Comment on this magnificent Austrian photographer unknown to me until now will be forthcoming in the future posting on the simultaneous exhibition The Poetry of the Everyday. Photographs by Elfriede Mejchar at Museum der Moderne Salzburg.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Wien Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“I am not an artist, I am a photographer.”
Elfriede Mejchar
Installation views of the exhibition On Her Own. The photographer Elfriede Mejchar at Wien Museum musa, Vienna
Elfriede Mejchar (1924-2020) was a major photographic artist, whose richly-varied oeuvre spans more than five decades, from the late 1940s well into the 21st century. The Viennese photographer, who only achieved recognition as an artist towards the end of her career, is now regarded as one of the most important representatives of the Austrian and the international photography scenes. May 10, 2024 marks the hundredth anniversary of her birth.
The exhibition at the Wien Museum presents a broad cross-section of the work of this artistic outsider, and demonstrates how the renewal of postwar Austrian photography was almost “all her own work.” Elfriede Mejchar consciously broke away from the photographic mainstream and the reportage style that was popular at the time. Rather than searching for the so-called “decisive moment,” she approached her subjects in a strongly conceptual and serial manner. She focused not on the extraordinary but on the unspectacular and the commonplace, the everyday and the banal, repeatedly addressing these in new ways in her photographic series.
In an Austria-wide cooperation between the Wien Museum, the State Gallery of Lower Austria, and the Museum der Moderne Salzburg, Elfriede Mejchar’s extensive oeuvre is being presented in 2024 for the first time, simultaneously, in three locations across the country. The exhibitions in Vienna, Krems, and Salzburg approach the work of Mejchar from different perspectives. And the three presentations are accompanied by a jointly conceived catalog published by Hirmer Verlag.
A cooperation between the State Gallery of Lower Austria, the Wien Museum and the Museum der Moderne Salzburg.
Installation view of the exhibition On Her Own. The photographer Elfriede Mejchar at Wien Museum musa, Vienna showing photographs from Mejchar’s series Simmering Heide and Erdberg Mais(1967-1976, below)
Elfriede Mejchar (1924-2020) was a major photographic artist, whose richly-varied oeuvre spans more than five decades, from the late 1940s well into the 21st century. The Viennese photographer, who only achieved recognition as an artist towards the end of her career, is now regarded as one of the most important representatives of the Austrian and the international photography scenes. May 10, 2024 marks the hundredth anniversary of her birth.
The exhibition in musa presents a broad cross-section of the work of this artistic outsider, and demonstrates how the renewal of postwar Austrian photography was almost “all her own work.” Elfriede Mejchar consciously broke away from the photographic mainstream and the reportage style that was popular at the time. Rather than searching for the so-called “decisive moment,” she approached her subjects in a strongly conceptual and serial manner. She focused not on the extraordinary but on the unspectacular and the commonplace, the everyday and the banal, repeatedly addressing these in new ways in her photographic series.
Elfriede Mejchar revealed her hometown Vienna from the periphery and had little interest in its iconic center, which was already the subject of countless thousands of photographs. As a photographer, she was at home where the city became rural, at the meeting point between urban development zones, derelict sites, green spaces, and post-industrial decay. In her long-term studies she documented the architectural and social textures of Vienna’s suburbs in a way that was both attentive and sober: new buildings advancing ever further onto green land, the monotony of endless arterial roads, derelict industrial complexes, market gardens and ageing gasometers, run-down housing and forgotten areas of landfill and decay. For Mejchar, however, the image of the urban periphery is not grey and the wasteland and its dereliction are repeatedly brightened by moments of unsuspected beauty.
Even if the urban and architectural photography of Vienna plays a major role in Elfriede Mejchar’s oeuvre, the range of subjects addressed in her work is far broader. Just as the photographer sheds a new photographic light on forgotten landscapes and buildings, she also approaches people and plants, places and things, in unexpected and surprising ways. In her incomparable series “Hotels,” she studies the interiors and typologies of Austrian accommodation in great detail, producing fascinating and often brightly coloured still lifes of plants and flowers as a means of aesthetically investigating the intermediate stages between blooming and withering. And in her bold collages and montages, a complex of work that continued to occupy her into her latter years, she created clever fantasy worlds, whose social criticism is only matched by their humour.
In an Austria-wide cooperation between the Wien Museum, the State Gallery of Lower Austria, and the Museum der Moderne Salzburg, Elfriede Mejchar’s extensive oeuvre is being presented in 2024 for the first time, simultaneously, in three locations across the country. The exhibitions in Vienna, Krems, and Salzburg approach the work of Mejchar from different perspectives:
Landesgalerie Niederösterreich. Elfriede Mejchar. Pushing the Boundaries of Photography April 13, 2024 to February 16, 2025 Tuesday – Sunday, 10am-6pm
musa. On her own. The photographer Elfriede Mejchar April 18 to September 1, 2024 Tuesday – Sunday, 10am-6pm
Museum der Moderne Salzburg. The Poetry of Everyday. Photographs by Elfriede Mejchar April 26 to September 15, 2024 Tuesday – Sunday, 10am-6pm
Biography of Elfriede Mejchar
Elfriede Mejchar (1924-2020) is undisputedly one of the most important personalities in Austrian photography. It was only at an advanced age that she received the public recognition she deserved, and in 2002 she was awarded the Federal Chancellery Prize for Artistic Photography and in 2004 the Lower Austrian Prize for Artistic Photography and the City of Vienna Prize for Fine Arts. In 2013, Elfriede Mejchar donated her entire oeuvre to the Province of Lower Austria. The Provincial Collections of Lower Austria have taken on the task of safeguarding this unique oeuvre for future generations and gradually making it accessible to the public. Her work is also prominently represented in the art collection of the Wien Museum, in the Federal Photography Collection and in the SpallArt Collection.
Installation view of the exhibition On Her Own. The photographer Elfriede Mejchar at Wien Museum musa, Vienna showing text and photographs from the section ‘Allure of the Everyday’
Exhibition texts
“I always marvelled at the wallpaper” (Prologue)
Elfriede Mejchar had two faces as a photographer: one in her day job, and one as an artist. Working for the Federal Monuments Office, she spent many years touring Austria, extensively documenting buildings and artworks in the provinces. On the side, she was a freelance photographic artist. When “at work,” she was bound by the strict criteria of art documentation. As an artist, she forged her own, very different paths.
While in her day job she photographed “great art,” in her free time she focused on the banality of everyday life, for example by taking interior shots of her accommodation over the years. The expenses covered by “the office,” she explained, “were not very generous, and I was always looking for lower-end lodgings. They could be very odd, anything was possible. In particular, I always marvelled at the wallpaper.”
1. Allure of the Everyday
A backlit trash can or advertising column, people waiting on the street, youths in the Bohemian Prater, the geometry of washing lines – even in her early series dating from the 1950s and 1960s, Mejchar’s fascination with scenes from everyday life is clear. She used her camera to record what she saw in the city in a matter-of-fact style, without judgment: the buildings and streets, cars and advertisements, traffic lights and posters. Only occasionally do people feature in her images. Often they seem a little lost. In contrast to many other photographers of her era, Mejchar was not looking for a quick snapshot or the “decisive moment.” “Speed doesn’t suit me,” she once said. Frequently she worked in series, often created over several years. Her focus was not on the extraordinary but on the unspectacular and the commonplace.
Working in Series
“I don’t like single photos very much,” said Elfriede Mejchar, thus describing one of the fundamental features of her photography. For almost 30 years, she explored Vienna’s peripheral zones on the southeast edge of the city. Again and again she returned to these uninviting places on the outskirts, where few people spent much time. In the main she photographed the landscapes, roads, and neighbourhoods in series, usually in parallel, but sometimes as a chronological sequence. For Mejchar as a photographer, the single image could not capture the complexity of this desolate and yet, in her eyes, beautiful landscape. It was the series that allowed her to show the different facets of a subject from ever new perspectives. Through her artistic and conceptual practice, Mejchar forged a completely new path in Austrian photography.
2. Evil Blooms
Throughout her working life, Mejchar photographed art, in other words, things created to last. Her images of flowers were a late counter-project. In these plant studies, some shot in luminous colour, the photographer brought transience and decay into focus, drawing out the fascinating transitions between blooming and withering. “I am not afraid of pathos, nor of kitsch,” Mejchar once said.
Elfriede Mejchar paid no heed to photographic conventions in her freelance work. Unabashed, she took delight in arranging and staging the plants and objects for her photographs in ways that opened up a range of associations. Some of her objects seem almost to come to life under her lens, while others wither away. Yet others invoke images of sexuality and desire.
Putting in a New Light
As a photographic subject, flowers are often dismissed as being romantic, kitsch, or unserious. Mejchar was not afraid of kitsch, but neither was she ever interested in the sweetness of the tulips or amaryllis she photographed. For her, flowers were like sculptures that needed to be shown in a proper light. Mejchar’s “merciless” gaze extended beneath the surface. It drilled into the very substance of the petals, laying bare the skeleton that emerged as the flower withered and capturing the bizarre forms of the dying plant. Yet the artist could not break free entirely of the strong metaphorical imagery of flowers. Sometimes, her shots of them in full bloom or with their inner parts exposed carried a sensual or sexual charge.
3. Measuring the Periphery
New builds encroaching ever further on the countryside, abandoned factories, fields of vegetables, ageing gasometers, the monotony of interminable highways, makeshift housing, wastelands – as a photographer, Elfriede Mejchar was especially keen on these forgotten landscapes on the margins of the Viennese metropolis. “It was the changes that I was concerned with.”
Starting in the 1960s, Mejchar roamed the city’s peripheral zones with her camera. “These were the sites that interested me the most. Where countryside and city collide.” Her long-term series “Simmeringer Heide and Erdberger Mais,” begun in the 1960s and first shown in 1976 in a solo exhibition at the Museum of the 20th Century, established Mejchar’s reputation as leading photo artist.
Constructing Space
Row upon row of plants, damp soil blanketed by the early morning mist, distant greenhouses, lettuces covering the ground, interspaced with sprinklers – Elfriede Mejchar documented every facet of Vienna’s market gardens at the edge of the city, from detached general views to shots that capture the smallest detail. Her images use a deep depth of field, making it seem almost as if the viewer could reach out and touch the clumps of soil or individual leaves in the foreground. But she also regularly translated landscapes, buildings, and spaces into abstract forms by setting up contrasting oppositions between individual motifs, or by reducing an image to monochrome surfaces.
4. Lips and Pistols
Faces ripped from fashion magazines and floral wallpaper, cogs and cigarettes, spools and dressmaking pins, small chains and cables – starting in the 1980s, Mejchar jumbled these found, everyday objects together to create small-scale, theatrical arrangements laced with acerbic wit. “I construct images,” the artist once said of her sarcastic and subversive collages and assemblages. In these composite scenes, Elfriede Mejchar gave free rein to an anarchic desire to assemble and disassemble. At the same time, she used humour and irony to lampoon society’s ideals of perfection, “adorning” beautiful faces with everyday objects, for example, or – with a knowing wink – targeting James Bond’s pistol on the eroticised lips of the beauty industry. Mejchar’s summary: “I like things colourful and crazy.”
Arranging Objects
After retiring from paid employment, Mejchar increasingly concentrated on her work in the studio, which now became a stage for herself and her camera. Here she created ironic, acerbic, and frequently bizarre object combinations, often as an exploration of gender stereotypes. In her collages, she dismantled and critiqued the fashion industry’s preformed ideals of beauty with zest and humour. She took pleasure in experimenting with a whole range of props, rearranging them into new scenes again and again. Fragmented faces from fashion magazines were combined with torn and cut wallpaper, then garnished with cogs, feathers, and cables. She literally nailed the beauty industry to the wall.
5. Remains and Ruins
The innards of a house scheduled for demolition, derelict industrial estates, overgrown railway lines and buildings, gouged landscapes, forgotten piles of bricks – over many years, Mejchar explored these remains of industrial culture. “My work only began,” she said, “when the people were gone.”
“I took myself off to the factories, going from one road to the next.” In her series “Wienerberger Brick Kilns,” which she photographed from 1979 to 1981 following the closure of the Wienerberger brick factory on Vienna’s southern edge, she made deliberate use of colour photography for the first time. Impregnated with brick dust, the ground and the remains of the industrial architecture glow red under an azure sky, assuming an air of unreality. Mejchar: “I am interested in what remains.”
Seeing in Color
During the first decades of her career as a photographer, Elfriede Mejchar worked in black and white because colour photography was too expensive. All the more astonishing, therefore, is the confidence and precision with which she employed colour as an aesthetic element in the photo series “Wienerberger Brick Kilns” in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Similar to the New Color Photography movement in the USA, Mejchar’s photographic explorations focused primarily on the borders between urban and rural spaces. Her main interest was in landscapes subjected to human interventions. She documented these run-down locations using vivid lighting and brilliant colours, producing unsentimental photographs of high aesthetic quality. In doing so, she opened up an entirely new approach to documentary photography in Austria.
Installation view of the exhibition On Her Own. The photographer Elfriede Mejchar at Wien Museum musa, Vienna showing at second right, Mejchar’s Aether and narcosim (1989-1991, below)
“Mayne’s subjects … confront the spectator in vivid and completely natural un/reality. Spirits who still inhabit London’s deliquescent urban spaces.” Dr Marcus Bunyan
Exhibition dates: 14th June – 1st September, 2024
Curator: Jane Alison
Roger Mayne (British, 1929-2014) Southam Street Group, North Kensington, London 1956 Vintage gelatin silver print 55.5 x 80.4cm Courtesy Victoria & Albert Museum
In vivid and completely natural un/reality
As readers of Art Blart over the years will know, I love a committed social documentary photographer, an artist with a heart and an informed social consciousness, one who is aware of the right or wrong actions (conscience).
Roger Mayne is one such photographer. Others in the pantheon include Helen Levitt, Chris Killip, Don McCullin, Edith Tudor-Hart, Bill Brandt, Tony Ray-Jones, Syd Shelton, Neil Kenlock, Lewis Hine, Jacob Riis, Daniel Meadows, Gordon Parks, Milton Rogovin, Teenie Harris, and Dave Heath to name just a few.
