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 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 tend to be 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
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
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
Silbergelatinepapier
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
Exhibition dates: 11th January – 16th December 2012
Model of a U-boat (Unterseeboot) used in the film Das Boot and multimedia screens at the exhibition
One of the greatest minds of the 20th century (code breaking, computers, intelligent machines, artificial intelligence), persecuted to death for being a homosexual. In 2010 there is an apology for Turing’s conviction as a homosexual: Prime Minister Gordon Brown speaks for the British people when he says that he is sorry for the treatment meted out to Alan Turing:
“You deserved so much better!”
Better late than never.
Many thankx to the Heinz Nixdorf Museums Forum for allowing me to publish some of the photographs in the posting. I have supplemented their media images with other images that can be found on the Internet: the plugboard of an Enigma machine, a logic machine by Gisbert Hasenjäger, the Pilot ACE (Automatic Computing Engine), installation photographs of Hello, world! by Yunchul Kim, Alan Turing with two colleagues at the Ferranti Mark I computer and installation photograph of Love Letters_1.0 by David Link.
All photographs have been attributed where possible. The use of these photographs has led to an infinitely better posting that gives a greater insight into the exhibition, the work of the brilliant Alan Turing, and other work based on his ideas. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Enigma machine lampboard and keyboard detail
Enigma machine rotor detail
Enigma and the Battle of the Atlantic
1939. The UK Government Code and Cipher School appoints one of the country’s best mathematicians, Alan Turing, to a post at its Bletchley Park headquarters, where the German enemy’s intercepted radio messages are to be deciphered. Operation ULTRA begins.
1940. The Atlantic becomes a major theatre of war, with German submarines attacking Allied supply lines. This first topic examines the secret communications between German submarines and the naval high command in Berlin. Messages are encrypted using the Enigma machine. They are intercepted at British listening posts and sent to Bletchley Park to be deciphered.
The HNF is exhibiting the original model of the submarine from the film Das Boot, as well as a Marine 4-rotor Enigma. Further prominent exhibits which help relate this exciting story include radio technology items, codebooks and an interactive cipher rotor.
A three-rotor Enigma machine with (from below rotors), lampboard, keyboard and plugboard (front of machine)
The Enigma was an electro-mechanical rotor machine used for the encryption and decryption of secret messages. It was developed in Germany in the 1920s. The repeated changes of the electrical pathway from the keyboard to the lampboard implemented a polyalphabetic substitution cipher, which turned plaintext into ciphertext and back again. Used properly, this provided a very high degree of security. The Enigma’s scrambler contained rotors with 26 electrical contacts on each side, whose wiring diverted the current to a different position on the two sides. On depressing a key on the keyboard, an electrical current flowed through an entry drum at the right-hand end of the scrambler, then through the set of rotors to a reflecting drum (or reflector) which turned it back through the rotors and entry drum, and out to cause one lamp on the lampboard to be illuminated.
At each key depression, at least one of the rotors (the right-hand or “fast” rotor) advanced one position, which caused the encipherment to alter. At a certain point, the right-hand rotor caused the middle rotor to advance and in a similar way, the middle rotor caused the left-hand (or “slow”) rotor to advance. Each rotor caused the “turnover” of the rotor to its left after a full rotation. The Enigma operator could rotate the wheels by hand to change the letter of the alphabet showing through a window, to set the start position of the rotors for enciphering a message. This three-letter sequence was “message key”. There were 26 × 26 × 26 = 17,576 possible positions of the set of three rotors, and hence different message keys. By opening the lid of the machine and releasing a compression bar, the set of three rotors on their spindle could be removed from the machine and their sequence (called the “wheel order” at Bletchley Park) could be altered. Multiplying 17,576 by the six possible wheel orders gives 105,456 different ways that the scrambler could be set up.
The plugboard of an Enigma machine, showing two pairs of letters swapped: S↔O and J↔A. During World War II, ten plugboard connections were made. The plugboard (Steckerbrett) is positioned at the front of the machine, below the keys. When in use, there can be up to 13 connections.
