seen in the flesh. Anyone who knows anything about photography understands this but not, apparently, the State Library of Victoria. Why do you even need to explain this to them? When looking at vintage photographs you actually have to see the physical print, the surface of the print, not some simulacra hidden behind plastic or a high res scan online!
As Bill Henson insightfully observes in an interview about his current selection of images at the Monash Gallery of Art in the exhibition Wildcards,
“One of those preoccupations is an interest in the photograph as an object, in the physical presence of the print or whatever kind of technology is being used to make it. Part of the reason for that is that photography, more than any other medium, suffers from a mistake or misunderstanding people have when they’ve seen a reproduction in a magazine or online: they think they’re seeing the original. A certain amount of photography is made with its ultimate intention being to be seen in a magazine or online, but most photography, historically, ended up in its final form as a print – a cyanotype, or a tin type or a daguerreotype or whatever it might be… [This] continues to interest me about photography: how these things inhabit the world as objects. And indeed we read them not just with our eyes but with how our whole bodies read and encounter and negotiate these objects, which happen to be photographs.”
“They’ve seen a reproduction in a magazine or online: they think they’re seeing the original… we read them not just with out eyes but with how our whole bodies read and encounter and negotiate these objects, which happen to be photographs.”1
Well said.
Perhaps the State Library needs to read Walter Benjamin’s 1936 essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction in which he discusses the aura of the original and
“the concept of authenticity, particularly in application to reproduction. “Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.” He argues that the “sphere of authenticity is outside the technical” so that the original artwork is independent of the copy, yet through the act of reproduction something is taken from the original by changing its context. He thus introduces the idea of the “aura” of a work and its absence in a reproduction.”2
In other words, there is nothing like standing in front of a jewel-like Vermeer and feeling the aura of the original, not one shielded behind glass (or plastic in this case). By making many reproductions, including online copies, you substitute a plurality of copies for a unique existence. This is why I was so looking forward to seeing the Marville’s, to FEEL THEIR PRESENCE…
Of course I am as guilty as anyone through this archive of disseminating reproductions around the world, and I freely admit that. The photographs I reproduce are not the originals and should never stand for them. Even in this age of infinitely reproducible digital images there is still that aura of standing in front of a print in a gallery and feeling its eternal value and mystery.
As Walter Benjamin writes, “the authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced.”
And you need to see and feel that history.
Finally, I wonder how many people the State Library of Victoria have coming in to see these prints? When was the last time anyone actually physically saw them that wanted to? I would think very, very, few people indeed. The “delicate balance” between access and conservation is obviously well weighted towards the former.
It will be interesting to see how the State Library of Victoria responds and whether they can “Cry ‘Havoc!’, and let slip the photographs of Marville.” Even for an instant. To facilitate my research in this time, in this space where one can admire the beauty of an object without compromising the need to preserve – no, lets think of better words: retain, possess, guard, protect, shield – the prints.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ Bill Henson. “Wildcards: Bill Henson shuffles the deck,” Monash Gallery of Art, 1 February – 30 March 2014 quoted on the Art Guide Australia website Nd [Online] Cited 20/02/2014. No longer available online
1/ Walter Benjamin (1968). Hannah Arendt, ed. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, Illuminations. London: Fontana. pp. 214-218 quoted in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” on the Wikipedia website
Charles Marville (French, 1813-1879) Parc Monceau c. 1853 – c. 1870 In collection: Photographic views of Paris Undated, dates assigned from time of Haussman’s renovation of Paris Photographic print mounted on cardboard : albumen silver 32 x 26cm Gift; Government of France; 1880 In the State Library of Victoria Pictures Collection
State Library of Victoria 328 Swanston St, Melbourne VIC 3000 Phone: (03) 8664 7000
Picture this is what Walker Evans does in his unique, forthright way.
He shows you what he is seeing in a very straight forward way – directly, purposefully, in images where the artist seems to have no presence, no ego to impart.
As artist Chris Killip observes, “Walker Evans is serious and smart and purposeful. He is trying to show you very clearly what he is seeing. It is very unadorned, as if nobody had taken the photograph. He conveys what is in front of him as clearly as possible.”1
But further than this, Evans presents us with a photographic version of Tomas Tranströmer’s poems which were seen by his English admirers in terms of “deep image”, a vaguely Jungian concept which suggests that “poetry could state absolute truths if only the images poets evoked welled up from deep enough sources uncontaminated by history and the follies of reason.”2
Evans direct, plainspoken images picture reality whilst hovering above the void – flirting with the duality of narrative truth and metaphysical inquiry. Whether Evans was consciously aware of this elemental antinomy is unlikely. Nevertheless we can read it in his images, even if we cannot read it in his prosaic words. You only have to look at the jet-black trees on a rainy day in Main Street, Saratoga Springs, New York (1931, below), or the justly famous Sharecropper’s Family, Hale County, Alabama (March 1936, below).
The people in the photograph have been posed but there is an intimate relationship here between the artist and his subjects. It is a loving photograph, for Evans cares for the dignity of these people in their naked condition. The grandmother wary of the camera with clasped hands, the weary husband, stick thin with glazed eyes, the young girl child with sallow stare, and the pensive mother with sleeping baby staring directly into camera, all of them dirty and in rags. In this absolute reality there is a nobility to these people and there, buried in the image, a relationship to the metaphysical essence of what it is to be human – the pictures of children on the back wall with text I can’t quite make out; the glorious arrangement of feet that run along the bottom of the image in all different angles and positions, the mothers folded under her almost collapsing with the weight of her burden; and what is that black shape prostrate on the floor? A rag? death? No! A cat.
The blackest most thinnest small cat that you ever seen, lingering on the edge of starvation, hovering in the void of existence.
As Thomas Sleigh writes of his first meeting with Tomas Tranströmer as he stepped from a small plane onto the ground, “I don’t mind large planes or middle-sized planes (his English was slightly guttural, his intonations lilting in a mild brogue), but small planes – you feel too much of the air under you.”3
And so with Evans if you know where to look.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
PS. For a fascinating insight into how these photographs were hung in the 1938 exhibition at MoMA see installation views of “Walker Evans American Photographs” at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, 1938 on the ASX website. Notice the smallness of the photographs, their different sizes, the juxtaposition of disparate images, some double or triple hung one above the other, some printed in the centre of white sheets of photographic paper, others displayed on dark walls. The image that I describe above, Sharecropper’s Family, Hale County, Alabama (March 1936) is shown in an installation photograph below. Notice how small the image is and what affect this size of image has on the viewer, its shear concentration and intensity.
A friend Christopher Young tells me, “The install was done by Evans himself the night before and very chaotically. I love the poetry of the 1938 opening in that he got to the front door and couldn’t enter the show. He instead circled the block a number of times before going home…” Sounds like my early exhibitions. I could be found next door in a cafe playing pinball, I couldn’t face the crowd!
Footnotes
1/ Interview with Chris Killip about his exhibition Work at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Renia Sofia, October 2013 [Online] Cited 11/02/2021
2/ Sleigh, Tom. “Too Much of the Air: Tomas Tranströmer,” 2005, on the Poets.org website [Online] Cited 15/02/2014. No longer available online
3/ Ibid.,
Many thankx to The Museum of Modern Art for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) Church Organ and Pews, Alabama 1936 Gelatin silver print, printed 1970 7 9/16 x 9 1/8″ (19.2 x 23.2cm) Printer: James Dow Mr. and Mrs. John Spencer Fund
Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) Sharecropper’s Family, Hale County, Alabama March 1936 Gelatin silver print 7 5/8 x 9 5/8″ (19.4 x 24.4cm) Gift of the Farm Security Administration
Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) Sharecropper’s Family, Hale County, Alabama (detail) March 1936 Gelatin silver print 7 5/8 x 9 5/8″ (19.4 x 24.4cm) Gift of the Farm Security Administration
Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) Sharecropper’s Family, Hale County, Alabama (detail) March 1936 Gelatin silver print 7 5/8 x 9 5/8″ (19.4 x 24.4cm) Gift of the Farm Security Administration
This installation celebrates the 75th anniversary of the first one-person photography exhibition in MoMA’s history, and the accompanying landmark publication, which established the potential of the photographer’s book as an indivisible work of art. Through these projects Walker Evans created a collective portrait of the eastern United States during a decade of profound transformation – one that coincided with the flood of everyday images, both still and moving, from an expanding mass culture, and the construction of a Modernist history of photography. As Lincoln Kirstein wrote in his essay for the book, “After looking at these pictures with all their clear, hideous and beautiful detail, their open insanity and pitiful grandeur, compare this vision of a continent as it is, not as it might be or as it was, with any other coherent vision that we have had since the war. What poet has said as much? What painter has shown as much? Only newspapers, the writers of popular music, the technicians of advertising and radio have in their blind energy accidentally, fortuitously, evoked for future historians such a powerful monument to our moment. And Evans’s work has, in addition, logic, continuity, climax, sense and perfection.”