Mayne’s portrait of the working class areas of London life, his gritty black and white images of a “crumbling post-war Britain” and the “modernisation of working class neighbourhoods after the war” picture – as Colin MacInnes author of the “cult 1959 novel Absolute Beginners, a lively account of the emergence of teen culture and attitude in the late 1950s” (wall text) states – “a rotting slum of a sharp, horrible vivacity.”1
What a turn of phrase!
But what MacInnes forgets is that there was community in those very slums, that there was a culture of supporting each other through the tough times, especially after the deprivations of the Second World War and the ongoing rationing which lasted until mid-1954 in the United Kingdom. I vividly remember as a child visiting my grandmother in a small town in suburban Hertfordshire in the 1960s and recall the drabness of the identical houses cheek by jowl, the washing hung in the backyard and the outdoor loo, and the dampness, darkness of the house. And the cold and the rain. But then there were the children playing in the streets, the smiles and the joy of freedom despite the poverty.
Mayne’s photographs push further than mere documentary reportage on these communities. As he himself says, photography becomes art through a “particular mixture of reality and unreality” and the photographers power to select what they are photographing. They become art through the photographers consciousness.
Here I believe that the mixture of reality and unreality and previsualisation (selection of what to photograph and how to frame the image) in Mayne’s photographs can be seen as a form of “magic realism” which is “a style or genre of fiction and art that presents a realistic view of the world while incorporating magical elements, often blurring the lines between fantasy and reality.”2 Matthew Strecher (1999) defines it as “what happens when a highly detailed, realistic setting is invaded by something too strange to believe.”3
Indeed, if we look at Mayne’s photograph Southam Street Group, North Kensington, London (1956, above) there is something so magical and strange about the atmosphere of this image – the out of focus girl in the foreground, boy with his hand to his neck, self absorbed girl on the steps looking out, peeling paint of the building, young children watching the man holding the bicycle and a second, orphaned larger wheel (what is it doing there?), the small child being propped on the too large bicycle, bulky pram lurking, hunkering at the side of the image – it is as though the image was part of a fable, a story about mythical characters and streetscapes that can never happen again.
This magic realism is repeated again and again in Mayne’s images: that sense of the extra/ordinary, of the super/natural – the spacing of the figures in Southam Street Corner, North Kensington, London (1957, below); the zoomorphic characteristics of the figures in Girls doing a Handstand, Southam Street (1956, below); the contrast between the stiff-legged boy and arms folded screaming girl in Screaming Child, Southam St. (North Kensington) (1956, below); and the lean of the whole photograph … the women, reaching out to touch the man child in Nottingham, St Ann’s (1969, below). And on we could go, each image taking us out of ourselves into strange new (old) worlds.
Roger Mayne was truly a magnificent, poetic artist. His subjects, though never appearing “posed,” confront the spectator in vivid and completely natural un/reality.4 Spirits who still inhabit London’s deliquescent urban spaces.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ Colin MacInnes (British, 1914-1976) Poverty and poetry in W.10 c. 1961
3/ Strecher, Matthew C. 1999. “Magical Realism and the Search for Identity in the Fiction of Murakami Haruki.” Journal of Japanese Studies 25(2): 263–98. p. 267 quoted in “Magic realism,” on the Wikipedia website
4/ Adapted from Colin MacInnes Op. cit.,
Many thankx to the Courtauld Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Colin MacInnes (British, 1914-1976) Poverty and poetry in W.10 c. 1961
Used under fair use for the purposes of education and research
“Photography involves two main distortions – the simplification into black and white and the seizing of an instant in time. It is this mixture of reality and unreality, and the photographer’s power to select, that makes it possible for photography to be an art.”
Roger Mayne
“[Mayne] understood how to compose images in the camera to create what he described to Peace News in 1960 as a “particular mixture of reality and unreality.”
“The photographer’s power to select…makes it possible for photography to be an art,” Mayne continued. “Whether it is good art depends on the power and truth of the artist’s statement.””
Installation views of the exhibition Roger Mayne: Youth at the Courtauld Gallery, London
Acclaimed British photographer Roger Mayne (1929-2014) was famous for his evocative documentary images of young people growing-up in Britain in the mid-1950s and ’60s.
This exhibition, of around 60 almost exclusively vintage photographs, includes many of his iconic street images of children and teenagers, alongside an almost entirely unknown selection of intimate and moving later images of his own family at home in Dorset, as well as those taken on his honeymoon in Spain in 1962.
Self-taught and influential in the acceptance of photography as an art form, Mayne was passionate about photographing human life as he found it. This is the first exhibition of his work since 2017.
Text from the Courtauld website
Playing in the Street
Installation view of the exhibition Roger Mayne: Youth at the Courtauld Gallery, London showing at left, Mayne’s Goalie, Brindley Road, Paddington, London (1956, below); at second left, Southam Street Group, North Kensington, London (1956, above); at centre, Girl on the steps, St. Stephen’s Gardens (1957, below); and at second from right, Southam Street Corner, North Kensington, London (1957, below)
Roger Mayne (British, 1929-2014) Southam Street Corner, North Kensington, London 1957 Vintage gelatin silver print mounted on board 43 x 58cm Courtesy Victoria & Albert Museum
Roger Mayne (British, 1929-2014) Children in a Bombed Building, Bermondsey, London 1954 Vintage gelatin silver print 28 x 19.5cm Courtesy the Roger Mayne Archive
Don McCullin (British, b. 1935) The Guv’nors, Finsbury Park, London 1958 Gelatin silver print
Used under fair use for the purposes of education and research
This photograph is not in the exhibition
Roger Mayne (British, 1929-2014) Girls doing a Handstand, Southam Street 1956 Modern print (printed in 1987) 30 x 23cm Courtesy the Roger Mayne Archive
Roger Mayne (British, 1929-2014) Goalie, Brindley Road, Paddington, London 1956 Modern print (printed in 2002) 38 x 30cm Courtesy the Roger Mayne Archive
Roger Mayne (British, 1929-2014) Girl on the steps, St. Stephen’s Gardens 1957 Vintage gelatin silver print mounted on board 49.3 x 34.5cm Courtesy Victoria & Albert Museum
In the case:
Roger Mayne (British, 1929-2014) Screaming Child, Southam St. (North Kensington) 1956 From the ‘Southam Street’ Album 1956-1961, 5 May 1956 Vintage gelatin silver print mounted in an album 36.4 x 54.8cm Courtesy Victoria & Albert Museum
Dave Heath (Canadian born United States, 1931-2016) Vengeful Sister, Chicago 1956 Gelatin silver print 7 3/16 x 8 7/8 inches The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri Gift of the Hall Family Foundation
Used under fair use for the purposes of education and research
This photograph is not in the exhibition
The summer season at The Courtauld Gallery in London has opened with a major exhibition of photographs by the acclaimed post-war photographer, Roger Mayne.
The first-ever photography exhibition at The Courtauld, Roger Mayne: Youth (14 June – 1 September 2024) reassesses the importance of Roger Mayne (1929-2014), through the lens of his evocative black and white images of young people. The exhibition brings together the works of the 1950s and early 1960s for which he is famous, alongside lesser-known images of his own children. The exhibition and accompanying catalogue positions Mayne as crucially important in the emergence of documentary photography as an art form in Britain in the years after the war.
A self-taught photographer, having discovered the medium while studying chemistry at Balliol College, Oxford, Mayne moved to London in 1953. Inspired by the work of the artist Nigel Henderson, among others, he became passionate about photographing human life as he found it. He quickly achieved widespread recognition for his powerful images of communities struggling with poverty against a backdrop of dereliction in London and across the UK. Renowned for his sustained portrayal of Southam Street, now long gone but then located on the northern fringes of Notting Hill, Mayne’s dedication to photographing this one locale over a six-year period – from 1956 to 1961 – was, and still is, extraordinary in the history of photography.
Mayne’s photography in the 1950s and early ’60s captured an exuberance and an uneasiness that embodied both the scars and hopes of post-war Britain. In documenting the lives of young people growing up in Britain, his images highlight the significance of children’s play and the identity formation of the teenager in the post-war years, revealing the tectonic shifts in society at that time. Highlights include Children in a Bombed Building, Bermondsey, London (1954) and one of his most famous images, A Girl Jiving in Southam Street (Eileen Sheekey), London (1957).
In 1962 a new chapter opened in Roger Mayne’s personal life, when he married Ann Jellicoe, a pioneering and well-established playwright. Their honeymoon in Spain left Mayne feeling creatively nourished by the vitality of the people he encountered there. With children and young people still at the forefront of this fresh strand of image-making, he judged the photographs from this trip to be ‘the best series of photographs I have yet done.’ Following the birth of his own children and a move to the Dorset countryside in the mid-1960s, family life and the local bucolic landscape became a new backdrop for Mayne’s lens. The imagery of the street was replaced by that of a growing and adored family.
This exhibition, curated by Jane Alison in close collaboration with Mayne’s daughter, Katkin Tremayne, features over 60 vintage photographs, some never exhibited before. While the two bodies of work, street and family, have a different tenor, they are united by Mayne’s radical empathy with his youthful subjects and his desire to create photographic images that enjoy a lasting impact, produced with great sensitivity and artistic integrity. With Mayne’s post-war subjects now in their more senior years, and today’s younger generation facing a myriad crises, Mayne’s deliberations on growing up, childhood, adolescence and family feel especially poignant and timely.
Press release from the Courtauld
Society at Large
Roger Mayne (British, 1929-2014) Nottingham, St Ann’s 1969 Modern print 16 x 23cm Courtesy the Roger Mayne Archive
In the case
Nine Pelican and Penguin paperback books including:
Adolescent Boys of East London, by Peter Willmott, Pelican, 1969 with Roger Mayne’s Street football, Southam St., North Kensington, 1958 (detail) on the cover
Relative Deprivation and Social Justice: A study of attitudes to social inequality in twentieth-century England, W. G. Runciman, Pelican, 1972 book cover
Poverty: The Forgotten Englishman, Ken Coates and Richard Silburn, Pelican, 1970 book cover
The Spanish Honeymoon
Installation view of the exhibition Roger Mayne: Youth at the Courtauld Gallery, London showing at left, Mayne’s Costa del Sol (1962); at centre, Girl in a Market, Almunecar, Costa del Sol (1962, below); at top right, Footballer Jumping, Almuneca, Costa del Sol (1962); and at bottom right, Girls by a Fountain, Almunecar, Costa del Sol (1962)
Roger Mayne (British, 1929-2014) Girl in a Market, Almunecar, Costa del Sol 1962 Vintage gelatin silver print mounted on board 59.5 x 91.5cm Gelatin silver print
Teenage Takeover
Installation view of the exhibition Roger Mayne: Youth at the Courtauld Gallery, London showing at left, Mayne’s Teenagers, Soho Fair, London (17 July 1958, below); at centre, Teenage Couple, Absolute Beginners photo-shoot (26 April 1959, below); and at right, Men and boys, Southam Street, London (1959, below)
Installation view of the exhibition Roger Mayne: Youth at the Courtauld Gallery, London showing at left, Mayne’s Teenage Couple, Absolute Beginners photo-shoot (26 April 1959, below); at centre, Men and boys, Southam Street, London (1959, below); and at right, Teddy Girls, Battersea Funfair (1956, below)
Roger Mayne (British, 1929-2014) Teenagers, Soho Fair, London 17 July 1958 Vintage gelatin silver print 24 x 36cm Courtesy Wilson Centre for Photography
Roger Mayne (British, 1929-2014) Men and boys, Southam Street, London 1959 Vintage gelatin silver print 18.5 x 27cm Courtesy the Roger Mayne Archive
Roger Mayne (British, 1929-2014) Beaulieu Jazz Festival 1961 Vintage gelatin silver print 18 x 27cm Courtesy the Roger Mayne Archive
Roger Mayne (British, 1929-2014) A Girl Jiving in Southam Street (Eileen Sheekey) London, 1957 Vintage gelatin silver print 36.5 x 25.2cm Courtesy Victoria & Albert Museum
The moving girl may have been living her best life, but this wasn’t peak prosperity for her. The street she lived on was the most densely populated street in London (according to a 1961 survey), a place where children played in the streets because there were no green spaces available….
Roger Mayne didn’t foreground this poverty. He photographed Southam Street in a way that was in some ways nostalgic. He wrote, “Empty, the streets have their own kind of beauty, a kind of decaying always great atmosphere… My reason for photographing the love on them, and the life on them. … [I]t may be warm and friendly on a sunny spring weekend when the street is swarming with children playing.”
At the same time, he doesn’t avoid the signs of poverty, the indicators of decay, and not does he romanticism them. When brickwork crumbles, you know it is a sing of neglect and not some kind of shabby working-class chic. His pictures also show the changes these communities are going through. Stephen Brooke wrote that the immediacy of Mayne’s images helped him “capture the dynamism of working-class life and chronicle new actors on the urban stage such as teenagers and African and West Indian immigrants.” …
It’s a world that is nostalgic in some ways, but is also a reminder of what we have lost. The public sites Mayne photographed, the spaces of the street, have been taken over by cars or commodified and securitized. And when we wonder at the nostalgia of it all, it might be a nostalgia tinged with mourning, not at what we have lost in our striving for affluence but at what has been taken from us.”
Colin Pantall. “West London’s Working-Class,” on the Blind Magazine website February 27, 2023 [Online] Cited 23/07/2024. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Roger Mayne (British, 1929-2014) Teddy Girls, Battersea Funfair 1956 Vintage gelatin silver print 58.3 x 43.8cm Courtesy Victoria & Albert Museum
Roger Mayne (British, 1929-2014) Teenage Couple, Absolute Beginners photo-shoot 26 April 1959 Vintage gelatin silver print 25.6 x 18.2cm Courtesy Victoria & Albert Museum
Absolute beginners
26 April 1959
Mayne was commissioned to photograph the cover image for Colin MacInnes cult 1959 novel Absolute Beginners, a lively account of the emergence of teen culture and attitude in the late 1950s. The young Mod couple that Mayne photographed for the book cover effectively announced the birth of “cool” in the UK. One of over 80 images that Mayne took on the day of the shoot, we know that this image was preferred by Mayne to the one on the cover, most likely due to the fact that he thought it looked less staged, which was something that he vehemently disliked.
Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Wall text from the exhibition
In the case
Colin MacInnes’s Absolute Beginners 1959 book cover
Soho, Notting Hill… a world of smoky jazz clubs, coffee bars and hip hang-outs in the center of London’s emerging youth culture. The young and restless – the Absolute Beginners – were creating a world as different as they dared from the traditional image of England’s green and pleasant land. Follow our young photographer as he records the moments of a young teenager’s life in the capital – sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, the era of the first race riots and the lead-up to the swinging sixties.
A twentieth-century cult classic, Absolute Beginners remains the style bible for anyone interested in Mod culture and paints a vivid picture of a changing society with insight and sensitivity.
The novel is written from the first-person perspective of a teenage freelance photographer, who lives in a rundown yet vibrant part of West London he calls Napoli. The area is home to a large number of Caribbean immigrants, as well as English people on the margins of society, such as homosexuals and drug addicts.
The themes of the novel are the narrator’s opinions on the newly formed youth culture and its fixation on clothes and jazz music, his love for his ex-girlfriend Crêpe Suzette, the illness of his father, and simmering racial tensions in the summer of the Notting Hill race riots.
Plot summary
The novel is divided into four sections. Each details a particular day in the four months that spanned the summer of 1958.
In June takes up half of the book and shows the narrator meeting up with various teenaged friends and some adults in various parts of London and discussing his outlook on life and the new concept of being a teenager. He also learns that his ex-girlfriend, Suzette, is to enter a marriage of convenience with her boss, a middle-aged gay fashion designer called Henley.
In July has the narrator taking photographs by the river Thames, seeing the musical operetta H.M.S. Pinafore with his father, has a violent encounter with Ed the Ted and watches Hoplite’s appearance on Call-Me-Cobber’s TV show.
In August has the narrator and his father take a cruise along the Thames towards Windsor Castle. His father is taken ill on the trip and has to be taken to a doctor. The narrator also finds Suzette at her husband’s cottage in Cookham.
In September is set on the narrator’s 19th birthday. He sees this, symbolically, as the beginning of his last year as a teenager. He witnesses several incidents of racial violence, which disgust him. His father also dies, leaving him four envelopes stuffed with money. Suzette has separated from Henley, but still seems uncertain as to whether she should resume her relationship with the narrator. The narrator decides to leave the country and find a place where racism doesn’t exist. At the airport, he sees Africans arriving and gives them a warm welcome.
Roger Mayne (British, 1929-2014) Girls Dancing at Richmond Jazz Festival 1962 Vintage gelatin silver print mounted on board 61 x 91.5cm
Installation view of the exhibition Roger Mayne: Youth at the Courtauld Gallery, London showing in the background at left, Girls Dancing at Richmond Jazz Festival (1962, above); and in the case the texts below
The Family Albums
The arrival of Roger Mayne’s own children, Katkin and Tom, prompted an ambitious documentary project entitled ‘Daughter and Son’, 1966-1974, for which he planned a comprehensive book of images accompanied by detailed behavioural observations. An earlier devotion to the youth of Southam Street was here replaced by an adoration of his own family. The images that Mayne took, along with later ones of his grandchildren, are collected in more than a dozen albums, four of which are featured here. A further album, made as a keepsake for the children’s great uncle, juxtaposed photographs with drawings by both children. These are prefigured by a much earlier album, which includes images of families.
Mayne sought to bring an unwavering gaze to the nature of human’s experiences. The act of giving birth and the emergence of new life presented itself to Mayne as an opportunity to bring sensitivity and authenticity as well as compositional flair and originality to these unique moments. As such, the group of images that Mayne took of his wife Ann giving birth to Katkin are unlike other childbirth photographs, which are typically taken from behind the mother’s head and without such a direct view of the emerging baby.
Cabinet display text from the exhibition
Early Work Album Vol II
This album of the photographer’s most important early images was brought together by Mayne and presented tot he Victoria and Albert Museum. The left-hand image of a family friend is marked by a wry humour that came to characterise much of Mayne’s mature work, whereas the image on the right-hand side, with the riot of closely, cropped and tangled bodies, foreshadows some of his best photographs of children in unruly abandon in London’s Southam Street. The right-hand image was taken on a trip to Victoria Park Lido with the artist Nigel Henderson’s family and friends.
Cabinet display text from the exhibition
Roger Mayne (British, 1929-2014) Three children at Nigel Henderson’s: Drusilla (Jo) and Justin Henderson, with a friend, Bethnal Green 1953 Vintage gelatin silver print 21 x 20cm Courtesy the Roger Mayne Archive
Roger Mayne (British, 1929-2014) Tom, Trafalgar Square 1970 Vintage gelatin silver print 27 x 17cm Courtesy the Roger Mayne Archive
The Courtauld Gallery Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 0RN
“I suggest that David Goldblatt was one such artist who was brought up to believe that he had an obligation to make a difference. And it was through the truth of his photographs that he made that difference.” Dr Marcus Bunyan
Exhibition dates: 30th May – 25th August, 2024
Curators: Judy Ditner, Leslie M. Wilson and Matthew S. Witkovsky
To keep this archive relevant I am constantly refreshing the postings to make sure all the links work, all the videos are still available, and all the bibliographic information about the photographers is up to date.
With the switch to the new template I am having to refresh every page that I have published since 2008 which is a mammoth task. Every time I search the Internet for an artist and their dates I say a little “thank you” when I find an artist is still living… for their creativity and energy is still present in the world. Unfortunately what I have found is that so many photographers have passed away since I started Art Blart in 2008, many within the last 8-10 years.
This is not surprising, people die! But we seem to be loosing that generation of photographers who were born in the 1920s-1940s who actually made a difference to the world and how we live in it. How they viewed the world in their own unique way and used photography to advocate for a fairer world free from war, discrimination and injustice. Photographs making a difference. As Lewis Hine observed, “Photography can light up darkness and expose ignorance.”
I find it very sad that every time a creative person dies you can no longer have a conservation with that person about their passion, their vision, their understanding of the world around them and how they photographed it. All we have left are their photographs, their lived consciousness if you like, as to what was important for them to photograph during their lifetime: family, friends, people, environment, spirit, protest, war, whatever … and what values they held fast to in order to picture the “improvised realities of everyday life.”
We are loosing a generation of photographers.
We are loosing a generation of photographers that captured an image of human existence as a reflection of reality, a truth lived in the world (rather than postmodern fragmentation, posthuman or AI).
At a time when the last fighter pilot who fought in the Battle of Britain in 1940 just turned 105 in July 2024 (Group Captain John Allman Hemingway, DFC, AE – one of the few that saved Britain), a large proportion of the artists listed below were born before or in the shadow of the cultural and ideological conflict that was the global conflagration of the Second World War. The grew up suffering the vicissitudes of war, bombing, death, rationing, deprivations, genocide and mass migration. They grew up knowing of the threat to their freedom and survival. They grew up with a heightened sense of the value of human life and the need to record that humanity. As my friend and photographer Joyce Evans (Australian, 1929-2019) eloquently said:
“We believed we had an obligation, neither social nor political, to make a difference. We were brought up as children to believe that we had an obligation to make that difference.
If we can find out what we are… that is the artist. This goes to the core element of your being, and the core element of your enquiry remains the same.
If the core part of your life is the search for the truth then that becomes a core part of your identity for the rest of your life. It becomes embedded in your soul.”1
I suggest that David Goldblatt was one such artist who was brought up to believe that he had an obligation to make a difference. And it was through the truth of his photographs that he made that difference.
Goldblatt was “the grandson of Lithuanian-Jewish migrants, who left Europe for South Africa in the 1890s to escape religious persecution. Goldblatt was born in the small gold-mining town of Randfontein in 1930 and later lived and worked in Johannesburg.”2
“In 1910 Chinese indentured labourers were repatriated and replaced by migrant black labour, many recruited from neighbouring territories. In 1921-1922 The Rand Rebellion/ Revolt saw white mine workers protest the industry’s attempt to replace semi-skilled white men with cheap black labour leaving about 200 people dead, more than 1,000 injured, 15,000 men out of work and a slump in gold production. The government came under pressure to protect skilled white workers in mining and three Acts were passed that gave employment opportunities to whites and introduced a plan for African segregation. In 1948 apartheid was legislated.”3
During the Second World War, “South Africa made significant contributions to the Allied war effort. Some 135,000 white South Africans fought in the East and North African and Italian campaigns, and 70,000 Blacks and Coloureds served as labourers and transport drivers… The war proved to be an economic stimulant for South Africa, although wartime inflation and lagging wages contributed to social protests and strikes after the end of the war. Driven by reduced imports, the manufacturing and service industries expanded rapidly, and the flow of Blacks to the towns became a flood. By the war’s end, more Blacks than whites lived in the towns. They set up vast squatter camps on the outskirts of the cities and improvised shelters from whatever materials they could find. They also began to flex their political muscles. Blacks boycotted a Witwatersrand bus company that tried to raise fares, they formed trade unions, and in 1946 more than 60,000 Black gold miners went on strike for higher wages and improved living conditions.”4
Goldblatt was a first generation migrant who grew up surrounded by the oppression of blacks in a small gold-mining town. He lived through the Second World War and as a human being and a Jew would know of the atrocities of the concentration camps. He started taking photographs when he was a teenager in the late 1940s after the war ended and just after the beginning of apartheid. All of these events – black oppression, Jewish genocide, and apartheid – would have affected his outlook on life and his values. He is quoted as saying, “Apartheid became very much the central area of my work, but my real preoccupation was with our values … how did we get to be the way we are?”5
How does any human being believe that their values are “right” and more valuable than those of another culture? that then leads them into conflict with other people who have different values? or to a belief that they are superior to another race? Such is the case with white supremacy and apartheid, a word used to describe a racist program of tightened segregation and discrimination.
Early in his career, to get subjects for his photographs, David Goldblatt posted “classified advertisements in local newspapers requesting sitters for his portraits. Goldblatt’s ads for his personal work often included a note of reassurance, one of which gave [this] exhibition its title: “I would like to photograph people in their homes in Johannesburg, Randburg and Sandton. There will be no charge and one free print will be supplied. Further copies at cost price. There is no catch andno ulterior motive.””6
The phrase “no ulterior motive” is part misnomer.
Leslie Wilson and Yechen Zhao have observed that while “Goldblatt’s use of “no ulterior motive” was supposed to allay concerns that he was trying to take advantage of his sitters,” Goldblatt was also fully aware of the use he wanted to put his photographs. “Even as he positioned himself as a photographer without an ulterior motive, Goldblatt certainly had an intention for the resulting photographs: to use them in service of understanding and representing South African social relations.”7
Goldblatt was fully aware, fully attentive and informed about the history his country – “the history of South Africa’s mining industry, white middle class, forced segregation of black and Asian communities into townships under the Group Areas Act” – and he used his photographs to objectively document social conditions in South Africa, photographs which were then published in magazines and books for wider distribution.
Unlike the more overtly activist photographs of the legendary Ernest Cole (which led to Cole fleeing South Africa after the publication of his book House of Bondage in 1967), Goldblatt’s photographs are quieter and more insidious in their criticism of the structures of the apartheid system. Through the quietness of everyday photographs, through the dignity of his subjects and through the elision of violence, Goldblatt subtly chisels away at the foundations of oppression and injustice in South African society. As Susan Aurinko observes, “One might argue that in his own silent way, he was an activist, using his camera to expose things that should never have been allowed to happen.”8
With the waning of a generation of social documentary photographers around the world who wrote history through their photographs, we leave ourselves open and vulnerable to the duplicity and misinformation of current media trends (including the viral promulgation of images).9 Photographs of truth and substance can still make a difference. I repeat the quote from Lewis Hine earlier in this text: “Photography can light up darkness and expose ignorance.”
With the rise of the far right around the contemporary world, the forces of darkness must be opposed; truth and justice must, can and will be upheld. Ignorance is not strength.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Here are some of the artists that I have had to update their details:
Abbas (Iranian, 1944-2018) John Baldessari (American, 1931-2020) Hilla Becher (German, 1934-2015) Richard Benson (American, 1943-2017) James Bidgood (American, 1933-2022) Geta Brâtescu (Romanian, 1926-2018) Anna Blume (German, 1937-2020) Jimmy Caruso (Canadian, 1926-2021)
Christo (Bulgaria, 1935-2020) John Cohen (American, 1932-2019) Joan Colom (Spanish, 1921-2017) Marie Cosindas (American, 1923-2017) Barbara Crane (American, 1928-2019) Bill Cunningham (American, 1929-2016) Destiny Deacon (Australian, Kuku/Erub/Mer, 1957-2024) Maggie Diaz (American Australian, 1925-2016) Elliott Erwitt (American, 1928-2023) Joyce Evans (Australian, 1929-2019) Larry Fink (American, 1941-2023)
Robert Frank (Swiss, 1924-2019) Vittorio Garatti (Italian, 1927-2023) David Goldblatt (South African, 1930-2018) Arlene Gottfried (American, 1950-2017) F. C. Gundlach (German, 1926-2021) Károly Halász (Hungarian, 1946-2016) Dave Heath (American, 1931-2016) Fred Herzog (Canadian born Germany, 1930-2019) Ken Heyman (American, 1930-2019) Thomas Hoepker (German, 1936-2024) Frank Horvat (Italian, 1928-2020) Hillert Ibbeken (German, 1935-2021) Vo Anh Khanh (Vietnamese, 1936-2023) Jean Mohr (Swiss, 1925-2018) Sigrid Neubert (German, 1927-2018) Floris Neusüss (German, 1937-2020) Ranjith Kally (South African, 1925-2017) Sy Kattelson (American, 1923-2018) Chris Killip (British, 1946-2020) William Klein (French born America, 1926-2022) Karl Lagerfeld (German, 1933-2019) Rosemary Laing (Australian, 1959-2024) Ian Lobb (Australian, 1948-2023) Ulrich Mack (German, 1934-2024) Mary Ellen Mark (American, 1940-2015) Elfriede Mejchar (Austrian, 1924-2020) Sonia Handelman Meyer (American, 1920-2022) Santu Mofokeng (South African, 1956-2020) Floris Neusüss (German, 1937-2020) Marvin E. Newman (American, 1927-2023) Terry O’Neill (British, 1938-2019) Polixeni Papapetrou (Australian, 1960-2018) Marlo Pascual (American, 1972-2020) Peter Peryer (New Zealand, 1941-2018) Marc Riboud (French, 1923-2016) Robert Rooney (Australian, 1937-2017) Lucas Samaras (American born Greece, 1936-2024) Jurgen Schadeberg (South African born Germany, 1931-2020) Michael Schmidt (German, 1945-2014) Malick Sidibé (Malian, 1935-2016) Michael Snow (Canadian, 1928-2023) Frank Stella (American, 1936-2024) Louis Stettner (American, 1922-2016) Charles H. “Chuck” Stewart (American, 1927-2017) Jerry N. Uelsmann (American, 1934-2022) Bill Viola (American, 1951-2024) John F Williams (Australian, 1933-2016) Michael Wolf (German, 1954-2019) Ida Wyman (American, 1926-2019) George S. Zimbel (American-Canadian, 1929-2023)
Footnotes
1/ Joyce Evans in conversation with Marcus Bunyan 2019
2/ Anonymous. “David Goldblatt,” on the MCA website October 2018 [Online] Cited 06/08/2024
4/ Alan S. Mabin and Julian R.D. Cobbing. “World War II in South Africa,” on the Britannica website last updated Aug 5, 2024 [Online] Cited 06/08/2024
5/ David Goldblatt quoted in Anonymous. “David Goldblatt,” on the MCA website October 2018 [Online] Cited 06/08/2024
6/ Leslie Wilson and Yechen Zhao. “In the Room with David Goldblatt,” on the Art Institute of Chicago website December 19, 2023 [Online] Cited 11/07/2024
9/ “… the French philosopher and critic, Paul Virilio, speaking of contemporary images, described them as ‘viral’. He suggests that they communicate by contamination, by infection. In our ‘media’ or ‘information’ society we now have a ‘pure seeing’; a seeing without knowing.”