Photograph from WikipediaunderCreative Commons GNU Free Documentation License
National Codes Centre and the National Museum of Computing (contemporary) Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) (World War Tw0) Bletchley Park Buckinghamshire, England
British Tabulating Machine Company Turing Bombe wiring at back (detail)
1940-1945
The Codebreakers of Bletchley Park
Up to 10,000 people are working hard to decipher German radio messages at Bletchley Park, and Alan Turing is one of their leading lights. He achieves the crucial breakthrough: his decryption device known as the Bombe can calculate Enigma code settings automatically, quickly and reliably. The rotors of up to 200 Bombes now run day and night, with radio messages able to be cracked within hours, while they are still of military relevance. This gives Winston Churchill and his military officers in London a priceless advantage.
The second topic of the HNF Turing year includes exhibits not previously seen in Germany, such as components of an original US Bombe owned by the NSA as well as loans of a functional checking machine and Bombe rotors from Bletchley Park. The entire communications chain is presented to visitors, from the German submarine radio operator all the way to the clear text message received by the British Prime Minister.
British Tabulating Machine Company Turing Bombe
1940-1945
7 feet (2.1 m) wide, 6 feet 6 inches (1.98 m) tall, 2 feet (0.61 m) deep
The working rebuilt bombe at Bletchley Park museum. Each of the rotating drums simulates the action of an Enigma rotor. There are 36 Enigma-equivalents and, on the right hand end of the middle row, three indicator drums. John Harper led the ‘Phoenix’ team that built this. It was officially switched on by the Duke of Kent, patron of the British Computer Society on 17 July 2008.
British Tabulating Machine Company Turing Bombe rotors (detail)
1940-1945
The international scientific focus in 2012 will be firmly on Alan Turing. This legendary British mathematician and computer pioneer was born in London on 23 June 1912. His 100th birthday will be marked by numerous events, primarily in his native country, but also in the USA, Brazil, China and elsewhere. Germany’s Heinz Nixdorf MuseumsForum in Paderborn is to pay tribute to the achievements of this equally academic and awkward scientist with an ambitious exhibition entitled Eminent & enigmatic – 10 aspects of Alan Turing. Its aim is to present Alan Turing’s outstanding achievements to visitors in the form of original exhibits and innovative and artistic installations alike.
Turing’s research made a huge contribution towards deciphering German radio messages encrypted using the Enigma machine during World War II. Thus he played a vital role in the Battle of the Atlantic, as well as in other major theatres of war. His theoretical work, which still forms the basis of information technology to this day, is equally significant. While his contemporaries could not see beyond the pure calculating capabilities of the computer, Turing designed the model of a universal machine capable of solving every algorithmic problem.
The exhibition at the Heinz Nixdorf MuseumsForum will focus on Turing’s achievements in breaking the Enigma code and his basic work as a computer and computer science pioneer, while also shedding light on his views on the subjects of artificial intelligence and spacial pattern formation, as well as on the tragedy of his untimely death and his legacy.
This marks the first time that an exhibition will be shown in stages, with the ten exhibition topics portrayed in successive monthly presentations. The exhibition will open on 10 January 2012 with the topic Enigma and the Battle of the Atlantic. It will be followed as of 14 February with exhibits and presentations on The code breakers of Bletchley Park, the UK’s National Codes and Cipher Centre during World War II. The remaining topics will also be shown for a period of around one month until the exhibition closes on 16 December 2012.
“The multi-part exhibition format will allow us to provide our visitors with insights into aspects of Alan Turing’s life and works all year long,” said HNF managing director and project manager Norbert Ryska of this unusual approach in the first public presentation of EMINENT & ENIGMATIC. “This was the only way to attract significant and highly sought-after loans from at home and abroad, including exhibits from the US National Security Agency, the Science Museum in London, Bletchley Park and IBM. So regular visits to the HNF will be more worthwhile than ever in 2012.”
The exhibition will be held in a specially constructed pavilion in the foyer. In addition to the technical and scientific exhibits, artistic installations are to shed light on Alan Turing’s work and thinking. “We want to pay tribute to Alan Turing with a series of presentations because he was the mastermind of the digital age as well as an exceptional personality,” said Ryska of the exhibition concept. Turing’s achievements will open up several unusual avenues into the HNF permanent exhibition. It can be accessed via a special Turing tour and workshops for schools, making the special exhibition a great stepping stone into the world’s biggest computer museum, in which a section in the Hall of Fame has been dedicated to Turing since its opening in 1996.
