This is a hugely disappointing exhibition of the work of Sue Ford at NGV Australia, Melbourne. The artist deserved better.
There is no doubting the importance of Ford’s early black and white photographs. Images of this type had not been seen in Australia before, and looking back now it is hard to appreciate the impact that the Time series (1962-74), Self-portrait with camera (1960-2006) and images of women had on the photographic scene at the time. These muscular, robust photographs, while not possessing great technical skill, are rightly acknowledged as seminal images in the history of photography in Australia. I cannot praise them highly enough.
However, this exhibition and the important series in it have been ruined by a disastrous hang. The first room is spoiled by an ugly, cheap looking round central installation which is covered by pinned images from the much later series Somewhere in France, 1917 (1995, below) inside of which is projected the video Faces 1976-96 (below). This huge installation simply destroys the sensitivity, size and presence of the small silver gelatin works, overpowering them with repetitive images of a much larger scale.
The second room features a haphazard disposition of Ford’s important portraits of women from her book A Sixtieth of a Second: Portraits of Women 1961-1981, the arrangement of which seems to have no rhyme or reason. It’s all downhill from there. It doesn’t help that Ford’s work looses focus after the initial succinct statements as she begins to work with experimental photographic techniques – photograms, multiple exposures and mirroring of negatives – and, starting in the mid-1980s, branches out into research of Indigenous histories which only results in serviceable photographs at best.
What is more disturbing is how later work such as the powerful series Shadow portraits (1994, below) are displayed. I remember seeing this series many years ago at the NGV in St Kilda Road and being bowled over by their size and formal presence; here in a darkened room they are displayed piecemeal and all impact and import is lost. The whole room should have been dedicated to this series, surrounding you with scans of nineteenth-century cartes-de-visite, the empty silhouettes filled with magical photograms of indigenous Australian fauna. That would have been something.
Finally, the exhibition shows 1990s works such as Bima, Brenda and the Madonna (1992-93), Video land (Kakadu river tour) (1994) and Yellowcake (1991) which continue Ford’s interest in social and political issues relating to the Australian landscape. Featuring still images of video shot from a tv screen these fractured, distorted and oversaturated images are printed as colour photocopies and then displayed as fragmented images in a rigid grid system pinned to the wall. These are ugly works. They contain too many elements, the colour, distortion, and bounding box of the tv screen playing badly against the too rigid grid system of the colour photocopies. Ford’s work seems to tail off into something unnatural, a dissolution of identity that really has nothing constructive to say.
Perhaps these works do parallel the physical, ecological and spiritual gulf that Ford felt existed between many non-indigenous urban Australians but I don’t really feel that connection in the work and her investigation doesn’t lead to good art. If you want to see the most excellent use of colour, collage, montage, weaving and layering you only have to go up a level at NGV Australia to look at the David McDairmid exhibition to see how it should be done… it’s like night and day, one artist experimenting for abstraction’s sake, and the other really knowing their medium, what they are doing and what narrative / message they want to communicate.
What we cannot take away from Sue Ford is the utmost importance of those feminist images of strong, independent women and the precious, jewel-like, time travelling portrait works. For Ford the process of taking, looking at and using photographs was implicitly connected to a sense of time, time in flux in which the faces of a doubled past (1962-74, 1976-96) are reanimated in the present allowing for a consideration of the effects of ageing and change. Ultimately, these are conceptual works that have great power and integrity.
Unfortunately, the itsy bitsy design of this exhibition doesn’t allow any of the work to shine. It is not up to scratch and not worthy of the artist. Did the NGV run out of time, money and inspiration or where there other factors going on behind the scenes, such as access to the work?
I don’t know the answers to these questions, but when you put this exhibition side by side with the 2011 Time Machine: Sue Fordat the Monash Gallery of Art, there is no comparison as to which better conveys the importance of Ford’s work in the history of Australian photography.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the National Gallery of Victoria for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
For some time I have been thinking about the camera itself. Trying to explore its particular UNIQUENESS, coming to terms with the fact that I had been trying to ignore for some years, that the camera is actually a MACHINE. The machine has an enormous power easily abused. Man seems to misuse his machines continuously, with disastrous results for this century. In Time series I tried to use the camera as objectively as possible. It was a time machine. For me it was an amazing experience. It wasn’t until I placed the photograph of the younger face beside the recent photograph that I could fully appreciate the change. The camera showed me with absolute clarity something I could only just perceive with my naked eye.
“The ground-breaking work of Australian photographer and filmmaker Sue Ford will be explored in a major retrospective opening at the National Gallery of Victoria on 17 April. One of the most important practitioners to emerge in the wave of 1970s feminist photographers, Ford is recognised for her inventive and unique approaches to the medium and passionate engagement with feminism and gender issues, contemporary politics and the histories of Australia and its Indigenous people.
The exhibition will bring together more than 150 photographs, digital prints, collages and films spanning the five decades of Ford’s career, as well as important archival materials and, poignantly, several unseen works that the artist was working on at the time of her death in 2009.
Tony Ellwood, Director, NGV, said, “Sue Ford has a long and significant history with the National Gallery of Victoria; she was the first Australian photographer to hold a solo exhibition at the Gallery with her renowned Time Series in 1974, and we have been honoured to present her work many times since. It is appropriate, then, that the NGV presents this retrospective exhibition surveying and celebrating her artistic work and life.”
Ford’s Time Series 1962-1974 is regarded as a key moment in Australian photography. In this work, black-and-white double portraits of Ford’s friends and associates were taken around ten years apart and displayed side by side. Some sitters were photographed for a third and even fourth time, producing a remarkable dialogue on the passage of time, identity and personal histories. The entirety of the Time Series will be on display in the exhibition, along with Ford’s long-term project Self-portrait with camera, an extraordinary series of 47 self-portraits taken between 1960 and 2006.
The exhibition will feature Ford’s social documentary and portraiture work; both political and personal, these images reveal intimate depictions of life in inner-city Melbourne along with powerful records of critical political and social milestones including the 1988 Barunga Festival in the Northern Territory. Her prolific output also allows for the exhibition to survey the development of her experimentation with photographic, film, printing and multimedia techniques since the 1960s, such as the photogram, multiple exposures and mirroring of negatives.”
The act of looking and the gaze through the eye of a photographer’s camera are the central motifs of Blow-Up.
“Don McCullin created the iconographic photographs that in the film are blown up by Thomas to discover something about the alleged crime. However, the blow-ups only offer ambivalent proof as they become more and more blurred and abstract by the continuous enlarging. Even photography that supposedly represents reality like no other form of media cannot help in shedding any light on the mysterious events in the park. Pictorial reality – thus Antonioni’s conclusion – is only ever constructed by the medium itself.” (Press release)
Then, look at Don Mcullin’s photograph British Butcher, East London (c. 1965, below). The Union Jack hat, the knife being sharpened and the contrast of the image. Savage. Not home grown but “Home killed”. Pictorial reality constructed by the medium but not just by the medium – but also by the aesthetic choices and the imagination of the photographer.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Albertina for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Arthur Evans (British, 1908-1994) David Hemmings in “Blow Up” (directed by Michelangelo Antonioni) 1966 Film still Private collection Vienna Courtesy: New Visions Film Distribution GmbH
Arthur Evans (British, 1908-1994) David Hemmings in “Blow Up” (directed by Michelangelo Antonioni) 1966 Film still Private collection Vienna Courtesy: New Visions Film Distribution GmbH
Arthur Evans (British, 1908-1994) David Hemmings in “Blow Up” (directed by Michelangelo Antonioni) 1966 Film still Private collection Vienna Courtesy: New Visions Film Distribution GmbH
The cult film Blow-Up by Michelangelo Antonioni (1966) occupies a central position in the history of film as well as that of art and photography. No other film has shown and sounded out the diverse areas of photography in such a differentiated way. Shot in London, this film, which tells the story of a fashion photographer who happens to photograph a murder in a park, has become a classic. Its relevance and the unabated fascination it evokes are partially due to the remarkable range of themes it deals with. While Antonioni’s description of the social and artistic environment of his protagonist in 1960’s London can be understood as a visual document of the Swinging Sixties, the eponymous photographic blow-ups meticulously examined by the photographer to find something out about an alleged crime prompted a theoretical discourse on the representation and ambiguity of pictures from the first showing of the film. Both themes, the historical outline as well as the media reflexions, concern the main focus of the film: photography.
For the first time the exhibition in the Albertina presents in several chapters the diverse and differentiated connections between film and photography, thus allowing a trenchant profile of the photographic trends of the 1960s.
Photography in Blow-Up
The photographic range of Blow-Up is highly diversified and ranges from fashion photography and social reportage to abstract photography. Film stills are shown next to works that can actually be seen in Blow-Up, as well as pictures that illuminate the cultural and artistic frame of the film production, London in the Swinging Sixties.
The meaning of photography for the film Blow-Up is most apparent when Antonioni uses it to characterise his main character Thomas. Played by David Hemmings, the protagonist is not only a fashion photographer, but is also working on an illustrated book with photographs of social reportage. In order to depict both the main figure and its two areas of work in an authentic way, Antonioni is guided by real photographers of the time; before starting to shoot the film he meticulously researched the work as well as environment of the British fashion (photography) scene.
In the course of his preparations Antonioni sent out questionnaires to fashion photographers and visited them in their studios. Thus the main character is modelled after various photographers like David Bailey, John Cowan and Don McCullin; some of them Antonioni asked to cooperate on his film. He also integrated their works, for example Don McCullin’s reportage photographs that the protagonist browses through in the film, or fashion photographs by John Cowan that in the film can be seen in the protagonist’s studio.
In addition Don McCullin created the iconographic photographs that in the film are blown up by Thomas to discover something about the alleged crime. However, the blow-ups only offer ambivalent proof as they become more and more blurred and abstract by the continuous enlarging. Even photography that supposedly represents reality like no other form of media cannot help in shedding any light on the mysterious events in the park. Pictorial reality – thus Antonioni’s conclusion – is only ever constructed by the medium itself.
Antonioni used the photographs seen in the film for media-theoretical reflections and thus set stills and moving pictures in a differentiated context. This complex connection between film and photography is made very clear by the film stills that were created for Blow-Up. These still photographs are based on an elaborate process whereby the photographer has certain scenes re-enacted for the photo camera thus transforming the film from moving images into something static. The manifold references of Blow-Up are once more condensed into photographs in the film stills, as the pictures reflect the real context of fashion photography in 1960’s London through the depiction of the photographer, of well-known fashion models and the use of clothes to match.
Artistic references
The photographic references in Blow-Up are also set in relation to other art forms. This contextualisation is essential for Antonioni’s understanding of photography. Antonioni was, unlike most other film directors, committed to the applied arts which he showed already in 1964 with his film Deserto Rosso, its abstract compositions based on Mark Rothko’s paintings. In Blow-Up an artistic reference of this nature becomes apparent in the character of the protagonist’s neighbour, an abstract painter named Bill, who is modelled on British artist Ian Stephenson. Also the oil paintings in the film were created by Ian Stephenson. They show abstract motifs that in the film are compared with the stylistically related ‘blow-ups’.
The Swinging Sixties
Michelangelo Antonioni filmed Blow-Up at the height of the Swinging Sixties, the social and artistic trends of which are rendered in the film. The agitation of youth culture so characteristic of this time í and not least of all initiated by the Beatles í is shown as well as its trendsetting figures. Thus a concert by the British band The Yardbirds, with Jimmy Page, the subsequent founder of Led Zeppelin, served as a filming location. The scene of the infamous Pot-Party in the film was shot in the apartment of the art and antique dealer Christopher Gibbs, who shaped the fashion look of the Swinging Sixties.
British art of the 1960s was also essential for Antonioni as it anticipated many of those abstract tendencies that set the tone for Blow-Up. There was, for instance, the pop art artist Richard Hamilton who created blow-ups from ordinary postcards, thus reducing motifs to dots. Or Nigel Henderson, a member of the Independent Group, who had already produced photos in the 1950s, in which he pointed out their material qualities by creasing them and using special procedures for the negatives.
As much as Antonioni’s work is rooted in the 1960s, it is nevertheless a timeless classic that is still relevant for today’s art. This becomes apparent in the exhibition by means of selectively chosen contemporary works that refer to Blow-Up. Particularly the filmic outline on the representation of images and their ambiguity serves as the artistic basis for the creations of various contemporary photographers. Blow-Up has lost none of its relevance for art since its creation in 1966.
Patrick Hunt David Bailey on the set of G.G. Passion 1966 Courtesy Philippe Garner
Arthur Evans (British, 1908-1994) Veruschka von Lehndorff with David Hemmings in “Blow Up” (directed by Michelangelo Antonioni) 1966 Film still Private collection Vienna Courtesy: New Visions Film Distribution GmbH
Shot in London in 1966, Michelangelo Antonioni’s masterpiece Blow-Up confronts its audience with the manifold genres of photography and their different social references with a precision like no other feature film. The director involved some of the most interesting photographers of the day in the production of the film. The photojournalist Don McCullin was on set as were the fashion photographers John Cowan and David Montgomery as well as the paparazzo Tazio Secchiaroli. They served as models for Antonioni’s protagonist, took photographs for Blow-Up, and, not least, made their work available to the filmmaker.