Paul Virilio. “The Work of Art in the Electronic Age,” in Block No. 14, Autumn, 1988, pp. 4-7 quoted in Roberta McGrath. “Medical Police”, in Ten.8 No. 14, 1984 quoted in Simon Watney and Sunil Gupta. “The Rhetoric of AIDS,” in Tessa Boffin and Sunil Gupta (eds.,). Ecstatic Antibodies: Resisting the AIDS Mythology. London: Rivers Osram Press, 1990, p. 143.
Many thankx to Fundación MAPFRE for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“… the kind of photography that I am interested in is much closer to writing than to painting. Because making a photograph is rather like writing a paragraph or a short piece, and putting together a whole string of photographs is like producing a piece of writing in many ways. There is the possibility of making coherent statements in an interesting, subtle, complex way.”
David Goldblatt
“Apartheid became very much the central area of my work, but my real preoccupation was with our values … how did we get to be the way we are?”
David Goldblatt
“While Goldblatt’s style and method vary from one series to the next, the constant impartiality and benevolence of his gaze are perhaps what best describe his unique approach to social documentary photography at the crossroads with fine art. He never judges his subjects, but seeks to expose the most insidious dynamics of discrimination in the everyday – that is, in the simple ways people and their surroundings present themselves before his eyes. His work is all the more subtle in that it doesn’t always engage head-on with politics, or at least at first glance.”
One of Goldblatt’s early methods for accessing such intimate spaces, in addition to word of mouth and fortuitous encounters, was to post classified advertisements in local newspapers requesting sitters for his portraits. Goldblatt’s ads for his personal work often included a note of reassurance, one of which gave our exhibition its title: “I would like to photograph people in their homes in Johannesburg, Randburg and Sandton. There will be no charge and one free print will be supplied. Further copies at cost price. There is no catch andno ulterior motive.”
In the most practical sense, Goldblatt’s use of “no ulterior motive” was supposed to allay concerns that he was trying to take advantage of his sitters. But this message also conveys the promise of a transparent and straightforward photographic encounter, a working method that cuts across his body of work. …
Even as he positioned himself as a photographer without an ulterior motive, Goldblatt certainly had an intention for the resulting photographs: to use them in service of understanding and representing South African social relations. He applied his analysis, captions, and sequencing to the pictures and presented them to a broad public audience. At first, much of Goldblatt’s work appeared in magazines and journals, but he labored to publish his photographs in books, finding them the ideal format to crystallize his perspective on South African people, history, and land.
Leslie Wilson and Yechen Zhao. “In the Room with David Goldblatt,” on the Art Institute of Chicago website December 19, 2023 [Online] Cited 11/07/2024. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
The renowned South African photographer David Goldblatt (Randfontein, Union of South Africa, British Empire 1930 – Johannesburg, 2018, South Africa) dedicated his life to documenting his country and its people. His photography focused on capturing issues related to South African society and politics, subjects that are essential today for a visual understanding of one of history’s most painful processes: apartheid.
David Goldblatt: No Ulterior Motive, organised in collaboration with the Art Institute of Chicago and the Yale University Art Gallery, is the first exhibition to delve into the connections and dialogues Goldblatt established with other photographers from different geographical and generational backgrounds who, like him, focused on representing the social and environmental changes taking place in their respective countries. Moreover, this ambitious project abounds in rare, old or unpublished material, and is exceptional in that it presents some series in their entirety. For all these reasons, the exhibition is intended as a fitting tribute to David Goldblatt, as well as the beginning of a new chapter in the study of his work.
Exhibition co-organised by The Art Institute of Chicago and the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, in collaboration with Fundación MAPFRE, Madrid.
Text from the Fundación MAPFRE
Installation views of the exhibition David Goldblatt: No Ulterior Motive at Fundación MAPFRE, Madrid
Goldblatt caught this raucous scene during his initial foray into photography just after high school. The spontaneous interaction of children of different races on a city street clashed with the country’s emerging politics at mid-century. The year before Goldblatt made this image, a white nationalist movement fomented by Afrikaners – an ethnic group descended predominantly from Dutch settlers – had come to political power as the National Party. In 1949 the government passed legislation to authorise new racial classifications and urban racial segregation. They subsequently allocated the neighbourhoods of Fietas (known officially as Pageview) and Mayfair as areas for white residents only, enforcing segregation by fines and compulsory resettlement.
The artistic career of South African artist David Goldblatt (1930, Randfontein – 2018, Johannesburg) embraced both a wide geographical spread of his country and a wide variety of human situations portraying the day-to-day life of his fellow citizens during and after apartheid. From his beginnings in 1950, his work – which he has progressively reflected in numerous books – has gone hand in hand with the historical, political, social and economic evolution of South Africa. From 1999 onwards, Goldblatt adopted colour for his work, which focused on the harsh living conditions of the post-apartheid period.
Goldblatt photographed with great objectivity the “watchmen”, dissidents, settlers and victims of that regime, the cities they lived in, their buildings, the inside of their homes… His images provide an extensive and touching visual record of the racist apartheid regime, a record that never explicitly shows its violence but clearly reveals all that it represented, as he himself pointed out: […] I avoid violence. And I wouldn’t know how to handle it as a photographer if I found myself caught up in a violent scene […] But then I’ve long since realised – it took me a few years to realise – that events in themselves are not so interesting to me as the conditions that led to the events. These conditions are often quite commonplace, and yet full of what is imminent. Immanent and imminent.
David Goldblatt. No ulterior motive gathers together nearly 150 works that show the continuity and strength of his work and also offers, for the first time, connections to other South African photographers from one to three generations later who acknowledge their debt to Goldblatt as a mentor who believed deeply in the value of exchange and debate, as well as in the importance of expressing one’s own opinions.
European settlement began at the Cape in 1652. The oldest modern structure still in existence is, appropriately, the Castle in Cape Town erected between 1666 and 1679 as a fortress to consolidate that settlement against growing opposition by indigenous people. The core of the history of this land in the 333 years since 1666 is its domination by white people, the subjection to them by force and institutionalised economic dependence of black people, and of sporadic and latterly of massively growing opposition by blacks and disaffected whites to the system of domination.
White hegemony approached its ultimate expression in the past thirty-nine years with the emergence of Afrikaner nationalism as the overwhelmingly ascendant social force in this society. The apotheosis of that force is the ideology of apartheid. There is hardly any part of life in this country that has not been profoundly affected by the quest for power, the determination to hold onto it, and the expression of that power through apartheid of the Afrikaner Nationalists and of their supporters and fellow travellers of other origins.
Innumerable structures of every imaginable kind and not a few ruins bear witness to the huge thrust of these movements across our land.
Now, Afrikaner nationalism, though by no means spent, is in decline. Change, probably convulsive, to something as yet unclear has begun. The first structures based in countervailing forces and ideology have made their tentative appearance.
David Goldblatt from the book “Structures,” 1987, p. 42
The fabric of this society permeates everything I do. I don’t know if this is the case with other photographers. I would dearly love to be a lyrical photographer. Every so often I try to branch out and rid myself of these concerns, but it rarely happens. You take your first breath of fresh air and you have compromised.
Recently I became very aware of the people thrown into detention. There is the elementary fact that is lost sight of in this country, that they are put in detention without trial, without recourse to the courts. Has become necessary here to remind ourselves of this fact. I have catalogued the faces fo some fo the people who have been in detention with something of their life and what happened to them in detention. I have also me with some who have been abused in detention. The photographs might in some small way, through their publication, act as a deterrent to further abuse or even to detention without trial itself. As the struggle for the survival of the apartheid system becomes more acute, so the system becomes more restrictive, especially with regard to the flow of information. We are going into a period of long darkness when the restrictions with become more severe. I am aware of photographing things that are disappearing and need to be documented, but in another sense I have a private mission to document what is happening in this country to form a record. There are many other photographers engaged in this. I regard this aspect of our work as very important, so that in the future, when the time comes, people will know what happened here, what transpired.
David Goldblatt from the book “Structures,” 1987, p. 68
Two men lean against one another tenderly as one holds up an identification document called a passbook. under the Pass Laws Act of 1952, all Black South Africans over the age of 16 were required to carry such identification at all times. Passbooks were also known as dompas, a term deriving from the phrase “dumb pass,” used to openly mock this hated tool for enforcing apartheid. Anyone stopped by police without a passbook or official permission to be in a given area could be penalised with arrest or fines. Policies that restricted the movement of Black people throughout the country have a long history in South Africa and were a key target of resistance movements.
In his photographs of office and office workers, Goldblatt often teased out the continuities between professional and private identities. The two women in this photograph are dressed for winter on Earth, but the art on the walls hearkens to a journey to outer space. At this moment in 1972, apartheid was so firmly in place that, for many, change was almost unthinkable – perhaps akin to landing on the moon. The artwork brings the prospect of liberty and the sheer thrill of adventure into an otherwise ordinary setting. Of course, the art might not have been their choice at all, but the photograph holds open the possibility that these women have a stake in missions long thought impossible.
The grandson of Lithuanian refugees, David Goldblatt was born in Randfontein in 1930 and spent most of his life in Johannesburg. From a very young age he showed an interest in photography and took his first images when he was only eighteen. After the death of his father, in 1963 he decided to become a professional photographer.
David Goldblatt scrupulously examined the history and politics of South Africa, where he witnessed the rise of apartheid, its brutal segregationist policies and its eventual disappearance. His sensitive photographs offer a vision of daily life under this regime and in the complex period that followed, when he moved from black and white to colour in his work.
Employing great objectivity, Goldblatt photographed dissidents, settlers and victims of apartheid, the cities where they lived, their buildings, the interior of their homes, etc. His images configure a wide-ranging and moving visual record of this racist regime, a record which, while never explicitly showing its violence, clearly reveals everything it represented, as the artist himself pointed out: “I avoid violence. And I wouldn’t know how to handle it as a photographer if I found myself caught up in a violent scene […] But then I’ve long since realised – it took me a few years to realise – that events in themselves are not so interesting to me as the conditions that led to the events. These conditions are often quite commonplace, and yet full of what is imminent. Immanent and imminent.“
In 1998 David Goldblatt was the first South African to be the subject of a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. His work has been recognised with the Hasselblad (2006) and Henri Cartier-Bresson (2009) prizes and the International Center of Photography award (2013). In 2016 he was made a knight of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government. He died in Johannesburg in 2018 at the age of eighty-eight.
David Goldblatt: No Ulterior Motive brings together around 150 works from several of the artist’s series with the aim of revealing the continuity of his work while also and for the first time establishing a dialogue with the work of other South African photographers of between one and three generations subsequent to Goldblatt, such as Lebohang Kganye, Ruth Seopedi Motau and Jo Ractliffe. Also on display are three mock-ups of books by Goldblatt, an aspect of his work to which he gave great importance.
The works on display are from the collections of The Art Institute of Chicago and Yale University Art Gallery and include important recent acquisitions of photographs by Goldblatt. Having been shown at The Art Institute of Chicago between December 2023 and March 2024, Fundación MAPFRE is now presenting the exhibition at its venue on Paseo de Recoletos, Madrid, until August this year. It will then be seen next year at Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven (Connecticut).
David Goldblatt: No Ulterior Motive is curated by Judy Ditner (Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven), Leslie M. Wilson and Matthew S. Witkovsky (The Art Institute of Chicago).
Key themes in the exhibition
Apparent tranquility
Throughout his career Goldblatt avoided the most difficult and shocking incidents that were a daily reality under apartheid. Rather, he considered that depicting everyday life, “the quiet and commonplace where nothing ‘happened'”, allowed the viewer to draw their own conclusions. The content was implicit in the apparent tranquility and in the very precise captions that accompany these images, which show ongoing, daily expressions of racism and the economic, social and political exploitation of the Black population under white rule.
Goldblatt, No Ulterior Motive
Goldblatt’s status as a white man allowed him greater freedom of movement and he took advantage of that privilege to document life in South Africa in the most honest and direct way possible. In the early 1970s he published a classified ad which read: “I would like to photograph people in their homes […]. No ulterior motive.” Nonetheless, this impartiality concealed a critical perspective towards his country’s people, history and geography.