Turing, who died on 7 June 1954 under mysterious circumstances, has only been properly appreciated by the public at large during recent years, although experts have sung his praises for decades. In 1952 Alan Turing was sentenced to a degrading 12-month course of oestrogen treatment designed to combat his homosexuality. He took his own life by eating a cyanide-laced apple one year after completion of the treatment, on 7 June 1954.
Exhibition topics and selected exhibits
~ 11.1.-12.2.2012 Enigma and the Battle of the Atlantic (Enigma, submarine model, radio equipment)
~ 15.2.-11.3.2012 The code breakers of Bletchley Park (Enigma, Bombe drums, Enigma rotor model)
~ 14.3.-8.4.2012 The Turing test (model of the brain, Turing test terminal)
~ 11.4.-6.5.2012 From Turbochamp to Deep Blue (Deep Blue Chip/Board, Turing chess engine)
~ 9.5.-8.7.2012 The history of intelligent machines (Robo Thespian)
~ 28.7.-26.8.2012 The Turing machine (HNF functional model, historic Turing machine)
~ 29.8.-23.9.2012 Pattern formation (Interactive Plant Growing)
~ 26.9.-21.10.2012 The Pilot ACE computer (UNIVAC delay line memory, Pilot ACE component)
~ 24.10.-18.11.2012 Love Letters/Mark I (installation by David Link)
~ 21.11.-16.12.2012 Tragedy and legacy – Turing today (Turing Award)
Short biography of Alan Turing (1912-1954)
Alan Turing was born on 23 June 2012 in London. From 1931 to 1934 he studied mathematics at King’s College, Cambridge, where he was elected a fellow in 1935. During World War II he worked at the Government Code and Cipher School at Bletchley Park, developing methods of deciphering German radio messages encrypted using the Enigma machine. At the end of the war Turing turned his attention towards computer development, first at the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington (1945-1947), where he developed the concept of the Automatic Computing Engine (ACE), and then (as of 1948) as deputy director of the computing laboratory at Manchester University.
Although Alan Turing did not have too deep an impact on the invention of the first computers in the 1940s and 1950s, his theoretical concepts earned him a place in computer history: The Turing machine still provides an important basis for research into theoretical computer science today, and the Turing test proposed by him in 1950 in response to the question “Can machines think?” lent impetus to the development of artificial intelligence.
Turing, who died on 7 June 1954 under mysterious circumstances, has only been properly appreciated by the public at large during recent years, although experts have sung his praises for decades. In 1952 Alan Turing was sentenced to a degrading 12-month course of oestrogen treatment designed to combat his homosexuality. He took his own life by eating a cyanide-laced apple one year after completion of the treatment, on 7 June 1954.
In 2010 British Prime Minister Gordon Brown expressed his regret at Turing’s persecution on behalf of the British Government and paid tribute to his exceptional contribution during World War II. US President Barack Obama placed Turing on a par with Newton, Darwin and Einstein during his recent state visit to London.
Text from the HNF website
British Tabulating Machine Company Turing Bombe (details)
1940-1945
7 feet (2.1 m) wide, 6 feet 6 inches (1.98 m) tall, 2 feet (0.61 m) deep
The Turing Test
In 1950 Alan Turing proposes a new type of test. He is researching the question of when a machine can be described as “intelligent”, using the human brain as a model. According to the Turing test, a machine is intelligent if it can convince a human interlocutor that it is itself “human”. This deception must succeed with the required frequency in repeated tests.
From Turochamp to Deep Blue
What do the contemporary luminaries Konrad Zuse, Claude Shannon, John von Neumann and Alan Turing have in common? They all want to play chess against calculating machines that they themselves have devised. But the history of computer chess began as early as the end of the 19th century, when Spanish engineer Torres Quevedo presented a chess-playing automaton whose rook and king could reliably checkmate the opponent’s king. The fourth topic is all about computer chess.
Turing defines his own rules for a chess algorithm, but his Turochamp program loses its first game in 1952 – played “by hand,” rather than run on a computer – against his friend Alick Glennie. It is not until 1997 that reigning chess world champion Garry Kasparov is defeated by a calculating machine, in the form of the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue. The HNF is exhibiting original hardware from the machine and the original chessboard from this “final” game in the Turing pavilion – the first time these have been on show in Germany.