Set against the social and artistic backdrop of London’s Swinging Sixties, Blow-Up tells us about a fashion photographer by the name of Thomas (David Hemmings) who secretly photographs two lovers in a park. He later enlarges these pictures and believes that he has coincidentally documented a murder. The blow-ups reveal a man lurking in the trees with a gun and, as Thomas supposes, a corpse. Fashion shootings and Thomas’s work on a book with reportage photographs featuring homeless people in London provide two further strands of reference in the film.
Presenting these contexts in five thematic sections, the exhibition in the Albertina offers a pointed cross-section of tendencies in the photography of the 1960s. The show not only explores the photo-historical circumstances under which Blow-Up was made but also presents real works of art Antonioni integrated into his film, as well as photographs he commissioned for the story. The visual translation of the film into stills constitutes another important field thematised in the exhibition. A selection of more recent works of art highlights the timelessness of Antonioni’s film.
Making film stills
Making film stills involves a complex production process in the course of which scenes of a film are specially reenacted in front of the still photographer’s camera. The difficulties the photographer is faced with result from the difference between film and photography as media. He has to transform the contents of a medium that renders movements and sequences of events in time into a photograph that freezes them in a single static moment.
Arthur Evans’s stills for Blow-Up go far beyond the genre’s traditional function of promoting a film. Evans created series of pictures which allow us to reconstruct certain sequences of movement and depict scenes not shown in the film. Hence his stills for Blow-Up are meta-pictures that shed light on the film from another perspective.
Voyeurism
The act of looking and the gaze through the eye of a photographer’s camera are the central motifs of Blow-Up, which becomes particularly evident in the famous scene in the park. This part of the film depicts the dynamics resulting from a camera focusing on persons and capturing them in a picture. Antonioni presents his protagonist as a paparazzo and voyeur secretly photographing people in the tradition of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954). Hidden behind shrubs, trees, and a fence, he watches a pair of lovers. The camera serves as an instrument for peeping through the keyhole, as it were. The dialogic dimension between photographer and model is revealed when the woman (Vanessa Redgrave) spots the photographer. She defends herself against Thomas’s invasive gaze, bites his hand, and runs away. The aesthetic of Thomas’s photographs shot in the park corresponds to the situation of their taking. The pictures are imbued with the instantaneousness and spontaneity deriving from the photographers wish to wrest a single picture from a dynamic context in a fraction of a second.
It is no coincidence that the photographer Tazio Secchiaroli was present on set in the very hours this scene was shot. Secchiaroli was an Italian paparazzo who had been after the suspects in a still unresolved murder case, the Montesi scandal, with his camera. Made against the background of this political scandal, Federico Fellini’s film La dolce vita (1960) features pushy photo reporters modelled after Secchiaroli.
Blow-Ups
The blow-ups of Thomas’s photographs shot in the park are the most famous pictures featured in Antonioni’s film. The filmmaker entrusted the renowned photojournalist Don McCullin with taking them. Following Antonioni’s instructions, McCullin had to position himself in the same places as Thomas in the film to reproduce his perspectives. He also used the same Nikon F camera the protagonist works with in Blow-Up. In order to ensure that the process of taking the pictures we see in the film corresponds with the photographer’s results, McCullin advised the actor David Hemmings on how to proceed. The actor learned how to handle the 35-mm camera correctly and was instructed about the body language connected with using it.
Fashion photography
The metropolis of London was the center of a new kind of fashion photography in the 1960s – a renown inseparably bound up with three names to this day: David Bailey, Terence Donovan, and Brian Duffy, also known as Black Trinity. Relying on 35-mm cameras, which had hitherto mainly been used for reportage photographs and ensured a supposedly spontaneous and dynamic pictorial language, these three photographers staged their models in unusual places outside their studios.
In preparing his film, Antonioni had meticulously researched the photographer’s living and working conditions by means of a several-page questionnaire in which he even inquired into their love relationships and eating habits. It was David Bailey who served as a model for the protagonist of Blow-Up. For his dynamic body language in the fashion shootings, for instance, Thomas took the cue from him. The style of clothes Thomas wears is indebted to that of the British fashion photographer John Cowan. Cowan made his studio available to Antonioni for the studio shots and acted as the filmmaker’s adviser. The photographs seen on the studio wall in Blow-Up are fashion photographs by Cowan which Antonioni chose for the film.
David Montgomery
David Montgomery is a US-American fashion photographer living in London. Before shooting his film, Antonioni visited him in his studio to watch him working with Veruschka, Jill Kennington, and Peggy Moffitt – the models he would subsequently cast for Blow-Up. David Montgomery has a cameo appearance in the beginning of the film: we see him taking pictures of the model Donyale Luna on Hoxton Market in London’s East End. When this scene was shot, he actually made the fashion photographs featuring Luna which he pretends to take in the film. Since Montgomery was no actor by his own account, he had to really take pictures in order to be able to play the scene in a convincing manner.
Arthur Evan’s fashion photographs
Arthur Evans, the still photographer, depicted the models appearing in Blow-Up in groups and in individual portraits. These pictures taken on set are very unusual for a still photographer, because they do not show scenes of the film, but are independently staged fashion photographs. The models’ costumes were designed by Jocelyn Rickards, the hats were made by James Wedge. Evans translated the linear patterns characteristic of both designers into graphic compositions in his photos.
Social reportage
Michelangelo Antonioni characterises his film’s protagonist also as a social reportage photographer who, for a book project on London he is working on, secretly takes pictures in a homeless shelter. A scene of the film has Thomas showing his publisher a dummy of the volume. The portraits in it were made by the photojournalist Don McCullin; their originals are presented in the exhibition for the very first time.
The pictures were taken in London’s East End in the early 1960s, when the area was notorious for its residents’ poverty, miserable housing conditions, and racial unrest. The photographer provides a cross-section of its inhabitants whom he mainly characterises through their occupation. The two-fold orientation of the film’s protagonist as fashion and reportage photographer is based on fact, as illustrated by both David Bailey and David Montgomery. The stylistic boundaries between the two genres blur in their works. The strategy of picturing models in urban surroundings with a 35-mm camera, for example, is clearly rooted in reportage photography.
Swinging London: Art and Life
Michelangelo Antonioni filmed Blow-Up in the heyday of London’s Swinging Sixties whose social and artistic trends are depicted in the film. He captured the youth culture and its agitation so characteristic of these years – which was not least triggered by the Beatles – as well as the protagonists of the scene. One location he chose was a concert of the Yardbirds, a British band counting Jimmy Page, who would found Led Zeppelin, among its players. The famous pot-party in Blow-Up was shot in the art and antique dealer Christopher Gibbs’ flat, who determined the fashion look of the Swinging Sixties to a remarkable degree.
The British art of the 1960s was also very important to Antonioni, as it already anticipated many of the abstract tendencies informing Blow-Up. The Pop artist Richard Hamilton, for example, used to enlarge everyday picture postcards, reducing their motifs to an abstract dot matrix. Nigel Henderson, a member of the Independent Group, had already emphasised the material qualities of his photos in the 1950s by folding his prints and employing negative techniques. Antonioni integrated works by British artists: for example a picture by Peter Sedgley, a representative of Op art, and oil paintings by Ian Stephenson into his film.
Ian Stephenson
Antonioni’s understanding of photography was informed by painting í an influence that becomes manifest in the character of the protagonist’s neighbour, in Blow-Up a painter named Bill. Antonioni compares the neighbour’s abstract paintings with the photographer’s blow-ups. When Thomas and his neighbour talk about the paintings, Bill maintains that he does not see much in them while painting them and only finds meaning in them later on. This form of reception tallies with Thomas’s attempt to determine the meaning of his similarly abstract enlargements.
The character of the painter is based on the British artist Ian Stephenson. Antonioni visited the artist in his studio before he started shooting Blow-Up. He watched the painter at work and selected the paintings he wanted to use in the film.
Blow-Up
The photographs central to Antonioniés film are the blow-ups of the pictures which the protagonist has taken in the park and which he examines meticulously. The enlargements reveal a man with a pistol lurking in the trees and a mass in the grass, which Thomas interprets as a lifeless body. To make the presumed corpse more visible Thomas enlarges the photograph again and again until it shows nothing but its grain and materiality, despite the photographs inherent relation to reality.
Antonioni uses the blow-ups to question the representation of reality by media and their specific modes of perception. He interlinks these considerations with the film. The final scene of Blow-Up shows Thomas coming upon a group of mimes playing an imaginary game of tennis. When the (invisible) ball lands behind the fence, Thomas joins in the mimes’ game, picks up the ball from the lawn and throws it back to the players. A camera pan traces the trajectory of the invisible ball. In evoking the ball without showing it, Antonioni confronts us with the most radical abstraction: the motif is not rendered as an abstract or blurry form like in the enlargements, but is altogether absent. The media-theoretical implications of Blow-Up are still the subject of conceptual photographs today. Like Antonioni, the Italian Ugo Mulas and the American Allan McCollum, for example, question photography’s relation to reality in their blow-ups.
Le montagne incantate
The nucleus for the blow-ups in the film is to be found in a series of artworks titled Le montagne incantate (The Enchanted Mountains), which Antonioni started working on in the mid-1950s. The filmmaker photographically enlarged his small-format abstract watercolours, making the material qualities of the paper and the application of the paint visible. Consequentially, Antonioni recommended the use of a magnifying glass – as used by the protagonist in Blow-Up – as the ideal instrument for viewing these pictures.
Curators: Dedo von Kerssenbrock-Krosigk and Beat Wismer, with additional curatorial input from Anita Hachmann for the contemporary section
Theodor Galle nach Jan van der Straet (Stradanus) (Belgium, 1523-1605) Destillierlabor c. 1589 – c. 1593 From the series Nova reperta Stiftung Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf Photo: Horst Kolberg, Neuss
Since I have 7 alchemy symbols tattooed on my right bicep in a vertical line to represent the 7 chakras, I thought this was a suitable exhibition for a posting.
I love anything alchemical, magical, spiritual – in art and in life. I have just had a couple of snowflakes tattooed on my forearms, one blue / green and the red / orange for an ice / fire combination. Each snowflake is unique and ephemeral, here and gone in the blink of an eye, just like we are. That is their, and our, magic.
The photographer Minor White said it is not just the images that matter, but the space between them that causes an ice / fire frisson. When looking at an exhibition I note how images play off of each other – in pairs, sequences and across the gallery space. It is a relatively simple thing for a photographer to take one good image, more difficult to put a pair of images together that actually says something, but when you get to a sequence of images (as in MW) or a body of work, this is were a lot of artists wane. The intertextual narrative, one woven from the imagination of the artist, does not resolve itself into a satisfying, stimulating whole. How many exhibitions do I see that have some good images but do not access the magic of the music.
Further, we must also remember that in Psychology and Alchemy, Volume 12 in The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, alchemy is central to Jung’s hypothesis of the collective unconscious. “Jung reminds us of the dual nature of alchemy, comprising both the chemical process and a parallel mystical component. He also discusses the seemingly deliberate mystification of the alchemists. Finally, in using the alchemical process to provide insights into individuation, Jung emphasises the importance of alchemy in relating to us the transcendent nature of the psyche.” (Wikipedia)
Jung sees alchemy as an early form of psychoanalysis. The melting of base metal in a crucible and its reforming into gold can be seen as a form of individuation – the dissolution of the ego and its integration into the whole self. Basically the recasting or reforming of identity into a new Self. As the instructive text on Wikipedia notes,
“For the alchemist trying to understand matter and develop base metals into their purest form, gold, substances are grouped as being alike based on their perceived value. Jung documents as these alchemists collectively come to understand that they themselves must embody the change they hope to effect within their materials: for instance, if they hope to achieve the philosopher’s stone that can redeem ‘base’ or ‘vulgar’ metals, then the alchemist too must become a redeemer figure. It became apparent to the alchemists that they were trying to redeem nature as Christ had redeemed man, hence the identification of the Lapis Philosophorum with Christ the Redeemer. The Opus (work) of alchemy, viewed through this interpretation, becomes a symbolic account of the fundamental process the human psyche undergoes as it re-orients its value system and creates meaning out of chaos. The opus beginning with the nigredo (blackening, akin to depression or nihilistic loss of value) in order to descend back into the manipulable prima materia and proceeding through a process of spiritual purification that must unite seemingly irreconcilable opposites (the coniunctio) to achieve new levels of consciousness.”
Much of my early black and white work was based on an understanding of the magical nature of the (art)work. This is a fascinating area of enquiry for all artists because this is what they do – they see the world differently, reform it through their art and present it as a pathway for the future.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
PS The catalogue to this exhibition is excellent with lots of interesting essays.