Apartheid
In 1948 the National Party, one of the most visible entities representing Afrikaners (a European, colonising ethnic group mainly comprising descendants of the Dutch, North Germans and French), came to power in South Africa. This minority of European origin then proceeded to institute apartheid as a State policy while promoting the ideology that people of different racial origins could not live together in equality and harmony. Successive governments reinforced the legacy of racist oppression against non-white peoples (indigenous Africans, people of Asian origin and those of mixed race), who made up more than 80% of the population. In 1990 segregation laws began to be eliminated, the activity of the African National Congress was legalised and its most important leader, Nelson Mandela, who was elected president of South Africa in 1993, was released from prison.
“I feel as though my teeth are being pulled out one by one. I run by tongue over the spaces and I try to remember the shape of what was there.” These words, spoken to Goldblatt by shop owner Ozzie Docrat, express what many residents must have experienced during their forced removal from the Johannesburg suburb of Fietas in the 1970s. Throughout the mid-20th century, Fietas was exceptional for the endurance of it multiracial, interfaith community of working- and middle-class people in the face of encroaching segregationist housing policies. In 1977, however, the government forced out Indian families like the Docrats, along with other people of color, to make this area exclusive to whites.
“Over the course of a career that spanned more than six decades, Goldblatt went looking for scenes like this one – quiet and tender, while also deeply revealing of the structures and values that constituted South African society. Though the family appears to be right at home, Goldblatt’s title shares that they were living illegally in the Johannesburg neighborhood of Hillbrow, violating laws that, under the system of segregation known as apartheid, dictated where different racial groups were permitted to reside. The cozy scene is therefore profoundly fragile because the family faced the persistent threat of removal.
This image powerfully presents the tensions that were central to what Goldblatt pursued through photography: soft furnishings and brutal laws, proximity and distance, access and exclusion, and informality and formality.”
Leslie Wilson and Yechen Zhao. “In the Room with David Goldblatt,” on the Art Institute of Chicago website December 19, 2023 [Online] Cited 11/07/2024. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Throughout South Africa and even across the continent, religion bears a complicated history embroiled in legacies of colonisation, oppression, and apartheid. Religion holds power. It was through the cross and the bullet that the continent was dissected by European powers. It was through the pages of the Bible that apartheid was theologically justified, and it was through the Dutch Reformed Church of white Afrikaners that “the races” were declared separate as mandated by God. Yet, it was also through the World Alliance of Reformed Churches that apartheid was acknowledged as heresy. It was through the Christian ethos and through ubuntu that Archbishop Desmond Tutu guided the post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission through ways of healing in a society bifurcated into “European” and “Non-White;” “have” and “have-not;” “believer” and “unbeliever.” Religion has the power to both destroy and heal a nation.
In a discussion about life under apartheid, my South African friend designated as “Coloured” – a category in between “White” and “Black African” – revealed that his parents were once denied communion on Sunday morning due to their sin of attending a “white church” while being of color. Whiteness meant purity and closeness with God; anything less than was deemed as “separate,” “other,” “unworthy” – “impure.” The sharing of bread and wine in the Christian tradition is meant to signify connection between people and between the divine. The denial of such connection, of saying that one was unworthy to drink from the same chalice because of one’s race or ethnicity, is an ultimate denial of humanity. It is an affront to the very word “communion” and an insult to fellowship. Religion was co-opted to subjugate and enforce a system of racial hierarchy. Sunday morning saw no race-mixing amongst God’s children.
Trevor O’Connor. “Religion in South Africa: The Power to Destroy and Heal a Nation,” on the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace & World Affairs website November 16, 2018 [Online] Cited 11/07/2024. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Goldblatt’s photographs of churches were so beautiful. They were wonderful architectural images, but they were deep with meaning capturing the issues of a missionary religion in a nonnative land. They symbolise the conflicts within the country which mirrored issues throughout other parts of the world. When I thought about South Africa it was about apartheid and relationships between blacks and whites, I had not considered the impact of western religion on the indigenous population (I should have because it is an issue still in our country today), nor did I know about the issues with the Muslim population in the country. In researching the issue of religion further, it appears the conflicts and violence in South Africa related to it appear to be ongoing to this day.
David Goldblatt (1930-2018) scrupulously examined the history and politics of South Africa, where he witnessed the rise of apartheid, its divisive and brutal policies, and its eventual demise. His sensitive photographs offer a view of daily life under the apartheid system and its complex aftermath. Goldblatt was drawn, in his own words, “to the quiet and commonplace where nothing ‘happened’ and yet all was contained and immanent.” Accompanied by precise captions, his images expose everyday manifestations of racism and point to Black dispossession – economic, social, and political – under white rule.
The grandson of Lithuanian Jews who had fled Europe in the 1890s, Goldblatt spent most of his life in Johannesburg. Although not part of the ascendant Dutch Protestant community, his position as a white man allowed him greater freedom of movement and he leveraged this privilege to document life in South Africa as honestly and straightforwardly as possible. In the early 1970s, he placed a classified ad: “I would like to photograph people in their homes […]. No ulterior motive.” Yet this professed impartiality masked a critical perspective toward South Africa’s people, history, and geography.
Goldblatt first took up the camera in 1948, the year the apartheid system was introduced, and over the next seven decades he assiduously photographed South Africa’s people, landscape, and built environment. Recognising the layered connections in his oeuvre, this exhibition proceeds thematically rather than chronologically: here, black-and-white photographs taken during the period of institutionalised segregation are interwoven with his work in colour from the 1990s on. Six thematic sections explore Goldblatt’s engagement with apartheid, its contradictions, and its multifaceted legacy.
Installation view of the exhibition David Goldblatt: No Ulterior Motive at Fundación MAPFRE, Madrid showing at left, wall text from the section ‘Informality’ (see below)
1/ Informality
Goldblatt’s photographs, especially his portraits, ask us to consider the informal and often idiosyncratic ways people resist oppression. Attuned to how his status and relative freedom as a white man influenced all social encounters, Goldblatt gained access to intimate moments of South Africans’ everyday lives by thoughtfully avoiding behaviour that might suggest an exercise of authority. Instead, he observed how frequently people segregated by law engaged in unsanctioned social and economic exchanges. Whether photographing descendants of Dutch colonists farming in the rural Cape in the early 1960s for the series Some Afrikaners Photographed, or a young Black couple in Johannesburg, Goldblatt emphasised the improvised realities of everyday life. This interest shifted in later years to the housing and mercantile arrangements dubbed South Africa’s “informal economy,” as well as to unofficial monuments to historical figures and events.
2/ Working people
Even as the architects of apartheid sought to separate South Africans, the system functioned through an economic structure that placed people into tense proximity on a daily basis. White families hired Black workers to raise their children and clean their homes; mines owned and managed by whites depended on people of color to perform the most dangerous labor. Government-dictated racial categories profoundly shaped the jobs that people could hold, creating strict hierarchies in workplaces. Goldblatt highlighted these inequalities with pictures like one of a domestic worker rushing to meet her employer. At the same time, he attended to how people retained a sense of self and dignity in their labor, as in his portraits of mineworkers who chose to pose for his camera in their traditional clothing.
3/ Extraction
Born in the mining town of Randfontein, Goldblatt began his career by looking at the extractive economy built by colonial ventures to exploit its natural resources. Goldblatt created his earliest series, On the Mines (1964–73), while working as a photographer for the country’s biggest mining corporations. The series showed how a predominantly Black migrant labor force performed the most dangerous work in gold and platinum mines, work that primarily enriched their white bosses. Decades later, the photographer found similar manifestations of inequality while recording the toxic legacy of asbestos mining and its disproportionate impact on Black communities.
4/ Near/Far
The white supremacist National Party, led by Afrikaners (descendants of predominantly Dutch settlers) and English-speaking whites, attempted to impose distance between people of different racial categories in South Africa. Goldblatt looked at how the National Party government pulled people from their homes to realise its vision of racial segregation, dispossessing and dispersing Black and Indian residents to make room for new white neighbourhoods.
However, the exclusive urban centres the party sought to create could not function without a daily influx of labourers and domestic workers from the country’s diverse population. Goldblatt was interested in the ways closeness continued to manifest even when distance was dictated by law, a status quo that also affected his relationship with the people he photographed. These images wryly register the constant collision of segregated groups in public and private spaces throughout the country.
5/ Disbelief
The illogic of apartheid led to widespread skepticism and practices of self-delusion among those who actively perpetuated the system. The photographs in this section capture the sense of disbelief with the labyrinthine, endlessly rewritten laws intended to legitimise a morally bankrupt system of abuse and oppression. Goldblatt rendered this state of affairs in brilliant deadpan, giving visual form to the incredulity that all but the most cynical and opportunistic beneficiaries of apartheid must have felt. Fortress-like churches of the Dutch Reformed Protestant faith mix with absurd scenes of suburban leisure in whites-only areas, while stony or stoic gazes meet moments of sudden demolition. Even after the official end of apartheid, Goldblatt continued to photograph sites that inspired feelings of disbelief as seen in his photographs of incomplete housing developments.
6/ Assembly
How do people come together in a country divided by segregation? In everything, from the bench they could sit on to where they could live, South Africans were physically separated by race. In the 1950s, protests against these new policies were common, but in the decades that followed, the government introduced increasingly brutal tactics to repress dissent and severely curtailed the right to assemble.
Goldblatt avoided straightforward depictions of open rebellion, seeing his country’s political struggles as clearly in the routine occasions that brought people together by choice or necessity. In later decades, he engaged more with overtly political subjects, turning his camera to newly elected lawmakers and young South Africans openly protesting colonial legacies in their post-apartheid society.
7/ Connections
Beyond his own work, Goldblatt was committed to aiding future generations of South African photographers. He helped found the Market Photo Workshop in 1989 to offer instruction and support to emerging, socially engaged photographers, hoping the school would be “a small counter to the ethnic surgery that had so successfully separated South Africans under apartheid.” Today, it remains a centre of education and community for photography in Johannesburg. Lebohang Kganye, Sabelo Mlangeni, Ruth Seopedi Motau, and Zanele Muholi are alumni with close ties to Goldblatt, who was a friend and mentor. All have explored themes of belonging, loss, memory, migration, and representation while uncovering original, often deeply personal ways to examine South Africa’s people, places, and policies.
Like Goldblatt, the artists in this gallery – Ernest Cole, Santu Mofokeng, and Jo Ractliffe – use the camera to reflect critically on their country’s society and politics. Cole used his camera to confront sweeping social, political, and environmental change from the 1950s to the 1980s. Mofokeng was a member of the Afrapix collective of South African documentary photographers throughout the 1980s. A former student of Goldblatt, he received his first long-term position in photography in part through Goldblatt’s recommendation. Ractliffe’s landscape photographs address issues of displacement and conflict, capturing the traces of often violent histories. She knew Goldblatt as a friend and colleague and has taught at the Market Photo Workshop, a vitally important school for photography in Johannesburg whose alumni are featured in gallery 3.
One might argue that in his own silent way, he was an activist, using his camera to expose things that should never have been allowed to happen. A single color image seems to define the show – in it, a housekeeper sits in her employer’s dining room with her two children on her lap. Behind her a round window forms a halo around her wrapped head, Madonna-like. The didactic tells us that all three of them died of AIDS within months. Such is the inequity of South Africa, quietly portrayed by David Goldblatt over seven decades.
Installation view of the exhibition David Goldblatt: No Ulterior Motive at Fundación MAPFRE, Madrid showing at right, Goldblatt’s Near Brak Pannen on the Beaufort West-Fraserburg road, Nuweveld, Karoo, 30 May 2004 (2004, below)
David Goldblatt (South African, 1930-2018) Near Brak Pannen on the Beaufort West-Fraserburg road, Nuweveld, Karoo, 30 May 2004 2004 Pigmented inkjet print The Art Institute of Chicago, promised gift of Cecily Cameron and Derek Schrier
Next to a road that shoots arrow-straight to the horizon, a pool of water evaporates from the intense sunlight of the Karoo, the semi-arid region that separates Cape Town from South Africa’s interior. The scarcity of water and the harsh climate in this enormous area impeded white settlers from centuries, an the lack of grand natural or manmade features confounded their desire to assimilate it into their idea of a beautiful landscape. From the 2000s onward Goldblatt made much of his new work by driving great distances through the Karoo. He appreciated the way it resisted easy aestheticisation, calling it the “fuck-all landscape.”
David Goldblatt (South African, 1930-2018) At Kewin Kwaneles Takwaito Barber, Landsdowne Road, Cape Town in the time of AIDS, 16 May 2007 2007 Pigmented inkjet print The Art Institute of Chicago, promised gift of Cecily Cameron and Derek Schrier
Here, Goldblatt joined a mass of onlookers recording the removal of the statue of 19th-century British mining magnate Cecil John Rhodes at the University of Cape Town (UCT). Rhodes vastly expanded European colonial rule on the African continent and exploited local labour to amass immense wealth. Disgusted by what they viewed as a symbol of white supremacy, student activists successfully campaigned to take down the statue honouring Rhodes.
UCT responded to this and related student protests by forming a committee to evaluate art on campus, intending to remove or hide problematic works from view. While Goldblatt had promised his archive to the university, he became concerned that this committee might censor art ad free speech. He ultimately withdrew his offer in 2017, bequeathing his archive to Yale University instead. In response to this decision, scholar Njabulo S. Ndebele has asked. “Was Goldblatt worried that the photographs would not survive the tests of freedom, even after they had survived those of oppression?”
Wall text from the exhibition
Fundación MAPFRE Recoletos Exhibition Hall Paseo Recoletos 23, 28004 Madrid
Opening hours: Mondays (except holidays): 2pm – 8pm Tuesday to Saturday: 11am – 8pm Sunday and holidays: 11am – 7pm
Exhibition dates: 22nd April, 2023 – 4th August, 2024
Curator: Jan Brazier
James Elliott (British) ‘A Week after the Derby’ c. 1855-1860 Hand-coloured stereograph (single image) Chau Chak Wing Museum, The University of Sydney Donated by Sandra Savides, 2014
A short text this week as I’m not well.