Processor board of Deep Blue, 1997
RoboThespian I am a Machine
RoboThespian demonstrates his acting skills – moving from robotic to fluid and emotional humanoid robot
The History of Intelligent Machines
“Can machines think?” It is 1950 when Alan Turing asks this provocative question and founds a new field of research along with significant contemporaries of the likes of Claude Shannon, Norbert Wiener and Joseph Weizenbaum: that of “artificial intelligence (AI).” To this day, the development of the “intelligent machine” has been marked by excessive expectations as well as important advancements.
The humanoid robot RoboThespian relates the history of AI as the fifth topic of our Turing year. RoboThespian is a prominent visitor to the Turing pavilion. With his love of theatrical appearances, he is more than happy to answer questions or cheekily imitate the gestures of visitors. An entire section of the permanent exhibition is devoted to AI and robotics. Our networked computers are becoming more powerful all the time. It is still unclear when precisely a team of robots will beat the human world champions – an event predicted by experts for some time.
The Turing Machine
Mathematician Kurt Gödel turns the world of numbers on its head in 1931, when he proves that there are some logical statements that are neither true nor false. Inspired by this revolutionary finding, Alan Turing takes up the baton and publishes the concept of the Turing machine in 1936. He demonstrates that his simple but universal theoretical machines can calculate everything that can be calculated by any machine or computer.
The HNF has built a mechanical Turing machine that can be tried and tested by visitors to the Turing pavilion. The logic machines of the Münster School are on show for the first time ever: in the 1960s Gisbert Hasenjäger and Dieter Rödding use spare parts from the German Federal Post Office to construct somewhat bizarre devices for logical calculations (see photographs below).
Gisbert Hasenjäger (German, 1919-2006) Logic machine
c. 1960s
A logic machine by Gisbert Hasenjäger based on Turing’s work Provided by Family Hasenjäger
Photographs from “Intelligenz ist ein soziales Produkt: Alan Mathison Turing zum 100. Geburtstag” on the Heise online website [Online] Cited 03/09/2020.
Die Turing-Maschine ist im Grunde keine konkrete Konstruktion, sondern ein mathematisches Konzept zum Nachweis der algorithmischen Berechenbarkeit einer Funktion. Dennoch sind anhand von Turings Arbeiten sehenswerte konstruktionstechnische Umsetzungen entstanden (The Turing machine has basically no concrete construction, but a mathematical concept for the detection of algorithmic computability of a function. Nevertheless, based on Turing’s work remarkable constructional reactions are caused).
The Automatic Computing Engine (ACE)
The war is over, with Germany having been defeated by the Allies. Alan Turing makes the transition from codebreaker to computer pioneer at the National Physical Laboratory. He designs the Automatic Computing Engine, known as ACE, entirely on his own. New features of this vacuum tube computer include its delay-line memories – very fast memories for digital data and programs. James H. Wilkinson builds the machine and presents the Pilot ACE builds the machine and presents the Pilot ACE to the public in 1950 as the world’s fastest computer.
At this point, Turing is already working on his next groundbreaking computer project, a new computer for the University of Manchester. The eighth topic is all about the new memory technology of the ACE. How can data be saved as sound waves? This question is answered not only with the help of an original ACE component, but also via the artistic installation Hello, world by Yunchul Kim, a three-metre sculpture made from copper pipes. This object acts as an analogue memory location for digital data.
Alan Turing (designer) James H. Wilkinson (builder) Pilot ACE (Automatic Computing Engine) (Science Museum, London)
1950
Photograph by Antoine Taveneaux from Wikipedia under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license
The Pilot ACE had 1450 thermionic valves (vacuum tubes), and used mercury delay lines for its main memory. Each of the 12 delay lines could store 32 instructions or data words of 32 bits. This ran its first program on May 10, 1950, at which time it was the fastest computer in the world with a clock speed of 1MHz.