Many thankx to the Stiftung Museum Kunstpalast for allowing me to publish the art work in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Marcus new tattoos February 2014
Pieter Brueghel the Younger (Belgium, 1564-1636) after Pieter Brueghel the Elder The Alchemist c. 1600 Oil on wood 68.8 x 96cm Private collection
David Teniers d.J. (Flemish, 1610-1690) Alchemist in his Workshop c. 1650 Courtesy of Roy Eddleman, Chemical Heritage Foundation Collections Photo: Will Brown
Johan Moreelse (Dutch, 1603-1634) The Alchemist 1630 Oil on canvas 90.5 x 107.5cm Robilant + Voena, London und Mailand
Giovanni Antonio Grecolini (Italian, 1675-1725) The Education of Cupid by Venus and Vulcan 1719 Oil on canvas 48.9 × 64cm Museum Kunstpalast Photo: Horst Kolberg
For the first time in Germany, an exhibition spanning all epochs and genres will be introducing the exciting link between art and alchemy in past and present times. 250 works from antiquity to the present, encompassing Baroque art, Surrealism, through to contemporary art from collections and museums in the USA, Great Britain, France, Mexico and Israel reveal the fascination which alchemy exerted for many visual artists. Artists featured in the exhibition, such as Joseph Beuys, Jan Brueghel the Elder, Lucas Cranach the Elder, Max Ernst, Hendrick Goltzius, Rebecca Horn, Anish Kapoor, Yves Klein, Sigmar Polke, Rembrandt van Rijn, Peter Paul Rubens and David Teniers the Youngerinvite visitors to explore the mystery of transformation.
Alchemy was invariably practised in secret, but was by no means a rare occurrence until well into the 18th century: Eminent personalities, including Paracelsus, Isaac Newton and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, were alchemists, too. It was not until the Age of the Enlightenment that alchemy was ousted and became intermingled with occultism, sorcery and superstition. In connection with 19th and early 20th-century psychoanalysis alchemy was brought to new life.
The exhibition is divided into two major periods: pre-Enlightenment art, in particular works from the 16th and 17th centuries and the art of the 20th and 21st centuries.
In the pre-Enlightenment era both artists and alchemists laid claim to the ability to not only imitate nature but to even perfect it. This ambition is illustrated in the exhibition by casts from nature made by Bernard Palissy and Wenzel Jamnitzer. Their lizards and other creatures are extraordinarily life-like and yet have been immortalised in precious metal or ceramic as if petrified. The circumstance that artists and alchemists were ultimately rivals is exemplified by the Dutch artist Adriaen van Ostade with his painting depicting an alchemist in his laboratory, having failed to produce gold.
By contrast, the exhibition also includes works by artists presenting alchemy in a favourable light, such as portraits by Rubens and David Teniers the Younger, allegorical paintings by Jan Brueghel the Elder and Hendrick Goltzius, as well as three copies of the “Splendor Solis”, the most richly illuminated manuscript in the history of alchemy. Furthermore, an original manuscript by physicist Isaac Newton, contributed by the Chemical Heritage Foundation in Philadelphia, will be presented here for the first time in Europe.
The modern section of the show begins with Surrealism. Max Ernst, for instance, repeatedly took up the theme of the “Chymical Wedding” in his work. A particular highlight is the painting “The Creation of the Birds”, a key work by the Surrealist artist Remedios Varo. The Androgyne is an important theme, for instance, in the exhibits by Rebecca Horn. Joseph Beuys will be represented by a number of sculptures, drawings and collages, as well as a film and photo documentation of his action at the 1982 documenta. Moreover, the exhibition includes works by Anish Kapoor displaying his characteristic use of intensely coloured pigments. Further exhibits include selected works by representatives of contemporary art, such as Anselm Kiefer, Yves Klein, Alicja Kwade, Sigmar Polke, Neo Rauch and Gerda Steiner and Jörg Lenzlinger.
The exhibition was conceived by Museum Kunstpalast in cooperation with the research group “Art and Knowledge in Pre-Modern Europe” at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, as well as a group of experts at the Chemical Heritage Foundation in Philadelphia, which also provided many pieces on loan. A Wunderkammer of curious and exotic treasures from flora and fauna is offered for visitors to explore. In an extensive accompanying programme the subject of art and alchemy will be expanded upon by means of lectures, talks and guided tours.
Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (Dutch, 1606-1669) Sogenannter Faust [Allegedly Faust] c. 1651‑1653 Drypoint 21.1 × 16.2cm Stiftung Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf, Sammlung der Kunstakademie (NRW) Photo: Horst Kolberg, Neuss
Francois-Marius Granet (French, 1775-1849) The Alchemist 1st half of the 19th century Oil on canvas 61 x 48.3cm Gift of Roy Eddleman Chemical Heritage Foundation Collections, Philadelphia Photo: Will Brown
John Isaacs (British, b. 1968) Thinking about it 2002 Wax, wire, plaster of paris 15 1/2 x 12 x 13 inches (30 x 30 x 50cm) Olbricht collection, Germany
Curated from the private collection of Marc Dessauce
Knud Lonberg-Holm (Danish, 1895-1972) Design for the Chicago Tribune Tower Competition West elevation 1922 Vintage photograph mounted on board 9 1/8 x 3 5/8 inches (23.2 x 9.2cm) The Knud Lonberg-Holm Archive from the Marc Dessauce Collection; Courtesy Ubu Gallery, New York
The second part of this posting about the work of architect Knud Lonberg-Holm. “Backside-views of buildings and fire escapes, rather than historicist ornamental facades, are presented in their “unselfconscious beauty” in opposition to traditional, Pictorialist architectural photography.” You only have to look at the photographs of the city by Alfred Stieglitz or Berenice Abbott taken at around the same time to notice the difference – less romantic, more “modern” in their geometry and form.
If it weren’t for the shock of seeing 1920s cars at the bottom of some of the images (for example, Detroit, Rear Façade of a Hotel, 1924 below) you could almost believe that they had been made 40 years later, around the time of Bernd and Hilla Becher. These photographs are monumental, industrial, but are tinged with humanity – the billboards, cars, people and advertising signs that hover at the bottom or in the deep shadows of the image. Then look at the tonality and atmosphere of the images, including the vibration of light in the two Dazzlescapes (New York, Madison Square and New York, Times Square, both 1923 below).
I don’t think I have ever seen a better collection of images of city architecture.
Many thankx to Ubu Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“I’ve always been annoyed by rummaging through the past; the future interests me much more.”
Knud Lonberg-Holm
Knud Lonberg-Holm (Danish, 1895-1972) Design for the Chicago Tribune Tower Competition West view axonometric 1922 Vintage photograph mounted on board 8 7/8 x 4 5/8 inches (22.5 x 11.7cm) The Knud Lonberg-Holm Archive from the Marc Dessauce Collection; Courtesy Ubu Gallery, New York
Knud Lonberg-Holm (Danish, 1895-1972) Equity Trust Building – Oblique View 1923 Reproduced in Erich Mendelsohn’s Amerika, p. 41 Vintage gelatin silver print 4 3/8 x 3 1/4 inches (11.1 x 8.3cm) The Knud Lonberg-Holm Archive from the Marc Dessauce Collection Courtesy Ubu Gallery, New York
Knud Lonberg-Holm (Danish, 1895-1972) Woolworth Building – Oblique View 1923 Reproduced in Erich Mendelsohn’s Amerika, p. 40 Vintage gelatin silver print 4 1/4 x 3 1/4 inches (10.8 x 8.3cm) The Knud Lonberg-Holm Archive from the Marc Dessauce Collection Courtesy Ubu Gallery, New York
Knud Lonberg-Holm (Danish, 1895-1972) Design for the Chicago Tribune Tower Competition Side elevation with Tribune sign visible 1922 Vintage photograph mounted on board 9 1/8 x 4 7/8 inches (23.2 x 12.4cm) The Knud Lonberg-Holm Archive from the Marc Dessauce Collection Courtesy Ubu Gallery, New York
Knud Lonberg-Holm (Danish, 1895-1972) Design for the Chicago Tribune Tower Competition Preliminary side elevation 1922 Photograph mounted on board 9 x 4 5/8 inches (22.9 x 11.7cm) The Knud Lonberg-Holm Archive from the Marc Dessauce Collection Courtesy Ubu Gallery, New York
Throughout the 1920s, he traveled to other American cities like Chicago and New York City, where, with a 35-millimetre handheld Leica, he took worm’s-eye views and extreme close-ups of skyscrapers, the back sides of buildings, fire escapes, billboards, and dazzling “lightscapes,” ignoring – for the most part – the facades of the buildings. Some of these images would appear, uncredited, in Erich Mendelsohn’s 1926 publication Amerika: Bilderbuch eines Architekten, the first book on the “International Style” in American architecture. (Only in an expanded, later edition from 1928 is Lonberg-Holm credited for 17 of the images.)
Soon the photographs cropped up in design and architecture journals in Holland, Germany, and Russia. “They received acclaim for being progressive and dynamic presentations of technology, commerce, and urbanisation,” says Adam Boxer, founder and owner of Ubu Gallery. “To expose Lonberg-Holm’s role as photographer means one can situate him in his deserved role – a pioneer of New Photography.” As a correspondent for the avant-garde, having his images and writings appear in radical European Modernist reviews – such as the Functionalist-Constructivist Swiss bulletin ABC Beitrage zum Bauen (Contributions on Building) and the Dutch i10 – were of crucial importance, since they circulated amongst members of the European vanguard. By the 1930s, however, Lonberg-Holm had given up architecture for marketing research, and his photographs, never signed or dated, no longer circulated. …
Lonberg-Holm also questioned how architecture was practiced and he pioneered the idea of the life cycle of a building. Decades before William McDonough discovered cradle-to-cradle thinking, Lonberg-Holm had been trying to put across the concept that all buildings, like all organisms, are subject to a life cycle, as predictable and as inevitable as the cycles in nature. “The building cycle involves research, design, construction, use, and elimination – and repeat,” wrote an editor in the January 1960 issue of Architectural Forum. “One of Lonberg-Holm’s chief contentions is that design that anticipates the cycle as a whole makes each succeeding step more rational and easier… Lonberg-Holm’s principle, ‘Anticipate remodelling in the initial design’, carries a corollary, which might be put this way, in keeping with the very important principle of design articulation: ‘Design each “system” in the building – the structural system, the heating or the air-conditioning system, the wiring, the plumbing, etc. – to be self-contained for easy assembly, with interconnections to other systems held to a minimum and made easy to alter’.
Extract from Paul Makovsky. “The Invisible Architect of Invisible Architecture,” on the Metropolis website [Online] Cited 18/07/2014. No longer available online. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Knud Lonberg-Holm (Danish, 1895-1972) Detroit 1924 Reproduced in Erich Mendelsohn’s Amerika, p. 67 Vintage gelatin silver print 4 1/4 x 3 1/4 inches (10.8 x 8.3cm) The Knud Lonberg-Holm Archive from the Marc Dessauce Collection Courtesy Ubu Gallery, New York
Knud Lonberg-Holm (Danish, 1895-1972) Detroit, Rear Areaway 1924 Reproduced in Erich Mendelsohn’s Amerika, p. 91 Vintage gelatin silver print 4 1/2 x 3 1/2 inches (11.4 x 8.9cm) The Knud Lonberg-Holm Archive from the Marc Dessauce Collection Courtesy Ubu Gallery, New York
During the 1920s, Lonberg-Holm traveled to American cities like Detroit, Chicago, and New York. With his 35-millimetre Leica camera, he took extreme close-ups of skyscrapers (such as this rear view Detroit Hotel, above), the back sides of buildings, fire escapes, billboards, and dazzling nighttime views.
Knud Lonberg-Holm (Danish, 1895-1972) Detroit 1924 Variant cropping reproduced in Erich Mendelsohn’s Amerika, p. 21 Vintage gelatin silver print 4 3/8 x 3 3/8 inches (11.1 x 8.6cm) The Knud Lonberg-Holm Archive from the Marc Dessauce Collection; Courtesy Ubu Gallery, New York
Knud Lonberg-Holm (Danish, 1895-1972) Detroit, Rear Façade of a Hotel 1924 Reproduced in Erich Mendelsohn’s Amerika, p. 89 Vintage gelatin silver print 4 1/2 x 3 3/8 inches (11.4 x 8.6cm) The Knud Lonberg-Holm Archive from the Marc Dessauce Collection Courtesy Ubu Gallery, New York
Knud Lonberg-Holm (Danish, 1895-1972) Chicago, Skyscraper of the Second Period c. prior to 1926 Reproduced in Erich Mendelsohn’s Amerika, p. 77 (right) Vintage gelatin silver print 4 3/8 x 3 3/8 inches (11.1 x 8.6cm) The Knud Lonberg-Holm Archive from the Marc Dessauce Collection Courtesy Ubu Gallery, New York
Knud Lonberg-Holm (Danish, 1895-1972) Chicago, 2 Skyscrapers c. prior to 1926 Reproduced in Erich Mendelsohn’s Amerika, p. 75 Vintage gelatin silver print 4 1/2 x 3 1/2 inches (11.4 x 8.9cm) The Knud Lonberg-Holm Archive from the Marc Dessauce Collection Courtesy Ubu Gallery, New York
Knud Lonberg-Holm: The Invisible Architect
“Lonberg-Holm was the first architect in my knowledge to talk about the ultimately invisible architecture. In 1929, when I first met him, he said the greatest architect in history would be the one who finally developed the capability to give humanity completely effective environmental control without any visible structure and machinery. Thus we have in our day an unsung Leonardo of the building industry, whose scientific foresight and design competence are largely responsible for the present world-around state of advancement of the building arts.”