What a delightful exhibition – a clean installation showcasing some beautiful, contemplative, witty and humorous images on an interesting subject.
The pathos of A Week after the Derby (c. 1855-1860, above); the gruesome humour of A Pair of Drawers (c. 1895, below); the Australian humour of The Great Australian Bite (Bight) (c. 1895, below). Staged for the camera, posed for the viewer, possessed of innocence, national pride and the delightful joy of living.
To flesh out the posting I have added bibliographic information for the artists and publishers where possible.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Chau Chak Wing Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
From costume portraits to comic and sentimental stereographs
This exhibition presents staged photographs taken between the mid-19th and early 20th centuries, illuminating the popular culture of the time.
These photographs were created in the photographic studio, with its painted backgrounds and props, where people came to have fancy dress or special outfits captured. Studio photographers also created tableaux, using posed models to stage scenes to tell stories, sentimental or comic. The most popular format was the stereograph. Even the home backyard became a stage for family portraits, posed in the manner of the studio.
Featuring enlarged reproductions, and original examples of glass negatives and stereographs from the historic photograph collection, The Staged Photograph is a fascinating delve into an unfamiliar photographic history.
Text from the Chau Chak Wing Museum website
Installation views of the exhibition The Staged Photograph at the Chau Chak Wing Museum at The University of Sydney with the exhibition texts in the bottom photograph to be seen below…
The Staged Photograph
Created in the theatrical space of the 19th century photographic studio, a staged photograph used the artifice of painted backgrounds and props against which to pose costumed sitters or models arranged in a tableau.
Sitters often used this studio stage to capture a special fancy dress or other costume worn to be photographed either on the way to, or sometimes after, the ball. From the time of the popular cartes-de-visite of the 1860s into the early 20th century, these private memories, storied in albums or framed on walls, give us rare visuals of the costumes worn.
The studio photographer also found a business line in selling staged fictional scenes, which told a story or posed a humorous moment. The most popular were the genre or narrative stereographs, featuring scenes of everyday life, sentimental or comic. Beginning in the late 1850s, this market changed from a middle-class parlour entertainment to a broader popular entertainment, and the views depicted reflect this change as a new century began.
With the advent of easier amateur photography through the Kodak revolution, rather than visiting the studio, the home photographer found a stage in the backyard. Family members were posed in the manner of the studio, with a suspended curtain on the washing line or a pot plant on a stand, often still capturing a special fancy dress costume.
This exhibition explores a range of these staged photographs, a window into popular culture of the time, revealing cultural and social values.
Costume Portraits
Photographers’ studios were theatrical spaces, with props and backgrounds that could give context to a fancy dress or other costume. In Sydney in 1879, photographer E. Riisfeldt advertised that he had ‘specially painted 12 SCENES by one of the finest scenic artists, suitable for any fancy costume’. (Sydney Morning Herald, 24 February 1879)
Costume balls were a popular feature of Sydney life from the 1830s. Balls were held to raise money for charities, including children’s fancy dress balls and poster balls, popular from 1900 in Australia where costumes featured in advertisements.
While there are long accounts in newspapers of the attendees, with lists of names and costumes worn, photography offered the possibility of capturing what an outfit looked like.
Wall text from the exhibition
James Elliott (British) ‘Broken Vows’ c. 1857 Hand-coloured stereograph (single image) Chau Chak Wing Museum, The University of Sydney Donated by Sandra Savides, 2014
James Elliott operated in London from approximately 1856 to 1861 and produced stereocards. According to Michael Pritchard’s Directory of London Photographers 1841-1908 he operated from two London addresses simultaneously: 9, Albany Court Yard and 48, Piccadilly.
Most famous for several hundred outstanding genre, usually beautifully tinted, on SCMs; most were elaborate studio sets, with large casts and complex accessories; several were in sets, such as “The Eve of Waterloo”; “The Wedding”, etc.; made views of England, esp. London on SCMs, which are much rarer and fairly ordinary. Often but not always used label with his name, or blind-stamp; views were extensively pirated both in England and US; he also pub. photos by W.M. Grundy.
Credit: National Stereoscopic Association with corrections and additions by Alan Griffiths and others.
Mark Anthony (Marc Antoine Gaudin) (French, 1804-1880)(attributed) [Staged scene featuring five women, their fingers pointing upwards] England c. 1855-1865 Half stereograph (single image) Macleay Collections, Chau Chak Wing Museum Donated by Alison Skeels, 1982
Freeman Brothers, Sydney (Australian) [Portrait of two girls in fancy dress] c. 1855-1865 Carte-de-visite Chau Chak Wing Museum, The University of Sydney
One of the largest and most celebrated Sydney photographic studios was run by the Freeman Brothers, whose skilful portraits were much admired. This pair of entrepreneurial photographers used the latest processes, building a large, well-appointed studio and actively promoting their work through display in international exhibitions. James Freeman was also extremely well versed in the potential uses of the medium, delivering a comprehensive lecture on the topic to a Sydney society in 1858.
Freeman and Co was established by the professional photographers William and James who arrived in Sydney from London in 1853 and 1854 respectively. Trading as Freeman Brothers, the pair opened Freeman’s Sydney Gallery of Photographic Art in 1855, specialising initially in daguerreotype portraits. James Freeman is credited with introducing the ambrotype process to the colony in 1856, and the company adopted this medium after this date. By the 1860s, the studio was busy producing carte de visite portraits, amassing nearly 30,000 negatives by 1870. In 1866 the brothers collaborated with the renowned English photographer Victor Prout, capitalising on his fine reputation in the colony and advertising themselves as ‘photographers to their Royal Highnesses the Prince and Princess of Wales and His Excellency the Governor.’ After William Freeman retired around 1890, the company passed into the hands of employee William Rufus George. Under George’s management in the 1890s the firm targeted a wealthy clientele, producing expensive platinum prints. The company still operates in Sydney, specialising in corporate, wedding, architectural and portrait photography.
G.H. Nicholas, Sydney (Australian) [Portrait of a child holding a stereoscope] c. 1870 Carte-de-visite Chau Chak Wing Museum, The University of Sydney Donated by Judith Mackinolty, 1982
These unique photos offer an intriguing insight into pop culture history
The Chau Chak Wing Museum presents The Staged Photograph, an exhibition exploring images from the mid-19th and early 20th centuries from Australia, Britain and the United States.
Australians embraced photography long before smartphone cameras enabled us to capture and curate every moment of our lives.
A new exhibition of rarely seen images at the Chau Chak Wing Museum transports us to a time when costumes had to be captured in a studio, and when fictional photographs, posing models in a story or comic scene, were sold and bought for home entertainment.
The Staged Photograph presents images taken between the mid-19th and early 20th centuries, by professional and amateur photographers, from Australia, Britain and the United States.
Exhibition curator Jan Brazier said: “The Staged Photograph is a fascinating dive into an unfamiliar photographic history. Its images are a diverse and intriguing insight into the role staged photographs played in our lives and the popular culture of the time.”
Studio: from the ballroom to bath soap
Costume balls were immensely popular from the 1830s. From the 1860s, families in their fancy dress costumes or special outfits could be professionally photographed in a studio complete with props and a painted background.
“These photos were private memories kept in frames or the family album, where undoubtedly many are still to be found,” said Jan Brazier.
Communities held balls to raise money for good causes and from 1900 they included the ‘poster ball’ when businesses would pay fundraisers to have someone wear a costume festooned with advertisements for their products. These balls were as popular in high society as in country towns and suburbs. Costumes for Sunlight Soap, Silver Starch laundry powder, Jelline jelly crystals and Silver Drop self-raising flour can be seen in the exhibition.
Stereograph, mass home entertainment
The ‘online’ experience of the 19th century, the stereograph used two nearly identical photographs to create a 3D image when seen through a viewer called a stereoscope. Originally a middle-class activity, with the family gathering in the parlour to enjoy the images, it became more affordable by the 1890s and the mass home entertainment of its time. Its transformation saw millions of stereographs in use worldwide.
Views of exotic locations were by far the most popular stereographs for ‘armchair travelling’, but commercial photographers also created fictional scenes using actors and props to tell highly theatrical stories. Sentimental and comical scenes were big sellers.
Some of the most popular themes are still familiar – love, courtship, marriage, children and drunkenness – but others are of their time, taken from vaudeville jokes or the prejudices of the age. Both Irish servant women and African American plantation workers were held up to racist ridicule. One popular genre was college girls taking part in dormitory ‘larks and pranks’. Another was financial ruin from horse racing.
“The visual humour revealed in these stereographs provides a way for us to understand and interrogate a previous era’s cultural and social values,” said Jan Brazier.
The Home Studio
Home photography took off when smaller, more portable cameras became available, and the Kodak revolution arrived in the early 20th century. Amateur photographers captured special family moments using the backyard as a set. Family members posed as if in a studio, with a suspended curtain on the washing line or a pot plant on a stand, often still capturing a special costume. There was also a practical reason to work outdoors: better light.
Our photographic collection
All photographs are drawn from the Macleay Collections of the Chau Chak Wing Museum. These photographs are some of the more than 60,000 in the University’s social history photograph collection. The majority were donated and cover the mid-19th to 20th century.
“It doesn’t surprise me the Museum’s historical photographic exhibitions are so popular as people make a direct connection with our past ways of seeing ourselves. Anyone interested in Australia’s photography, history and early pop culture will enjoy this current exhibition,” Jan Brazier said.
Text from the Chau Chak Wing Museum website
Rose Stereograph Company, Melbourne (Australian)(publisher) ‘A Pair of Drawers’ c. 1895 Stereograph (single image) Chau Chak Wing Museum, The University of Sydney Donated by Sandra Savides, 2014
Rose Stereograph Company, Melbourne (Australian)(publisher) ‘You Hussy, let my Husband alone’ c. 1895 Stereograph (single image) Macleay Collections, Chau Chak Wing Museum Donated by Sandra Savides, 2014
The Rose Stereograph Company
The publishing output of this long-lived firm (which operated from about 1880 until it went into liquidation in 2017) was phenomenal, and when the remains of what must have been a vast photographic archive went on sale in June 2021 with Lloyds Auctions…
According to a brief history by postcard collector Leo Fitzgerald, the Rose story began when Cornish sea captain William Rose came to the Victorian Ballarat gold fields from California and married Grace Ash at Ballarat in 1861. The couple’s son, George, was born in 1862 at the town of Clunes. He worked in his father’s shoe shop in Chapel Street, Prahran, between 1877 and 1880 (apparently producing his earliest photos from those premises) and began spending his Sundays selling photos to picnic parties in the Dandenong hills. Finding his niche in photography, he moved to a new address at Armadale and founded his own firm publishing stereographic views. Over the years he travelled to many countries and recorded numerous important historic events with his stereographic camera equipment, opening offices in Sydney, Wellington and London. His images from Korea have become especially celebrated in Korea, where they represent an extremely rare glimpse of the nation in 1904, before the onset of the destruction wrought by the wars of the 20th century. …
Collector and researcher Ron Blum, whose excellent books built on Leo Fitzgerald’s work, wrote that George’s son Walter took over the business sometime before 1931, selling it in that year to long-time employees Edward Gilbert and Herbert Cutts… George’s wife, Elizabeth, died in 1929, and both George’s sons died before him. With no longer any legal interest in the company he had founded, George kept on taking photographs for the old firm, travelling around Australia in a mobile darkroom and camping along the way. He worked almost until his death in 1942, aged 80… The Rose Stereographic Company continued under the stewardship of Herbert “Bert” Cutts, who brought his son Neil into the business in the 1950s.
Greg Ray. “The Rose Stereograph Company: a snapshot,” on the Photo Time Tunnel website July 16, 2021 [Online] Cited 23/09/2023. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Rose Stereograph Company, Melbourne (Australian)(publisher) ‘The Great Australian Bite (Bight)’ c. 1895 Stereograph (single image) Chau Chak Wing Museum, The University of Sydney Donated by Sandra Savides, 2014
George Rose was born in Clunes, Victoria, in 1861. He did not follow his father into boot-making, but was interested in astronomy and natural history. He was unconventional, of rather eccentric and Bohemian character. After moving to Melbourne in 1876, George developed his skills as a photographer, especially in the stereoscopic field – what is known as 3D photography today. He founded the Rose Stereographic Company in 1880. In 1901 George recorded the celebrations for the visit of the Duke and Duchess of York, and in the following years travelled across Australia and over 35 countries taking three-dimensional photos. By 1907 his business employed six people – two males and four females; at its peak, staff numbered around 20. In 1913 the Rose Stereographic Company began manufacturing “real photo” postcards. George’s son Walter managed the company, allowing his father to concentrate on taking the photographs. In 1931 the business was sold to two long-time employees, Edward Gilbert and Herbert (Bert) Cutts. George Rose died of cancer in 1942, having outlived both his sons, but the business remained in the Cutts family for many years before it finally closed down in March 2017.
Information from the book George Rose – The Postcard Era by Ron Blum.
C.H. Graves, Universal Photo Art Co (American) ‘How Bridget served the POTATOES UNDRESSED. ‘I’ll not take off another STITCH if I lose me JOB’ ‘ c. 1897 Stereograph (single image) Chau Chak Wing Museum, The University of Sydney Donated by Sandra Savides, 2014
The Universal Photo Art Company was one of several business titles under which photographer Carlton Harlow Graves sold his photographs late in his career. He was the son of Jesse Albert Graves, an important early worker who was based in the Delaware Water Gap area of Pennsylvania in the 1860-1880 time frame and produced some 500 generally fine scenic views of the western part of the state. Carlton learned the photographic art from his father and moved to Philadelphia to began producing on his own in about 1880. In his early years, he seems to have taken all the views which he published, but he soon began to buy or pirate images from others. Stereoviews issued under his own name are extremely rare.
