Installation view of Jeff Wall Photographs at NGV Australia showing, at right, The Destroyed Room 1978 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation shots of the new Jeff Wall exhibition at NGV Australia. Review to follow in due course.
Many thankx to Jemma Altmeier and all the media team at NGV for all their wonderful help and congratulations to the curators, Susan van Wyk and Dr Isobel Crombie, for their restrained yet contemporary installations and for getting the exhibitions to Melbourne. They look magnificent. Well done!
Installation view of Jeff Wall Photographs at NGV Australia showing, at left, The Destroyed Room 1978, and at right, Double Self-Portrait 1979 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of Jeff Wall Photographs at NGV Australia showing, at right, Double Self-Portrait 1979 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of Jeff Wall Photographs at NGV Australia showing, at left, Doorpusher 1984, and at right, Polishing 1998 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of Jeff Wall Photographs at NGV Australia showing, at centre, Doorpusher 1984, and at right, Polishing 1998 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of Jeff Wall Photographs at NGV Australia showing, at left, Diagonal Composition 1993, and at right, Doorpusher 1984 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of Jeff Wall Photographs at NGV Australia showing, at right, A view from an apartment 2004-2005 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of Jeff Wall Photographs at NGV Australia showing After ‘Invisible Man’ by Ralph Ellison, the Prologue 1999-2000 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Curator: Gabriele Schor, founding director of the VERBUND COLLECTION, Vienna, and Veit Ziegelmaier, curator for the Museum der Moderne Salzburg
Many thankx to the Museum Der Moderne Salzburg for allowing me to publish the text and photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
In the exhibition open spaces | secret places, the MUSEUM DER MODERNE SALZBURG is showing artistic positions from 1970 until today from the SAMMLUNG VERBUND. The phenomenons of the perception of spaces and places will be visualised. The first part of the exhibition is dedicated to the medium of photography. Jeff Wall stages mysterious fragments of urban environments in peripheral area. Joachim Koester, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Tom Burr, Teresa Hubbard/Alexander Birchler and David Wojnarowicz explore the fragility of the present in the light of historical changes of space and time. Louise Lawler draws our attention to places where works of art are stored and presented. Janet Cardiff/George Bures Miller stage a journey through memories as an audiovisual space of experience…
The increasing spatialisation of art goes hand in hand with our life style, which has changed considerably in social and cultural terms as a result of new spatial conditions (virtual space, increased mobility). It is this fluctuating presence which seems to make us more acutely aware of our location. In the past we asked other people on the telephone “How are you?”, today we ask “Where are you?
All text from the Museum Der Moderne Salzburg website (including below)
Jeff Wall (American, b. 1946) Forest 2001 Jeff Wall / SAMMLUNG VERBUND, Wien Courtesy Jeff Wall Studio, Vancouver and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris
Jeff Wall (American, b. 1946) The Crooked Path 1991 Grossbilddia in Leuchtkasten Jeff Wall / SAMMLUNG VERBUND, Wien Courtesy Jeff Wall Studio, Vancouver and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris
Jeff Wall
Boys Cutting Through a Hedge, 2003 The Crooked Path, 1991 Forest, 2001
For more than thirty years now, Jeff Wall has been best known for his large-format light boxes in which the colours of his giant transparencies are brilliantly illuminated. In the first few decades of his career, he was celebrated as a peintre de la vie moderne [the painter of modern life] – to use Charles Baudelaire’s term – on account of his ability to combine traditional composition with themes of modern life. For the past decade, however, he has produced a number of large format black-and-white photographs that clearly belong in the context of his affinity for traditional documentary photography or straight photography. The group of three photographs in the SAMMLUNG VERBUND shows peripheral, unimportant places, underscoring Wall’s interest in the “unofficial use of places” (Jeff Wall). In Forest two people are claiming a makeshift private territory in a forest. The Crooked Path and Boys Cutting Through a Hedge, meanwhile, show places in which people have to find their way on the other side of conventional topography.
Jeff Wall (American, b. 1946) Boys Cutting Through a Hedge 2003 Grossbilddia in Leuchtkasten Jeff Wall / SAMMLUNG VERBUND, Wien Courtesy Jeff Wall Studio, Vancouver and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris
Historically and philosophically charged places form the prime themes in the photographical work of Danish artist Joachim Koester. The series The Kant Walks follows the great philosopher’s daily and precisely scheduled walks through his hometown Kaliningrad (formerly known as Königsberg), which Kant allegedly never left throughout his life. Drifting through Kaliningrad’s “psychogeography” (Joachim Koester), the artist rediscovers Kant’s walks. His photographs evoke impressions, both from the past and the present, as they visualise overgrown roads, disintegrating concrete buildings, and presumably abandoned and forgotten places.
Likewise, Koester creates a link to the past in histories. Juxtaposing historic, not less than 30 year old photographs – taken by Gordon Matta-Clark or Bernd and Hilla Becher to name just a few – with recently taken shots from the very same location evokes not one, but two “histories”: that of conceptual photography, and that of the places and events depicted.
Bernd (German, 1931-2007) and Hilla Becher (German, 1934-2015) Gasbehälter 1965-2001
Bernd and Hilla Becher
Entwürfe für Typologien, recorded in the 1960s, compiled 1970-1971 Gasbehälter, 1965-2001
Within 20th century art only a few artists have been able to combine their enduring artistic concept with an outstanding history of reception of their own work. The German photographer couple Bernd and Hilla Becher has been working strictly with documentary photography since the 1950s, and thus influences publications, exhibitions and art collections worldwide up to this day and even beyond the death of Bernd Becher in 2007, providing crucial impulses for the theory and history of art.
Ever since they started working together, Bernd and Hilla Becher were creating an inventory of industrial architecture, both in Europe and in the United States. Their black-and-white photographs depict furnaces, water towers, winding towers, factory buildings, cement and lime plants, entire mining sites as well as timbered houses. A sense of objectivity is innate to their approach to documentary photography. Bernd and Hilla Becher avoided any dramatic setting and confidently relied on the formal aesthetics of analog photography. Through strictly standardising the photographic process, the couple created the possibility to categorise their entire work in typologies, adding a whole new and important conceptual level to their oeuvre.
Tom Burr addresses a long-obsolete phenomenon. In 2005, he presented a white wooden house cut in two halves, entitled Split, outside on a lawn. Burr’s house is a response to the multiple-seat outhouse from the premodern era. Despite (or perhaps because of) the cramped conditions, he sees in it the symbol of “a lost type of intimacy”, repressed by our western societies from their collective consciousness “in favour of cool, smooth, and clean porcelain surfaces.” Considering Burr’s penchant for referencing selected avant-garde works, what comes to mind in relation to this work is Marcel Duchamp’s urinal Fountaine of 1917 and certainly Matta-Clark’s bisected Splitting house, also shown in the exhibition, as well as Minimal Art. Burr stages Split with aesthetic minimalism – cool, austere, and sober. At the same time, however, he unfolds a strange associative field of uncomfortable conditions: of closeness and intimacy, shame, smell, at times even disgust. The earth toilet was common from ancient times up until the 19th century. Installing a version of it in public space today is intended to have the function of an “alien”, a foreign element. Burr’s earlier photo series Unearthing the Public Restroom of 1994 traces experiences of public access, hygiene, privacy, sexuality, criminality, and surveillance that cluster around, and in fact produce, the history of the public restroom. Crime and sexuality, particularly homosexuality, caused many of these spaces to be shut down. What interests the artist is precisely this state of non-use, of abandonment, and the ghost-like presence.
The photo work Filmstills, created in 2000, marks a crucial step in the oeuvre of Teresa Hubbard and Alexander Birchler. Up to this work, the two Irish-Swiss artists were mainly known for their large-size photo series, such as Falling Down, Holes, or Gregor’s Room which were choreographed down to the smallest detail. Filmstills was the first work done outside the studio and on the spot. Filmstills show movie theatres in Berlin, which have been getting on in years. The Rio was closed some time ago and let go to ruin, whereas the Odeon still tries to maintain its hold against the flood of standardised movieplexes. Both shots are based on the same formal principle. A very narrow detail shows the respective main entrance with the cinema’s name written in big letters. The digital processing of the photographs as well as their sizes make the viewers perceive the cinemas as film stills or clips from a movie. In contrast to filmic illusion, here reality is fictionalised. The series Arsenal delivers melancholic interior views of the deserted premises of an abandoned independent cinema in Berlin, wherein only a female usher is still present.
In the summer of 1979, David Wojnarowicz a twenty-four-year-old self-taught artist, borrowed a broken camera to produce a series of black-and-white photographs entitled Arthur Rimbaud in New York.
The Rimbaud series proposes hypothetical scenarios involving the French Symbolist outlaw poet as if he existed a century later, showing Brian Butterick, the friend and temporary lover of the artist, with a mask of Rimbaud. Arthur Rimbaud in New York tracks provocative “locations and movements.” Meatpacking district, subway, piers and Coney Island (off-season) further characterise a generally invisible marginalisation reinforced by abiding unsightliness, tawdriness, and rustication. Desolate Hudson river pier warehouses or anonymous Times Square’s red-light district allude to cavalcades of outsiders whether artists, thieves, queers, young runaways, sex workers, injection drug users, the poor, or homeless. The Rimbaud series would forge links between the artist’s engagement in his own social marginality to that of peers and prior heroes, each one demonstrating the transformative potential of creative response to existential crisis.
Louise Lawler (American, b. 1947) Not Yet Titled 2004-2005
Louise Lawler is one of a group of artists associated with the so-called Pictures generation of the 1970s and 1980s. The Pictures generation conceived of the image as a “picture” – that is, as a set of representations that could be found or appropriated, was rarely original or unique, and that contradicted the claims of authenticity upheld by most modern aesthetics. Lawler’s Not Yet Titled belongs to a long series of projects that investigate the afterlife of artworks – what happens to them after they leave the artist’s studio and enter the domain of private homes or public institutions. This photograph captures Gordon Matta-Clark’s “building cut” Bingo (1974) just after it was installed in the contemporary art galleries of the recently renovated Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2004. Only the top of Bingo is visible in the near foreground, as the edges of Matta-Clark’s object alternately frames and obscures smaller black-and-white photographs of buildings by the contemporary artist Thomas Struth mounted on the gallery walls behind. Lawler’s luminous colour photograph demonstrates the ways in which an institution can change the meaning of an object, as it turns Bingo – already transformed from a building part into a sculpture – into an enigmatic framing device that calls into question the relationships between both the artworks and their context.