Buckminster Fuller, 1968
The historical documents in this collection represent a hitherto unexplored aspect of the influence of European modernist architects – specifically, those who emigrated to the United States early and voluntarily, before the rise of fascism necessitated the wholesale evacuation of the European avant-garde. The seemingly disparate archive of photographs, drawings, diagrams and correspondence can be grouped around a unifying theme: the realisation of the avant-garde ambition of integration and control of architectural production through industrialisation; and around a central figure: the architect Knud Lonberg-Holm. The documents bear witness to a complex history that is not easily tracked elsewhere. This is due, in part, to the fact that they bridge two continents, and in part because they unveil processes of reform, such as the scientific conversion of the institutions of architectural practice and the transformation of the project, that were aimed at the most mundane level of building, not at exceptional structures. Moreover, the documents show this professional and anonymous destiny together in line with inversely artistic and revolutionary origins. Thus, the archive documents a phenomenon of cultural disappearance, bringing missing substance to the link between the Americanism of the European avant-garde and the history of modern architecture in the United States.
A native of Denmark, which he leaves in 1923 for the United States, Knud Lonberg-Holm (1895-1972) is the emblematic figure of this disappearance. Initially considered a “pioneer of modern architecture” by the anthropologists of the 1920s, and even held representative of “the space-time conception” by Henry Russell Hitchcock, his true contributions will be ever more unacknowledged as they become more fundamental. First of the modernist émigrés in the United States, he becomes the obliged correspondent for the European avant-garde, in particular for the De Stijl group and also the Berlin Constructivists, with whom he was closest. He was a contributor to both ABC and i10, a member of ASNOVA, a collaborator of Buckminster Fuller, and also the American delegate to CIAM with Richard Neutra. His experiments with photography in the early 1920s (diffused widely by J.J.P. Oud, Moholy-Nagy, Erich Mendelsohn, and others) were received with critical success in Europe and the USSR. This is due as much to the revolutionary use of extreme viewpoints from below and above, as to the renewal of the iconographic sources of modernism: the substitution of the imagery of the grain elevators and the “balancing of the masses,” for an aesthetic of structure and tension gleaned from the metallic skeletons of unfinished skyscrapers. In Lonberg-Holm, this aesthetic schism is accompanied by a renouncement of the project – a sort of Duchampian abandonment of the traditional identity of the architect, which intervenes at the moment he arrives in his work at a controlled resolution of the opposing influences of rationalism and neo-plasticism, for example in the McBride Residence project of 1926.
Lonberg-Holm’s institutional itinerary begins at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 1924-1925, where he introduces a basic design course similar to that of the Soviet Vkhutemas. Moving to New York in 1929, he enters the organisation of the F.W. Dodge publishing corporation, initially at the journal The Architectural Record, where he devises both content and format, and then as the head of the research department of Sweet’s Catalog Service, the indispensable architect’s handbook of building products. The reorganisation of Sweet’s Catalog, perhaps Lonberg-Holm’s most tangible contribution to modern architectural production in America, gives substance to his doctrinaire activity of the 1930s, concerned with urban obsolescence, cycles of production, and information theory. In collaboration with Czech designer Ladislav Sutnar, Sweet’s Catalog becomes a complete oeuvre of industrial and plastic organisation. Its critical and enduring importance in the process of architectural production makes it an implemented avant-garde project, at an appreciable scale, and testament to Lonberg-Holm’s heretofore-unacknowledged influence on the development of a truly modern American architecture.
Marc Dessauce, 2003
Marc Dessauce (1962-2004) was an architectural historian who lived and worked in NYC and Paris. His research, exhibitions, and writings focused on the foundations of both American and European avant-garde architecture in the twentieth century. Marc assembled this archive between 1986 and 1995 when he was a PhD candidate at Columbia University in the department of Art History. His book The Inflatable Moment: Pneumatics and Protest in ’68, was published by Princeton Architectural Press in 1999.
Knud Lonberg-Holm (Danish, 1895-1972) New York, Madison Square 1923 Reproduced in Erich Mendelsohn’s Amerika, p. 31 Vintage gelatin silver print 4 1/8 x 3 1/4 inches (10.5 x 8.3cm) The Knud Lonberg-Holm Archive from the Marc Dessauce Collection; Courtesy Ubu Gallery, New York
Knud Lonberg-Holm (Danish, 1895-1972) New York, Times Square 1923 Reproduced in Erich Mendelsohn’s Amerika, p. 6 Vintage gelatin silver print 4 1/4 x 3 3/8 inches (10.8 x 8.6cm) The Knud Lonberg-Holm Archive from the Marc Dessauce Collection Courtesy Ubu Gallery, New York
Amerika: Bilderbuch eines Architekten
Seventeen of Lonberg-Holm’s photographs appeared uncredited in Erich Mendelsohn’s 1926 book, a very influential volume on modern American architecture. Only in a later, expanded edition was Lonberg-Holm given credit. El Lissitzky was so impressed with Amerika that he said the volume “thrills us like a dramatic film. Before our eyes move pictures that are absolutely unique. In order to understand some of the photographs you must lift the book over your head and rotate it.”
Knud Lonberg-Holm (Danish, 1895-1972) Sweet’s Display Exposition des Techniques Américianes de l’Habitation et de l’Ubranisme (Information 1, 2, 3) Paris, Grand Palais, June 14-July 21, 1946 Vintage gelatin silver print 7 1/8 x 7 1/4 inches (18.1 x 18.4cm) The Knud Lonberg-Holm Archive from the Marc Dessauce Collection Courtesy Ubu Gallery, New York
Knud Lonberg-Holm (Danish, 1895-1972) Sweet’s Display Exposition des Techniques Américianes de l’Habitation et de l’Ubranisme(Biblioteque SS) Paris, Grand Palais, June 14-July 21, 1946 Vintage gelatin silver print 7 1/8 x 7 1/8 inches (18.1 x 18.1cm) The Knud Lonberg-Holm Archive from the Marc Dessauce Collection Courtesy Ubu Gallery, New York
A diagram from Development Index illustrating the interrelations of cultural and social factors, which Lonberg-Holm and Larson considered necessary to the practice of design. The index was a screening system intended to manage incoming and outgoing streams of data.
Larson and Knud Lonberg-Holm later collaborated on the idea of a “Development Index” – a systems-thinking approach and research tool that studied the interaction of human activity, environmental relations, and communications with the idea to improve the built environment. It was an attempt to manage information flow and, in a pre-Internet sort of way, provide relevant data through a centralised system, using what was then state-of-the-art media such as microfilm, microfiche, and electronics.
Wendingen “Skyscraper as a solution of the Housing Problem” No. 3, 1923 Paperbound volume 12 7/8 x 13 inches (32.7 x 33cm) The Knud Lonberg-Holm Archive from the Marc Dessauce Collection Courtesy Ubu Gallery, New York
Shelter Cover design by Knud Lonberg-Holm April 1938 Magazine cover 11 x 9 inches (27.9 x 22.9cm) The Knud Lonberg-Holm Archive from the Marc Dessauce Collection Courtesy Ubu Gallery, New York
Shelter now Cover design by Knud Lonberg-Holm Vol. 2, No. 4, May 1932 Magazine cover 12 x 9 inches (30.5 x 22.9cm) The Knud Lonberg-Holm Archive from the Marc Dessauce Collection Courtesy Ubu Gallery, New York
Knud Lonberg-Holm with Latislav Sutnar Multi-Measure (MM) Metal Enclosures c. 1942-1944 Cover of catalog 11 x 8 1/2 inches (27.9 x 21.6cm) The Knud Lonberg-Holm Archive from the Marc Dessauce Collection Courtesy Ubu Gallery, New York
The cover of a catalog for Multi-Measure Metal Enclosures, Inc., designed with Ladislav Sutnar between 1942 and 1944. Lonberg-Holm collaborated with architect C. Theodore Larson at F.W. Dodge Corporation’s Sweet’s Catalog division to develop a systematic approach to organising the information needed by the building industry. When graphic designer Ladislav Sutnar later joined him, they radically altered the way business information was streamlined, designed, and packaged, becoming pioneers of “information design” along the way.
i10 “America, Reflections” (by Knud Lonberg-Holm) No. 15, October 20, 1928 Paperbound volume 11 3/4 x 8 1/4 inches (29.8 x 21cm) The Knud Lonberg-Holm Archive from the Marc Dessauce Collection Courtesy Ubu Gallery, New York
Lonberg-Holm’s 1928 essay on America fori10 – focused on the country’s obsession with time and efficiency – shows that the fields of communications, the car industry, elevators, railways, and the movie industry were more important to him. He wrote: “Time-study is a profession. And a highly paid profession. What the [Saint] Peters church was for the European Renaissance, Henry Ford’s assembly line is for America of today. The most perfect expression for a civilisation whose god is efficiency. Detroit is the Mecca of this civilisation. And the pilgrims come from all over the world to meditate before this always-moving line.”
Knud Lonberg-Holm (Danish, 1895-1972) Photograph of “Modern Architecture” at Fifth Avenue c. 1923-1924 Vintage gelatin silver print 4 1/2 x 2 3/4 inches (11.4 x 7cm) The Knud Lonberg-Holm Archive from the Marc Dessauce Collection Courtesy Ubu Gallery, New York
Knud Lonberg-Holm (Danish, 1895-1972) Automobile Plant Detroit, 1931 Vintage gelatin silver print 5 1/4 x 4 1/4 inches (13.3 x 10.8cm) Titled on verso The Knud Lonberg-Holm Archive from the Marc Dessauce Collection Courtesy Ubu Gallery, New York
Knud Lonberg-Holm (Danish, 1895-1972) Photograph of Longberg-Holm c. 1923-1924 Vintage gelatin silver print 4 1/2 x 2 3/4 inches (11.4 x 7cm) The Knud Lonberg-Holm Archive from the Marc Dessauce Collection Courtesy Ubu Gallery, New York
Knud Lonberg-Holm (Danish, 1895-1972) 48th Street/St. Nicholas Church scaffolding c. 1923-1924 Vintage gelatin silver print 4 1/2 x 2 3/4 inches (11.4 x 7cm) The Knud Lonberg-Holm Archive from the Marc Dessauce Collection Courtesy Ubu Gallery, New York
Knud Lonberg-Holm (Danish, 1895-1972) Photograph of Antenna c. 1923-1924 Vintage gelatin silver print 4 1/2 x 3 1/2 inches (11.4 x 8.9cm) The Knud Lonberg-Holm Archive from the Marc Dessauce Collection Courtesy Ubu Gallery, New York
Note from Iwao Yamawaki to Knud Lonberg-Holm Dessau, July 9, 1931 The Knud Lonberg-Holm Archive from the Marc Dessauce Collection Courtesy Ubu Gallery, New York
Knud Lonberg-Holm (Danish, 1895-1972) Iwao Yamawaki (Japanese, 1898-1987) (attributed) Knud & his wife Ethel outside of Bauhaus 1931 Vintage gelatin silver print 4 3/8 x 3 3/8 inches (11.1 x 8.6cm) Dated & inscribed on verso The Knud Lonberg-Holm Archive from the Marc Dessauce Collection Courtesy Ubu Gallery, New York
This photo, attributed to the Japanese Bauhaus-trained photographer Iwao Yamawaki, shows Lonberg-Holm and his wife, Ethel (who later became an art director for J. Walter Thompson advertising agency), at the Bauhaus in 1931. A friend of Bauhaus instructors László Moholy-Nagy, Josef Albers, Hannes Meyer, Walter Gropius, and Mies van der Rohe, Lonberg-Holm taught the first foundational course based on the Bauhaus model at the University of Michigan in 1924.
Knud Lonberg-Holm (1895-1972), an overlooked but highly influential Modernist architect, photographer, and pioneer of information design The Knud Lonberg-Holm Archive from the Marc Dessauce Collection Courtesy Ubu Gallery, New York
Ubu Gallery 416 East 59th Street New York 10022 Phone: 212 753 4444
Installation views of Jeff Wall: Tableaux, Pictures, Photographs, 1996-2013 at Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam Photos: Gert Jan van Rooij
What an absolutely beautiful space to show your work. Can you just imagine what you would create if you had the chance!