Yunchul Kim Hello, world! 2006
Prix Ars Electronica 2006, Honorary Mention Interactive Art
Photographs from Marc Wathieu’s Flickr photostream Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic
Hello, world! is an interesting take on long- and short-lived data storage media. It uses acoustic signals to store data. A codified auditory signal (feedback) circulates in a closed system consisting of a computer, a loudspeaker, 246 meters of copper tubing and a microphone. Due to the acoustic delay in the tubing system, it’s possible to save data, whereby the rule is: the longer the copper tubing, the longer the time delay and the greater the memory capacity. In addition to this a screen shows a visual representation of the information traveling around the system. If a participant makes noises near the installation or hits the copper piping it interferes with the audio signal loop.
There is some instability in the system. If you go up to the sculpture you can hear the sounds (every sign of the ASCII code has its own sine wave frequency thus translating it in an acoustic signal) travelling through the copper piping. But a loud noise in the exhibition space or a vibrational disturbance from passing traffic or low frequency rumble effects the lettering on the screen and the text and Hello, World! starts to tremble as the quality of the signal degenerates and recovers.
Love Letters from a Machine
While in Manchester, Alan Turing writes the programming manual for the Ferranti Mark I, an early British digital computer, and trains staff as programmers. The Mark I no longer saves data and programs on punched tape, but instead uses a new system of a line of dots on a Williams tube display. Its storage capacity, which was huge for the time, gave users plenty of scope for new experiments, such as initial chess and draughts programs as well as digital musical compositions. The penultimate topic in our Alan Turing year includes a display of the interactive installation Love Letters by David Link, who has created a fully functioning replica of the Ferranti Mark I using original components. The machine program generates personal love letters with the help of an algorithm. Christopher Strachey originally wrote the code for the love letters program in the 1950s.
Alan Turing with two colleagues at the Ferranti Mark I computer
1951
Photograph from the Love Letters website [Online] Cited November 2012. No longer available online
David Link Love Letters_1.0. MUC=Resurrection. A Memorial
2009-
Photographs from the Love Letters website [Online] Cited November 2012. No longer available online
From August 1953 to May 1954 strange love-letters appeared on the notice board of Manchester University’s Computer Department:
DARLING SWEETHEART
YOU ARE MY AVID FELLOW FEELING. MY AFFECTION CURIOUSLY CLINGS TO YOUR PASSIONATE WISH. MY LIKING YEARNS FOR YOUR HEART. YOU ARE MY WISTFUL SYMPATHY: MY TENDER LIKING.
YOURS BEAUTIFULLY
M. U. C.
The acronym M.U.C. stood for “Manchester University Computer”, the earliest electronic, programmable and universal calculating machine worldwide; the fully functional prototype was completed in June 1948 and was based on Williams tubes as means of volatile storage. One of the very first software developers, Christopher Strachey (1916-1975), had used the built-in random generator of the Ferranti Mark I, the first industrially produced computer of this kind, to generate texts that are intended to express and arouse emotions.
Tragedy and Legacy: “You deserved so much better!”
Alan Turing dies at not quite 42 years of age, after eating a poisoned apple, as in the fairytale. His incredibly influential body of work remains, and has left its mark on the discipline known as computer science today. The tenth and final topic looks back on the Alan Turing year of 2012. For twelve months, Turing has been the focus of international conferences, events and exhibitions, which the HNF now reviews. We follow in Turing’s footsteps, visiting places where he worked and where his presence is still felt.
At the end comes an apology for Turing’s conviction as a homosexual: in 2010 Prime Minister Gordon Brown speaks for the British people when he says that he is sorry for the treatment meted out to Alan Turing: “You deserved so much better.” Queen Elizabeth visits Bletchley Park in 2011. The Turing Award is now the biggest of its kind in the world of computer science.
Elliott & Fry Alan Mathison Turing
1951
Alan Turing at the time of his election to a Fellowship of the Royal Society.
Photograph was taken at the Elliott & Fry studio on 29 March 1951.
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 (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
“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
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
Telephone 020 7494 3857
“… 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
Exhibition dates: 28th September – 11th November 2012
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
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. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Dolce_Vita
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. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Dolce_Vita
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.
“Today, in the West, we have come to regard diamond, pearl, emerald, sapphire, and ruby as the most precious of materials. That has not always been the case. Other substances have commanded equal attention, from feathers, claws, and mica appliqués to coral and rock crystal, serving a protective role, guarding their wearer from dangerous circumstances or malevolent forces. Other substances, especially those that are rare and available to a select few, are signifiers of wealth and power.”