Comprising approximately 60 prints from the Museum’s collection that were included in the 1938 exhibition or the accompanying publication, the current installation maintains the bipartite presentation of the originals; the first section portrays American society through images of its individuals and social environments, while the second consists of photographs of the relics that constitute expressions of an American cultural identity – the architecture of Main streets, factory towns, rural churches, and wooden houses. The pictures provide neither a coherent narrative nor a singular meaning, but rather create connections through the repetition and interplay of pictorial structures and subject matter. Its placement on the fourth floor of the Museum – between galleries featuring the paintings of Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Jackson Pollock, and Andy Warhol – underscores the continuation of prewar avant-garde practices in America and the unique legacy of Evans’s explorations of signs and symbols, commercial culture, and the vernacular. Their profound impact on not only photography, but also film, literature, and the visual arts, reverberates today.
Text from The Museum of Modern Art website
Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) American Legionnaire 1936 Gelatin silver print 5 3/4 x 5 1/8″ (14.6 x 13cm) Gift of the Farm Security Administration
Curators: Susan Van Wyk, Senior Curator of Photography at the NGV, and Paola Di Trocchio, Assistant Curator of Fashion and Textiles at the NGV
Edward Steichen (American, 1879-1973)
Model Dinarzade in a Dress by Poiret 1924
Gelatin silver photograph
Image used under fair use for the purpose of art criticism
This is a sublime exhibition, teaming with fabulous frocks and beautiful, classical, evanescent photographs. The exhibition was in my top nine magnificent Melbourne exhibitions that featured on Art Blart last year. Elegant, sophisticated and oozing quality, this exhibition has been a sure fire winner for the NGV. This review will concentrate on the photographs by Edward Steichen. See my previous posting on the exhibition including installation photographs.
High Society
Edward Steichen (1879-1973) was a painter and champion of art photography who initially worked in the soft focus, Pictorialist style prevalent at the beginning of the 20th century. He was an artist who worked closely with Alfred Stieglitz on the influential quarterly art journal Camera Work, designing the cover and the Art Nouveau-style typeface especially for the internationally focused publication. Stieglitz, and by extension Camera Work, lived to promote photography as an art form and to challenge the norms of how art may be defined.1 In the early years Camera Work only published photography, but in later years the journal increasingly featured reproductions of and articles on modern painting, drawing and aesthetics.
“This change was brought about by a similar transformation at Stieglitz’s New York gallery, which had been known as the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession until 1908. That year he changed the name of the gallery to “291”, and he began showing avant-garde modern artists such as Auguste Rodin and Henri Matisse along with photographers. The positive responses he received at the gallery encouraged Stieglitz to broaden the scope of Camera Work as well, although he decided against any name change for the journal.”2
Steichen was heavily associated with Gallery 291 (291 Fifth Avenue, New York City) which ran from 1905 to 1917. The gallery exhibited European artists such as Braque, Picasso, Matisse, Brancussi, Cézanne and Rodin and soon to be famous American artists such as John Marin, Max Weber, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley and Georgia O’Keeffe. Virtually no other gallery in the United States was showing modern art works with such abstract and dynamic content at this time.3 Both the gallery and the journal ran hand in hand; both closed in 1917. The journal closed due to a downturn in interest in Pictorial photography, a lack of subscribers, cultural changes and the economic effects of the First World War, which saw both the costs and even the availability of the paper on which it was printed become challenging.4 In the penultimate issue 48 (October 1916) Stieglitz,
” …introduced the work of a young photographer, Paul Strand, whose photographic vision was indicative of the aesthetic changes now at the heart of Camera Work’s demise. Strand shunned the soft focus and symbolic content of the Pictorialists and instead strived to create a new vision that found beauty in the clear lines and forms of ordinary objects. By publishing Strand’s work Stieglitz was hastening the end of the aesthetic vision he had championed for so long. Nine months later, in June 1917, what was to be the final issue of Camera Work appeared. It was devoted almost entirely to Strand’s photographs.”5
Edward Steichen felt the change in the air. When he accepted the job as chief photographer for Condé Nast publications in 1923 his early fashion photographs for Vogue and Vanity Fair were seen as innovative and ground breaking, even as his former art colleagues saw shooting fashion and celebrities was a way of selling-out. Steichen bought to fashion and portrait photography an aesthetic of clear lines and forms that simply had not been present before, coupled with a Pictorialist sensibility for light and the use of low depth of field. John McDonald in his excellent review of the exhibition observes, “Steichen has claims to having invented fashion photography with a series of pictures he took in Paris in 1911, for couturier, Paul Poiret; but the genre had found its first true professional in Baron Adolphe de Meyer, who left Vogue for Harper’s Bazaar, opening the door for Steichen’s appointment. De Meyer was an incurable mannerist who remained true to the Pictorialist aesthetic, but his successor would prove himself an innovator.”6
Steichen’s photographs from 1923-1924 are pared back, Modernist photographs that evidence the beginning of his later photographic style. Madame Nadine Vera wearing a crêpe evening gown by Chanel (1924) has a plain background of some wooden studio panels; Model Dinarzade in a Dress by Poiret (1924, above) has fabric hanging behind while Crêpe de chine dress by Lanvin (1924) has three doors casually put together to form the backdrop to the model. All three photographs show beautiful tonality and lighting in the full length capture of the models with hints of browns and yellows in the prints. The figure is isolated in the studio space simply and elegantly. The model is being studied. Steichen’s models are immersed in suffused light but the form of the photograph is different from that of Pictorialism, for the models themselves are pin sharp, as though stepping out into the world. These early photographs are fascinating to study, for they lay the ground work for what is to follow. These three images inform the viewer as to the experimentation that Steichen was undertaking to get to a starting point for the complex and atmospheric studio lighting that he would later employ.
Gradually, Steichen’s images become more confident and assured and take on a patina of beauty, style and grace. In his close-up portraits there is an isolation of the face against out of focus backgrounds with the use of profiles, arms and elbows as framing devices, for example Actress Sylvia Sidney (1929) and Actress Clara Bow (1928, above). In his longer-length portraits there is an isolation of figures against a white or black ground, as in Marion Morehouse in a dress by Louise Boulanger (1929) and Actresses Norma and Constance Talmadge (1927). Males usually have a heavy darkness to them while the females are more luminously lit. In the male portraits the hands dominate. The hands in the male photographs belong to the male as part of the portrait whereas in the early photographs of women they are only models, there at his command, and the hands are almost invisible. Only in the later photographs of high society women are the hands of females fully represented. What can be observed is that the figure is usually isolated against an out of focus background, with deep, dark shadows and soft luxurious light, low depth of field and feminine profiles.
In commercial terms (and we must remember that this is how the artist made his living for these photographs were seen as his commercial work at the time), Steichen’s photographs fulfilled his brief: the portrayal of shimmer and sparkle, geometric Art Deco style, the drama and theatrical lighting of the talkies, and the spectacle of the liberated modern women. She in turn was influenced by the prevalent cultural conditions: smoking, jazz, prohibition, automobiles, trains, dancing, fast living, gold (King Tuts tomb was discovered in 1922) and African and Japanese art. Appealing to the new leisure classes, publications such as Vogue and Vanity Fair offered a glimpse of a longed for paradise to the burgeoning middle-classes with their photographs of the rich and famous, the glamour and the costumes – the social groups that hold the most power actually exposing their own status on paper through these magazines.