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Stedelijk Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Jeff Wall (Canadian, b. 1946) Volunteer 1996 Gelatine silver print 221.5 x 313cm Courtesy of the artist
Jeff Wall (Canadian, b. 1946) The Flooded Grave 1998-2000 Transparency in lightbox 225.5 x 282 x 25cm Courtesy of the artist
Jeff Wall (Canadian, b. 1946) Invisible man by Ralp Ellison, The Prologue 1999-2000 Transparency in lightbox 174 x 250 x 25cm Courtesy of the artist
Jeff Wall: Tableaux, Pictures, Photographs, 1996-2013 presents recent work in colour and black and white, and features the new, previously unseen diptych Summer Afternoons (2013). It is the first major photography exhibition to be presented at the Stedelijk following its reopening in 2012.
Since the 1980s, Wall has produced critically acclaimed work in the form of colour transparencies backlit by fluorescent light strips and presented in lightboxes. He was one of the first artists to make photographs on a large scale. The standard lightbox was created for the primary purpose of outdoor advertising. In Wall’s work, this medium became a platform for his figurative tableaux, street scenes and interiors, landscapes and cityscapes. Wall explores themes such as the relationships between men and women and the boundary between metropolis and nature. He offers social commentary on violence and cultural miscommunication, and conjures seductive nightmarish fantasies and personal memories. These scenes provide the basis for photographic reconstructions of Wall’s experience. They derive their inherent suspense from a combination of extreme realism and sometimes elaborate artifice.
The exhibition hinges on the year 1996, which marked a turning point in Wall’s production: It was the first year that he produced black-and-white prints on paper. More immediately than the lightboxes, the black-and-white photographs suggest new relations of his work to documentary themes and aesthetics. But Wall also orchestrates the content of these images, employing tools borrowed from filmmaking. Wall sees photographs as autonomous, independent images and, strictly speaking, all his works are created using photographic means. At the same time, he analyses and expands the visual language of photography by adding elements from painting, cinema, theatre. In choosing his themes, Wall deconstructs common ideas and assumptions, including those relating to his own work. He has, for instance, also shot many “unstaged” images.
Curator Hripsimé Visser said: “Jeff Wall is first and foremost an ‘artist’s artist,’ he is well- known and much loved by other artists, as well as critics. With this exhibition, the Stedelijk hopes to create broader public awareness of Jeff Wall as one of the artists who uniquely and enduringly defined photography as a fine art medium. Wall’s work is classic, yet entirely contemporary at the same time. His themes are both commonplace and tension-filled. What at first seems straightforward and intelligible is also complex and enigmatic. Wall carefully selects his mode of display to be produced with an incredible eye for detail. The large scale of the images is a natural, integral feature of the work.”
Jeff Wall himself chose the title of this exhibition. It is a reference to the layers that can be found in his work. He says, “‘Tableau’ refers to the free-standing, autonomous object we look at from a distance, often when it is hanging on the wall in front of us. ‘Picture’ relates to that special and isolated image within the entire spectrum of image production available in a culture. And ‘photograph’ identifies it in the technical sense, and as medium, distinct from other ways of making tableaux or pictures.” Wall aims to present each photo as an independent, unique image, intended to be seen hanging on a wall, not as reproductions in a book. As such, Wall arranged this presentation to give each individual artwork the space it needs. The monumental scale of the work encourages viewers to experience the space that is evoked in the images. At the same time, the themes and formal and stylistic qualities of the different images prompt viewers to draw comparisons between them.
The exhibition will fan out across the Stedelijk’s former Hall of Honor, two adjacent gallery spaces in the historic building, and the Van den Ende Foundation Gallery in the new wing of the museum. Jeff Wall: Tableaux Pictures Photographs 1996-2013 was curated by Hripsimé Visser, in close collaboration with the artist and in collaboration with Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria, and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaeck, Denmark. The exhibition will travel to both museums.
Jeff Wall grew up in Vancouver and studied at the University of British Columbia and at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. Since the late 1970s, he has been considered one of the art world’s most innovative contemporary photographers. His work has been the subject of recent solo exhibitions at the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich (2013), the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2007), and Tate Modern, London (2005), among others. The Stedelijk Museum first presented Wall’s work in 1985.
Press release from the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam website
Jeff Wall (Canadian, b. 1946) Overpass 2001 Transparency in lightbox 214 x 273.5 x 25cm Courtesy of the artist
Jeff Wall (Canadian, b. 1946) In Front of a Nightclub 2006 Transparency in lightbox 226 x 360 x 30cm Courtesy of the artist
Jeff Wall (Canadian, b. 1946) Knife Throw 2008 Inkjet print 195 x 267cm Courtesy of the artist
Jeff Wall (Canadian, b. 1946) Boy Falls From Tree 2010 Colour photograph 234.3 x 313.7cm Courtesy of the artist
Jeff Wall (Canadian, b. 1946) Boxing 2011 Colour photograph 222.9 x 303.5cm Courtesy of the artist
Forum: Jeff Wall – Artist Talk – 01-03-14
As part of the Public Program in conjunction with Jeff Wall: Tableaux Pictures Photographs 1996-2013 exhibition, the Stedelijk Museum is honoured to present a new stedelijk|forum afternoon with an artist talk by Jeff Wall, introduced by Hripsimé Visser (curator Photography, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam).
Artists represented: Philip Potter, John Storey, John Englart, Barbara Creed, Ponch Hawkes, Rennie Ellis
Curators: Dr Marcus Bunyan and Nicholas Henderson
LAST DAY TOMORROW = MAKE SURE YOU DON’T MISS IT IF YOU ARE IN MELBOURNE!
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to all the artists for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Curator Dr Marcus Bunyan talks about the exhibition Out of the closets, into the streets: Gay Liberation photography 1971-73 at Edmund Pearce Gallery, Melbourne July 2014
John Storey was a self-taught photographer who ran his own commercial photography business from 1979 until his move into academia in 1985. As a free-lance photographer, he documented the Gay Liberation Movement in Sydney as well as contributing photography to several publications including Peter Spearitt’s Sydney since the Twenties (1978); Waterfront Sydney 1860-1920, (1984, 1991) co-authored with Graeme Applin; and Anne Richter’s 1994 publication, Arts and Crafts of Indonesia, (1994). Photographs by John Storey are also included in Peter Spearitt’s history: The Sydney Harbour Bridge: a life (2007, 2011).
John took-up a part-time lecturer’s position in Photography at Charles Sturt University, Wagga Wagga in 1985 where he also established a film society and camera club. In 1986 he accepted a position as Lecturer in Photography at RMIT, where he worked until 2004, by which time he was Associate Professor and Post Graduate Coordinator in the School of Creative Arts. John’s commitment to practice based PhDs and the intersection between the creative and the scholarly was critical to the establishment of that programme. His Doctorate of Creative Arts from the University of Wollongong in 2992 entitled Journals of a Stranger: documents of a life, brings together image and text in a discontinuous narrative using photography, creative and exegetical writing.
As an artist, John’s work was exhibited both nationally and internationally, and he curated a number of exhibitions that reflected his interests in social justice, urban landscape, gender and intimacy for hospitals and old people’s homes. He was a member of the Stills Art Co-operative Melbourne and sat on the Board of Directors at Melbourne’s Centre of Contemporary Photography.
Dogged by ill health for many years, Dr John Storey is remembered as a committed, tenacious and caring teacher, artist and researcher. Charming, witty and a rigorous and progressive thinker, he is greatly missed by his family, friends and colleagues.
Anonymous text. “Obituary: Dr John Storey (1950-2019),” on the Non | Traditional Research Outcomes website April 18, 2019 [Online] Cited 02/11/2022. No longer available online. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Gays held a picnic in the Botannical Gardens, Melbourne during Gay Pride Week. They decided to play spin the bottle after forming a circle – the bottle can be seen at bottom left – and much kissing ensued. Lots of straights stopped to watch and laugh. Someone called the cops and the confrontation occurred that can be seen in the photograph below. Apparently, they were breaking some council by law about not playing games in the gardens, even though families were kicking footballs right next to them on the lawn.
Anonymous photographers Graffiti on Melbourne streets 1971-1973
Phillip Potter Portraits for CAMP Ink magazine 1973
Gay activist Lex Watson is the person in the bottom photograph. Lex sadly died very recently.
Installation photographs
Around the room, surrounded by colour and movement with elements of stillness
Title of the exhibition and opening images
Title of the exhibition with Barbara Creed’s three 35mm black and white photographs
Phillip Potter and John Storey photographs of the first ever Gay Liberation protest in Sydney in 1971 to the right; then Ponch Hawkes four photographs followed by three photographs by Rennie Ellis
Phillip Potter and John Storey photographs of the first ever Gay Liberation protest in Sydney in 1971.
From a series of photographs of the very first gay rights demonstration which attracts 70 people outside NSW Liberal Party headquarters in support of the pre-selection of Tom Hughes against a right wing challenge following his support for homosexual law reform.
John Englart’s five photographs of Sydney Gay Pride Week march 1973 in the centre with Rennie Ellis at right of these
Phillip Potter portraits for CAMP Ink magazine 1973 at left with Graffiti in Melbourne 1971-73 at right
Graffiti in Melbourne 1971-73
Stills from a super 8mm Women’s Liberation march by Barbara Creed, 1973, at left with Phillip Potter portraits for CAMP Ink magazine 1973 at right
Barbara Creed (Australian, b. 1943) Stills from a Super 8mm film of a Women’s Liberation march Melbourne, 1973, printed 2014
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Dr Marcus Bunyan and the best photography archive in Australia sponsor this event artblart.com
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Captain Samuel White Sweet (Australian born England, 1825-1886) Planting the first pole of the Overland telegraph at Darwin on the 15th September, 1870 1870 From glass plate negative B 4638
South Australian photography in the 19th century – daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, tintypes, glass plates and photographic equipment. A fascinating look at our visual past. Moriendo renascor is a latin phrase meaning In death I am reborn. The exhibition runs at the State Library of South Australia till the end of July.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the State Library of South Australia for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
G.B. Goodman (English, ? – 1851) Daguerreotype of a group of actors c. 1850 Daguerreotype of a group of men, possibly actors associated with the Adelaide stage 135mm x 185mm (image); 23cm x 18cm x 2.5cm (case) B 46371
In January 1846, travelling daguerreotype photographer, G.B. Goodman took up a 40 day residency at the rear of Adelaide auctioneer, Emanuel Solomon’s home. Here he created 50 daguerreotype images for Adelaide patrons (Register 21 January 1846). At this time, it had become increasingly common to set up temporary studios at the rear of a building.
According to Jane Messenger in A century in focus: South Australian photography, 1840s-1940s, this daguerreotype differs from others of the period due to its informal nature and the way it flaunts contemporary social and pictorial conventions. Portraits of multiple figures were unusual at the time and usually reserved for family groups. This was due to technical complications related to focal distance, plate sizes and exposure times. Messenger suggests that this image is largely experimental in its composition, and is designed to reveal the photographers sophisticated image creation skills (p. 30). It is also suggested that the man second from right is George Selth Coppin – the father of Australian theatre who lived in Adelaide from 1846 to the end of 1851.
Developed in 1839 by Louis-Jacques-Mande Daguerre and given to the world by the French government, the Daguerreotype was the first photographic method of capturing a scene or a likeness. Despite the difficulty and expense of the Daguerreotype, the process spread rapidly around the world, being first demonstrated in Sydney in 1842 and Adelaide in 1845.
John W. Butler (publisher) Advertisement for Townsend Duryea’s studios Photographic Gallery of Townsend Duryea, south-east corner of Grenfell Street and King William Street National directory of South Australia for 1867-68 1867 Created in Melbourne Object Source:The national directory of South Australia for 1867-68: including a squatters’ directory also a new and correct map of the Colony
In 1867 Townsend Duryea had his photographic gallery on the south-east corner of Grenfell Street and King William Street.
Born in 1823, New Yorker, Townsend Duryea, arrived in South Australia in 1855 and set up a studio on the corner of Grenfell Street and King William Street. He and his brother Sanford were the first photographers known to have worked outside of Adelaide. In a disaster for both the photographer and South Australia his studio caught fire in the early hours of 18 April 1875. Duryea’s entire collection of 60,000 negatives was destroyed.
The Register, reporting on the investigation into the cause of the fire wrote:
“Mr. J. M. Solomon, J.P., on Monday, April 19, held an investigation into the cause of the fire. As the Coroner remarked in summing up, the matter is involved in mystery, and it is just possible that the fire might have resulted from the spontaneous combustion of chemicals used by Mr. Duryea in the prosecution of his business. During the course of the proceedings the Coroner several times checked spectators eager to put questions to witnesses, and stated his view of their position. The Jury returned the following verdict:- “That the premises of Townsend Duryea were destroyed by fire, but that there is not sufficient evidence to show what was its origin.”
South Australian Register April 1875, p. 5.
After the fire he moved to New South Wales where he died in 1888.
Photographer unknown Henry Ayers c. 1848 Daguerreotype PRG 67/48
The oldest known photograph in the State Library’s collection.
This example shows former South Australian Premier Henry Ayers, approximately ten years before he entered parliament. Born in England in 1821, he arrived in South Australia in 1840. He was elected to the first Legislative Council in 1857 and held several positions including chief secretary, premier, and president of the council during his 36 years as a member of parliament. Ayers died on 11 June 1897. Sir Henry Ayers was Premier of South Australia five times between the years 1863 and 1873.