Exhibition brochure text from the exhibition Focus on Photography: Recent Acquisitions at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University in St. Louis, 2010. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Not Yet Titled, 2004-2005 Abbau, 2002 Not Yet Titled, 2004-2005 CS # 204, 1990 It Could Be Black and White, 1994-1996 Wall Pillow, 2010/2012
Louise Lawler’s gaze is fixed not on a single, isolated work of art, but rather on the institutional environment in which that particular work is viewed; this, astonishingly, turns out to lend works a completely different meaning. It is the private, semi-public or public context of the gallery or the museum which constantly reshapes, redefines, and refigures a work of art. In principle, Lawler takes pictures of existing situations, in the sense that she does not rearrange the works or make any changes to their position relative to each other. She quite often adopts an off-stage stance to this end, enabling her to view an exhibition from an angle which would normally be closed to visitors.
Wall Pillow, for instance, reveals the verso of a painting, while Abbau shows the absence of art – the two nails and a spotlight shining on a bare wall are all that remains after the work itself has been removed. For what she has done is to sever the magic thread that connects the work per se to the aura it acquires through its hanging. What is evident from Not Yet Titled and CS #204, is that the artist is clearly attracted first and foremost by those works of art which she herself values highly, such as by Gordon Matta-Clark’s façades and Cindy Sherman’s self portraits. Lawler’s photographs focus on the other side of the coin of institutional art presentation. Yet for all her apparent deconstruction, one still has the feeling that she wants to “rescue” these works and in doing so restore their original dignity.
The striking presence of female figures in Ulla von Brandenburg’s work suggests an interest in the conflicted role of nineteenth-century women and the continued complexity of the performance of gender roles and attitudes in contemporary society. Our uncertainty about the position of these women, who are frequently presented in a liminal state, and their potential vulnerability, align perfectly with von Brandenburg’s interest in shifting roles and meaning: Though commanding of attention, von Brandenburg’s female figures are often on the verge of hysteria or loss of control – a state of powerlessness that nevertheless enforces their centrality in the action taking place. The artist’s work Around, 2005 best embodies this state of deferral or ambiguity: von Brandenburg filmed a tightly packed group of figures standing in the middle of a street with their backs to the camera. As the camera travels around the group the figures shift their position so that no frontal aspect is ever revealed. A view of their faces is never revealed in this conspirative meeting. Around we go waiting for the glimpse that will reveal, well, what exactly? We are left standing in front of the projection watching this group of performers, each of us struggling to find the “right” position.
Eleanor Antin (American, b. 1935) 100 Boots 1971-1973 From the 51-part series, black and white postcards Eleanor Antin / SAMMLUNG VERBUND, Wien Courtesy the artist and Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York
Eleanor Antin
100 Boots, 1971-1973
For her 51-piece instalment 100 Boots Eleanor Antin positioned one hundred ordinary black rubber boots on various locations all over Southern California and consequently in New York City. She took photos, printed them on postcards and assembled a mailing list of about a thousand names – mainly artists, writers, critics, galleries, universities and museums – who received the various postcards over a period of two and a half years between 1971 and 1973. The first card, 100 Boots Facing the Sea, was mailed on the Ides of March, 1971, unannounced and without further comment. A few weeks later it was followed by 100 Boots on the Way to Church and three weeks thereafter by the next one.
In a total of 51 photographs, Eleanor Antin documented the travels of the 100 Boots, her so called “hero” – from a beach close to San Diego to a church, to a bank, to the supermarket, trespassing, under the bridge, to a saloon and on their travels eastward. Finally, on May 15th, 1973 100 Boots arrived at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. By this time, 100 Boots had long become an epic visual narrative and a picaresque work of conceptual art.
The works of Ceal Floyer are minimalist and restrained. Some visitors will walk past them without even taking note of them. What the artist addresses everyday situations and activities. It is this apparent insignificance that Ceal Floyer refuses to accept, and so the conceptual strategy she pursues is interrogating our modes of perception. For her piece Me/You (Love Me Tender) from 2009, the artist installs two loudspeakers facing each other, from which the words “me” and “you” can be heard. Between them, the silence becomes palpable. The title can be read as the key to the work since it makes clear that what is heard is an excerpt from Elvis Presley’s song “Love Me Tender.” Ceal Floyer condenses love to its very essence here, namely, to the notions of “me” and “you.”
On Air (2009) is a work in which title and material are one and the same. The words “on” and “air” do not usher in the work, they are the work itself. Ceal Floyer uses the red neon letters used by radio and TV stations to signal that a live broadcast is going on and mounts them above the museum’s or gallery’s exit door. As soon as the viewer connects with the recording studio it becomes clear that this is about a shifting of our perception: We see five letters and realise that the real content of this work is what can be heard. All the sounds, voices and talks from outside the museum are put “on air” here, and the museum, the place where we have learnt to contemplate works of art in silence, pauses to listen to everyday life outside the walls of the institution.
Gordon Matta-Clark (American, 1943-1978) Splitting (b) 1974 Gelatin silver print
Gordon Matta-Clark (American, 1943-1978) Conical Intersect 1975 Gelatin silver print
In spring 1973 Gordon Matta-Clark presented his gallerists Holly and Horace Solomon with an unusual idea. He wanted to saw a house into two halves, and asked them if they knew of anything that might be available. As it happened, Horace Solomon had just the thing. He had bought a house in a speculative real estate deal, and it was soon to be demolished. Matta-Clark was given permission to do what he wanted with it, although it was clear that the work would not last.
Matta-Clark completely cleared the house and, taking a chain-saw and a plumb line, made two parallel incisions into the house. He then cut diagonally through one half of the foundations of house. Next, one half (weighing fifteen tons) of the house started to slope downwards until a split appeared that measured sixty centimeters at the top of the roof. Lastly, Matta-Clark sawed off the four top corners of the house. These were later exhibited as a sculpture entitled Four Corners. The whole project took about four months in total and was demolished shortly after completion. A film, a series of photographs, photomontages, and an artist’s book – all autonomous works of art in their own right – documented the process.
Gordon Matta-Clark (American, 1943-1978) Office Baroque 1977/2005 Gelatin silver print
Museum der Moderne Salzburg Mönchsberg 32 5020 Salzburg Phone: +43 662 842220
This is an excellent exhibition by Greg Elms at Edmund Pearce Gallery, Melbourne. The photographs, made using a film scanner re-purposed into a lens-less camera, have great fidelity. Fidelity refers to the degree to which a model or simulation reproduces the state of a real world object and is therefore a measure of the realism of a model or simulation.
These photographs also have great overall presence – as the artist himself puts it, “Focus of the subject is likewise abnormal, sharp only where features press against the glass platen screen, dissolving into darkness and blur as they recede, implying a sense of entrapment behind the image surface.” This limited depth of field means that the taxidermies loom out of the intimate darkness into the artificial light, the scanners passing recorded as a crescent moon in the eyes of the preserved, the deceased.
Ashely Crawford, in an excellent piece of writing, notes how Elms captures the notion of the animal as ‘other’ while observing that there is much to say about the permeable membrane between human and non-human in postmodern culture. The press release states that, “Preserved raises allusions to the history of zoological inquiry and highlights the sense of loss intrinsic to mortality. Indeed, the works can be read as a series of ecological memento mori.”
These ideas can be further interrogated. Personally, I think it is more than just a singular, momentary death. There is the original death of the animal, its re/animation through the art of preservation, taxidermy, and then a second little death due to the light of the scanner. These photographic animalia may be a reflection on our ecological relationship to the world, caught in a double time-freeze – a postmodern reflection on our memories, histories and interactions with the animal world that are becoming released from the historical contexts on which they are traditionally based, the referent silently split from its once powerful reality. Much as we humans objectify our death through ritual (the dressing of the body, the viewing of the body, the singing of songs, the saying of validations for a life; the coffin, the priest, the burial, the burning) these photographs objectify a simulation of death, as though the death of these animals has been pre-served, like warming up a TV dinner in the microwave and then letting it go cold again. Our relationship to the animals of this world is now mainly about death (live sheep exports, eat your heart out!)
Gothic, nocturnal and now immortal, Elms photographs transcend the animal-human connection and evoke primal emotional responses in the viewer causing us to ask, yet again, what the hell we are doing to this planet.
Greg Elms (Australian, b. 1960) Female Red Kangaroo, Macropus Rufus 2010 Archival Inkjet Print
Gregory Elms pursues the rupture of photography’s implicit claim to realism. To this end his current series, Preserved, investigates the staged realism of taxidermy. Both zoological document and faux wildlife imagery, the work oscillates between life and death, veracity and fiction, the horrific and the sublime. It documents the lifelike lifelessness of taxidermy, presenting a zoological menagerie that is both hyper-real and otherworldly. The work was inspired by childhood memories of taxidermy hunting trophies on the walls of the Sportsmans Bar, at his father’s suburban hotel. But it’s also a gothic investigation of our relationship with animals, influenced by the Romantic movement, the Age of Enlightenment, and the tradition of vanitas painting with it’s metaphorical associations to mortality. According to curator Simon Gregg it “erects an invisible barrier between us and the animals; a physical barrier but in many ways and with more consequence to us, a psychological barrier.”
As the artist observes,
“I grew up in a suburban hotel with a public bar festooned in taxidermy hunting trophies. I’d spend ages gazing at them and have remained enthralled by their life-like lifelessness ever since. For me taxidermy is akin to photography: it too presents a frozen moment as a copy of the real thing. On one level, the work explores our primal emotional responses when in close proximity to animals and insects. But it also explores what truth means in photography – is a contrived photograph still real? And doesn’t photography always render the real as contrived? I seek to highlight this conundrum with the further contrivance of taxidermy.