As John McDonald notes, “Steichen uses every trick at his disposal to convey a particular kind of image,”7 an image that uses increasingly elaborate studio lighting and disparate indoor and outdoor locations. But by the early 1930s the work becomes quite formulaic with its use of low depth of field, profiles, angles of arms or chairs and geometric shapes. The figure is tightly controlled – either cropped close in or set amongst ambiguously filled sets and shaped backgrounds. There is a sameness and repetitiveness about the work as one image bleeds into another. In fact, after that early period of experimentation, there is basically no change to his mature style from the years 1925-1937 and this makes for a long twelve years for an artist of his talent. He found his mother load and he stuck to it.
Steichen’s photographs of the rich and famous are “pictures” taken by one who mingled with the elite, one who enjoyed the trappings of fame and high society. As Robert Nelson notes in his review of the exhibition, “Steichen’s talents were never incompatible with the conspicuous snobbery of his age, for which it would never have occurred to him to proffer an apology. Having arrived himself, he naturally admires gentry-by-ambition and crowns it with the smugness that it enjoys.”8 Ouch! Nelson goes on to observe, “Much of the work is statuesque and formidable in its composition, lighting and symbolic rigour,” while at the same time portraying a world that is completely artificial in which nothing is real and everything is a pose.9 And we, the viewer and reader, are voyeurs of this hedonistic world.
On close reading, the photographs flatten out into a studied set of stylistic manoeuvres, a form where style stands in for a quality of visual perception.10 As Steichen seeks to “clinch the image” the syntax of his photographs (the system of organisation used in putting lines together to form pictures) becomes imitative. This leads to evanescent photographs, images that soon pass out of sight, memory, or existence; images that slip for the mind as quickly as one sees them. There is little sense of dislocation in the images, only “in his ability to distance himself from a subject, analysing his or her foibles with a cool, practiced eye,”11 and in the distance of the scene from the reality of everyday life. Each photograph becomes a microcosm of vanity, celebrity and fashion. Steichen ticks all the boxes (and he made all the boxes that he ticked) but the photographs usually don’t fulfil any new demands that the situation generates. He restricts his field of view to one that he creates and controls within certain narrowly defined boundaries, usually using passive people who are at his command. In his orientation to the world the photographs are not ‘things as they are’ but things as they are constructed to be (seen) – a form of social capital, social fascism, even.12
Only when Steichen is challenged by an active “personality” does he raise his game. This is when the modernist, emotive, visually rhapsodic AND MEMORABLE photographs take hold in this exhibition.
The great breakthrough with Greta Garbo (1929, below), mass of black with face surmounting, hair pulled back by hands “the woman came out full beauty on her magnificent face” Steichen said; Actress Gloria Swanson (1924, below) like some prowling, wide-eyed animal hidden behind a black lace veil, “a predatory femme fatale concealing her ambitions behind a mask of beauty”13; Marlene Dietrich (1934, below) nestled into the glorious curve of an armchair, lace-covered hand open, inviting; and Actress Loretta Young (1931) active, not passive, in which Steichen humanises his sitter. For me, these are the glorious images – not the men, not the fashion photographs, but these strong, independent women.
“An interested image-maker takes available resources for meaning (visual grammars, fabrication techniques and focal points of attention), undertakes an act of designing (the process of image-making), and in so doing re-images the world in a way that it has never quite been seen before.”14 Initially, in the early experimentation, this is what Steichen did; he achieves it again in the photographs of Garbo, Swanson, Dietrich and Young.
As for the other photographs we feel an overall suffused glow of beauty and glamour – we admire their scale and intensity, the deep blacks and velvety whites, and wonder at the light and assemblage of elements – but they do not have the power and engagement of the best, most challenging work. In these photographs of vibrant women the viewer finally starts to feel the spirit of the face, the spirit of the person captured in an instant. And that is a rare and beautiful thing.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Word count: 1,883
Footnotes
1/ Whelan, Richard. Alfred Stieglitz: A Biography. NY: Little, Brown, 1995, pp. 189-223 2/ Anon. “Camera Work,” on Wikipedia website [Online] Cited 15/02/2014 3/ Anon. “291,” on Wikipedia website [Online] Cited 15/02/2014 4/ “Camera Work,” op. cit., 5/ Hoffman, Katherine. Stieglitz : A Beginning Light. New Haven: Yale University Press Studio, 2004, pp. 213–222 cited in “Camera Work,” op. cit., 6/ McDonald, John. “Edward Steichen & Art Deco Fashion” on John McDonald website February 1, 2014 [Online] Cited 15/02/2014 7/ Ibid., 8/ Nelson, Robert. “An age of elegance captured forever,” in The Age newspaper Wednesday November 6th, 2013, p. 54 9/ Ibid., 10/ Rewording of a sentence by Sleigh, Tom. “Too Much of the Air: Tomas Tranströmer,” 2005, on the Poets.org website [Online] Cited 15/02/2014. No longer available online 11/ McDonald, op. cit., 12/ “In sociology, social capital is the expected collective or economic benefits derived from the preferential treatment and cooperation between individuals and groups. Although different social sciences emphasise different aspects of social capital, they tend to share the core idea “that social networks have value”.” Anon. “Social capital,” on Wikipedia website [Online] Cited 15/02/2014 “Social fascism was a theory supported by the Communist International (Comintern) during the early 1930s, which held that social democracy was a variant of fascism because, in addition to a shared corporatist economic model, it stood in the way of a complete and final transition to communism.” Anon. “Social fascism,” on Wikipedia website [Online] Cited 15/02/2014 13/ McDonald, op. cit., 14/ Anon. “The Image of Transformation: Properties of Consequence,” on The Image website [Online] Cited 15/02/2014. No longer available online
Many thankx to the National Gallery of Victoria for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Steichen’s portrait of Gloria Swanson has taken on iconic masterpiece status overtime. Created in 1924, just as the first feature-length sound movies were emerging – effectively truncating the actress’s brilliant silent-film career – this image caught the essential Gloria Swanson: haunting and inscrutable, forever veiled in the whisper of a distant era. Steichen’s photograph has elements of turn-of-the-century Pictorialism (moody and delicate, the subject seeming to peer from the darkness, as if from jungle foliage), yet it also projects modernist boldness, with its pin-sharp precision and graphic severity.
Anonymous. “Gloria Swanson by Edward Steichen,” on the Iconic Photos website October 5th, 2009 [Online] Cited 11/02/2021. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Maurice Mouvet was one of the most famous and successful dance teams around the early 1910’s and lead the way for many performers that would follow… Maurice was born in New York but as a young lad moved to Paris with his father and knew he wanted to be a dancer as a young boy. He had his first professional dance at the Noveau Cirque in Paris, France at age 15. Mouvet’s best partners were Florence Walton and Leonora (Leona) Hughes.
Pola Negri (née Apolonia Chałupiec, January 3, 1897 – 1 August 1987) was a Polish stage and film actress who achieved worldwide fame during the silent and golden eras of Hollywood and European film for her tragedienne and femme fatale roles. She was the first European film star to be invited to Hollywood, and become one of the most popular actresses in American silent film. She also started several important women’s fashion trends that are still staples of the women’s fashion industry. Her varied career included work as an actress in theatre and vaudeville; as a singer and recording artist; as an author; and as a ballerina.
Marion Morehouse (1906-1969), was a fashion model who rose to prominence in the late 20s and early 30s, sitting for Vanity Fair and Vogue photographer Edward Steichen. The pair created some strikingly modernist photographs. According to Steichen Morehouse was:
“The greatest fashion model I ever photographed … When she put on the clothes that were to be photographed, she transformed herself into a woman who really would wear that gown … whatever the outfit was.”
She was also a favourite of Cecil Beaton and French Vogue’s Baron George Hoyningen-Huene. Morehouse was of Choctaw Indian ancestry, with brown eyes and an angular frame. After her modelling career ended, she took up photography herself. Later she became the third wife of author and painter E.E Cummings. When Cummings met Marion Morehouse in 1932, he was in the middle of a painful split from his second wife, Anne Barton. Although it is not clear whether the two were ever formally married, Morehouse lived with Cummings in a common-law marriage until his death in 1962. Morehouse died on May 18, 1969.