This portrait was accompanied by a note signed by Ayers. It explained that the photo was taken a few years after his appointment as Secretary of the Burra Burra mines in 1845: This was taken by a travelling Artist at the Burra sometime in 1847 or 1848 when I was 26 or 27 years old. It was greatly esteemed by my Dear Wife as a capital likeness of H.A.
The daguerreotype is part of a collection of papers of Sir Henry Ayers, former Premier of South Australia, and of his granddaughter, Lucy Lockett Ayers.
Hammer and Co. Bust of a young woman Rundle Street, c. 1895 Albumen photograph, cabinet card B58331/26
Saul Solomon (Australian born England, 1836-1929) Published by the Adelaide School of Photography Man dressed as Robinson Crusoe 1888 Albumen photograph, cabinet card 99mm x 146mm B 32878
On Monday 30 July 1888 a carnival was held at the Columbia Roller Skating Rink in the Jubilee Exhibition Building, North Terrace, Adelaide. The South Australia Weekly Chronicle, 4 August 1888, reported that over 2,000 persons attended and the floor was reserved for ladies and gentlemen in fancy costume or evening dress and that among the most successful gentlemen’s costumes was a “Robinson Crusoe with a gun and umbrella”.
Cabinet cards were a popular form of family photograph. They often featured the photographer’s details on the front and further description of their services on the reverse.
Photographer unknown Leslie Quinn and W. Dunk c. 1890 Tintype B 47091
I just love how the jacket of the lad on the right is about two sizes too small for him. As though he is growing so fast into adulthood, his arms elongating so quickly, that he has outrun the life of his jacket ~ Marcus
Photographer unknown Leslie Quinn and W. Dunk (detail) c. 1890 Tintype B 47091
Unknown photographer Tom Thumb c. 1880 From a glass plate negative
Michael Pynn was born at Baker’s Flat in 1860. In his obituary, the Kapunda Herald (July 5 1929, p. 2), reported that Mickey was known from the late 1870s as the Australian Tom Thumb.
“It was toward the late seventies that General Tom Thumb, of England, visited Australia, and the tour of his little company included Kapunda. It was this circumstance that brought Micky Pynn into prominence, and later into almost world-wide notoriety. He made a career as a circus clown and travelled the world.”
Michael Pynn died in Sydney on 22 June 1929.
Frederick Charles Krichauff (Australian, 1861-1954) From the Adelaide Town Hall c. 1880 Photograph
View of the General Post Office (GPO) from the Albert Tower of the Adelaide Town Hall, showing Victoria Square with horse drawn cabs, and the GPO clock showing 1.23 pm.
The State Library holds many thousands of glass plate negatives including a number by amateur photographer Frederick Krichauff (1861-1954). We also hold three of his photograph albums and these may be viewed online via the Library’s catalogue. Krichauff was an architect and a keen member of the Royal Philatelic Society. He lived at Portrush Road, Toorak Gardens.
State Library of South Australia Kintore Ave, Adelaide SA 5000 Phone: (08) 8207 7250
Exhibition dates: Tuesday 22nd July – Saturday 26th July, 2014
Artists represented: Philip Potter, John Storey, John Englart, Barbara Creed, Ponch Hawkes, Rennie Ellis
Curators: Dr Marcus Bunyan and Nicholas Henderson
Figure 1 Photographer unknown The original eight hour day banner 1856
This is my catalogue essay that accompanies the exhibition Out of the closets, into the streets: gay liberation photography 1971-73 at Edmund Pearce Gallery, Melbourne. It’s a bit of a read (3,000 words) but stick with it. I hope you like the insights into the background of the images and the people in the exhibition.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to all the artists for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image. Download the Being (t)here catalogue essay (2.2Mb pdf)
Being (t)here: Gay liberation photography in Australia 1971-73
“For the colour and the soundtrack to be part of the politics, even a central part of the politics… meant something new by way of embodiment. Much of the political action was about being there, about putting one’s body on the line. A demonstration, sit-in or blockade is centrally about occupying space. A nonviolent movement tried to occupy space with bodies, not bullets.
It was a key feature of the new left that this embodied politics couldn’t stop in the streets: that is, the public arena as conventionally understood. ‘Being there’ politically also applied to households, classrooms, sexual relations, workplaces and the natural environment.”1
I came out as a gay man in 1975, six years after Stonewall and only a few short years after the photographs in this exhibition were taken. The first open acknowledgement of my nascent sexuality was to walk into a newsagent in Notting Hill Gate, London, head down, red as a beetroot and pick up a copy of Gay Times. I literally flung the money at the person behind the counter and ran out. I was so embarrassed. I was seventeen.
From the gay rag I found the name of the local convenor of the Campaign for Homosexual Equality (CHE) and went to meet him at his home. John was the very first openly gay man that I had ever met. We became lifelong friends. He used to hold coffee evenings a couple of times a week in his flat so that the local gay men had somewhere safe and secure to meet – to chat and laugh, to talk about love and life. Once a month there was a pub that we all went to in the country for a bit of a dance night, but that was it unless you went up to London to a nightclub.
None of us were very active politically, although we kept an eye on the papers and we all understood the discrimination and persecution we faced. But by the very act of being openly gay, as most of us were, we were making a political statement. I was openly gay at college in London and stopped “passing” as something I was not (a straight man) by coming out to my family and friends. I placed my being – there, there and there, in different contexts, so that my family, friends and the community could not ignore my sexuality. I never lived in fear but there was a great deal of self-loathing going on behind the scenes. In those days you were always thought of as “abnormal” and defective if you were a poofter. And there was the guilt of that association. As James Nichols observes, “To be gay or lesbian meant belonging to a genealogy of suffering, to have a dramatic, if not a tragic, destiny. Despite the many battles and certain victories that ensued, the homosexual remained a victim in the collective consciousness; a hidden man.”2 William Leonard continues the theme: “If concealment is a psychic wounding that divides each gay man against himself, it is also a collective division that precludes the forms of public association and political affiliation on which gay liberation depends. As gay men confront their own internalised feelings of self-recrimination, if not disgust, they begin to rattle the closet door and seek out, in public, others of their own kind.”3 And rattle the closet door I did. I flaunted my hi-vis identity for all to see. If the liberation movement meant putting your body on the line – not so much by consciously protesting on the streets but by being visible in whatever setting as a gay man – then I certainly did that.
Photography documented this Gay Liberation thing, the emergence in public and private of gay people. It not only documented this visibility but also represented it in very aesthetic and artistic ways that up until now have not really been recognised as such. This is where the photographs in this exhibition make their presence known. As gay people found their voice in the early 1970s artists, often at the very beginning of their careers, were there to capture meetings in lounge rooms, consciousness raising groups and street protests. The photographer as artist was not just a witness to these events but actively participated in these actions, which they envisioned in a subjective way. Unlike earlier images of protest marches where there is an observational distance between the photographer / event which allowed for the depiction of environment and numbers (for example in the 8 hour day marches, see figures 1-4) – from the mid-1960s onwards there is a seismic shift in how photographs represent social change and observed history. Now the photographer marches with the inmates and becomes an intimate participant in the proceedings (see figures 5-6).
In this revolutionary era, the artist evidences an empathy with the events being photographed, an up close and personal point of view. Whatever meeting or protest they were there to record was important to them, be it anti-Vietnam war, anti-Apartheid, pro abortion, nuclear disarmament, Gay Liberation, Women’s Liberation, Aboriginal rights, anti-fascist marches and student protests from around the world. And it didn’t matter whether the photographers were gay, straight or whatever. People appropriated public and private space as a form of collective activism, using social movement cultures to re-make the world. The ways of imagining life and transformation, of imaging life and transformation were enabled by the photographer actively participating in these events. The photographer’s “second sight” did not consist in “seeing” but in being there.
As Professor Barbara Creed states of her interest in artistically documenting these actions, “I was very keen on the slogan – ‘The personal is political’. I was in favour of political action of all kinds – direct action, demonstrations, marches, meetings, consciousness raising groups, media publicity, television appearances, coming out at work, talks to schools etc. I was also very interested in the possibility of using artistic practices (film, photography, poetry, fiction, art) to build solidarity among gay people and to help change public opinion.”4
While “the early demonstrations illustrated in this exhibition did often include sympathetic “straights” – a term that seems to have disappeared from the language – for whom gay liberation was part of a wider set of cultural issues,”5 for gay men pictured in the photographs these meetings and marches could be seen as a form of “coming out”, or a place to find solidarity, friendship or sex.6 Gay Pride Week in 1973, for example, was seen as a chance to target, “all the institutions of our oppression: the police courts, job discrimination, the bigoted churchmen and politicians, the media, the psychiatrists, the aversion therapists, the military, the schools, the universities, the work-places … It will also seek to change the mind of the prejudiced, the fearful, the conditioned, the sexually repressed, all those who in oppressing us, oppress themselves.”7 It was also intended to say to gay and straight alike, “gay is good, gay is proud, gay is aggressively fighting for liberation. It will say to gays: come out and stand up. Only you can win your own liberation. Come out of the ghettos, the bars and beats, from your closets in suburbia and in your own minds and join the struggle for your own liberation.”8
For photographers it was a chance to picture a changing world. As Sydney photographer Roger Scott has observed, “I knew I could make a point with my camera. It was exciting. The old conservative world was ending and a new Australia was beginning.”9 With the birth of a new Australia came the end of the White Australia policy when the Whitlam Government passed laws to ensure that race would be totally disregarded as a component for immigration to Australia in 1973; with it came the presence of gay people on the streets shouting ‘come out, come out, wherever you are’ – but certainly not in the newspapers or on television for there was, essentially, the suppression of any reference to, or reportage of ‘homosexuals’ in the mainstream press in Australia.10 If they were pictured, gay people still usually turned away from the camera or had their faces blacked out for fear of discrimination and abuse. As artist John Storey notes, “Conservatism flooded the media, government and all the rest. Homophobia was everywhere but was not a term used in public.”11
As for what prompted artists to document organisations and events, Professor Creed remarks, “I loved to film life around me. I had access to good equipment. I thought it was important to have a visual record of the emergence of Gay Liberation. I believed that films and photos would help to create a sense of community for everyone involved in Gay Liberation. Many members of Gay Lib had been ‘closeted’ all of their lives and so it was a new experience for them to join what is best described as an alternative family. In those days, the Gay Lib group was relatively small – perhaps 30-40 members, so we all knew each other. We held regular meetings, joined CR groups, took part in demonstrations, went away for weekend group events, held dances etc. I also wanted to capture the way we looked, couples together, friends, what we wore, our fashions and styles. Some of the guys had a fantastic sense of style – much more than many of the women who were in revolt against ‘feminine’ fashion. I hoped my films and photos would give support to the gay community and to our emerging sense of forming a new identity.”12
By their very embodiment, the art and politics of these photographs awakens what Roland Barthes calls the “intractable reality” of the image 13 – that prick of consciousness (the punctum), that madness that documents activism and freedom from persecution as both aesthetic and ethical, performative and political. Here, the idea of “being there” – being fully present, in mind and body; being there at the marches; being in the images; being in front of the image looking at it; coupled with the physical presence of the photograph, manifests itself most strongly. Even today, the photographs shock the viewer with their intractable reality. You can just feel the passion of these people, the police presence, the fear, and the authenticity of the photographers’ voice – raw, in your face, people really standing up to be counted.
There is also another side to these photographs – the documentation of the more private moments (meetings, consciousness raising groups, friends in the car etc) and the portrayal of gays one on one, close up and personal with the camera in mugshots used in a grid for the cover of CAMP Ink magazine in 1972. Only today can we truly appreciate the intimacy and beauty of these photographs: the photographs of two young gay men in the back of a VW Kombi van that exists only as a 35mm contact print, now scanned and rescued from oblivion; or the presence of gays posing for the camera against a neutral backdrop, every pore of their skin able to be seen (a precursor to the large colour portraits of Thomas Ruff). As Professor Creed states of her desire to capture these intimate moments, “In the 70s film, media and television rarely if ever depicted us at all – let alone our public or private lives. I have always been drawn to the aesthetic power of film and photography to represent the inner world and inner lives of people. The visual image is a great leveller – it reveals the commonality of living things, the need for affection, companionship, community. Contrary to popular myths of the time, gays and lesbians also have a need for intimacy, as does everyone else. When I made my documentary, Homosexuality A Film For Discussion, I included a segment of intimate moments between couples before the commencement of the documentary street interviews, to link the two (private and public together) and to show that many of the negative comments from the general public about loneliness did not match the actual lives of gay people.”14
So where did the photographs that were taken by these artists end up? Often they were collectively passed from hand to hand and used in newsletters, pamphlets and magazines such as CAMP Ink. As Jill Matthews, who compiled the album of Adelaide photographs observes, “The groups and events were very collective enterprises. In those days anyone who had a camera took photos. If people took photos of you, you asked for copies or they gave you prints. There were many prints made and various people had copies. At the time the use of the photos was personal and collective. The newsletters were collective enterprises with everyone chipping in, using whatever was to hand. There was no editor, although some efforts were made to achieve a sense of continuity. Making the newsletters were always fun group events, with a lot of different things you could do, they were basically parties really.”15
Eventually the photographs settled in personal archives and were largely forgotten or were donated to institutions such as the Australian Lesbian and Gay Archives (now the Australian Queer Archives). And then they all but disappeared from view.