At its peak, The Universal Photo Art Company seems to have been a rather substantial outfit. In addition to the headquarters offices and production facilities in Philadelphia, there was a western branch in Naperville, Ill., under F. A. Messerschmidt as general manager. There are numbers listed to almost to 5,000, although the number of individual photos actually used is only about 1,300. By the late 1890’s, C. H. Graves company became a major publisher offering “Art Nouveau Stereographs” on light gray curved mounts. His trade list offered excellent views of hunting scenes, Jamaica, Japan, Java, New York City, Palestine and others. To compete with low priced lithographs and copies, Graves offered his “Universal Series” or “Universal Views” on black mounts with no credit to himself. These have the number and the title in the negative and were sold at a reduced price from the regular “Art Nouveau” issues. Graves also offered boxed sets but they were not sold in the quantities of Underwood and Underwood, the Keystone View Company and H. C. White. The company seems to have been active until about 1910 when its stock of negatives were sold to Underwood & Underwood and presumably went from there to the Keystone View Company with the rest of the Underwood photos.
Paul Rubinstein. “Universal Photo Art Company,” on the Yellowstone stereoviews website Nd [Online] Cited 07/07/2024. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
C.H. Graves, Universal Photo Art Co (American) ‘Rocky Mountain telephone line’ 1895-1905 Stereograph (single image) Chau Chak Wing Museum, The University of Sydney Donated by Sandra Savides, 2014
Keystone View Company (American) ‘Bliss disturbed’ c. 1903 Stereograph Chau Chak Wing Museum, The University of Sydney Donated by Sandra Savides, 2014
The Keystone View Company was founded in 1892 in Meadville, Pennsylvania, U.S.A. by amateur photographer B. L. Singley (Benneville Lloyd Singley). The trade list at the end of 1892 consisted of only a hundred titles but by 1940 they had commercially produced more than 40,000 titles. …
The views sold by the company in the U.K. from 1898 to 1906 were distributed under the name ‘The Fine-Art Photographers’ Publishing Co.’ and included instructions on how to view them with a ‘Realistiscope’; the company were manufacturing and selling stereoscopes from 1898 onwards.
There was an increased popularity of stereographs between 1898 and 1906, during which Keystone (like Underwood & Underwood) entered the box-set market. Along with topographical, nature, events and genre-view scenes, Keystone also began an Educational department in 1898 which issued sets illustrating geography, commerce, technology, history and natural studies.
After 1920 the Keystone View Company was the major global publisher of stereoviews, between 1915 and 1921 they had bought the negatives of nearly all of their competitors. With offices all over the world at this time the company was successful, especially from the sales of World War I stereoview sets.
The Keystone View Company maintained regular production right up until 1939 but continued to manufacture views for optometric purposes, with individual orders for stereoviews being filled up until the early 1970s.
Rebecca. “Keystone View Company,” on The Stereoscopy Blog 3rd January 2021 [Online] Cited 07/07/2024. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Lorna Studios, Glebe (Australian) [Sunlight Soap Girl] 1905-1915 Cabinet card Chau Chak Wing Museum, The University of Sydney Donated from Lydia Bushell, 1983
George Henry Hawkins, Sydney (Australian) [Four children in fancy dress featuring the products, Jelline and Silver Drop Flour] 1910-1930 Glass negative, half-plate Chau Chak Wing Museum, The University of Sydney Donated by R. Hawkins, 1988
George Henry Hawkins, Sydney (Australian) [Lily dressed in costume as ‘Victoria’] 1910-1930 Glass negative, quarter-plate Chau Chak Wing Museum, The University of Sydney Donated by R. Hawkins, 1988
J.G. Park, Leichhardt (Australian) [Portrait of a young Jean Cunningham and Master Hurlstone in English court costumes] c. 1914-1920s Glass negative Chau Chak Wing Museum, The University of Sydney Donated by J. Park, 1981
Scottish-born John Gartly Park (1878-1945) established his photographic studio at his home in Francis Street, Leichhardt around 1914. He was active in the local community, a member of the Loyal Orange Lodge, and a choir and orchestra conductor for the lodge and church.
His collection of glass negative portraits includes a small number of sitters in costume. Posed against Park/s decorative studio background during and after the First World War years, we are reminded of the popularity of fancy dress events, of which these images are rare photographic evidence. Surnames of his sitters are scratched into the edge of the negatives providing clues as to the identities.
The Park Collection was donated by his son, John Park in 1981.
Wall text from the exhibition
J.G. Park, Leichhardt (Australian) [Portrait of Miss Orr in fancy dress as Britannia] c. 1914-1920s Glass negative Chau Chak Wing Museum, The University of Sydney Donated by J Park, 1981
J.G. Park, Leichhardt (Australian) [Portrait of Miss Larsen wearing a Silver Star Starch costume] c. 1914-1920s Glass negative Chau Chak Wing Museum, The University of Sydney Donated by J. Park, 1981
Oliver Emery, Sydney (Australian) [Three boys posed outside against a makeshift backdrop] c. 1914-1930 Glass negative, half-plate Chau Chak Wing Museum, The University of Sydney Donated by O. Emery, 1983
Chau Chak Wing Museum – The University of Sydney Level 1, University Place, Camperdown, NSW 2006 Phone: 02 9351 2812
Opening hours: Monday to Friday (until 9pm Thursdays) 9am – 5pm Saturday and Sunday 12 – 4pm Closed public holidays
“Here is one the world’s top ten photographers of all time – a woman, taking photographs within the first twenty five years of the birth of photography” Dr Marcus Bunyan
Exhibition dates: 3rd May – 28th July, 2024
Organiser: Kristen Gaylord, the Herzfeld Curator of Photography and Media Arts
Julia Margaret Cameron made this portrait of Annie Philpot, the daughter of a family staying on the Isle of Wight, within a month of receiving her first camera. She inscribed some prints of it ‘My first success’. She later recounted, ‘I was in a transport of delight. I ran all over the house to search for gifts for the child. I felt as if she entirely had made the picture.’
Text from the V&A website
“Nothing is scared but beauty.”1
Since the establishment of Art Blart in November 2008, Julia Margaret Cameron appears in a select and esteemed group of photographic artists who each have over 6 postings in the archive: Eugène Atget, William Eggleston, Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Dorothea Lange, Robert Mapplethorpe, László Moholy-Nagy and August Sander.
I am always ecstatic when I see Cameron’s work. Nobody has ever taken portraits like JMC before or since.
As I have written on JMC in earlier exhibitions:
“When you think about it, here is one the world’s top ten photographers of all time – a woman, taking photographs within the first twenty five years of the birth of commercial photography, using rudimentary technology and chemicals – whose photographs are still up there with the greatest ever taken. Still recognisable as her own and no one else’s after all these years. That is a staggering achievement – and tells you something about the talent, tenacity and perspicacity of the women… that she possessed and illuminated such a penetrating discernment – a clarity of vision and intellect which provides a deep understanding and insight into the human condition.”2
“As with any genius (a person who possesses exceptional intellectual or creative power) who goes against the grain, full recognition did not come until later. But when it does arrive, it is undeniable. As soon as you see a JMC photograph… you know it is by her, it could be by no one else. Her “signature” – closely framed portraits and illustrative allegories based on religious and literary works; far-away looks, soft focus and lighting, low depth of field; strong men (“great thro’ genius”) and beautiful, sensual, heroic women (“great thro’ love”) – is her genius.
There is something so magical about how JMC can frame a face, emerging from darkness, side profile, filling the frame, top lit. Soft out of focus hair with one point of focus in the image. Beautiful light. Just the most sensitive capturing of a human being, I don’t know what it is… a glimpse into another world, a ghostly world of the spirit, the soul of the living seen before they are dead.
Love and emotion. Beauty, beautiful, beatified.”3
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ “The line runs from Winckelmann’s Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek Works of Art in Painting and Sculpture, first published in 1755, to the end of the 19th century and beyond; see Walter Pater’s “Winckelmann,” written in 1867 and published in The Renaissance.
Margaret Walters. “The Classical Nude,” in Margaret Walters. The Nude Male: A New Perspective. New York & London: Paddington Press, 1978, p. 34. Footnote 2.
~ Exhibition: ‘Julia Margaret Cameron’ at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, August 2013 – January 2014
Many thankx to the Milwaukee Art Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“I longed to arrest all beauty that came before me, and at length the longing has been satisfied.”
Julia Margaret Cameron
One of the most influential photographers in the medium’s history, Julia Margaret Cameron made portraits of transcendent beauty in close-up, soft-focus photographs. Arresting Beauty: Julia Margaret Cameron – a major traveling exhibition the Milwaukee Art Museum partnered with the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, to bring to the Midwest – highlights the renowned photographer’s pioneering style.
Cameron (English b. India, 1815-1879) received her first camera at the age of 48, making her career even more impressive for its brevity. Her portraits depict family and friends; contemporary scientists, scholars, and artists; and scenes staging allegorical, biblical, historical, and literary stories. For over a decade, she produced thousands of photographs and built a career, selling and exhibiting her work internationally. Her distinct style set her apart, and her legacy positions her as an artist who broke ground for future photographers.
The Museum’s unique presentation of this celebratory exhibition features more than 90 objects and includes works of art from its collection to provide historical context for the art that influenced, and was influenced by, Cameron.
Just as she modelled her Madonna photographs on Renaissance art, Julia Margaret Cameron looked to painting and sculpture as inspiration for her allegorical and narrative subjects. Some works are photographic interpretations of specific paintings by artists such as Raphael and Michelangelo. Others aspired more generally to create ‘Pictorial Effect’.
This depiction of a sibyl, a prophetess from classical mythology, is based on Michelangelo’s fresco of the Erythraean Sibyl on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome (1508-1510). The model’s braided hair, bare arms and profile pose with a large book are all copied from Michelangelo’s version. Cameron’s good friend and neighbour Tennyson had prints of the Sistine Chapel frescoes decorating his home.
Cameron’s friend and mentor, the painter G.F. Watts, wrote to Cameron, ‘Please do not send me valuable mounted copies … send me any … defective unmounted impressions, I shall be able to judge just as well & shall be just as much charmed with success & shall not feel that I am taking money from you.’ This photograph is one of approximately 67 in the V&A’s collection that was recently discovered to have belonged to him. Many are unique, which suggests that Cameron was not fully satisfied with them. Some may seem ‘defective’ but others are enhanced by their flaws. All of them contribute to our understanding of Cameron’s working process and the photographs that did meet her standards.
Julia Margaret Cameron looked to painting and sculpture as inspiration for her allegorical and narrative subjects. Some works are photographic interpretations of specific paintings by artists such as Raphael and Michelangelo. Others aspired more generally to create ‘Pictorial Effect’.
Cameron’s harshest critics attacked her for using the supposedly truthful medium of photography to depict imaginary subject matter. Some suggested that at best her photographs could serve as studies for painters. The South Kensington Museum mainly acquired ‘Madonnas’ and ‘Fancy Subjects’, and exhibited them as pictures in their own right.
Cameron considered her close friend, the painter and sculptor G. F. Watts, to be her chief artistic advisor. She wrote of this period, ‘Mr. Watts gave me such encouragement that I felt as if I had wings to fly with.’ Here she transforms him into a musician, perhaps to symbolise the arts in general, rather than showing him specifically as a painter. Kate Keown, the girl on the right, whispers inspiration.
Many of the photographs purchased by the South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria and Albert Museum) from Julia Margaret Cameron were ‘Madonna Groups’ depicting the Virgin Mary and the infant Christ. Her housemaid Mary Hillier posed as the Virgin Mary so often she became known locally as ‘Mary Madonna’.
Like many of her contemporaries, Cameron was a devout Christian. As a mother of six, the motif of the Madonna and child held particular significance for her. In aspiring to make ‘High Art’, Cameron aimed to make photographs that could be uplifting and morally instructive.
Julia Margaret Cameron’s earliest photographic subjects were family and friends, many of whom were eminent literary figures. These early portraits reveal how she experimented with dramatic lighting and close-up compositions, features that would become her signature style.
Cameron made numerous studies of her grandson, both as himself and in the guise of the Christ child. He features in eight of the photographs the South Kensington Museum acquired in 1865.
In the poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Christabel is a virtuous maiden who is put under a spell by an evil sorceress. Cameron wrote of photographs such as this, ‘When coming to something which, to my eye, was very beautiful, I stopped there instead of screwing on the lens to the more definite focus which all other photographers insist upon’.
In late 1865, Julia Margaret Cameron began using a larger camera. It held a 15 x 12 inch glass negative, rather than the 12 x 10 inch negative of her first camera. Early the next year she wrote to Henry Cole with great enthusiasm – but little modesty – about the new turn she had taken in her work.
Cameron initiated a series of large-scale, closeup heads that fulfilled her photographic vision. She saw them as a rejection of ‘mere conventional topographic photography – map-making and skeleton rendering of feature and form’ in favour of a less precise but more emotionally penetrating form of portraiture. Cameron also continued to make narrative and allegorical tableaux, which were larger and bolder than her previous efforts.
Cameron based the model’s pose, drapery and sad expression on a painting attributed to Guido Reni that was famous at the time. The subject is the 16th-century Italian noblewoman Beatrice Cenci, executed for arranging the murder of her abusive father. One review admired Cameron’s soft rendering of ‘the pensive sweetness of the expression of the original picture’ while another mocked her for claiming to have photographed a historical figure ‘from the life’.
In late 1865, Julia Margaret Cameron began using a larger camera. It held a 15 x 12 inch glass negative, rather than the 12 x 10 inch negative of her first camera. Early the next year she wrote to Henry Cole with great enthusiasm – but little modesty – about the new turn she had taken in her work.
Cameron initiated a series of large-scale, closeup heads that fulfilled her photographic vision. She saw them as a rejection of ‘mere conventional topographic photography – map-making and skeleton rendering of feature and form’ in favour of a less precise but more emotionally penetrating form of portraiture. Cameron also continued to make narrative and allegorical tableaux, which were larger and bolder than her previous efforts.
In this image, Cameron concentrates upon the head of her maid Mary Hillier by using a darkened background and draping her in simple dark cloth. The lack of surrounding detail or context obscures references to narrative, identity or historical context. The flowing hair, lightly parted lips and exposed neck suggest sensuality. The title, taken from a line in the poem ‘Lancelot and Elaine’ from Alfred Tennyson’s ‘Idylls of the King’, transforms the subject into a tragic heroine.