Text from the Photographs, film, literature & quotes from the bygone era website [Online] Cited 10/02/2014. No longer available online. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
France’s most popular milliner Madame Agnes was born in France in the late 1800’s, she retired in 1949, and died a short while later. She was famous for cutting the brims of her hats while they were worn by her customers. Madame Agnes styled hats which were both abstract and unique. An illustration from 1927 depicts Madame Agnes’ Congo inspired hats with a model wearing a slave collar. As the 20’s moved into the 30’s, the hats became smaller and away from the face. In December 1935 she introduced hats with large straw brims which were mounted on flowered madras handkerchiefs. Madame Agnes was inspired by a matador’s hat when she created a small dinner hat for Spring 1936. It was sewn of black maline with heavy white silk fringe. The fringe was mounted on each side of the hat’s top. In mid-1946 she created a soft beige beret of felt which featured a line that was broken just above the right eyebrow, where a soft quill was inserted.
Text from the Photographs, film, literature & quotes from the bygone era website [Online] Cited 10/02/2014. No longer available online. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Elizabeth “Lee” Miller, Lady Penrose (April 23, 1907 – July 21, 1977) was an American photographer. Born in Poughkeepsie, New York, in 1907, she was a successful fashion model in New York City in the 1920s before going to Paris, where she became an established fashion and fine art photographer. During the Second World War, she became an acclaimed war correspondent for Vogue, covering events such as the London Blitz, the liberation of Paris, and the concentration camps at Buchenwald and Dachau.
Elsa Schiaparelli (1890-1973) was an Italian fashion designer. Along with Coco Chanel, her greatest rival, she is regarded as one of the most prominent figures in fashion between the two World Wars. Starting with knitwear, Schiaparelli’s designs were heavily influenced by Surrealists like her collaborators Salvador Dalí and Alberto Giacometti. Her clients included the heiress Daisy Fellowes and actress Mae West.
Perhaps Schiaparelli’s most important legacy was in bringing to fashion the playfulness and sense of “anything goes” of the Dada and Surrealist movements. She loved to play with juxtapositions of colours, shapes and textures, and embraced the new technologies and materials of the time. With Charles Colcombet she experimented with acrylic, cellophane, a rayon jersey called “Jersela” and a rayon with metal threads called “Fildifer” – the first time synthetic materials were used in couture. Some of these innovations were not pursued further, like her 1934 “glass” cape made from Rhodophane, a transparent plastic related to cellophane. But there were more lasting innovations; Schiaparelli created wraparound dresses decades before Diane von Furstenberg and crumpled up rayon 50 years before Issey Miyake’s pleats and crinkles. In 1930 alone she created the first evening-dress with a jacket, and the first clothes with visible zippers. In fact fastenings were something of a speciality, from a jacket buttoned with silver tambourines to one with silk-covered carrots and cauliflowers. Schiaparelli did not adapt to the changes in fashion following World War II and her business closed in 1954.
Gwili Andre (4 February 1908 – 5 February 1959) was a Danish actress who had a brief career in Hollywood films. Andre came to Hollywood in the early 1930s with the intention of establishing herself as a film star. She appeared in the 1932 RKO Studio films Roar of the Dragon and Secrets of the French Police and began to attract attention for her striking good looks. These films provided her with starring roles playing against such established actors as Richard Dix, ZaSu Pitts and Frank Morgan, and RKO began using her glamorous looks to promote her.
A widespread publicity campaign ensured that her name and face became well known to the American public, but her next role in No Other Woman (1933), opposite Irene Dunne, was not the success the studio expected. Over the next few years she was relegated to supporting roles which included the Joan Crawford picture A Woman’s Face (1941). Her final role was a minor part in one of the popular Falcon series, The Falcon’s Brother in 1942.
Curator: Amanda Maddox, Assistant Curator of Photographs
William Henry Fox Talbot (English, 1800-1877) Boulevard des Italiens, Paris
1843
Salted paper print from a Calotype negative
16.8 x 17.3cm
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Another gem of a photography exhibition from the Getty. These In Focus exhibitions are just a treasure: from Making a Scene, Still LifeandThe Sky to Los Angeles, Picturing the Landscape and now Architecture. All fabulous. To have a photography collection such as the Getty possesses, and to use it. To put on these fantastic exhibitions…
I like observing the transition between epochs (or, in more architectural terms, ‘spans’ of time), photographers and their styles. From the directness and frontality of Fox Talbot’s Boulevard des Italiens, Paris (1843, below) to the atmospheric ethereality of Atget’s angular The Panthéon (1924, below) taken just three years before he died; from the lambent light imbued in Frederick Evans’ architectural study of the attic at Kelmscott Manor (1896, below) to the blocked, colour, geometric facade of William Christenberry’s Red Building in Forest, Hale County, Alabama (1964, below).
I love architecture, I love photography. Put the two together and I am in heaven.
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.
Eugéne Atget (French, 1857-1927) The Panthéon 1924 Gelatin silver chloride print on printing-out paper Image: 17.8 x 22.6cm The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Eugène Atget made this atmospheric study across the place Sainte-Geneviève toward the back of the Panthéon, a church boldly designed to combine the splendour of Greece with the lightness of Gothic churches. The church’s powerful colonnaded dome, Atget’s primary point of interest, hovers in the background, truncated by the building in the left foreground.
In order to make the fog-veiled Panthéon visible when printing this negative, Atget had to expose the paper for a long period of time. As a consequence of the long printing, the two buildings in the foreground are overexposed, appearing largely as black silhouettes. Together they frame the Panthéon, rendered entirely in muted greys. This photograph exceeds documentation to become more a study of mood and atmospheric conditions than of architecture.
Frederick Evans’s architectural study of the attic at Kelmscott Manor, a medieval house, part of which dates from 1280, is a visual geometry lesson. The composition is all angles and intersections, formed not only by the actual structure but also by the graphic definition of light within the space. Soft illumination bathes the area near the stairs, while the photograph’s foreground plunges into murky darkness. The sharp angles of intersecting planes are mediated by the rough-hewn craftsmanship of the beams and posts, almost sensuous in their sinewy imperfection and plainly wrought by hand. The platinum print medium favoured by Evans provides softened tonalities that further unify the triangles, squares, and diagonal lines of the dynamic composition.
William Christenberry began photographing this makeshift wooden structure in his native Alabama in 1974. Since that time, he has made nearly annual trips to document the facade of this isolated dwelling, located deep in the Talladega National Forest. Such vernacular structures were uncommon photographic subjects until Walker Evans, Ed Ruscha, William Eggleston, and other twentieth-century photographers elevated their stature. Like the edifices photographed by Eugène Atget, Bernd and HIlla Becher, and others, the buildings Christenberry recorded in the southern United States were often in disrepair and in danger of disappearing altogether.
Soon after its invention in 1839, photography surpassed drawing as the preferred artistic medium for recording and presenting architecture. Novel photographic techniques have kept pace with innovations in architecture, as both media continue to push artistic boundaries. In Focus: Architecture, on view October 15, 2013 – March 2, 2014 at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Getty Center, traces the long, interdependent relationship between architecture and photography through a selection of more than twenty works from the Museum’s permanent collection, including recently acquired photographs by Andreas Feininger, Ryuji Miyamoto, and Peter Wegner.
“Architectural photography was an integral part of the early days of the medium, with the construction of many of the world’s most important and magnificent structures documented from start to finish with the camera,” explains Timothy Potts, director of the J. Paul Getty Museum. “This exhibition demonstrates how architectural photography has grown from straightforward documentary style photographs in its early days to genre-bending works like those of Peter Wegner from 2009.”