Inspired by gothic and nocturnal precursors in art, and the history of zoology, the fauna are recontextualised into a menagerie of lost lives – some of them, presumably, the celebration of a now forgotten hunting spree. Each one echoes the story of their demise and surrender to human intervention, their poses animated by a taxidermist’s skills of presentation and reality re-enactment. To document the series, I have employed the idiosyncratic image making qualities of a film scanner re-purposed into a lens-less camera, its simplicity reminiscent of a camera obscura. Set in an otherwise unlit studio, the resultant image reveals a constructed twilight that fuels a dark narrative. Focus of the subject is likewise abnormal, sharp only where features press against the glass platen screen, dissolving into darkness and blur as they recede, implying a sense of entrapment behind the image surface.”
Preserved raises allusions to the history of zoological inquiry and highlights the sense of loss intrinsic to mortality. Indeed, the works can be read as a series of ecological memento mori.”
Press release from the Edmund Pearce Gallery website
Greg Elms (Australian, b. 1960) Red Fox, Vulpes Vulpes 2010 Archival Inkjet Print
The Art of Preservation
Ashley Crawford
In the world of Ridley Scott’s 1982 Science fiction classic Blade Runner one of the most prized possessions is a perfectly replicated owl. The film is based on a 1968 Philip K. Dick novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep in which social status is most often based on the ‘model’ of animal one can afford – or even better, the ownership of a real animal in a world where most species have been killed by nuclear fallout. This is the background to a more complex story, but it is one that is infused with melancholy and a powerful sense of loss. What is humanity without the context of the animal?
But humanity and the animal and insect kingdoms have long maintained an imbalanced sense of symbiosis. On the one hand we ogle animals in zoos or more regularly via television documentaries. Only the most hardy of tourists today bother venturing into what remains of natural habitats – all too often zones of environmental Armageddon. Very few species are truly ‘domesticated’. Indeed almost all animals remain the ‘other’, psychologically impregnable – some are good for eating, some are pests but they all, in one way or another, remain objects of fascination.
Gregory Elms captures this sense of fascination with unnerving potency. His menagerie of misfits, malcontents and monsters are captured with alluring charm. Elms reveals no prejudice when it comes to selecting his portraits; the pestilent hyena alongside the strangely elegant and impelling Dead Leaf Mantis, the odious Cane Toad against the loyal Jack Russell. Via Elms’ aesthetic each and every one of them carries a peculiar charm, as though they had been groomed for their portraiture session. With his deliberately formalised composition, his animals become indisputably individualistic. They are not generic dogs, toads or birds. They are members of a bestiary noblesse.
Animals have, of course, long been the stuff of artistic inspiration, from Durer’s famous rabbit to Hirst’s infamous shark. In Australia, Elms fits alongside an enduring history of animal as subject, seen contemporaneously in the powerful 2004 exhibition Instinct at the Monash Faculty Gallery, which featured artists as diverse as Emily Floyd, Sharon Goodwin, Irene Hanenbergh, Louise Hearman, Ronnie van Hout, David Noonan and Lisa Roet.
And while Elms may capture the notion of the animal as ‘other’ he also taps into the strange connections we feel toward other species. The animal-human connection is obviously a fertile one. In light of the success of recent works in the firecracker-hot field of comparative ethology, delving into the minds and emotional lives of animals, there is much to say about the permeable membrane between human and non-human in postmodern culture. Animals have also played an intriguing, little-examined role in the emergence of technological modernity, from NASA’s space monkeys to experiments on animal behaviour and intelligence.
But Elms work also hints at the pre-history of animal-human interaction. Throughout art history, animals have been utilised by artists to represent human character traits – a man is a ‘snake’ or a ‘dog’ or a ‘pig’ depending on their personality. Animals have also featured in mythology and the supernatural – the werewolf, the vampire. Elms also turns the gallery into the scientific laboratory, the taxidermists studio and, inevitably, the Hunting Lodge.
Yes, often sadly, (the Cane Toad aside), Elms’ subjects are dead. But they live on with a strange majesty via Elms’ lens.
*PLEASE NOTE THIS POSTING CONTAINS ART PHOTOGRAPHS OF MALE SEXUAL NUDITY- IF YOU DO NOT LIKE PLEASE DO NOT LOOK, FAIR WARNING HAS BEEN GIVEN*
The titles from this period are poetic, pragmatic or composed, like Japanese haiku. The photographs are a mixture of personal narrative and universal archetype, hence the affinity to Frederick Sommer’s incantation: Circumnavigation of the blood is always Circumnavigation of the world.
I am scanning my negatives made during the years 1991-1997 to preserve them in the form of an online archive as a process of active memory, so that the images are not lost forever. These photographs were images of my life and imagination at the time of their making, the ideas I was thinking about and the people and things that surrounded me.
Photographs are available from this series for purchase. As a guide, a vintage 8″ x 10″ silver gelatin print costs $700 plus tracked and insured shipping. For more information please see my Store web page.
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Doll on chair 1992-1994 Silver gelatin photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Paul on the balcony, Mcilwrick Street, Windsor 1992-1994 Silver gelatin photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Paul resting 1992-1994 Silver gelatin photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Marcus holding his cock 1992-1994 Silver gelatin photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Post with finial, tree 1992-1994 Silver gelatin photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stars 1992-1994 Silver gelatin photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Paul, Windsor and the city 1992-1994 Silver gelatin photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Self portrait with punk jacket and flanny 1992-1994 Silver gelatin photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Release 1992-1994 Silver gelatin photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Jesus, Mary and Joseph 1992-1994 Silver gelatin photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Circumnavigation of the blood is always Circumnavigation of the world (for Frederick Sommer) 1992-1994 Silver gelatin photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Release (cock, hands, cum) 1992-1994 Silver gelatin photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Madonna and child, skull 1992-1994 Silver gelatin photograph
Exhibition dates: 5th September – 2nd December, 2012
Curator: Klaus Albrecht Schröder, Director of the Albertina
Ishiuchi Miyako (Japanese, b. 1947) 1906#38 Nd Courtesy by The Third Gallery Aya
“The past neglect of the body in social theory was a product of Western mind-body dualism that divided human experience into bodily and cognitive realms. The knowledge-body distinction identifies knowledge, culture, and reason with masculinity and identifies body, nature, and emotion with femininity. Viewing human reason as the principal source of progress and emancipation, it perceives “the rational” as separate from, and exalted over, the corporeal. In other words, consciousness was grasped as separate from and preceding the body (Bordo 1993; Davis 1997). Following feminist thinking about women’s bodies in patriarchal societies, contemporary social theories shifted focus from cognitive dimensions of identity construction to embodiment in the constitution of identities (Davis 1997). Social construction theories do not view the body as a biological given but as constituted in the intersection of discourse, social institutions, and the corporeality of the body. Body practices, therefore, reflect the basic values and themes of the society, and an analysis of the body can expose the intersubjective meaning common to society. At the same time, discourse and social institutions are produced and reproduced only through bodies and their techniques (Frank 1991, 91). Thus, social analysis has expanded from studying the body as an object of social control and discipline “in order to legitimate different regimes of domination” (Bordo 1993; Foucault 1975, 1978, 1980) to perceiving it as a subject that creates meaning and performs social action (Butler 1990). The body is understood as a means for self-expression, an important feature in a person’s identity project (Giddens 1991), and a site for social subversiveness and self-empowerment (Davis 1997).”
Orna Sasson-Levy and Tamar Rapoport. “Body, Gender, and Knowledge in Protest Movements: The Israeli Case,” in ‘Gender & Society’ 17, 2003, p. 381. No longer available online. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Despite my great admiration for John Coplans’ photographs of his body, on the evidence of these press photographs and the attached video, this exhibition seems a beautiful if rather tame affair considering the subject matter.
Of course these photographs of the body can be understood as a means for self-expression and self-empowerment but there seems little social subversiveness in the choice of work on display.
The two Mapplethorpe’s are stylised instead of stonkingly subversive. The exhibition could have been taken photographs from his ‘X’ portfolio (the self portrait of him with a bull whip up his arse would have been particularly pleasing to see in this context). The exhibition could also have included some of the many artists using the body as protest during the AIDS crisis (perhaps some photographs by David Wojnarowicz or William Yang’s Sadness), the famous Burning Monk – The Self-Immolation (1963) by Malcolm Browne, photographs by Stellarc, Arthur Tress, Duane Michals, Nan Goldin, Diane Arbus, Francesca Woodman, Sally Mann, Cindy Sherman to name but a few; even the Farm Security Administration photographs of share cropper families by Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange would have had more impact than some of the photographs on display here.
Having not seen the entire exhibition it is hard to give an overall reading, but on the selection presented here it would seem that this was a missed opportunity, an exhibition where the body did not protest enough.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Albertina, Vienna for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
John Coplans (British, 1920-2003) Self Portrait Interlocking Fingers No 6 1999 Silver gelatin paper Albertina, Wien
The exhibition The Body as Protest highlights the photographic representation of the human body – a motif that has provided a wide variety of photographers with an often radical means of expression for their visual protest against social, political, but also aesthetic norms.
The show centres on an outstanding group of works by the artist John Coplans from the holdings of the Albertina. In his serially conceived large-format pictures, the photographer focused on the rendering of his own nude body, which he defamiliarised through fragmentation far from current forms of idealisation. Relying on extremely sophisticated lighting, he presented himself in a monumental and sculptural manner over many years. His photographs can be understood as amalgamations of theoretical and artistic ideas, which in the show are accentuated through selective juxtapositions with works by other important exponents of body-related art.
The body also features prominently in the work of other artists such as Hannah Wilke, Ketty La Rocca, Hannah Villiger, Vito Acconci, Bruce Nauman, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Miyako Ishiuchi. By means of these positions, such diverse themes as self-dramatisation, conceptual photography, feminism, body language, and even transience are analysed within an expanded artistic range. Moreover, the exhibition offers a differentiated view of the critical depiction of the human body as it has been practiced since 1970.