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Continuing my love affair with exquisite jewellery. What splendour! I love them all…
Marcus
Many, many thankx to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston for allowing me to publish the reproduction of the jewellery in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the art works.
As the saying goes, “diamonds are a girl’s best friend” – at least in modern times – but as the exhibition Jewels, Gem, and Treasures: Ancient to Modern illustrates, ornaments made of ivory, shell, and rock crystal were prized in antiquity, while jewellery made of diamonds, emeralds, sapphires, rubies, and pearls became fashionable in later years. On view July 19, 2011, through November 25, 2012, this exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA), highlights some 75 objects representing the rich variety of jewels, gems, and treasures that have been valued over the course of four millennia.
Drawn from the MFA’s collection and select loans, these range from a 24th-century BC Nubian conch shell amulet, to Mary Todd Lincoln’s 19th-century diamond and gold suite, to a 20th-century platinum, diamond, ruby, and sapphire Flag brooch honouring the sacrifices of the Doughboys in World War I. Jewels, Gems, and Treasures is the inaugural exhibition in the MFA’s new Rita J. and Stanley H. Kaplan Family Foundation Gallery, which debuts on July 19. The gallery – one of only a few at US museums solely dedicated to jewellery – will feature works from the Museum’s outstanding collection of approximately 11,000 ornaments. It is named in recognition of the generosity of the Rita J. and Stanley H. Kaplan Family Foundation.
“The opening of the Museum’s first jewellery gallery provides an ongoing opportunity for the MFA’s collection to shine,” said Malcolm Rogers, Ann and Graham Gund Director of the MFA. “In this inaugural exhibition, visitors will see a wide range of gems that will both inform and dazzle in a beautiful new space that will allow the MFA to showcase its stellar assemblage of jewellery, which ranges from ancient to modern.”
Jewels, Gems, and Treasures sheds light on how various cultures throughout history have defined the concept of “treasure,” showcasing an exquisite array of necklaces, rings, bracelets, pendants, and brooches, as well as mineral specimens. In addition, the exhibition explains the significance of jewellery, which can be functional (pins, clasps, buckles, combs, and barrettes); protective (talismans endowed with healing or magical properties); and ornamental, making the wearer feel beautiful, loved, and remembered. Beyond functionality and adornment, jewellery can also establish one’s status and role in society. Rare gems and precious metals, made into fabulous designs by renowned craftsmen, have often served as symbols of wealth and power. This is especially evident in a section of the show where jewellery worn by celebrities is on view, including fashion designer Coco Chanel’s enamelled cuff bracelets accented with jewelled Maltese crosses (Verdura, New York, first half of 20th century) and socialite Betsey Cushing Whitney’s gold and diamond “American Indian” Tiara (Verdura, New York, about 1955), which she wore to her presentation to Queen Elizabeth II in 1956 as the wife of the US Ambassador to the Court of St. James.
The significance of precious materials in jewellery in the 20th century is explored in the exhibition, where several modern adornments from the MFA’s Daphne Farago Collection examine jewellery’s traditional roles in society. Among them are a 1985 brooch of iron, pyrite, and diamond rough by Falko Marx and a 1993 ring by Dutch jeweller Liesbeth Fit entitled Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend. (The Daphne Farago Collection comprises 650 pieces of contemporary craft jewellery made by leading American and European artists from about 1940 to the present.)
Jewels, Gems, and Treasures begins with a look at jewellery made of organic materials – substances readily available and easy to work with, such as ivory, shell, wood, and coral. These range from a pair of ivory cuff bracelets from Early Kerma culture in modern Sudan (2400-2050 BC) to more sophisticated creations made possible through the advancement of tools. Examples include a gold, silver, carnelian and glass Egyptian Pectoral (1783-1550 BC) and a Nubian gold and rock crystal Hathor-headed crystal pendant (743-712 BC) recovered from the burial of a queen of King Piye, the great Kushite ruler who conquered Egypt in the eighth century BC. In addition to having magical properties that protected the wearer against malevolent forces, adornments such as these were often buried with their owners as their amuletic capabilities were needed during the arduous journey to the afterlife. On the other side of the globe, Mayans wore ear flares – conduits of spiritual energy – made of sacred green jadeite that represented key elements of human life. Various cultures throughout the ages at one point believed that amber could cure maladies, coral could safeguard children, an animal’s tooth or claw could invest the wearer with strength and ferocity, and gold and silver invoked the cosmic power of the sun and moon. In Medieval and Renaissance Europe, many hard stones were believed to have magical properties (some were even ground and consumed), and pendant reliquaries containing a holy person’s cremated ashes or bone fragments were often donned, along with rosaries (Rosary, South German, mid-17th century), as sacred adornments. Even today, zodiac ornaments and good luck charms are sometimes worn as tokens, recalling their earlier mystical importance.