Beginnings of Architectural Photography
Recognised for their accuracy and precision, photographs could render architectural details as never before and show the built environment during construction, after completion, or in ruin. Nineteenth-century photographers were eager to utilise the new medium to document historic sites and structures, as well as buildings that rose alongside them, or in their place. In 1859, Gustave Le Gray photographed the Mollien Pavilion, a structure that constituted part of the “New Louvre,” a museum expansion completed during the reign of Napoleon III. Le Gray’s picturesque composition highlighted the Pavilion’s ornamented façade and other intricate details that could inform the work of future architects. Louis-Auguste Bisson, a trained architect, worked with his brother Auguste-Rosalie to photograph grand architectural spaces such as Interior of Saint-Ouen Church in Rouen (1857). The Bisson brothers produced a monumental print, derived from a glass negative of the same size, to feature the nave of the structure in an interior view rarely depicted in 19th century photographs.
A burgeoning commercial market for tourist photographs emerged toward the end of the nineteenth century. Views of architectural landmarks and foreign ruins became popular souvenirs and tokens of the ancient world. Artists such as J.B. Greene, who ventured to exotic destinations, provided visions of historic sites in Egypt, while Louis-Émile Durandelle took a series of photographs that documented the construction of the Eiffel Tower in the years before it became a symbol of the modern era at the World’s Exposition of 1889. Durandelle’s frontal view of the structure underscored its perfect geometric form, and his photographs were the earliest of what became a popular motif for amateur and professional photographers. Other noted photographers of this period included Eugène Atget, who obsessively documented the streets and buildings of Paris before its modernisation, and Frederick H. Evans, who created poetic photographs of Romanesque and Gothic cathedrals.
The Rise of Modern Architectural Photography
As the commercial market for photographs expanded and technologies advanced, representations of architectural forms began to evolve as well. In the twentieth century, images of buildings developed in conjunction with the rise of avant-garde, experimental, documentary, and conceptual modes of photographic expression.
Andreas Feininger, who studied architecture in Weimar, followed what Bauhaus instructor László Moholy-Nagy called a “new vision” of photography as an autonomous artistic practice with its own laws of composition and lighting. In Portal in Greifswald (1928), Feininger created a negative print, or a photograph with reversed tonalities, resulting in a high contrast image that enhanced the mystery of the architectural subject and removed it from its ecclesiastical context.
“The experimental spirit that permeated photography in the first half of the twentieth century inspired new ways to look at architectural forms,” says Amanda Maddox, assistant curator of photographs at the J. Paul Getty Museum and curator of the exhibition. “As photographs could present buildings in abstracted, close-up, or fragmented views, they encouraged viewers to see the built environment around them as never before.”
At the same time the Bauhaus was influencing photographers throughout Europe, Walker Evans was at the forefront of vernacular photography in the United States, which elevated ordinary objects and events to photographic subjects. In keeping with this trend, architectural photography shifted its focus to ordinary domestic and functional buildings. Derelict and isolated dwellings feature prominently in the work of William Christenberry, whose photograph and “building construction” of Red Building in Forest, Hale County, Alabama (1994) will be on display in the exhibition.
Architecture as a photographic subject became more malleable at the end of the twentieth century, as artists continued to explore the symbolism and vitality of the modern cityscape. This transition is exemplified in Peter Wegner’s 32-part Building Made of Sky III (2009), in which the spaces between skyscrapers in New York, San Francisco and Chicago create buildings of their own. Wegner described the series as “the architecture of air, the space defined by the edges of everything else.” When presented as a grid, the works form a new, imaginary city.
Press release from the J. Paul Getty website
Gustave Le Gray (French, 1820-1884) Mollien Pavilion, the Louvre 1859 Albumen silver print Image: 36.7 x 47.9cm The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Standing opposite a newly built pavilion of the Louvre, Gustave Le Gray made this photograph when the sun’s position allowed him to best capture the details of the heavily ornamented facade, from the fluted columns on the ground level to the figurative group on the nearest gable. Paving stones lead the viewer’s eye directly to the corner of the pavilion, where the sunlit facade is further highlighted beside an area blanketed in shadow.
Though the extensive art collections of the Louvre had first been opened to the public in 1793, after the French Revolution, it was not until 1848 that the museum became the property of the state. Le Gray’s image shows the exuberance of the architecture undertaken shortly thereafter, during the reign of Napoléon III, when large sections of the building housed government offices.
The long, interdependent relationship between photography and architecture is the subject of this survey drawn from the Getty Museum’s collection. Spanning the history of the medium, the exhibition features twenty-four works by such diverse practitioners as William Henry Fox Talbot, Eugène Atget, Walker Evans, Bernd and Hilla Becher, and Ryuji Miyamoto. Seen together, the varied photographic representations of secular and sacred structures on display reveal how the medium has impacted our understanding and perception of architecture.
In the nineteenth century, photography surpassed drawing as the preferred artistic medium for recording and presenting architecture. Recognised for their accuracy and precision, photographs could render architectural elements as never before. The intricate ornamented facade, the sprawling sunlit Napoléon Courtyard, and the classical design of the Louvre appear in magnificent detail in Gustave Le Gray’s picturesque image of the Mollien Pavilion, a structure completed in the 1850s during the reign of Napoléon III.
Photographers working in the nineteenth century documented historic structures on the verge of disappearance as well as contemporary buildings erected before their eyes. They also captured the built environment during construction, after completion, and in ruin. This photograph by Louis-Émile Durandelle shows the Eiffel Tower, the centrepiece of the 1889 World Exposition, in November 1888 when only its four columns, piers, and first two platforms were in place.
With the advancement of photographic technologies and the modernisation of the built environment around the turn of the twentieth century came innovative representations of architecture. Compositions and photographic processes began to reflect the avant-garde and modernist sensibilities of the time, and photographs of buildings, churches, homes, and other structures often showcased these developments. Andreas Feininger, who trained as an architect, utilised an experimental printing technique to depict gothic St. Nikolai cathedral in Greifswald in a nontraditional way.
Images of architecture by contemporary photographers Robert Adams, William Christenberry, and others working in the documentary tradition often underscore the temporality of buildings. Vernacular structures found in his native Alabama are among the subjects Christenberry has systematically recorded for the past six decades. By returning year-after-year to photograph the same places, such as the red building shown above, Christenberry chronicles the decay (and sometimes the ultimate disappearance) of stores, tenant houses, churches, juke joints, and other rural buildings.
Experimental and conceptual approaches toward the representation of architecture have been embraced by photographers. Peter Wegner used skyscrapers in New York, San Francisco, and Chicago as his framing devices to feature the spaces between high rises that form buildings of their own. By upending images of these canyons, he created buildings made of sky. When presented as a grid, they form a new, imaginary city.
Text from the J. Paul Getty website
Henri Le Secq (French, 1818-1882) Tour de Rois à Rheims (Tower of the Kings at Rheims Cathedral) 1851 Salted paper print 35.1 x 25.9cm The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Louis-Émille Durandelle (French, 1839-1917) The Eiffel Rower: State of Construction 1888 Albumen silver print 43.2 x 34.6cm The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
The Centennial Exposition of 1889 was organised by the French government to commemorate the French Revolution. Bridge engineer Gustave Eiffel’s 984-foot (300-meter) tower of open-lattice wrought iron was selected in a competition to erect a memorial at the exposition. Twice as high as the dome of St. Peter’s in Rome or the Great Pyramid of Giza, nothing like it had ever been built before. This view was made about four months short of the tower’s completion. Louis-Émile Durandelle photographed the tower from a low vantage point to emphasise its monumentality. The massive building barely visible in the far distance is dwarfed under the tower’s arches. Incidentally, the tower’s innovative glass-cage elevators, engineered to ascend on a curve, were designed by the Otis Elevator Company of New York, the same company that designed the Getty Center’s diagonally ascending tram.
Exhibition dates: 18th October 2013 – 9th February 2014
Curator: Kathleen Bühle
Participating artists: Vito Acconci / Bas Jan Ader / Luc Andrié / Lynda Benglis / Luciano Castelli / Martin Disler / VALIE EXPORT and Peter Weibel / Gelitin / Pascal Häusermann / Alexis Hunter / Cathy Joritz / Jesper Just / Jürgen Klauke / Frantiček Klossner / Elke Silvia Krystufek / Marie-Jo Lafontaine / Peter Land / Littlewhitehead / Sarah Lucas / Urs Lüthi / Manon / Paul McCarthy / Tracey Moffatt / Josef Felix Müller / Ursula Palla / Adrian Piper / Anne-Julie Raccoursier / Ugo Rondinone / Carole Roussopoulos / Rico Scagliola and Michael Meier / Sylvia Sleigh / Nedko Solakov / Megan Francis Sullivan / Sam Taylor-Johnson / Costa Vece / William Wegman / Silvie Zürcher.