A second (but different) “coming out”
With this exhibition these eclectic photographs re-emerge in a kind of second “coming out.” Having been put away for so many years they appear in the clear light of day, in the clear light of new thinking about their artistic merit and how they act as memory aids to feelings and relationships, events and politics.
While analogue photographic images carry Roland Barthes imprint ‘this has been’ – in other words, a photograph is a depiction of something that has already happened, that is already dead – images do not have fixed or settled meanings. As Scott McQuire insightfully observes, meaning in images “is always transactive: it is the result of complex and dynamic processes of interpretation, contestation and translation. Evidence and testimony is always to be actively produced in the complex present… the photograph’s combination of unprecedented visual detail, which seems to anchor the image in a particular time and place, [is] coupled to the endless capacity for images to travel into new times and places.”16 He goes on to say that photographic history is littered with images that have their meaning altered by entry into a new setting. The images in this exhibition are a case in point for I am examining them as artworks as much as they can be seen as documentary evidence of things that have been.
We should not be afraid of this new interpretation for, as McQuire notes, “Too often when we talk about ‘context’ in relation to a photograph, it is as if there is a finite set of connections that might be fully reproduced, if only we had the time or resources. In other words, the polysemy of the image is given a cursory and limited acknowledgement, in the hope that it can be thereby tamed. Rather than this partial, rather defensive acknowledgement of the fragility of meaning, I am arguing that we need to begin with acceptance of the irreducible openness of technological images. This quality is integrally related to the capacity of any image to circulate and appear in new situations.”17 In other words there is no definitive context for any image and we should not be afraid to approach new interpretations of the work or the coexistence of many possible meanings within that work. This process can be seen as analogous in a contextual sense to the construction of what the French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859-1941) called the ‘composite’ in the physical sense, which he defined as, “construction / model where things different in kind are reconciled through our experience over time. Differences are reconciled not unified. The composite embraces ideas of complexity and multiplicity, allowing different conventions, materials and contents to coexist in an artwork. It therefore permits complexities and relationships of readings to coexist. The viewer becomes aware of new and shifting layers of content revealed over the time of viewing, and of our role in constructing, interpreting and experiencing content(s). This is not just theoretical, it is the way we experience and negotiate the world everyday, as complexity in the continuum of time and space.”18 The viewer thus creates a composite view of these images in the here and now.
The images importance, then, lies in the interplay between the historical and the contemporary, between self-representation and imposed representation, and the relationship between subject and photographer. Their residence in the Australian Lesbian and Gay Archives (ALGA) archive (now the Australian Queer Archives (AQuA), which undoubtedly preserves them, marks this institutional passage, this transition of marginalised histories from private to public, “which does not always mean from the secret to the non-secret.” Under the privileged topology of ALGA they are classified and ordered and made available for study and research, but we must also acknowledge that archives give shape to and regulate cultural memory. They influence our perception of the past and present. As Jacques Derrida writes in Archive Fever: “”There is no political power without control of the archive, if not of memory.” He indicates that the stakes are high over the memorialisation and excavation of sites and people’s histories.”19 This does not mean that ALGA does not promote an active engagement with the works it holds in safe keeping, far from it. They encourage the use of the archive by artists and the recontextualisation and renarrativisation of the images in this exhibition, from documentary objects to visual art works and back again, could not have occurred without their forthright help. But as Mathias Danbolt notes in his excellent article Not Not Now: Archival Engagements in Queer Feminist Art, archives will always be sites of contestation: “The conversations on archives in queer and feminist contexts tend to center on ways to break with the strictures and structures of archival logics, in order to give room for alternative forms of historical (and herstorical) transmissions. But even though archival logics tend to be a continual object of critique in feminist and queer work, the desire for archives is still present… If the process of archivisation is fundamentally about conferring historical status upon material, how to avoid that the status as archival disconnect the queer feminist “past” from the “present” – the “then” from the “now”?”20 Danbolt goes on to suggest that this process is a balancing act, “between the desire for having a history, and the anxiety for being historicised, in the sense of being cut off – metaphorically, practically, systemically – from the present.”21
For me, then, this exhibition is as much about freeing these images from the guardianship of the archive, if ever so briefly, to let them live again in the real world, to let them speak for themselves, as those first gay protesters did all those years ago. To free them of the shackles of being seen as “historical” documentary photographs, the official history of gay liberation in Australia and for them to be seen works of art in their own right. It is about the representation of queer identity through the evidence of photography – from that place, in that time, now breathing in a different era, these people fighting for their liberty.
It is about these images and the people in them being (t)here.
In contemporary society, where we are flooded with a maelstrom of images, I believe it is important to contemplate these images for more than just a few seconds in order to understand their history and importance not just for the past, but also for the present and the future. Today, we compose our stories and our histories out of fragments and alterations of spaces. We gather together our sources (in archives, for example) and try and make sense of the past in the present for the future. This process of understanding is about an acknowledgement of the past in the present for the future.
Again I say, it is about being (t)here.
In an era of ubiquitous media images, the photographs in this exhibition deserve our attention and contemplation for they are survivors – images that perceptively visualise the initial stages of Gay Liberation in Australia, images that are still alive in the present. Their contemporary re-emergence may lead the community to finally have some iconographic images of the early stages of gay resistance and visibility – intimate representations of protests, meetings and events that ultimately changed the lives of many GLBTI people. They may also have some damn good art upon which to feast their eyes.
Dr Marcus Bunyan July 2014
Word count: 3,423
Endnotes
1/ Connell, Raewyn. “Ours is in colour: the new left of the 1960s,” in Carolyn D’Cruz and Mark Pendleton (eds.,). After Homosexual: The Legacies of Gay Liberation. Perth: UWA Publishing, 2013, p. 43.
3/ Leonard, William. “Altman on Halperin: politics versus aesthetics in the constitution of the male homosexual,” in Carolyn D’Cruz and Mark Pendleton (eds.,). After Homosexual: The Legacies of Gay Liberation. Perth: UWA Publishing, 2013, p. 197.
4/ Email text in response to the question ‘What were your politics during your involvement with Gay Liberation/events (Gay Pride Week etc)’ to co-curator Nicholas Henderson 01/06/2014.
7/ Anon. “Gay Pride Week,” in Melbourne Gay Liberation Newsletter, 1973 quoted in Ritale, Jo and Willett, Graham. “Rennie Ellis at Gay Pride Week, September 1973,” in The La Trobe Journal No. 87, May 2011, pp. 87-88 [Online] Cited 11/07/2014.
8/ Ibid., p. 88.
9/ Scott, Roger quoted in Scott, Roger; McFarlane, Robert and Hock, Peter. Roger Scott: from the street. Neutral Bay, N.S.W.: Chapter & Verse, 2001, p. 13.
10/ Email text from co-curator Nicholas Henderson 12/03/2014.
11/ Email text from John Storey to co-curator Nicholas Henderson 17/05/2014.
12/ Email text in response to the question ‘What prompted you to document the organisations/events?’ to co-curator Nicholas Henderson 01/06/2014.
13/ Barthes, Roland. Camera lucida: Reflections on photography. Hill and Wang, 1st American edition, 1981.
14/ Email text in response to the question ‘One of the aspects of your photographs that I am quite intrigued by is the documentation of the more private moments (meetings, consciousness raising groups, friends in the car etc), what brought you to photograph these subjects?’ to co-curator Nicholas Henderson 01/06/2014.
15/ Jill Matthews notes from telephone conversation to Nicholas Henderson, Tuesday 22 April 2014.
16/ McQuire, Scott. “Photography’s afterlife: Documentary images and the operational archive,” in Journal of Material Culture 18(3) 2013, p. 227.
17/ Ibid.,
18/ Thomas, David. “Composite Realities Amid Time and Space: Recent Art and Photograph,” on the Centre for Contemporary Photography website [Online] Cited 12/07/2014. No longer available online
19/ Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996, 4, note 1 quoted in Eckersall, Peter. “The Site is a Stage/The Stage is a Site,” on the Archaeology and Narration blog, Saturday, April 9, 2011 [Online] Cited 05/07/2014.
20/ Danbolt, Mathias. “Not Not Now: Archival Engagements in Queer Feminist Art,” in Imhoff, Aliocha and Quiros, Kantuta (eds.,). Make an effort to remember. Or, failing that, invent. Bétonsalon No. 14, 2013, p. 4. ISSN: 2114-155X.
21/ Ibid., p. 5.
Figure 2 John F. Shale (Australian, 1855-1924) Mounted police assembled in the square during the General Strike, Brisbane 1912
Figure 3 Photographer unknown Eight Hour Day parade in Brisbane 1912
Figure 4 Photographer unknown Women evening students’ float on Park Street in the 1940s Photo, Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW
Emmet Gowin is a superlative photographic artist. His images possess a unique sensuality that no other artist, save Frederick Sommer, dare approach.
His own family was an early significant subject matter, one to which only he had ready access. “I was wondering about in the world looking for an interesting place to be, when I realised that where I was already interesting.”1
I feel (imperative word) that the photographs of his family are his strongest work for they image an intimate story, and Gowin is nothing if not a magnificent storyteller. Look at the beauty of images such as Nancy, Danville (Virginia) (1969, above) or Ruth, Danville (Virginia) (1968, below) and understand what awareness it takes – first to visualise, then capture on the negative, then print these almost mystical moments of time.
As Gowin observed in his senior thesis, which was predicated upon the necessary co-ingredients of art and spirituality, “Art is the presence of something mysterious that transports you to a place where life takes on a clearness that it ordinarily lacks, a transparency, a vividness, a completeness.”2 He complemented this understanding of art and spirituality with an interest in science. He was in harmony with the physicists and the scientists, finding them to be the most poetic people of the age.3 Inspired by Sommer, Gowin perfected his printing technique through a respect for the medium, respect for the materials and conviction as to what the materials were capable of doing.4
“Sommer freely shared with Gowin his knowledge of photographic equipment, materials, chemicals and printing techniques and Gowin often repeats Sommer’s admonition to him: “Don’t let anyone talk you out of physical splendour.” Over the years Gowin developed methods of printing born from patient experimentation and a love of craft. His background in painting and drawing taught him that there are many solution to making a finished work of art… which he often builds to achieve the most satisfying integration of elements: “The mystery of a beautiful photograph really is revealed when nothing is obscured. We recognise that nothing has been withheld from us, so that we must complete its meaning. We are returned, it seems directly, to the sense and smell of its origin… A complete print is simply a fixed set of relationships, which accommodates its parts as well as our feelings. Clusters of stars in the sky are formed by us into constellations. Perhaps I feel that this constellation has enough stars, and doesn’t need any more. This grouping is complete. It feels right. Feeling, alone, tells us when a print is complete.””5
His later more universal work, such as the landscapes and aerial photographs, are no less emphatic than the earlier personal work but they are a second string to the main bow. The initial impetus of this work can be seen in the book Emmet Gowin Photographs as a development from still life photographs such as Geography Pages, 1974 (p. 62). This second theme took Gowin longer to develop but his photographs are no less powerful for it. His photographs of Petra possess the most amazing serenity of any taken at this famous site; his photographs of Mount St Helens after the volcanic eruption and the aerial photographs of nuclear sites and aeration ponds are among the strongest aerial photographs that I have ever seen. Gowin’s experimentation with the development of the negative, using different times and developers; his experimentation with the development of the print, sometimes using multiple developers and monotones or strong / subtle split toning (as can be seen in the photographs below) is outstanding. His poetic ability rouses the senses and is munificent but for me these photographs do not possess the “personality” or significance of his earlier family photographs. But only just, and we are talking fractions here!