Text from the Albertina website
Ketty La Rocca (Italian, 1938-1976) Craniologia 1973 Radiografie mit überblendeter Fotografie SAMMLUNG VERBUND
“The photos of Thorne-Thomsen are truly magical … they engage you wistfully, holding you in a quiet, silent, attentive dreamspace.” Dr Marcus Bunyan
Exhibition dates: 12th September – 17th November, 2012
RAY K. METZKER:Pictus Interruptus RUTH THORNE-THOMSEN:Expeditions
Ray K. Metzker (American, 1931-2014) Pictus Interruptus (77EY24) 1977 Gelatin silver print
I like both these bodies of work but it is the enigmatic Expeditions that leave the most lasting impression on my subconscious, out imagining the abstract distortions of Metzker in my mind’s eye. While the images of Pictus Interruptus are interesting in a textural way, the photographs of Thorne-Thomsen are truly magical – like a photographic version of Joseph Cornell’s boxes they engage you wistfully, holding you in a quiet, silent, attentive dreamspace. Some of the photographs are almost Jungian in their holistic balance. Photographs such as Levitating Man and Trio are truly memorable, and in our over saturated media environment it is wonderful to find images that make us slow down and inhale their aura
You contemplate these images: that is the word, contemplation. Enjoy.
PS. Prima Materia, a title of one of Thorne-Thomsen’s series, “is, according to alchemists, the alleged primitive formless base of all matter, given particular manifestation through the influence of forms… The alchemical operation consists essentially in separating the prima materia, the so-called Chaos, into the active principle, the soul, and the passive principle, Mind-body dichotomy, the body. They are then reunited in personified form in the coniunctio, the ritual combination of sol and Luna, which yields the magical child – filius philosophorum – the reborn self, known as the ultima materia.” (Wikipedia)
Jung undertook an analysis of the ritual and processes of alchemy and found that while the alchemists were trying to turn lead into gold by melting the lead down and reforming it as gold, what they were actually doing was letting go of their old identity and reforming it anew. This could be seen as an early form of psychoanalysis that encouraged the process of what Jung calls individuation, the emergence of a new identity as the ego dissolves into the Self. “The symbols of the individuation process… mark its stages like milestones’, prominent among them for Jungians being ‘”the shadow, the Wise Old Man… and lastly the anima (female) in man and the animus (male) in woman”‘. Thus ‘there is often a movement from dealing with the persona at the start… to the ego at the second stage, to the shadow as the third stage, to the anima or animus, to the self as the final stage. Some would interpose the Wise Old Man and the Wise Old Woman as spiritual archetypes coming before the final step of the Self’.” (Wikipedia)
I see elements of this inner work in the art of Ruth Thorne-Thomsen.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Laurence Miller Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Ray K. Metzker (American, 1931-2014) Pictus Interruptus (77FK42) 1977 Gelatin silver print
Ray K. Metzker (American, 1931-2014) Pictus Interruptus (78AD23) 1978 Gelatin silver print
Ray K. Metzker (American, 1931-2014) Pictus Interruptus (78BW19) 1978 Gelatin silver print
Ray K. Metzker (American, 1931-2014) Pictus Interruptus (80FP9a) 1980 Gelatin silver print
Ray K. Metzker (American, 1931-2014) Pictus Interruptus (77FK28) 1977 Gelatin silver print
Ray K. Metzker (American, 1931-2014) Pictus Interruptus (77FW60) 1977 Gelatin silver print
Ray K. Metzker (American, 1931-2014) Pictus Interruptus (76EO4) 1976 Gelatin silver print
Laurence Miller Gallery is pleased to present Two of a Mind, photographs by Ray K. Metzker and Ruth Thorne-Thomsen, made between 1976 and 1991. Presently husband and wife, these two influential photographers independently created innovative and highly personal work that challenge our willingness to believe and stimulate our need to imagine.
Both achieved this by inserting images and objects into the view of the camera, turning reality on its head. Ray Metzker’s Pictus Interruptus series, made between 1976 and 1981, offers us inexplicable images – landscapes and cityscapes disrupted by abstract forms that combine, complement, and contrast with recognisable elements of the city or the land. Coat hangers, magazine images, folded paper and board were some of the items placed before the camera lens. Ruth Thorne-Thomsen’s Expeditions and Door series, as well as Prima Materia and Songs of the Sea, made between 1976 and 1991, also utilised the insertion of objects in front of her pin-hole camera, things like plastic and metal toys, children’s charms, ornaments and trinkets. The resulting images feel like poems come to life – credible enough to seem real, yet imaginary enough to seem like dreams.
Ray (1931-2014) and Ruth (born 1943) met in Chicago in 1980, and immediately felt a kinship of spirit and mind. Each had been pursuing a personal photographic vision which took reality as a starting point and then explored the world of the imagination to challenge the general belief that what a photograph presents is truth. Metzker was more intrigued by the possibilities of form and space, while Thorne-Thomsen pursued the possibilities of mythology and dreams. For each artist, reality and artifice became intertwined and inseparable. This is the first exhibition in which their photographs are presented together. This showing of Metzker’s images also coincides with a major retrospective of his work at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, opening September 25th and continuing through February 24, 2013.
Text from the Laurence Miller Gallery website
Ruth Thorne-Thomsen (American, b. 1943) Echo Wisconsin 1991 From the series Songs of the Sea Gelatin silver print
Ruth Thorne-Thomsen (American, b. 1943) Icarus Figure Wisconsin 1993 From the series Songs of the Sea Gelatin silver print
Ruth Thorne-Thomsen (American, b. 1943) Paper Palms, California 1981 From the Expeditions Series Gelatin silver print
Ruth Thorne-Thomsen works with a pinhole camera, which is essentially a simple box that lets light in through a tiny hole rather than a lens. This setup is well-suited for photographing what Thorne-Thomsen calls her “environmental collages:” mythical, imagined scenes populated with miniature, handmade cardboard props and figurines. In “Paper Palms, California,” the photographer pulls back the curtain a bit on her own craft, allowing the edges of the paper props to disrupt the illusion of real space.
Text from the Philadelphia Museum of Art Facebook page
Ruth Thorne-Thomsen (American, b. 1943) Trio Wisconsin 1991 From the series Songs of the Sea Gelatin silver print
Ruth Thorne-Thomsen (American, b. 1943) Levitating Man, Wisconsin 1983 From the Door Series Gelatin silver print
Ruth Thorne-Thomsen (American, b. 1943) Chair Over Point Wisconsin 1983 From the Door Series Gelatin silver print
Laurence Miller Gallery
There is no longer a physical exhibition space for this gallery. Laurence Miller Gallery currently operates as a private fine art photography dealer.
Opening hours: We are open by appointment only, with locations in New Hope, Pa. and New York City.
“If, having fixed the original form in our mind’s eye, we ask ourselves how that form comes alive and fills with life, we discover a new dynamic and vital category, a new property of the universe: reverberation (retentir). It is as though a well-spring existed in a sealed vase and its waves, repeatedly echoing against the sides of this vase, filled it with their sonority. Or again, it’s as though the sound of a hunting horn, reverberating everywhere through its echo, made the tiniest leaf, the tiniest wisp of moss shudder in a common movement and transformed the whole forest, filling it to its limits, into a vibrating, sonorous world.”
Eugene Minkowski. ‘Vers une Cosmologie’ (translated by Maria Jolas) quoted on Michael Ormerod. “Minkowski’s Reverberating Forest,” on the ‘The Spirit of the Mass’ blog 23rd April 2012 [Online] Cited 24th October 2012 and again on 3rd September 2020
The Australian artist Rosemary Laing moves between different genres in her work, drawing upon installation, performance and photography at the same time. The groundspeed series is the result of a sort of “field trip” to the eucalyptus forests of southern Australia. Together with a team of assistants, Laing produced a series of images of landscapes in which reality and fiction combine through the insertion of ordinary industrially produced carpets in practically unspoilt natural settings. Her work thus weds the open landscape of the image in the background with an element in the foreground that instead recalls an interior, an inhabited human environment. But where is the reality or where is the fiction? Are we sure we can believe in the reality of pure and idyllic nature?
The artist’s working method is comparable to filmmaking. A team of professionals goes to the selected location and creates a set that meets all of the artist’s requirements and is therefore ready to be photographed. This procedure enables Laing to achieve results that would be impossible through digital manipulation of the images alone. The flower-patterned carpets Laing uses belong to a European tradition that was very popular and widespread in Australia when she was young. She thus “grafts” a piece of European culture onto the Australian landscape. She intervenes in nature and alters it. Reverberating in her works is an explicit criticism of the appropriation of the Australian continent by European colonisers, a process underway for at least 200 years. In the light of these considerations, Laing’s apparently idyllic and fantastic images suddenly take on a bitter and dramatic aftertaste. The artistic representation thus succeeds in arriving at a higher level of truth than that of the concrete visual reality it uses.”
Text from the Manipulating Reality: How Images Redefine the World website [Online] Cited 24th October 2012 and again on 3rd September 2020. No longer available online. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
“groundspeed (Red Piazza) #4 is from the series groundspeed, in which patterned Feltex carpet is laid on the forest floor or on the edge of a rocky coastal setting. This particular image uses retro Red Piazza carpet in the forest at the George Boyd Lookout in southern New South Wales. The carpet is obviously incongruous to the forest, even though its floral pattern is inspired by nature. The lush saturated colours are typical of Laing’s work. Here, red and green – opposites on the colour spectrum – are placed in combination, heightening the tone and conceptual vigour of the union. In each photograph from the series, nature is shown as living and abundant; from the fecund, green forest to, in other images, the ferocity of waves breaking against the coast.
The title is an amalgamation of Laing’s concerns: ‘ground’ refers to land and solidity, and ‘speed’ references flight and impermanence. Placed together these terms conceptually summarise the visual considerations at work. In a reversal of accepted norms in which nature is distanced from domestic living and where nature is historically sidelined by cultural pursuits, Laing figuratively brings the inside out. In so doing groundspeed makes concrete the unstable and provocative rapport between habitation and inhabitation, stillness and movement, growth and decay. Laing’s vibrant images subsume the visual in a historical, social and cultural dialogue where the ground keeps shifting.”