PLEASE NOTE: THIS POSTING CONTAINS ART PHOTOGRAPHS OF MALE NUDITY AND MALE SEXUAL AROUSAL – IF YOU DO NOT LIKE PLEASE DO NOT LOOK, FAIR WARNING HAS BEEN GIVEN
“… muscularity is a key term in appraising men’s bodies … this comes from men themselves. Muscularity is the sign of power – natural, achieved, phallic.”
Richard Dyer. Only Entertainment. London: Routledge, 1992, p. 114
“The formation of ‘The Cult of Muscularity’ (Elliott Gorn. The Manly Art. London: Robson Books, 1986) in the last decade of the 19th century was a reaction to the perceived effeminisation of heterosexual masculinity. The position of the active, heroic hetero-male was under attack from the passivity of industrialisation, from the expansion of women’s rights and their ability to become breadwinners, and through the naming of deviant sexualities that were seen as a threat to the stability of society. By naming deviant sexualities they became visible to the general public for the first time, creating apprehension in the minds of men gazing upon the bodies of other men lest they be thought of as ‘pansies’. (Remember that it was in this decade the trials of Oscar Wilde had taken place in England after he was accused of being a sodomite by The Marquis of Queensbury. It is perhaps no coincidence that the rules that governed boxing, a very masculine sport in which a man could become a popular hero, were named after his accuser. By all accounts he was a brute of a man who despised and beat his son Lord Alfred Douglas and sought revenge on his partner, Oscar Wilde, for their sexual adventures). Muscles became the sign of heterosexual power, prowess, and virility. A man had control over his body and his physical world. His appearance affected how he interacted with this world, how he saw himself, and was seen by others, and how closely he matched the male physical ‘ideal’ impacted on his own levels of self-esteem. The gymnasium became a meeting point for exercise, for health, for male bonding, and to show off your undoubted ‘masculinity’…”
The development of ‘The Cult of Muscularity’ may also have parallels in other social environments which were evolving at the turn of the century. For example, I think that the construction of the muscular mesomorphic body can be linked to the appearance of the first skyscrapers in cities in the United States of America. Skyscrapers were a way increasing visibility and surface area within the limited space of a crowded city. One of the benefits of owning a skyscraper like the Chrysler Building in New York, with its increased surface area, was that it got the company noticed. The same can be said of the muscular body. Living and interacting in the city, the body itself is inscribed by social interaction with its environment, its systems of regulation and its memories and historicities (his-tor-i-city, ‘tor’ being a large hill or formation of rocks). Like a skyscraper, the muscular body has more surface area, is more visible, attracts more attention to its owner and is more admired. The owner of this body is desired because of his external appearance which may give him a feeling of superiority and power over others. However this body image may also lead to low self-esteem and heightened body dissatisfaction in the owner (causing anxiety and insecurity in his identity) as he constantly strives to maintain and enhance his body to fulfil expectations he has of himself.
Of course, body image is never a static concept for the power of muscular images of the male body resides in their perceived value as a commodity. This value is reinforced through social and moral values, through fluid personal interactions, and through the desire of self and others for a particular type of body image; it is a hierarchical system of valuation. It relies on what type of body is seen as socially desirable and ‘beautiful’ in a collective sense, even though physical attractiveness is very much a personal choice.”
Dr Marcus Bunyan. Excerpt from “Bench Press” in Pressing the Flesh: Sex, Body Image and the Gay Male, PhD thesis, RMIT University, Melbourne, 2001.
“Re-Pressentation” chapter from Pressing the Flesh: Sex, Body Image and the Gay Male. Phd Research, RMIT University, Melbourne, 2001
“In Press” chapter from Pressing the Flesh: Sex, Body Image and the Gay Male. Phd research, RMIT University, Melbourne, 2001
“Bench Press” chapter from Pressing the Flesh: Sex, Body Image and the Gay Male. Phd research, RMIT University, 2001
“Historical Pressings” chapter from Pressing the Flesh: Sex, Body Image and the Gay Male. Phd research, RMIT University, 2001
Many thankx to the Kunstmuseum Bern for allowing me to publish the art work in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Ugo Rondinone (Switzerland, b. 1962) I Don’t Live Here Anymore 1998 C-prints between Alucobond and Plexiglas Each 180 × 125cm Kunstmuseum Bern, purchased with the donation of an Art Lover (From the section Masculinity as Masquerade)
Digitally manipulates photos of women depicted in various suggestive poses, replacing their features with his own in a sufficiently consistent way for the image to retain its erotic content. By slipping into different bodies, he tests his own body and appearance, and he raises the issue of reality. The artist can only offer his own, man-made version.
Lynda Benglis (American, b. 1941) Artforum Advertisement in: Artforum, November 1974, Vol. 13, No. 3, S. 3-4 1974 26.7 × 26.5 × 0.5cm Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, München (From the section Experiments)
Peter Land (Danish, b. 1966) Peter Land d. 5. maj 1994 1994 Colour video Time, 25 Min. Courtesy Galleri Nicolai Wallner (From the section Crisis and Criticism)
Ursula Palla (Switzerland, b. 1961) balance 2012 Colour video installation Time, 8 Min. Courtesy the artist (From the section Crisis and Criticism)
Masculinity under scrutiny
This themed group exhibition is our contribution to the discussion on new role definitions of the male gender, a topic that has long been on the agenda of academia and popular culture. Works by artists of both sexes will address the issue of how contemporary art stages male role models and masculinity, critically scrutinising the content of the same.
Who or what makes a man? How do men define themselves in art since feminism; how do they reflect on their gender and the portrayal thereof? Whereas the preferred angle of engaging with female artists is still today via “gender”, this is still a novel angle for looking at male artists. And as feminist art has finally become an established entity in major institutions, it is time to take a closer look at the art produced by men about men. The Sexual Revolution as well as the feminist and gay movements did not have only one side to them: they likewise impacted the roles of men and transformed images of masculinity. The exhibition therefore explores how contemporary Western artists of both sexes have, since the 1960s, invented new notions of masculinity or shattered existing ones. It does this with some 45 installations, some of which are large and extensive.
With this exhibition, the Kunstmuseum Bern is addressing a topic that, until now, has hardly been tackled in a museum context: the “normal” white heterosexual male, hitherto the ultimate measure for everything we consider characteristically human, is now facing a crisis. The exhibition and catalogue draw on the reflections and insights gained from masculinities studies to throw light on the consequences of the contemporary male crisis and how it is reflected in art, making the extent of the crisis visually palpable.
The works selected for the show have been divided up into six sections. These sections explore what “normal” might be and what the new nuances inherent in being “male” are today. The prescribed tour of the exhibition begins with the chapter on “Strong Weaknesses” and then proceeds through the sections focusing thematically on “Experiments”, “Emotions”, “Eroticism”, “Critique and Crisis”, and “Masculinity as Masquerade”. This route follows, at the same time, a roughly chronological order. The show is accompanied by a rich fund of educational programs with tours of the exhibition, discussions of artworks with invited guests, as well as a film program in collaboration with the cinema Kino Kunstmuseum, and not least, workshops for schools.
The exhibition The Weak Sex – How Art Pictures the New Male zeroes in on the evolution of male identity since the 1960s. On view are works by 40 artists regardless of gender who question masculinity and stage it anew. The Kunstmuseum Bern seeks to foster dialogue in the exhibition and is therefore increasing its focus on social media. For the first time our visitors can respond to issues raised by an exhibition immediately on location…
The whole spectrum of art media and male images
The exhibition is presenting works that cover the entire range of media used by artists, including paintings, drawings, photographs, films, videos, sculptures and performance-installations. Artists of all ages are represented in the exhibition, enabling it to highlight images of men in all age groups. Each of the artworks questions social norms, who or what a man is, while orchestrating masculinity in novel ways and reflecting on what it means to be a “man”. The artworks in the show take up the theme of masculinity or male emotions – as discussed in society in general or as openly demonstrated by men today: as weeping sport heroes, the disadvantaged position of divorced fathers, overstrained top managers or criminal youths.