Throughout much of history, jewellery’s role as a symbol of one’s elevated status has inspired the wealthy to seek out stones that sparkle, gold that gleams, and designs that reflect the greatest artistry money can buy. To illustrate this, Jewels, Gems, and Treasures features some of the most opulent works from the Museum’s jewellery collection, including an 1856 diamond wedding necklace and earrings suite given by arms merchant Samuel Colt to his wife (the 41.73-carat suite, purchased for $8,000, is now valued at $190,000) and Mary Todd Lincoln’s gold, enamel, and diamond brooch with matching earrings, which she acquired around 1864, shortly after the death of the Lincolns’ beloved son, Willy, and then sold in 1867 to pay mounting debts. Also on view is a Kashmir sapphire and diamond brooch (around 1900); a gold and diamond necklace made by August Holmström for Peter Carl Fabergé, the famous Russian jeweller to the czars; and cereal heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post’s lavish platinum brooch from the 1920s, featuring a spectacular 60-carat carved Mughal emerald surrounded by diamonds, which she purchased in anticipation of her presentation at the British court in 1929.
Also on view in the exhibition are superb adornments made by leading French Art Nouveau jewellers, which were fashioned for a wealthy and artistic clientele in the late 19th to early 20th centuries. The Art Nouveau movement, which originated in Europe, embraced an aesthetic that was avant-garde, sensuous, and symbolic – one that looked to the natural world, the Impressionists, and the arts of Japan for inspiration. In response to the “tyranny of the diamond” – the all white platinum and diamond jewellery previously in vogue – these elaborate, one-of-a kind pieces often featured coloured gems and unusual materials, such as horn, enamel, irregularly shaped pearls, steel, and glass. Examples in the show include René Lalique’s fanciful gold, silver, steel, and diamond Hair ornament with antennae (about 1900), and Paul Lienard’s gold and mabe pearl Seaweed brooch (about 1908). The Arts and Crafts movement, which emerged in Britain during the 1870s as a reaction to the mechanisation and poor working conditions of the Industrial Revolution, is represented by Marsh-bird brooch (1901-1902) by Charles Robert Ashbee, who sought to create a delicate stained-glass effect with this piece. The refined techniques of the Art Deco movement are evident in Japanesque brooch (about 1925), incorporating platinum, gold, enamel, diamonds, rubies, and onyx. The movement arose after World War I and continued through the 1930s. It was influenced by avant-garde ideology, as was the Art Nouveau and Arts and Crafts movements, but instead chose to express its aesthetic through geometric shapes, linear stylisation, and a return to platinum and diamonds.
Jewels, Gems, and Treasures also highlights a variety of interesting and unique pieces, such as a Suite of hummingbird jewelry (brooch and earrings, about 1870), made out of gold, ruby, and taxidermied hummingbirds; an ebony, ivory, silver lapis lazuli, and amber casket designed to showcase the amber cameos and intaglios collected by Arnold Buffum (about 1880-1885); an Indian silver and tiger claw necklace (19th century); and a gold, silver, agate, diamond, and ruby animal sculpture, The Balletta Bulldog (about 1910) made by the workshop of Peter Carl Fabergé Fabergé. In addition, the exhibition features jewellery as seen in William McGregor Paxton’s painting, The New Necklace (1910).