“These photographs of the tracings of human beings reveal mankind not as a nurturer but as a blind and godlike power. Even his latest aerial agricultural landscapes made on route to nuclear sites have a magnificent indifference to human scale. For Gowin, confrontation of man’s part in the creation of ecological problems would seem to require the most transcendental point of view, and as his subjects have become more difficult and frightening, he has created his lushest and most seductive prints.”6
Gowin is an artist centred in a space of sensibility. An understanding of the interrelationships between people and the earth is evidenced through aware and clearly seen images. Gowin digs down into the essence of the earth in order to understand our habituation of it. How we fail to change the course we are on even as we recognise what it is that we are doing to the world. When the stimulus is constantly repeated there is a reduction of psychological or behavioural response and this is what Gowin pokes a big stick at. As he observes,
“We are products of nature. We are nature’s consciousness and awareness, the custodians of this planet… We begin as the intimate person that clings to our mother’s breast, and our conception of the world is that interrelationship. Out safety depends on that mother. And now I’m beginning to see that there’s a mother larger than the human mother and it’s the earth; if we don’t take care of that we will have lost everything.”7
I was luck enough to meet Emmet Gowin when he visited Australia in 1995. He had an exhibition in the small gallery in Building 2 in Bowens Lane at RMIT University, presented a public lecture and held a workshop with about 20 students. I remember I was bowled over by his intensity and star power and I admit, I asked a stupid question. The impetuousness of youth with stars in their eyes certainly got the better of me. Now when I look at the work again I am still in awe of the works sincerity, spirituality, sensuality and respect for subject matter. No matter what he is photographing.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ Gowin, Emmet quoted in Chahroudi, Martha. “Introduction,” in Emmet Gowin Photographs. Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1990, p. 10. 2/ Ibid., p. 9. 3/ Ibid., p. 11. 4/ Ibid., p. 11. 5/ Gowin quoted in Kelly, Jain (ed.,). Darkroom 2. New York, 1978, p. 43 quoted in Chahroudi, Martha. “Introduction,” in Emmet Gowin Photographs. Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1990, p. 11. 6/ Chahroudi, Op. cit., p. 15. 7/ Ibid., p. 15.
Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“For me, pictures provide a means of holding, intensely, a moment of communication between one human and another.”
“There is a profound silence that whines in the ear, a breathless quiet, as if the light or something unheard was breathing. I hold my breath to make certain it’s not me. It must be the earth itself breathing.
Emmet Gowin, the catalog accompanying a retrospective now touring in Spain, is a great introduction to the artist’s works and a great keepsake for a fan. The writings by Keith Davis, Carlos Gollonet and Gowin himself identify the photographer’s humanist and spiritual roots and detail his journey from 1960’s-era people pictures focused on his wife, Edith and family in Danville, VA, to aerial photographs of ravaged landscapes, like the nuclear test grounds in Nevada, and his most recent project archiving tropical, nocturnal-moths.
While his disparate bodies of work may look like geologic shifts in subject matter, Gowin talks in the book about the spiritual quest he’s on, and his realisation that humankind inhabits the land, and that the land is a vital part of who we are. To my eye, what holds all the works together is Gowin’s never-ceasing focus on non-conventional beauty. His way of photographing both people and the wasted landscapes plays up the dark sublime. These are not traditional pretty pictures, but they are exquisitely beautiful. All Gowin photos smoulder with emotion and feel like they were snapped with a breath held, bated with desire.
From May 14th to July 27th 2014, Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson will hold an exhibition of the American photographer Emmet Gowin. This important retrospective is showing 130 prints of one of the most original and influential photographer of these last forty years. This exhibition shows on two floors his entire career: his most famous series from the end of the sixties, the moths’ flights and the aerial photographs. The exhibition organised by Fundación MAPFRE in collaboration with Fondation HCB is accompanied by a catalogue published by Xavier Barral edition.
Born in Danville (Virginia) in 1941, Emmet Gowin grows up in Chincoteague Island, in a religious family. His father, a Methodist minister gives him a righteous discipline and a strict education, while his mother, musician, was a gentle, nurturing presence. During his spare time, Emmet encounters the surrounding landscape and begins drawing.
He completes his high school education and enrols in a local business school in 1951 and works at the same time at the design department of Sears, the multinational department store chain. In 1961, Gowin enters in the Commercial Art Department at Richmond Professional Institute, where he studies drawing, painting, graphic design, and history of Art. After a few months, he realises that photography is the best mean of expression and gives him the possibility to seize the Fate and the Unexpected.
Gowin’s early photographic influences came in the form of books and catalogues such as Images à la Sauvette by Henri Cartier-Bresson, History of Photography by Beaumont Newhall or Walker Evans’s American Photographs. Emmet Gowin acquires his first Leica 35mm in 1962 and after two years spent observing the Masters of photography, he finally feels ready to affirm his own photographic style. In 1963, he goes for the first time in New York and meets Robert Franck who encouraged him.
The first Gowin’s portfolios realised in 1965, is technically simple in approach. While the subjects vary considerably, all are drawn from everyday life: kids playing outdoors, Edith’s family, adults in the streets or squares, cars and early pictures of Edith. They get married in 1964. Edith Morris and Emmet Gowin are born in the same city but they grew up in totally different families. Edith’s one, was more exuberant and emotionally close than Emmet’s. As we can discover in the first floor of the exhibition, Edith and her family are the heart of the photograph’s creative universe. As mentioned by Carlos Gollonet, curator of the exhibition, Gowin’s work, seen cumulatively, is a portrait of the artist.
In 1965, they move to Providence, and Emmet begins his studies with Harry Callahan at Rhode Island School of Design. He begins to consistently use a 4 x 5 inch view camera from this time on. This bigger negative produced prints with beautiful transparent details and correspondingly finer and smoother tonal scale.
Just before his first son’s birth, Elijah, in 1967, Emmet and Edith moved to Ohio, where he begins teaching at the Dayton Art Institute. This marks the start of a teaching career that spans more than four decades. He concentrates his work on Edith and let us going through his private life and proposes a very personal artistic vision of this work: I do not feel that I can make picture impersonally, but that I am affected by and involved with the situations which lead to, or beyond, the making of the pictures. In these years, he met Ralph Eugene Meatyard and Frederik Sommer, who would become his close friend and mentor.
At the end of the 1960’s, Gowin begins making circular images of Edith, her family, and their own household, both indoors and out. The Gowin’s second son, Isaac, born in 1974, was the subject – both before and after birth – of many of these circular 8×10 inch photographs, which give the impression of looking through a keyhole. At the beginning of the 1970’s, the exhibitions at the Light Gallery and MoMA mark a significant step toward his American success. In 1973, he’s appointed Lecturer at Princeton University. He is later appointed Full Professor, a position he will hold until his retirement in 2009. He inspired a new generation of photographers such as Fazal Sheikh, David Maisel or Andrew Moore.
From 1973, Gowin goes back to sources, nature and landscape and introduces the idea of Working Landscapes in which the contributions of many generations, overtime, shape the use and care of the land. He travels in Europe, Ireland and Italy, where he discovered the ancient Etruscan city of Matera. His first monograph, Emmet Gowin: photographs, is published in 1976. In 1982, the Queen Noor of Jordan, one of Gowin’s students at Princeton, invites him to photograph the archeological site of Petra. Some of these photos are exhibited on the second floor of the foundation. Later, he continues making views of nature and traveled overseas, reverting to a traditional rectangular format. His interest in gardens and the historical balance between nature and human culture stimulates a dedication to a larger landscape, recorded first from the ground and then from the air. He photographs the incredible destruction of the Mount St. Helens volcano, Washington, and spent years recording the inhabited – and often scarred – face of the American West. Gowin is not an environmental activist. Nonetheless, once he comes to know and experience these landscapes his acute moral and intellectual sense is also conveyed in his images. He wants to show the conflict that exists in our relationship with nature. “It is not a call for an action … It’s a call for reflection, meditation and consideration to be on a more intimate basis with the world.”
Over the past few years, Gowin has constantly photographed nocturnal moths. His scientific interest has led him to catalog thousands of species working alongside with biologists in tropical jungles. By chance, he traveled with a cutout silhouette of Edith in his wallet or luggage and produced a series of photographs in which Edith is once again the principal subject, in this case through her silhouette. They recall the instrument known as the physionotrace, a forerunner of the earliest photographs which was used to male silhouette reproducing the images of loved ones. Those images, printed on handmade paper with the silver image gold toned confirm that Emmet Gowin is one of the finest photographers of any period.
Press release from the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson website
The aerial photos, taken while flying over bomb test sites and waste water catchment basins and other scenes of industrial/military destruction are almost abstract to the eye. They are also very beautiful. Getting nose to nose with these works and reading the title card, however, allows the slowly-dawning realisation that you are looking at a full blown horror. This suite of works dates from 1980 when Gowin took to the air to view the aftermath of the Mt. St. Helens volcanic eruption in Washington state and was taken with the way things not visible from “human” space below revealed themselves from above. In 1986 he started exploring man-made industrial inroads into the land from the air, flying over Hanford Reservation, for one, where nuclear reactors and chemical separation plants made scars on the land like nothing nature had done. These are truly devastating pictures, and what makes them more so is the thought that this is the tip of the iceberg and that many other sites on earth bear the scars of man-made intrusion.
Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933) Body Builder on Venice Beach, California 1964 Gelatin silver print 8 1/4 x 12 1/4 in. Courtesy of Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York
An exhibition that questions the ways in which our contemporary understanding of beauty has been constructed and framed through the body and invites a deeper reading of beauty, its impact on mass culture and individuals and how the display of beauty affects the ways in which we see and interpret the world and ourselves. According to author and historian Barbara Summers: “Beauty is power. And the struggle to have the entire range of Black beauty recognised and respected is a serious one.”
If beauty is only skin deep, and colour deep, why the need to differentiate? Surely it doesn’t matter what colour your skin, beauty just is. You know it when you see it, regardless of colour. Not everything is about power; not everything is a site of contestation… to me, recognising true beauty is an acknowledgement of the light that shines from within, not something that is imposed from without. When you see true beauty, you know it instinctively. Intuitively. Enough of this posing – are you image or essence?
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“That there are so few images of African-American women circulating in popular culture or in fine art is disturbing; the pathology behind it is dangerous … We got a sistah in the White House, and yet mediated culture excludes us, denies us, erases us. But in the face of refusal, I insist on making work that includes us as part of the greater whole,” said Carrie Mae Weems in a 2009 interview conducted by Dawoud Bey for ‘BOMB Magazine’.
Edward Curtis (American, 1868-1952) A Desert Queen 1898 (printed 2009) Modern digital print 20 x 16 inches Special Collections, University of Washington Libraries
Theodore Fonville Winans (American, 1911-1992) Dixie Belles, Central Louisiana 1938 Courtesy of the Ogden Museum of Southern Art and Bob Winans
Leonard Freed (American, 1929-2006) Harlem Fashion Show, Harlem 1963 Gelatin silver print 17 x 21 1/4 inches Magnum Photos
Anthony Barboza (African-American, b. 1944) Pat Evans c. 1970s Digital print 24 1/2 x 24 inches Courtesy of the photographer
Anthony Barboza (African-American, b. 1944) ‘Marvelous’ Marvin Hagler, boxer 1981 Gelatin silver print
Exploring contemporary understandings of beauty, Posing Beauty in African American Culture frames the notion of aesthetics, race, class, and gender within art, popular culture, and political contexts. The exhibition – and its companion, Identity Shifts – will be on view April 26 – July 27, 2014.
Posing Beauty in African American Culture examines the contested ways in which African and African American beauty has been represented in historical and contemporary contexts through a diverse range of media including photography, film, video, fashion, advertising, and other forms of popular culture such as music and the Internet. The exhibition explores contemporary understandings of beauty by framing the notion of aesthetics, race, class, and gender within art, popular culture, and political contexts. The exhibition is organised by the Department of Photography & Imaging at New York University, Tisch School of the Arts, traveled by Curatorial Assistance Traveling Exhibitions, and curated by Dr. Deborah Willis. The touring exhibition is made possible in part by the JP Morgan Chase Foundation. Additional support has been provided by grants from the Tisch School of the Arts Office of the Dean’s Faculty Development Fund, Visual Arts Initiative Award from the NYU Coordinating Council for Visual Arts, and NYU’s Advanced Media Studio. Drawn from public and private collections, Posing Beauty features approximately 85 works by artists such as Carrie Mae Weems, Charles “Teenie” Harris, Eve Arnold, Gary Winogrand, Sheila Pree Bright, Leonard Freed, Renee Cox, Anthony Barboza, Bruce Davidson, Mickalene Thomas, and Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe.
Posing Beauty is divided into three thematic sections. The first theme, Constructing a Pose, considers the interplay between the historical and the contemporary, between self-representation and imposed representation, and the relationship between subject and photographer. The second theme, Body and Image, questions the ways in which our contemporary understanding of beauty has been constructed and framed through the body. The last section, Modeling Beauty and Beauty Contests, invites a deeper reading of beauty, its impact on mass culture and individuals and how the display of beauty affects the ways in which we see and interpret the world and ourselves.
According to author and historian Barbara Summers: “Beauty is power. And the struggle to have the entire range of Black beauty recognised and respected is a serious one.”
Press release from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts website
John W. Mosley (American, 1907-1969) Atlantic City, Four Women c. 1960s Gelatin silver print 20 x 16 inches Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection, Temple University
Huey Percy Newton (February 17, 1942 – August 22, 1989) was an African-American political and urban activist who, along with Bobby Seale, co-founded the Black Panther Party in 1966. Newton had a long series of confrontations with law enforcement, including several convictions, while he participated in political activism. He continued to pursue an education, eventually earning a Ph.D. in Social Science.Newton spent time in prison for manslaughter and was involved in a shooting that killed a police officer, for which he was later acquitted. In 1989 he was shot and killed in Oakland, California by Tyrone “Double R” Robinson, a member of the Black Guerrilla Family.
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