Of strong weaknesses, eroticism and the male in crisis
The exhibition is divided into six sections that explore key aspects of masculinity studies and thus simultaneously follow a loose art-historical chronological thread. The introductory section takes up the theme of “Strong Weaknesses” with representations of men weeping or expressing fear. The second section “Experiments” scrutinises the exciting events that took place in conjunction with the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s. The section “Emotions” presents male emotionality in intensely stirring artistic orchestrations. The section “Eroticism” take us through a selection of artworks that investigate men as objects of desire. The last two sections of the exhibition “Crisis and Critique” and “Masculinity as Masquerade” investigate traditional male images and give us an account of the potential of new gender orientations.
Press release from the Kunstmuseum Bern website
Bas Jan Ader (born Winschoten, Netherlands, 1942, died 1975 presumably on the high seas. Lived in California, USA, as of 1963) I’m Too Sad to Tell You 1970-1971 16mm, s/w Time, 3:34 Min. Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (From the section Strong Weaknesses)
Sylvia Sleigh (born Llandudno, Wales, Great Britain, 1916; died New York, USA, 2010) Paul Rosano in Jacobson Chair 1971 Oil on canvas 131 x 142cm Courtesy The Estate of Sylvia Sleigh & Freymond-Guth Fine Arts Zürich (From the section Eroticism)
Gelitin Ständerfotos – Nudes (Standing Photos – Nudes) 2000 Series of 15 Lambda prints Various dimensions (From the section Eroticism)
Gelitin Ständerfotos – Nudes (Standing Photos – Nudes) 2000 Series of 15 Lambda prints Various dimensions (From the section Eroticism)
Austrian artists’ collective with Wolfgang Gantner, Ali Janka, Florian Reither, and Tobias Urban. Apparently became acquainted at a summer camp in 1978. Changed their name from Gelatin to Gelitin in 2005.
Those who lived through their childhood and youth as members of the baby-boomer generation in the period of the late nineteen-fifties to the mid-seventies, as we did, received a clear view of the world along the way. It was the Cold War. There were precise dividing lines, and it was possible to completely separate good and evil, right and wrong, from one other. The division of roles between men and women was regulated in a way that was just as self-evident. For many children of this time, it was natural that the father earned the money while the mother was at home around the clock and, depending on her social position, went shopping and took care of the laundry herself, or left the housework to employees in order to be able to dedicate herself to “nobler” tasks such as, for instance, beauty care. Family and social duties were clearly distributed between husband and wife: the “strong” sex was responsible for the material basics of existence and for the social identity of the family. The “weak” or also fair sex, in contrast, was responsible for the “soft” factors inside: children, housekeeping, and the beautification of the home. The year 1968 did away with bourgeois concepts of life. Feminism and emancipation anchored the equality of men and women in law. And since the nineteen-sixties, art has also dealt intensively and combatively with feminism and gender questions.
Since VALIE EXPORT walked her partner Peter Weibel on a leash like a dog in their public action that unsettled the public in 1968, legions of creators of art, primarily of the female sex, have questioned the correlations between the genders and undertaken radical reassessments. The formerly “strong” gender has thus long since become a “weak” one. Nevertheless, the exhibition The Weak Sex: How Art Pictures the New Male is not dedicated first and foremost to the battlefield of the genders. Nor is the gender question, which has so frequently been dealt with, posited in the foreground. The Weak Sex is instead dedicated to man as object of research. In what state does he find himself now that his classical role has been invalidated? How does he behave after the shift from representative external appearance to work within the family unit? And where does he stand in the meantime in the midst of so many strong women? What has become of the proud and self-assured man who once signed the school report cards with praise or reproach as head of the family? What has become of the XY species since then is presented – insightfully, sarcastically, and wittily – in the exhibition by Kathleen Bühler.
Part of the Preface to the exhibition by Matthias Frehner, Director of the Kunstmuseum Bern and Klaus Vogel, Director of the Deutsches Hygiene-Museum Dresden
Costa Vece (Swiss, b. 1969) Me as a Revolutionary, Dictator, Guerilla, Freedom Fighter, Terrorist, Jesus Christ 2007 Ultrachrome – Digitalprint 106 × 80cm (From the section Crisis and Criticism)
Ugo Rondinone (Swiss, b. 1962) I Don’t Live Here Anymore 1998 C-print between Alucobond and Plexiglas 180 × 125cm Kunstmuseum Bern, purchased with the donation of an Art Lover (From the section Masculinity as Masquerade)
Rico Scagliola & Michael Meier (Swiss, b. 1985; Swiss, b. 1982) Nude, Leaves and Harp 2012 Floor Installation, HD Digital Print on Novilux traffic, dimensions variable Ed. 1/5
Jürgen Klauke (Germany, b. 1943) Rot 1974 Series of 7 photographs Each 40 × 30cm Kunstmuseum Bern (From the section Experiments)
Stronger and Weaker Sexes: Remarks on the Exhibition
Kathleen Bühler Curator Kunstmuseum Bern
In 1908, the Genevan politician and essayist William Vogt wrote the book Sexe faible (The Weak Sex), in which he examines the “natural” weaknesses and inabilities of the female gender. Intended as a “response to absurd exaggerations and feminist utopias,”1 since then the catchy title has shaped the battle of the sexes as a dictum. Like Otto Weininger’s misogynistic study Geschlecht und Charakter (Sex and Character, 1903), Sexe faible is one of the texts from the turn of the previous century that justified the legal, political, and social subordination of women based on their anatomical and, according to the opinion of the author, thus also intellectual inferiority in comparison with men.2 The perception of women as the “weak sex” persisted tenaciously. It is first in recent years that this ascription has slowly been shifted to men, as for instance in the report by neurobiologist Gerald Huther called Das schwache Geschlecht und sein Gehirn (The Weak Sex and His Brain) published in 2009.
Polemics has long since yielded to statistics, and the most recent biological discoveries are gaining currency, such as the fact that male babies are already at risk in the womb because they lack a second X chromosome.3 This genetic “weakness” would apparently lead seamlessly to a social weakness, since males more frequently have problems in school, turn criminal, and die earlier.4 In addition to the findings on biologically based weaknesses also comes the social, economic, and political challenge, which has for some years been discussed as a “crisis of masculinity.” With this metaphor, “an attempt is made to apprehend all the changes that contribute to the fact that the dominance of the male gender, which was formerly consolidated to a large extent, … has lost the obviousness of being self-evident.”5 Nothing therefore demonstrates the transience of gender stereotypes more clearly, and one might rightly ask whether the earlier “weaknesses” might long since have come to be considered new “strengths.” The exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Bern takes up the thread that was already spun by the small but noteworthy exhibition in Switzerland Helden Heute (Heroes Today) in 2005.6 At that time, the focus was put on hero images in contemporary art and on society’s current need for strong men in art and politics.7 The current exhibition in Bern, in contrast, argues quite differently that specifically images of “weak” men best represent the social and cultural liberation movements of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The fact that men today are allowed to express their feelings publicly, as is shown for instance by the example of the exceptional Swiss athlete Roger Federer, or that they are staged by female artists as object of desire and no longer as subject of desire is a crucial innovation in the visualisation of gender identities. After various exhibitions in recent years were dedicated to gender relations, gender imprinting, or the social latitude in performative stagings of gender,8 the exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Bern focuses exclusively on men in contemporary art for the first time.9 It brings together the points of view of male and female artists who deal either with their own experiences with men and / or being a man, or with an examination of the images of men that are available. This exhibition has been long overdue.