Exhibition dates: 12th October – 9th November, 2012
Curator: James Hyman
Edouard Baldus (French, 1813-1889) Vue generale de Paris pont neuf c. 1855 Salt print mounted on card 33.6 x 43.9cm (13.20 x 17.25 ins) Negative: Lower left inscribed in negative: no 82 Mount: Lower right beneath negative: stamped E. Baldus Lower left bottom: Vue generales des Paris pont neuf
A beautiful, complimentary post to the last one on the exhibition Eugène Atget: Old Paris. It is interesting to compare the styles of the two photographers and the change in photography that takes place between the 1850s and the 1890s. Baldus’ photographs are eloquent in their grandeur and frontality, tonality and texture. Atget’s photographs on the other hand are slightly claustrophobic in their intensity, the camera obliquely placed to capture old buildings, narrow cobbled streets and distant vanishing points. Both, in their own way, are very modern photographers. Baldus’ legacy, as Dr James Hyman correctly notes, was his influence on his German compatriots such as the Bechers, Thomas Struth and, to a lesser extent, Andreas Gursky. His rigorous frontality (the photographing of the thing itself) gives his photographs the simplicity of diagrams and emphasises their topographical state, while their density of detail offers encyclopaedic richness. This straightforward “objective” point of view was most notably used by Bernd and Hilla Becher in contemporary photography. Atget’s photographs, on the other hand, aroused an immediate interest “among the Surrealists because of the composition, ghosting, reflections, and its very mundanity.”
Conversely, it is the subjective signature of both artists that make their work truly great – not the mundanity, not the topographic objectivity but their intimate vision of this city, Paris. As I noted in an earlier posting on the Bechers,
“These are subjective images for all their objective desire. The paradox is the more a photographer strives for objectivity, the more ego drops away, the more the work becomes their own: subjective, beautiful, emotive… What makes great photographers, such as Eugène Atget, Walker Evans, August Sander and the Bechers, is the idiosyncratic “nature” of their vision: how Atget places his large view camera – at that particular height and angle to the subject – leaves an indelible feeling that only he could have made that image, to reveal the magic of that space in a photograph. It is their personal, unique thumbprint, recognisable in an instant.”
The same can be said of Baldus and these magnificent, ethereal photographs.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to James Hyman Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Edouard Baldus (French, 1813-1889) Le Nouveau Louvre c. 1857 Salt print mounted on card 31.6 x 44.3cm (12.42 x 17.41 ins) Le Nouveau Louvre series: 1855-1857 Negative: Lower left inscribed in negative: no 107 Mount: Lower right beneath negative: stamped E. Baldus Lower left bottom: Le Nouveau Louvre
Mid-nineteenth century Paris was a city in the midst of modernisation, and as such, was ripe for documentation of its changing landscape. Counted as one of the premier photographers of his day, Edouard Baldus captured the aesthetic of the Second Empire’s ideology in his monumental views of both old and new Parisian landmarks. In 1855, Baldus received his largest commission, to document the construction of the Musee du Louvre. This rich salt print is a survey of the project as it nears almost full completion. Baldus produced over two thousand images of each part of the new Louvre, from large pavilions to small decorative statue. This photograph, however, takes a step back from the individual pieces of the lengthy project, and allows the viewer to appreciate the endeavour as a whole.
Edouard Baldus (French, 1813-1889) Le Pantheon 1853 Salt print mounted on card 33.8 x 43.5cm (13.28 x 17.10 ins) Negative: Lower left inscribed in negative: Le Pantheon Lower right inscribed in negative: Baldus Mount: Lower right beneath negative: stamped E. Baldus Lower left bottom: Le Pantheon
Due to the strength of his architectural imagery and work with the Mission Heliographique, Baldus would go on to gain the support of a government commission, Les Villes de France Photographies, which focused on the landmarks of Paris in particular, such as the Pantheon. Similar in style to the frontal views of the Louvre pavilions, this image is a precursor to that project, and also includes Saint Etienne du Mont in its background. The Pantheon is one of Paris’ best-known landmarks, and was originally built as a church dedicated to Saint Genevieve. Looking out over the whole of the city, it is now a mausoleum that houses the remains of distinguished French citizens.
Edouard Baldus (French, 1813-1889) Arc de Caroussel c. 1853 Salt print mounted on card 34.1 x 44.3 cms (13.40 x 17.41 ins) Negative: Lower left inscribed in negative: signature of E.Baldus Lower right inscribed in negative: no.81 Mount: Lower right beneath negative: stamped E.Baldus Lower left bottom: Arc de Caroussel Mount: 43.9 x 61 cms Image: 34.1 x 44.3 cms
One of Baldus’ greatest projects was to provide a photographic inventory of the New Louvre and adjoing Tuilleries. A number of these works are of particular interest, expecially those of the Tuilleries Palace, which would be burnt down in 1870-1871. All that remains today is the central triumphal arch, the Caroussel, which is depicted here, still with the palace visible in the background. Built between 1806 and 1808, the Arc de Caroussel is a monument commemorating Napolean’s military victories, with Peace riding a triumphal chariot atop the central archway. Two guards flank the sides of the arch, each atop their own horse, which not only provide for a sense of scale, but, being slightly blurred, also hint at the length of Baldus’ exposure. This enhances the effects of the delicately carved sculptures that adorn the archway, presented here with a clarity that defined the standard Baldus set with his architectural images.
James Hyman is proud to present a loan exhibition of one of the greatest photographers of the nineteenth century, Edouard Baldus. Remarkably, this is the first major exhibition of Edouard Baldus ever to be staged in London. Baldus was famed for his monumental photographs of the buildings of Paris at a time of massive transition under Napoleon III, Baron Haussman and Viollet Le Duc, as well as the depiction of the contemporary landscape of France. Acclaimed as the greatest architectural photographer of the nineteenth century, Baldus’s prints were some of the largest photographs in existence and pioneered an aesthetic of presenting modernity and the modern city that would have a profound influence on later photographers from the Bechers to John Davies.
Baldus was one of the great calotypists of the 1850s, producing works of an unprecedented range and scale. He moved to Paris in 1838 to study painting alongside other future photographers such as Le Gray, Le Secq, and Negre. He frequently retouched his paper negatives, adding pencil and ink, to add clouds or clarify details, then printing his own large-scale negatives. He was also adept at stitching several negatives together to re-create architectural views, most famously in his views of the cloisters of Saint Trophime.
Famed especially for his depiction of architecture, Baldus not only documented the modernisation of Paris but also travelled widely through France recording modernity and new construction – including new railways and aqueducts, as well as the building of the new Louvre. In 1851 the Commission des Monuments Historiques cited Baldus as one of the five best architectural photographers and he was commissioned to record the monuments of France for what became known as the Mission heliographic. His beginnings in photography are not well documented before his participation in the Mission heliographique, although it is known that he took photographs of Montmajour in 1849.
In 1852 he began Villes de France photographies to which the minister of Beaux-Arts subscribed until 1860. In 1854 he travelled with his student Petiot-Groffier in Auvergne and in 1855 the Baron James de Rothschild commissioned him to photograph the new Northern train line from Paris to Boulogne as a gift, in the form of a commemorative album, for Queen Victoria before her visit to the Exposition Universelle. Later, in his commission to document the reconstruction of the Louvre, Baldus took more than two thousand views in a period of three years. His last big commission was from 1861-1863 documenting the Paris-Lyon-Mediterranean train line illustrating seventy views of the train’s track. After this, Baldus tried to provide more commercial alternatives to his large-format works, creating smaller prints and heliogravures of his earlier work. Unfortunately, the effort was unsuccessful and Baldus passed away in bankruptcy and relative obscurity.
Press release from the James Hyman website
Edouard Baldus (French, 1813-1889) Pavillon Colbert, Nouveau Louvre, Paris c. 1855 Salt print mounted on card 43.2 x 34.1cm (16.98 x 13.40 ins) Stamped ‘E. Baldus’ on the lower right of the mount and titled lower left ‘Pavillon Colbert Nouveau Louvre’
Of the many photographs Baldus took of the Louvre during the period 1855-1857, it is his large-format photographs of the main pavilions that best demonstrate the stretch of his artistic achievements. Commissioned by the French government once again, Baldus was charged with documenting every aspect of the new Palace’s construction, which was to be the Second Empire’s largest building project. Consequently, over the course of two years, it also evolved into the largest photographic commission to date, and Baldus took over two thousand photographs ranging in subject matter from individual statuary to the grand frontal views of each completed pavilion, such as this example of the Pavillon Colbert.
This particular photograph is an astounding example of the precision and clarity wet plate negatives afforded Baldus in capturing the texture of New Louvre’s stonework. Each part of the façade, from the temple relief statuary to the columns flanking the entryway, is bathed in a bright light that emphasises the three-dimensionality of the new pavilion. The sense of crisp stonework evident in this image is only heightened by the blurred tree in the bottom left corner, as well as the trace of a ghostly figure in the foreground – a horse and cart that paused long enough to be captured, just barely, in Baldus’ long exposure.
The subject of this picture brings to bear the importance of the symbolism of the architecture of the Nouveau Louvre for the reign of Napoleon III. The relief and figures on the façade of the Pavillon Colbert highlight France’s greatest realms of achievement, from the conquering of nature through to industry. The upmost relief represents Earth and Water, while the figures to either side personify Science and Industry. Baldus has also ensured that a human figure on the right-hand side of the central entrance has stood still long enough to provide the viewer with a sense of the imposing scale of the statuary, as well as the entire façade. The result is a striking image that is sharper than any contemporary enlargement, exemplary of Baldus’ ability to isolate and capture architecture while giving a slight hint to the life that continued to move around it.