Press release from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston website
This hair ornament with its whimsical character is a unique piece by Lalique. It features the unusual exclusive use of diamonds which were sparingly used by the Art Nouveau jewellers who preferred less precious stones and enamel to provide colour and opalescence. From the gold wire headband emerge two antenna composed of hollow silver cubes in which are set graduated brilliants each secured by four prongs. A steel wire runs through the cubes to form the curved shape of each antenna. Except for the scroll terminals of the antennae, each cube is individually mounted and stacked without being attached to each other so that they tremble when the wearer moves, accentuating the sparkle of the diamonds.
The brooch is part of a suite with matching earrings. Each element is quatrefoil in shape and has a central diamond with a diamond surround. Eight smaller diamonds form a second tier of stones. The stones are all mine-cut and are probably original to the suite. The colour range is J-K with VS-VS1 clarity. there are some losses to the tracery enamel. The suite was featured in Frank Lesley’s Illustrated Newspaper (Oct. 26, 1867). It was part of a large group of Mrs. Lincoln’s clothes, jewellery, and furnishings that were offered for sale through Brady & Company of New York City. Apparently, Mrs. Lincoln fell into dire financial circumstances after the assassination of her husband, Abraham Lincoln. The sale price was listed as $350.00.
The brooch was originally a hair ornament that was converted to a brooch (silver pin stem and “C” hook added). Conversion probably occurred shortly after the ornament was made. The hair comb was fabricated by A. Gebhardt and enamelist William Mark, both members of the Guild of Handicraft.
John Paul Cooper, a leading figure in the British Arts and Crafts movement, was an architect, designer, and metalsmith. Born into an affluent Leicester family, Cooper prepared for a career as a writer but was discouraged from pursuing this endeavour by his industrialist father. Instead, he apprenticed to London architect John D. Sedding, a strong proponent of the ideas of John Ruskin and Henry Wilson, an architect with interests in craft, especially metalwork and jewellery. Afterwards, Cooper joined the “Birmingham Group” and served as head of the Metalwork Department of the Birmingham Municipal Art School (1901-1906). He exhibited regularly at the Arts and Crafts Society exhibitions and completed several important public commissions, including two crosses and a pair of altar vases for Birmingham Cathedral. Additionally, his work often appeared in article published in Studio and Art Journal.
Cooper’s interest in jewellery design and fabrication began shortly after his association with Wilson. Like Wilson, he eventually employed others to fabricate his jewellery designs although he sometimes did the chasing and repoussé work himself. The jewellery was crafted primarily in 15 kt gold, utilising semi-precious cabochons (domed, unfaceted stones) and mother-of-pearl. Unlike many Arts and Crafts jewellery designers, Cooper often worked his designs from a selection of stones, rather than creating a design and then finding suitable gems. He once commented that stones should “… play on one another as two notes of music…”
In addition to jewellery, Cooper’s workshop designed and fabricated ecclesiastical objects and various decorative arts, including hollowware and frames. Many of the objects incorporate unusual materials, such as coconut shell, ostrich-egg shell, and narwhal tusk. At the beginning of his career, he often used gesso and plaster modelling to decorate surfaces and, at the end of the 1890s, he began making wooden boxes which he covered with shagreen, a decorative veneer made from the skin of certain sharks and rays.
This brooch is a major work by Cooper. Created during a period when the artist relied less on chased representational imagery and more on stones, the ornament conveys a sense of refined opulence. Inspired by medieval and Celtic design, the brooch is both airy and graceful. The goldwork is decorated with finely chased leaves and tendrils and the bezel-set stones include ruby, pearl, moonstone, amethyst, and chrysoprase. It took 273 hours to produce the brooch and Lorenzo Colarosi, Cooper’s chief craftsman, was the primary fabricator. It’s possible that Cooper did the chasework. The drawing for the brooch, which is dated 3 December 1908, can be found in Stockbook I, p. 81 in the Cooper Family Archives. Cooper entitled the piece Big double gold brooch.
The brooch was purchased by Marjorie Merriweather Post (1887-1973) and is documented by two portraits; one by Frank O. Salisbury (Palm Beach Bath and Tennis Club) and the other by Douglas Chador (Hillwood Museum). Both date to 1952. The central stone in the brooch is a mid-17th century carved emerald that was purchased by Marcus and Co.’s agent in Bombay in the 1920s. Oscar Heyman & Bros. made many of the jewels marketed by Marcus & Co. during the 1920s.
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