Nonetheless, what first needs to be overcome is the perception that “gender” themes are a woman’s matter and that only marginalised positions have addressed their social gender. Hegemonic male types – thus men who, according to general opinion, embody the dominant masculine ideal most convincingly – have only been reflected in public through media for a relatively short time, even though the male gender is also a sociocultural construct, just like that of women, transgender, or inter-gender individuals.10 What comes to be expressed here is the invisibility of norms. As is generally known, it is those social groups that hold the most power that actually expose their own status the least. In Western cultural tradition, these are physically sound, white heterosexual men.11 They remain the norm unchallenged as a “blind spot” without their position of power and their power to make decisions ever becoming a focus. The masculine-heterosexual dominance succeeds in “remaining out of the question itself,” as the art historian Irit Rogoff has criticised, by subordinating all representations of the “other” to their own norm, including women, individuals with a different sexual orientation, and non-whites.12
The fact that male bodies are becoming visible today in the most unexpected places is demonstrated in a striking way by the work Nude, Leaves and Harp (2012) by Rico Scagliola and Michael Meier, which graces the entrance area to the exhibition in Bern. The artist duo incorporated detailed images of their naked, sculpted bodies into a palm and marble decor on the floor. The path to the exhibition literally leads over their nakedness. Two exhibitions in Austria were also recently dedicated to this new presence of the naked man,13 with numerous works documenting “the deconstruction of hegemonic models of masculinity – the look of desire at the male body as well as body cult and exploitation,” which is also a focus of the exhibition in Bern.14 However, while those responsible in Linz and Vienna assumed a distanced, art-historical perspective by taking an iconographic approach based on the selection of motifs or a chronological approach according to epoch, the exhibition in Bern favours a different perspective. It focuses on representations of masculinity in art since the nineteen-sixties while simultaneously taking the historical conditions of being a man into consideration by utilising central issues in masculinity research as a guide. What thus results is a logical division of the exhibition and this publication into six chapters.
The introductory chapter “Strong Weaknesses” revolves around the change in gender virtues and considers this based on the example of the weeping and fearful man. The chapter “Experiments” presents eccentric artistic stagings and socio-critical actions that were influenced by the sexual revolution. The chapter “Emotions” highlights the point in time at which men themselves increasingly cast aside the image of the successful and unflinching hero and explore men’s emotionality through doing so. The chapter “Eroticism” describes the change in gaze and position from the male subject to object of desire. The final two chapters “Crisis and Criticism” and “Masculinity as Masquerade,” in contrast, are dedicated to a younger generation of artists who deal out criticism of their “fathers” and also discover the arsenal of gender stagings and their utopian potential anew.
Footnotes
1/ Une riposte aux exagérations, aux absurdités et aux utopies du féminisme is the subtitle.
2/ Otto Weininger, Geschlecht und Charakter, 19th ed. (Leipzig and Vienna, 1920), p. 390. Both Weininger’s book and Vogt’s pamphlet, which saw signs of cultural decay in the women’s movement, are considered to be expressions of a growing antifeminism. The often-used term “weak sex” then also provided the title of a theatre piece by Edouard Bourdet in 1929, which was even filmed in 1933.
3/ “Männer – Das schwache Geschlecht und sein Gehirn: Peter Schipek im Gespräch mit Prof. Dr. Gerald Hüther,” p. 2 (accessed July 2013) No long available online.
4/ Carmen Sadowski, “Der Mann: das schwache Geschlecht,” Express.de, (accessed July 14, 2013) No longer available online.
5/ Michael Meuser and Sylka Scholz, “Krise oder Strukturwandel hegemonialer Männlichkeit?,” in In der Krise? Männlichkeiten im 21. Jahrhundert, ed. Mechthild Bereswill and Anke Neuber (Münster, 2011), p. 56. See also the text by Michael Meuser in this book.
6/ Helden Heute: Das Heldenbild in der zeitgenössischen Kunst, Centre Pasquart, Biel, 2005.
7/ Sociologists interpret this as a sign of need in times of social upheaval. See Dolores Denaro, in Helden Heute: Das Heldenbild in der zeitgenössischen Kunst, ed. Dolores Denaro, exh. cat. Centre Pasquart (Biel, 2005), p. 20.
8/ Oh boy! It’s a Girl, Kunstverein München, 1994; Féminin – Masculin, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 1995; Rosa für Jungs: Hellblau für Mädchen, Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst, Berlin, 1999; Das achte Feld, Museum Ludwig, Cologne, 2006; to name but a few.
9/ To date, this has occurred only in smaller exhibition spaces, above all during the nineteen-eighties and nineties, and has remained practically undocumented. An exception in this respect was the exhibition Women’s Images of Men (1984) at the Institute of Contemporary Art, London, organised by Joyce Agee, Catherine Elwes, Jacqueline Morreau, and Pat Whiteread.
10/ Inge Stephan, “Im toten Winkel: Die Neuentdeckung des ‘ersten Geschlechts’ durch men’s studies und Männlichkeitsforschung,” in Männlichkeit als Maskerade: Kulturelle Inszenierungen vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart, ed. Claudia Benthien and Inge Stephan (Cologne et al., 2003), p. 13.
11/ Richard Dyer, “Introduction,” in The Matter of Images: Essays on Representation, ed. Richard Dyer (London and New York, 1993), p. 4.
12/ Irit Rogoff, “Er selbst: Konfigurationen von Männlichkeit und Autorität in der Deutschen Moderne,” in Blick-Wechsel: Konstruktionen von Männlichkeit und Weiblichkeit in Kunst und Kunstge-schichte, ed. Ines Lindner et al. (Berlin, 1989), p. 141.
13/ Nude Men, Leopold Museum, Vienna, 2012-2013; The Naked Man, Lentos Museum, Linz, 2012-2013.
14/ Barnabàs Bencsik and Stella Rollig, “Vorwort,” in Der nackte Mann: Texte, exh. cat. Lentos Kun-stmuseum Linz and Ludwig Museum – Museum of Contemporary Art (Budapest, 2012), p. 7.
littlewhitehead (Craig Little, born Glasgow (UK), 1980. Blake Whitehead, born Lanark (UK), 1985) The Overman 2012 Mannequin, towels, Boxing Glove, wooden base 120 x 120 x 120cm Saatchi Collection, London Courtesy of the artist/Sumarria Lunn Gallery/Saatchi Collection (From the section Crisis and Criticism)
Pascal Häusermann (Swiss, b. 1973) Megalomania, No. 8 2009 Monotype, oil paint, shellac 43 x 29cm Private Collection, Courtesy the artist (From the section Crisis and Criticism)
Silvie Zürcher (Swiss, b. 1977) Blue Shorts 2005-2006 From the series I Wanna Be a Son Collage 31.5 x 24.4cm Courtesy Silvie Zürcher (From the section Masculinity as Masquerade)
Research experience on the Charles Marville photographs at the State Library of Victoria update
Dear readers
Yah _ a lovely response from the State Library of Victoria !!
I look forward to seeing the Marville’s in all their glory. I will let you know how the visit goes…
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Hi Marcus, we’re sorry to hear your experience was not a positive one. The Marville Collection is an extraordinary anthology of photographs to be celebrated. While we certainly don’t wish to keep this treasure from the public, we do want to ensure these photographs are preserved for future generations to enjoy.
So that everyone can access these photographs at any time, we have digitised the entire collection in high resolution and made available online. We also arrange viewings of the original photographic prints by appointment but due to their age, size and delicate nature, it’s preferable that only a selection are brought out at any one time and handled with care. The plastic envelopes in which the photographs are kept are archival and the blue card on which they’re mounted is how the prints were exhibited in 1880 and include the original captions. Conservation staff have assessed the prints and original backing card and are of the opinion that the card is not causing any damage to these photographs.
Our Collection Services Manager is getting in touch with you to arrange another visit where you can see more from this wonderful collection. We look forward to seeing you back at the Library soon.
Charles Marville (French, 1813-1879) Rue Tirechape (de la rue St Honoré) c. 1853 – c. 1870 In collection: Photographic views of Paris Undated, dates assigned from time of Haussman’s renovation of Paris Photographic print mounted on cardboard: albumen silver 32 x 26cm Gift; Government of France; 1880
State Library of Victoria 328 Swanston St, Melbourne VIC 3000 Phone: (03) 8664 7000
Art Blart _ art and cultural memory archive 
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