Edouard Baldus (French, 1813-1889) Pavillon de la Bibliotheque, Rue de Rivoli, Paris c. 1855 Salt print mounted on card 43.2 x 34.3cm (16.98 x 13.48 ins) Inscribed ‘no 103’ in the negative, lower left. Stamped E. Baldus on the lower right of the mount and titled lower left ‘Nouveau Louvre Rue Rivoli’
Edouard Baldus (French, 1813-1889) Pavillon Richelieu, Nouveau Louvre, Paris c. 1855 Salt print mounted on card 45 x 34.5cm (17.69 x 13.56 ins) Inscribed ‘no 79’ in the negative, lower left and signed in the negative lower right ‘E. Baldus’ Stamped E. Baldus on the lower right of the mount and titled lower left ‘Pavillon Richelieu Nouveau Louvre’
An image that the Metropolitan Museum of Art describes as “among the most spectacular of all Baldus photographs,” it is clear that Baldus took full advantage of the opportunity to use larger equipment, which was necessary to capture his tremendous subject. The technical advantages afforded by glass plate negatives allowed him to create equally large contact prints without joining separate negatives, as was his practice with many of his earlier images. Here, the resulting photograph depicts the Pavillon Richelieu in a striking range of tonality, from the crisp texture of the street to the glowing reflection of the pavilion’s new tiled roof.
Edouard Baldus (French, 1813-1889) Pavillon Sully, Nouveau Louvre, Paris c. 1857 Salt print mounted on card 44.5 x 34.5cm (17.49 x 13.56 ins) Inscribed ‘no 92’ in the negative, lower left. Stamped E. Baldus on the lower right of the mount and titled lower left ‘Pavillon Sully Nouveau Louvre’
Baldus returned to this particular pavilion numerous times, his earliest images of the structure produced while he was photographing for the Mission Heliographique. The Pavillon Sully was originally built during the Classical Period of Louis XIV in 1625, and served as a model for the Second Empire additions. One of the grandest of all the completed facades, the Pavillon Sully acquired many sculptural additions during the reconstruction, but the central clock from which the pavilion derived its original name (Pavillon de l’Horloge) remained central.
Taking an elevated view, Baldus depicted the Pavillon Sully with exemplary precision that is sharper than any contemporary enlargement. The result is one of the most imposing images of the Nouveau Louvre pavilions, giving the entire façade a commanding sense of presence as it rises above trees in the foreground, which are just blurred enough to reveal Baldus’ long exposure.
Edouard Baldus (French, 1813-1889) Saint Etienne du Mont, Paris c. 1858 Salt print mounted on card 44.1 x 34.2cm (17.33 x 13.44 ins) Stamped E Baldus on the lower right of the mount and titled lower left ‘St Etienne du Mont’ Mount: 61 x 43.9 cms Image: 44.1 x 34.2 cms
Edouard Baldus(French, 1813-1889) Notre Dame, Facade Principale, Paris 1857 Salt print mounted on card 44.5 x 34.2cm (17.49 x 13.44 ins) Inscribed ‘no 34’ in the negative, lower right. Stamped E. Baldus on the lower right of the mount and titled lower left ‘Notre Dame Facade Principal’ Dimensions Mount: 61 x 44 cms Image: 44.5 x 34.2 cms
This iconic image of Notre Dame embodies the direct and frontal style that came to define Baldus’ architectural images. Here, he has captured the majesty of one of Paris’ most notable landmarks by elevating his vantage point and placing the viewer at eye level with its magnificent rose window. This print is a carefully executed example of the type of balance and symmetry Baldus aimed to capture while working on this commission.
James Hyman Gallery 16 Savile Row London W1S 3PL Phone: 020 7494 3857
“Atget’s images reverberate (retentir) with an essence of life that flows onward in terms of time and space independent of their causality.” Dr Marcus Bunyan
Exhibition dates: 24th August – 4th November, 2012
Curator: Vigen Galstyan, Assistant Curator for Photographs at AGNSW
“… I have assembled photographic glass negatives… in all the old streets of Old Paris, artistic documents showing the beautiful civil architecture from the 16th to the 19th century. The old mansions, historic or interesting houses, beautiful façades, lovely doors, beautiful panelling, door knockers, old fountains, stylish staircases (wrought iron and wood) and interiors of all the churches in Paris… This enormous documentary and artistic collection is now finished. I can say that I possess the whole of Old Paris.”
Eugène Atget 1920
“The first time I saw photographs by Eugène Atget was in 1925 in the studio of Man Ray in Paris. Their impact was immediate and tremendous. There was a sudden flash of recognition – the shock of realism unadorned. The subjects were not sensational, but nevertheless shocking in their very familiarity. The real world, seen with wonderment and surprise, was mirrored in each print.”
Berenice Abbott 1964
Spaces That Matter…
[In revelatio, in revelation] the photographers trained eye is perhaps more of a hindrance than may at first be thought. The photographer may struggle with, “a sense of intense inevitability, insofar as this kind of image seems to be one that the photographer ‘could not not photograph’.”9 Awareness may become a double bind for the photographer. It may force the photographer to photograph because he can do nothing else, because he is aware of the presence of ‘punctum’ within a space, even an empty ‘poetic space’, but this awareness may then blind him, may ossify the condition of revealing through his directed gaze, unless he is very attentive and drops, as Harding says, “memory and imagination and desire, and just take what’s given.”10 The object, as Baudrillard notes,”isolates itself and creates a sense of emptiness … and then it irradiates this emptiness,”11 but this irradiation of emptiness does require an awareness of it in order to stabilise the transgressive fluctuations of the ecstasy of photography (which are necessarily fluid), through the making of an image that, as Baudrillard notes, “may well retrieve and immobilise subjective and objective punctum from their ‘thunderous surroundings’.”12 Knowledge of awareness is a key to this immobilisation and image making. The philosopher Krishnamurti has interesting things to say about this process, and I think it is worth quoting him extensively here:
“Now with that same attention I’m going to see that when you flatter me, or insult me, there is no image, because I’m tremendously attentive … I listen because the mind wants to find out if it is creating an image out of every word, out of every contact. I’m tremendously awake, therefore I find in myself a person who is inattentive, asleep, dull, who makes images and gets hurt – not an intelligent man. Have you understood it at least verbally? Now apply it. Then you are sensitive to every occasion, it brings its own right action. And if anybody says something to you, you are tremendously attentive, not to any prejudices, but you are attentive to your conditioning. Therefore you have established a relationship with him, which is entirely different from his relationship with you. Because if he is prejudiced, you are not; if he is unaware, you are aware. Therefore you will never create an image about him. You see the difference?”13
Now apply this attention to the awareness of the photographer. If he does not create images that are prejudice, could this not stop a photographer ‘not not’ photographing because he sees spaces with clarity, not as acts of performativity, spaces of ritualised production overlaid with memory, imagination, desire, and nostalgia?
Here an examination of the work of two photographers is instructive. The first, the early 20th century Parisian photographer Eugène Atget, brings to his empty street and parkscapes visions that elude the senses, visions that slip between dreaming and waking, between conscious and subconscious realms. These are not utopian spaces, not felicitous spaces that may be grasped and defined with the nostalgic fixity of spaces we love,14 but spaces of love that cannot be enclosed because Atget made no image of them.
I believe Atget moved his photographs onto a different spatio-temporal plane by not being aware of making images, aware-less-ness, dropping away the appendages of image making (technique, reality, artifice, reportage) by instinctively placing the camera where he wanted it, thus creating a unique artistic language. His images become a blend of the space of intimacy and world-space as he strains toward, “communion with the universe, in a word, space, the invisible space that man can live in nevertheless, and which surrounds him with countless presences.”15 These are not just ‘localised poetics’16 nor a memento of the absent, but the pre-essence of an intimate world space re-inscribed through the vision (the transgressive glance not the steadfast gaze) of the photographer. Atget is not just absent or present, here or there,17 but neither here nor there. His images reverberate (retentir), in Minkowski’s sense of the word, with an essence of life that flows onward in terms of time and space independent of their causality.18”
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Excerpt from the paper Spaces That Matter: Awareness and Entropia in the Imaging of Place (2002). Read the full paper…
Endnotes
9/ Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. (trans. Richard Howard). New York: Hill and Wang, 1981, p. 47, quoted in Zurbrugg, Nicholas. “‘Apocalyptic’? ‘Negative’? ‘Pessimistic’?: Baudrillard, Virilio, and techno-culture,” in Koop, Stuart (ed.,). Photography Post Photography. Melbourne: Centre for Contemporary Photography, 1995, p. 79.
10/ See Endnote 2. I believe that this form of attentiveness to present experience is not the same as Featherstone’s fragmentation of time into affect-charged experiences of the presentness of the world in postmodern culture. “Postmodern everyday culture is … a culture of stylistic diversity and heterogeneity (comprising different parts or qualities), of an overload of imagery and simulations which lead to a loss of the referent or sense of reality. The subsequent fragmentation of time into a series of presents through a lack of capacity to chain signs and images into narrative sequences leads to a schizophrenic emphasis on vivid, immediate, isolated, affect-charged experiences of the presentness of the world – of intensities.“ Featherstone, Mike. Consumer Culture and Postmodernism. London: Sage Publications, 1991, p. 124.
11/ Baudrillard, Jean. The Transparency of Evil. (trans. James Benedict). London: Verso, 1993, quoted in Zurbrugg, Nicholas. “‘Apocalyptic’? ‘Negative’? ‘Pessimistic’?: Baudrillard, Virilio, and techno-culture,” in Koop, Stuart (ed.,). Photography Post Photography. Melbourne: Centre for Contemporary Photography, 1995, p. 80.
12/ Baudrillard, Jean. The Art of Disappearance. (trans. Nicholas Zurbrugg). Brisbane: Institute of Modern Art, 1994, p.9, quoted in Zurbrugg, Nicholas. “‘Apocalyptic’? ‘Negative’? ‘Pessimistic’?: Baudrillard, Virilio, and techno-culture,” in Koop, Stuart (ed.,). Photography Post Photography. Melbourne: Centre for Contemporary Photography, 1995, p. 83.
13/ Krishnamurti. Beginnings of Learning. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1978, pp. 130-131.
14/ Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. (trans Maria Jolas). Boston: Beacon Press, 1994, p. xxxv.
15/ Ibid., p. 203.
16/ Palmer, Daniel. “Between Place and Non-Place: The Poetics of Empty Space,” in Palmer, Daniel (ed.,). Photofile Issue 62 (‘Fresh’). Sydney: Australian Centre for Photography, April 2001, p. 47.
17/ Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. (trans Maria Jolas). Boston: Beacon Press, 1994, p. 212.
18/ See the editor’s note by Gilson, Etienne (ed.,) in Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. (trans Maria Jolas). Boston: Beacon Press, 1994, p. xvi.
Many thankx to the Art Gallery of New South Wales for allowing me to publish the photographs in this posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Eugene Atget: Old Paris
Lose yourself in the beauty of old Paris with over 200 rare and original prints from the founder of documentary photography.
His bellows camera, glass plates and printing technique may link him to earlier 19th-century photography, but the vision of Eugène Atget (1857-1927) was an astonishingly modern one.
The best of Atget’s work is revealed through his images of the streets of Old Paris. In a time of rapid transformation, Atget captured the buildings, gardens, old shops and streets that had not been touched by Baron Haussmann’s 19th-century modernisation program. We are shown a city remote from the clichés of the Belle Époque, a genuine glimpse into the past of this iconic metropolis.
Considered the founder of documentary photography, Atget and his enigmatic images inspired numerous artists including Brassaï, the Surrealists, Walker Evans and Berenice Abbott, as well as Man Ray, who collected some of the photographs included in the exhibition.
Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) Cour, 28 rue Bonaparte dépendant de l’abbaye de Saint-Germain, Editeur Ernest Leroux, 6ème arrondissement, Paris 1910 Albumen photograph Musée Carnavalet, Histoire de Paris
Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) Cabaret de l’Enfer, Boulevard de Clichy, Paris c. 1910 Albumen photograph
Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) Boulevard de Strasbourg 1912 Albumen photograph George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film, Rochester
Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) Rue du Figuier 1924 Albumen photograph
Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) Un coin, rue de Seine 1924 Albumen photograph
Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) Le Dôme, boulevard Montparnasse June 1925 Albumen photograph
Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) Coin de la rue Valette et Pantheon, 5e arrondissement, matinee de mars 1925, printed 1978 Albumen photograph
The first comprehensive exhibition in Australia of Eugène Atget’s (1857-1927) work will showcase over 200 photographs primarily from the more than 4000 strong collection of Musée Carnavalet, Paris with the important inclusion of Atget’s work, as compiled by Man Ray, from the collection of George Eastman House, Rochester, USA.
Atget was considered a commercial photographer who sold what he called ‘documents for artists’, ie. photographs of landscapes, close-up shots, genre scenes and other details that painters could use as reference. As soon as Atget turned his attention to photographing the streets of Paris, his work attracted the attention of leading institutions such as Musée Carnavalet and the Bibliothèque Nationale which became his principal clients. It is in these photographs of Paris that we find the best of Atget, the artist who shows us a city remote from the clichés of the Belle Époque. Atget’s images of ‘old Paris’ depict areas that had not been touched by Baron Haussmann’s 19th century modernisation program of the city. We see empty streets and buildings, details that usually pass unnoticed, all presented as rigorous, original compositions that offer a mysterious group portrait of the city.
The exhibition is organised into 11 sections that correspond to the thematic groupings used by Atget himself. They are: small trades, Parisian types and shops 1898-1922; the streets of Paris 1898-1913; ornaments 1900-1921; interiors 1901-1910; vehicles 1903-1910; gardens 1898-1914; the Seine 1900-1923; the streets of Paris 1921-1924; and outside the city centre 1899-1913.
The equipment and techniques deployed by Atget link him to 19th-century photography. He had an 18 x 24cm wooden, bellows camera which was heavy and had to be supported on a tripod. The use of glass plates allowed Atget to capture every tiny detail with great precision. Also traditional was his printing method, usually on albumen paper made light-sensitive with silver nitrate, exposed under natural light and subsequently gold-tinted. Atget’s vision of photography was, however, an astonishingly modern one. The photographs selected by Man Ray, who met Atget in the 1920s, indicate the immediate interest that the work aroused among the Surrealists because of the composition, ghosting, reflections, and its very mundanity. The first to appreciate his talents and importance as an artist were the photographer Berenice Abbott and Man Ray himself, both of whom lobbied to preserve Atget’s photographs.
As a result, he inspired artists and photographers such as Brassaï, the Surrealists, Walker Evans and Bernd & Hilla Becher amongst many others, and he can also be considered a starting-point for 20th-century documentary photography.
Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) Porte d’Asnieres – cité Trébert 1913 Albumen print 21.7 x 18.0cm (trimmed) Collection of George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film, Rochester
Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) Rue de l’Hôtel de Ville 1921 Gelatin silver photograph 22.8 x 17.7cm Collection Art Gallery of New South Wales
Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) Rue de l’Hôtel de Ville (detail) 1921 Gelatin silver photograph 22.8 x 17.7cm Collection Art Gallery of New South Wales
Art Gallery of New South Wales Art Gallery Road, The Domain Sydney NSW 2000, Australia
Opening hours: Open every day 10am – 5pm except Christmas Day and Good Friday
“Crewdson’s tableaux act as a kind of threshold or hinge of experience – between interior and exterior, viewer and photograph.” Dr Marcus Bunyan
Exhibition dates: 28th September – 11th November, 2012
Curators: Estelle Af Malmborg, Jens Erdman Rasmussen, and Felix Hoffmann
Installation photographs of the series Beneath the Roses (2003-2008) from the exhibition Gregory Crewdson: In A Lonely Place at the Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP), Fitzroy, Melbourne Photos: Dr Marcus Bunyan
Downfall of a dream: (n)framing the enigma in Gregory Crewdson’s Beneath the Roses
After the excoriating diatribe by Robert Nelson in The Age newspaper (“Unreal stills, unmoving images” Wednesday October 17 2012) I hope this piece of writing will offer greater insight into the work of this internationally renowned artist. With some reservations, I like Crewsdon’s work, I like it a lot – as do the crowds of people flocking to the Centre for Contemporary Photography, Fitzroy to see the exhibition. Never have I seen so many people at the CCP looking at contemporary photography before and that can only be a good thing.
Let’s get the basics out of the way first. The early series Fireflies are small silver gelatin photographs that capture “the tiny insects’ transient moments of light as they illuminate the summer night.” These are minor works that fail to transcend the ephemeral nature of photography, fail to light the imagination of the viewer when looking at these scenes of dusky desire and discontinuous lives. The series of beautiful photographs titled Sanctuary (2010) evidence the “ruin of the legendary Cinecittà studios, which was founded by Mussolini in the 1930s and is associated with the great Italian film director Federico Fellini.” Wonderful photographs of doorways, temples, dilapidated stage sets with excellent use of soft miasmic light creating an atmosphere of de/generation (as though a half-remembered version of Rome had passed down through the generations) interfaced with contemporary Rome as backdrop. The digital prints show no strong specular highlights, no deep blacks but a series of transmutable grey and mid tones that add to the overall feeling of romantic ruin. It is a pity that these photographs are not printed as silver gelatin photographs, for they would have had much more depth of feeling than they presently possess. They just feel a little “thin” to me to sustain the weight of atmosphere required of them.
But it is the series Beneath the Roses (2003-2008) that has made Crewdson truly famous. Shot using a large format camera, Crewdson makes large-scale photographs of elaborate and meticulously staged tableaux, which have been described as “micro-epics” that probe the dark corners of the psyche. Working in the manner of a film director, he leads a production crew, which includes a director of photography, special effects and lighting teams, casting director and actors. He typically makes several exposures that he later digitally combines to produce the final image. Photographs in the series of “brief encounters” include external dioramas (shot in a down at heel Western Massachusetts town), where Crewdson shuts down streets and lights the whole scene; to interior dialogues where houses are built on sound stages and the artist can control every detail of the production. Influences on these works include, but are not limited to:
David Lynch (Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks), Alfred Hitchcock (Vertigo), Steven Spielberg (Close Encounters), the paintings of Edward Hopper, Diane Arbus (the detritus of her photographic interiors), film noir, psychoanalysis, American suburbia, the American dream, the photographs of Walker Evans, Cindy Sherman and surrealism. Concepts that you could link to the work include loneliness, alienation, apathy, resignation, mystery, contemplation and confusion, identity, desire, memory and imagination.
Now to the nuts and bolts of the matter.
Another major influence that I will add is that of the great Italian director Federico Fellini (La Dolce Vita – The Sweet Life) who shot most of that film on the sets at Cinecittà studios in Rome. It is perhaps no coincidence that Crewdson, on his first overseas film shoot, shot the series Sanctuary at the very same location. Crewdson’s photographs in the series Beneath the Roses are an American form of “The Sweet Life.” In 1961, the New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther praised Fellini’s “brilliantly graphic estimation of a whole swath of society in sad decay and, eventually, a withering commentary on the tragedy of the over-civilized… Fellini is nothing if not fertile, fierce and urbane in calculating the social scene around him and packing it onto the screen. He has an uncanny eye for finding the offbeat and grotesque incident, the gross and bizarre occurrence that exposes a glaring irony. He has, too, a splendid sense of balance and a deliciously sardonic wit that not only guided his cameras but also affected the writing of the script. In sum, it is an awesome picture, licentious in content but moral and vastly sophisticated in its attitude and what it says.”1
The same could equally be said of the Crewdson and his masterpieces in Beneath the Roses.
Crewdson is in love with Fellini’s gesture – of the uplifting of the characters and their simultaneous descent into “sweet” hedonism, debauchery and decadence using the metaphor of downfall (downfall links each scene in La Dolce Vita, that of a “downward spiral that Marcello sets in motion when descending the first of several staircases (including ladders) that open and close each major episode.”)2 Crewdson’s “spectacular apocalypses of social enervation”3 mimic Fellini’s gestural flourishes becoming Crewdson’s theme of America’s downfall, America as a moral wasteland. Crewdson’s is “an aesthetic of disparity” that builds up a cumulative impression on the viewer that finds resolution in an “overpowering sense of the disparity between what life has been or could be, and what it actually is.”4
Crewdson’s cinematic encounters are vast and pin sharp when seen in the flesh. No reproduction on the web can do their physical presence justice; it is the details that delight in these productions. You have to get up close and personal with the work. His dystopic landscapes are not narratives as such, not stills taken from a movie (for that implies an ongoing story) but open-ended constructions that allow the viewer to imagine the story for themselves. They do not so much evoke a narrative as invite the viewer to create one for themselves – they are an “invitation” to a narrative, one that explores the anxiety of the (American) imagination, an invitation to empathise with the dramas at play within contemporary environments.
For me, Crewdson’s extra ordinary photographs are a form of enigma (a puzzling or inexplicable occurrence or situation), the picture as master puzzle (where all the pieces fit perfectly together in stillness) that contains a riddle or hidden meaning. Clues to this reading can be found in one of the photographs from the series (Blue Period, see detail image, below) where Crewdson deliberately leaves the door of a bedside cupboard open to reveal a “Perfect PICTURE PUZZLE” box inside. The viewer has to really look into the image and understand the significance of this artefact.
Another reading that I have formulated is of the transience of space and time within Crewdson’s series. In the disquieting, anonymous townscapes people look out from their porches (or the verandas are lit and empty), they abandon their cars or walk down desolate streets hardly ever looking directly out at the viewer. The photographs become sites of mystery and wonder hardly anchored (still precisely anchored?) in time and space. This disparity is emphasised in the interior dialogues. The viewer (exterior) looks at a framed doorway or window (exterior) looking into an scene (interior) where the walls are usually covered with floral wallpaper (interior / exterior) upon which hangs a framed image of a Monet-like landscape (exterior) (see detail image, above). Exterior, exterior, interior, interior / exterior, exterior. The trees of the landscape invade the home but are framed; exterior/framed, interior/mind. There is something mysterious going on here, some reflection of an inner state of mind.
In his visual mosaics Crewdson engages our relationship with time and space to challenge the trace of experience. His tableaux act as a kind of threshold or hinge of experience – between interior and exterior, viewer and photograph. His photographs are a form of monism in which two forces (interior / exterior) try to absorb each other but ultimately lead to a state of equilibrium. It is through this “play” that the context of the photographs and their relationship to each other and the viewer are “framed.” This device emphasises the aesthetic as much as information and encourages the viewer to think about the relationship between the body, the world of which it is part and the dream-reason of time.5
This intertextual (n)framing (n meaning unspecified number in mathematics) encourages the viewer to explore the inbetween spaces in the non-narrative / meta-narrative,”and by leaps (intuitive leaps, poetic leaps, leaps of faith)”6 encourage escapism in the imagination of the viewer. It is up to us as viewers to seek the multiple, disparate significances of what is concealed in each photograph as “felt knowledge” (Walter Benjamin), recalling to mind the sensory data placed before our eyes, something that can be experienced but cannot be explained by man: “the single moment of the present amidst the transience of life and searching for some kind of eternal truth.”7
Finally, in a more adverse reading of the photographs from the series Beneath the Roses, I must acknowledge the physically (not mentally) static nature of the images where every detail of the mise-en-scène is fully articulated and locked down: from the perfect trickle of blood running from the woman’s vagina in Blue Period, to the reflections in mirrors, the detritus of living scattered on the bedroom floor, the dirty telephone, packed suitcases and keys in locks to the desolate looks of the participants that never engage with the viewer.
Despite allusions of despair, in their efficacy (their static and certain world order), there is no real chthonic madness here, no real messiness of the capture of death, murder and the wastage of human life (famine, AIDS, cancer or the blood running over the pavement in one of Weegee’s murder scenes for example). This is Fellini’s gross and bizarre LITE. Americurbana “is being addressed with the same reserve and elegance that ensures that the institution – artistic, political, what you will – is upheld and never threatened. It is pre-eminently legible, it elicits guilt but not so much as to cause offence.”8
I must also acknowledge the male-orientated viewpoint of the photographs, where men are seated, clothed, lazy or absent and all too often women are doing the washing or cooking, are naked and vulnerable. In their portrayal of (usually) half dressed or naked females the photographs evidence a particularly male view of the world, one that his little empathy or understanding of how a female actually lives in the world. For me this portrait of the feminine simply does not work. The male photographer maintains control (and power) by remaining resolutely (in)visible.
Overall this is a outstanding exhibition that thoroughly deserves that accolades it is receiving. Sitting in the gallery space for an hour and a half and soaking up the atmosphere of these magnificent works has been for me one of the art experiences of 2012. Make sure that you do not miss these mesmerising prophecies.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Footnotes
1/ Crowther’s review first published in The New York Times, April 20, 1961. In Fava and Vigano, 105 quoted in Anon. “La Dolce Vita,” on Wikipedia Footnote 30 [Online] Cited 20/10/2012
2/ Anon. “La Dolce Vita,” on Wikipedia Footnote 30 [Online] Cited 20/10/2012
3/ Sultanik, Aaron. Film, a Modern Art. Cranbury, N.J: Cornwall Books, 1986, p. 408
4/ Richardson, Robert. “Waste Lands: The Breakdown of Order,” in Bondanella (ed.), Federico Fellini: Essays in Criticism, p. 111 quoted in Anon. “La Dolce Vita,” on Wikipedia Footnote 30 [Online] Cited 20/10/2012
5/ Bacon, Julie Louise. “Liquid Archive: On Ambivalence,” in Liquid Archive. Melbourne: Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA), 2012, p. 119
6/ Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. “The Museum – A Refuge for Utopian Thought,” in Rüsen, Jörn; Fehr Michael, and Ramsbrock, Annelie (eds.). Die Unruhe der Kultur: Potentiale des Utopischen. Velbrück Wissenschaft, 2004. In German.
7/ Kataoka, Mami commenting on the work of Allan Kaprow. “Transient Encounters,” in Broadsheet: Criticism, Theory, Art Vol 41.3, September 2012, p. 174
8/ Geczy, Adam. “A dish served lukewarm,” in Broadsheet: Criticism, Theory, Art Vol 41.3, September 2012, p. 177
Many thankx to the artist, Gagosian Gallery and the Centre for Contemporary Photography for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Special thankx to Director of the CCP Naomi Cass and Ms. James McKee from Gagosian Gallery for facilitating the availability of the media images. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Details from Gregory Crewdson’s Untitled (Blue Period) (2003-2005, above) from the series Beneath the Roses (2003-2008) Photos: Dr Marcus Bunyan
“The American middle-class nightmare: nothing is clean, orderly, idyllic, or romantic. In his perfectly staged, hyperrealistic tableaux, photographer Gregory Crewdson reveals the claustrophobic limbo and abyss of spiritual repression that is the typical suburb. Here, hushed-up violence, alienation, isolation, and emptiness are nothing new or unfamiliar, but rather part of the everyday neighbourhood experience.”
Gregory Crewdson, In a Lonely Place, Abrams Publishing, New York, 2011
“I have always been fascinated by the poetic condition of twilight. By its transformative quality. Its power of turning the ordinary into something magical and otherworldly. My wish is for the narrative in the pictures to work within that circumstance. It is that sense of in-between-ness that interests me.”
In a Lonely Place presents selections from three major series by Gregory Crewdson, Fireflies (1996), Beneath the Roses (2003-2008), Sanctuary (2010) and, presented for the first time, the video Field Notes (2009). The exhibition title comes from Nicholas Ray’s 1950s film noir of the same name, one of many films that inspired Crewdson. In a Lonely Place is evocative of an underlying mood-a quiet feeling of alienation and loneliness that links the three series selected by curators Estelle Af Malmborg, Jens Erdman Rasmussen and Felix Hoffmann. In a Lonely Place presents the first comprehensive exhibition of Crewdson’s work in Australia.
In Beneath the Roses, anonymous townscapes, forest clearings and broad, desolate streets are revealed as sites of mystery and wonder; similarly, ostensibly banal interiors become the staging grounds for strange human scenarios. Crewdson’s scenes are tangibly atmospheric: visually alluring and often deeply disquieting. Never anchored precisely in time or place, these and the other narratives of Beneath the Roses are located in the dystopic landscape of the anxious American imagination. Crewdson explores the American psyche and the dramas at play within quotidian environments.
In his most recent series, Sanctuary (2010), Crewdson has taken a new direction, shooting for the first time outside the US. During a trip to Rome, he visited the legendary Cinecittà studios, which was founded by Mussolini in the 1930s and is associated with the great Italian film director Federico Fellini. Crewdson discovered fragments of a past glory, with occasional unexpected views of the surrounding contemporary Roman suburbia. Cinecittà is a lonely place deserted by the film crews who once used the site to recreate settings of ancient Rome, medieval Italy and nineteenth-century New York.
In the intimate photographs of Fireflies, Crewdson portrays the mating ritual of fireflies at dusk, capturing the tiny insects’ transient moments of light as they illuminate the summer night. Unlike the theatrical scale of the Beneath the Roses and Sanctuary series, Fireflies is a quiet meditation on the nature of light and desire, as the images reflect not only upon the fleeting movements of the insects in their intricate mating ritual, but upon the notion of photography itself, in capturing a single ephemeral moment.
Gregory Crewdson received a BA from the State University of New York, Purchase, New York in 1985 and an MFA in Photography from Yale School of Art, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut in 1988. He has exhibited widely in the United States and Europe. He is Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in Photography at the Yale School of Art, Yale University. Gregory Crewdson is represented by Gagosian Gallery and White Cube Gallery.
Press release from the Gagosian Gallery website
Installation photographs of the series Sanctuary (2010) from the exhibition Gregory Crewdson: In A Lonely Place at the Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP), Fitzroy, Melbourne Photos: Dr Marcus Bunyan
In this Ovation TV original special, acclaimed photographers Albert Maysles, Sylvia Plachy, Andrew Moore and Timothy Greenfield-Sanders discuss the impact their work has on their lives and on culture as a whole.
Gregory Crewdson is an American photographer who is best known for elaborately staged, surreal scenes of American homes and neighborhoods.
In this interview, acclaimed photographer, Gregory Crewdson shares with us insight into his techniques.
Art Blart _ art and cultural memory archive 
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