When Julia Margaret Cameron photographed her intellectual heroes, such as Tennyson, her aim was to record ‘the greatness of the inner as well as the features of the outer man’. Another motive was to earn money from prints, since her family’s finances were precarious. Within her first year as a photographer she began exhibiting and selling through the London gallery Colnaghi’s. She used autographs to increase the value of some portraits.
In March 1868 Cameron used two rooms at the South Kensington Museum as a portrait studio. Her letter of thanks makes clear her commercial aspirations, mentioning photographs she had sold and asking for help securing more sitters, including, she wrote hopefully, any ‘Royal sitters you may obtain for me’.
Sir John Herschel was an eminent scientist who made important contributions to astronomy and photography. Cameron wrote of this sitting, ‘When I have such men before my camera my whole soul has endeavoured to do its duty towards them in recording faithfully the greatness of the inner as well as the features of the outer man. The photograph thus taken has been almost the embodiment of a prayer.’
Text from the V&A website
Milwaukee Art Museum Presents Major Exhibition of Renowned Photographer Julia Margaret Cameron’s Pioneering Portraits
The only Midwestern presentation of the internationally touring exhibition Arresting Beauty: Julia Margaret Cameron showcases the 19th-century artist’s explorations of transcendent beauty through portraiture.
The Milwaukee Art Museum partners with the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, to present Arresting Beauty: Julia Margaret Cameron, an exhibition illuminating the transcendent beauty of the renowned photographer’s pioneering style. Featuring more than 90 works, including photographs, paintings, and archival objects, the exhibition will be on view May 3 – July 28, 2024, in the Museum’s Herzfeld Center for Photography and Media Arts.
“We are honoured to bring this significant selection of Julia Margaret Cameron’s photographs from the V&A’s collection to the Milwaukee Art Museum,” said Marcelle Polednik, PhD, Donna and Donald Baumgartner Director. “As the only Midwest venue for Arresting Beauty, our visitors will have a unique opportunity to view these rare and groundbreaking prints that will likely not be brought back together again in our generation.”
Julia Margaret Cameron (English born India, 1815-1879) is distinguished as one of the most innovative and influential photographers in the medium’s history. In 1863, at 48 years old, she received her first camera as a gift from one of her children. Cameron refined her artistic practice, creating a distinct style that set her apart from other photographers: close-up, soft-focus portraits often with scratches and smudges she thought enhanced the images’ beauty. Though her style was criticised and considered aesthetically radical for her time, Cameron’s legacy positions her as an artist who broke ground for future photographers. For over a decade, she made photographs from her home in Freshwater on the Isle of Wight and her studio at the South Kensington Museum (now the V&A) in London. She is best known for sensitive, spiritual portraits of her contemporaries and scenes staging allegorical, biblical, historical, and literary stories. Sitters for Cameron’s photographs include Charles Darwin and Alfred Tennyson, as well as her family members, friends, neighbours, and domestic workers.
“Julia Margaret Cameron found beauty in the everyday – both in the people around her and in the photographic ‘mistakes’ she made,” said Kristen Gaylord, Herzfeld Curator of Photography and Media Arts at the Milwaukee Art Museum. “Her artistic pursuit of such beauty left an enduring impact on the field, and I’m thrilled we can bring this major internationally touring exhibition to our community.”
Arresting Beauty travels from Jeu de Paume, Paris, to the Milwaukee Art Museum and comprises three sections: Cameron’s early photography experiments, her portraits of her contemporaries, and her allegorical compositions and artistic tableaux.
Exhibition highlights include:
~ Annie, 1864, a portrait of Cameron’s neighbour, deemed by the artist as her “first success”; ~ The Whisper of the Muse, 1865, an early allegorical photograph featuring artist George Watts as a musician with two local girls as muses; ~ John Frederick William Herschel, 1867, a striking portrait of the prominent scientist and photographic inventor who was a friend of Cameron’s; ~ The Rosebud Garden of Girls, 1868, a composition featuring five women surrounded by flowers, its title inspired by a line from one of Alfred Tennyson’s poems.
Accompanying Cameron’s prints are archival treasures, such as rarely exhibited, handwritten pages from her influential memoir Annals of My Glass House; her camera lens; and a photograph of Cameron taken by her son, Henry Herschel Hay Cameron. To provide historical context for the art that influenced, and was influenced by, Cameron, the Milwaukee Art Museum will present pieces from its collection alongside those from the V&A, including its own photograph by Julia Margaret Cameron, three paintings from its European collection, and three prints never before exhibited.
Arresting Beauty: Julia Margaret Cameron was organised by Lisa Springer, Curator of Photography Touring Exhibitions, and Marta Weiss, Senior Curator of Photography, Victoria and Albert Museum, London. The Milwaukee Art Museum presentation was organised by Kristen Gaylord, Herzfeld Curator of Photography and Media Arts.
When Julia Margaret Cameron photographed her intellectual heroes such as Alfred Tennyson, Sir John Herschel and Henry Taylor, her aim was to record ‘the greatness of the inner as well as the features of the outer man.’ Another motive was to earn money from prints of the photographs, since her family’s finances were precarious. Within her first year as a photographer she began exhibiting and selling through the London gallery Colnaghi’s. She used autographs to increase the value of some portraits.
The naturalist Charles Darwin and his family rented a cottage on the Isle of Wight from the Camerons in the summer of 1868. By 27 July, Colnaghi’s was advertising, ‘We are glad to observe her gallery of great men enriched by a very fine portrait of Charles Darwin’. Due to the sitter’s celebrity, Cameron later had this portrait reprinted as a more stable carbon print.
Her husband, Charles Hay Cameron, a retired reformer of Indian law and education, frequently posed for Cameron. Cameron’s husband, Charles, was two decades older than Julia.
In this image, Cameron concentrates upon the head of her maid Mary Hillier by using a darkened background and draping her in simple dark cloth. The lack of surrounding detail or context obscures references to narrative, identity or historical context. The flowing hair, lightly parted lips and exposed neck suggest sensuality.
“New technologies, new aesthetics, new dispositions. The shock of the new.” Dr Marcus Bunyan
Exhibition dates: 9th April – 7th July, 2024
Co-curators: Karen Hellman, former associate curator at the Getty Museum, and Carolyn Peter, assistant curator in the Department of Photographs at the Getty
Hippolyte Bayard (French, 1801-1887) William Henry Fox Talbot (English, 1800-1877) Samuel Buckle (British, 1808-1860) Nicolaas Henneman (British, 1813-1893) Reverend Calvert Jones (British, 1804-1877) David Kinnebrook (English, 1819-1865) M.H. Nevil Story-Maskelyne (British, 1823-1911) Unknown maker Cover of Dessins photographiques sur Papier. Recueil No. 2. [The “Bayard Album”] 1839-1855 The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles Public domain
Shock of the new
At the moment the archive is going through a veritable feast of wonderful exhibitions on 19th century photography, this exhibition at the Getty a companion to last week’s posting on the exhibition Nineteenth-Century Photography Now also at the J. Paul Getty Museum. What a delight!
This posting on the important photographer and inventor Hippolyte Bayard (French, 1801-1887) – one of the pioneers of photography who was finally acknowledged as such during his lifetime and received due recognition – offers the visitor the opportunity to view fragile photographs from the Getty’s treasured Bayard album, one of the first photographic albums ever created, before the leaves of the album are reassembled after restoration.
“The album includes 145 of Bayard’s experiments with different photographic processes on paper, primarily salted paper prints from paper negatives from about 1839 to the late 1840s… Bayard divided the album into four sections: still lifes, portraits, urban and rural landscapes, and an assortment of miscellaneous images. The inclusion of twenty-two photographs by British photographers, including William Henry Fox Talbot, provides evidence of Bayard’s interactions with his fellow pioneers across the English Channel. …
Inscriptions found on the Getty album pages and versos of its photographs support the theory that the artist himself – or someone with firsthand knowledge of the chemicals he used – compiled this volume. Thus, this treasure offers intriguing insights into Bayard’s practice, aesthetic choices, and strategies for presenting himself through the order and arrangement of the photographs.”1
The full album and layout can be viewed on the Getty’s website.
What I find delightful about this “album of experiments” – other than Bayard’s perceptive, inquisitive self-portraits and delicate, atmospheric cyanotype and salted paper print photograms – is the colour (including hand coloured), size and placement of the photographic prints on the pages of the album. Sometimes gridded, sometimes singular in grand isolation, sometimes asymmetrical with empty pages between images, the album seems to flow allow like a river… only for the viewer then to have to change orientation, as vertical images on one page are then abutted next to a page of images that need to be viewed in a horizontal format but turning the album through 90 degrees.
It’s as if the compiler of the album, probably Bayard himself, applied this prick of consciousness to the viewing of the album, to stop the viewer skimming over the images but forcing them to be attentive, to be aware, of the progression of the story that the artist was telling, to be aware of a certain “disposition” in the viewer in order to – a/ disrupt the tendency of something to act in a certain manner under given circumstances and b/ impinge on a person’s inherent quality of mind and character. To offer a new dispensation on reality.
In other words, the artist challenges the viewer as to how photographs are read and interpreted through changes to the perception and point of view said “reader”. I don’t think I have ever seen such an early photo book that proposes such a daring reorientation of consciousness as does this album.
New technologies, new aesthetics, new dispositions.
The shock of the new.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ Carolyn Peter, J. Paul Getty Museum, Department of Photographs, 2024
Many thankx to the J. Paul Getty Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Parisian bureaucrat by day and tireless inventor after hours, Hippolyte Bayard (French, 1801-1887) was one of the most important, if lesser-known, pioneers of photography. During his thirty-year career, he invented the direct positive process and several other photographic techniques on paper. This exhibition presents an extraordinarily rare opportunity to view some of Bayard’s highly fragile photographs dating from the 1840s – the first decade of the new medium. The exhibition journeys back to the 19th century to unveil a collection of Bayard’s delicately crafted photographs, offering an extraordinarily rare glimpse into his unique processes, subjects, and persistent curiosity. He brought an artistic sensitivity into capturing the first staged self-portraits and set precedents for photography as we know it today. It highlights Getty’s treasured Bayard album, one of the first photographic albums ever created.
This exhibition is presented in English and Spanish.
Text from the J. Paul Getty Museum website
Hippolyte Bayard (French, 1801-1887) William Henry Fox Talbot (English, 1800-1877) Samuel Buckle (British, 1808-1860) Nicolaas Henneman (British, 1813-1893) Reverend Calvert Jones (British, 1804-1877) David Kinnebrook (English, 1819-1865) M.H. Nevil Story-Maskelyne (British, 1823-1911) Unknown maker Title page of Dessins photographiques sur Papier. Recueil No. 2. [The “Bayard Album”] with Hippolyte Bayard’s [Self-Portrait in the Garden] June 1845 1839-1855 The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles Public domain
Text above the photograph: Bromure d’argent vapeurs de Mercure (Silver bromide Mercury vapors)
Hippolyte Bayard’s self-portrait at his garden gate [Self-Portrait in the Garden] introduces the contents of this 184-page album, one of the earliest photographic albums ever created…
Titled Dessins photographiques sur Papier. Receuil No. 2 [Photographic Drawings on Paper. Collection No. 2], the album includes 145 of Bayard’s experiments with different photographic processes on paper, primarily salted paper prints from paper negatives from about 1839 to the late 1840s. Twenty-two photographs by six of his British peers are also interspersed through the album. With its green-and-black marbled covers, it is similar in style to the other known album devoted to Bayard – Album d’essais [Album of Experiments] – owned by the Société française de photographie (SFP) in Paris. Inscriptions found on the Getty album pages and versos of its photographs support the theory that the artist himself – or someone with firsthand knowledge of the chemicals he used – compiled this volume. Thus, this treasure offers intriguing insights into Bayard’s practice, aesthetic choices, and strategies for presenting himself through the order and arrangement of the photographs.
Bayard divided the album into four sections: still lifes, portraits, urban and rural landscapes, and an assortment of miscellaneous images. The inclusion of twenty-two photographs by British photographers, including William Henry Fox Talbot, provides evidence of Bayard’s interactions with his fellow pioneers across the English Channel.
This album has passed through several owners over its 180-plus year life. While gaps still exist, we have traced much of its provenance, or history of ownership. Working back in time, the Getty Museum purchased the album in 1984 from the American collector Arnold Crane (1932-2014) as part of its foundational photography collection. Crane had acquired it in 1970 from Alain Brieux (1922-1985), a Parisian book dealer. By the early 1950s, the album was in the possession of the commune of Breteuil-sur-Noye, Bayard’s hometown, or its mayor, François Monnet (1890-1970). A member of Bayard’s extended family may have given or sold the album to Breteuil. Moving further back into the nineteenth century, Bayard’s family likely chose to keep the album at the time of his death in 1887. We believe that Bayard possessed the album from its creation until he passed away.
Over time different individuals have added inscriptions, numbering systems, correspondence, a biography, and a souvenir from a 1959-1960 exhibition on Bayard in Essen, Germany. At the top left corner of pages, an early inventory system notes the page number, the number of images on the page, and total number of photographs in the album up to that point. Numbers under each photograph represent a second system. At the bottom of the pages, Getty Museum staff and Crane each assigned an accession number to identify the album within their collections. Note that Getty numbers begin with “84.XO.968.” and Crane numbers with “A58.”.
With each change of hands, the album has adopted new meanings. It started as an artist’s notebook and portfolio. Upon Bayard’s death it became a family memento and then a symbol of a commune’s pride. Later in the twentieth century, it shifted from an antiquarian book dealer’s curious commodity to a collector’s treasure. Today it is a museum object valued for what it tells us about processes, subject matter, and sophisticated lines of communication between photographers during the earliest years of photography.
Carolyn Peter, J. Paul Getty Museum, Department of Photographs, 2024. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
For more information see:
~ Hellman, Karen and Carolyn Peter, eds. Hippolyte Bayard and the Invention of Photography. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2024.
~ Peter, Carolyn. “The Many Lives of the Getty Bayard Album.” Getty Research Journal 15 (2022): 67-86.
Hippolyte Bayard (French, 1801-1887) William Henry Fox Talbot (English, 1800-1877) Samuel Buckle (British, 1808-1860) Nicolaas Henneman (British, 1813-1893) Reverend Calvert Jones (British, 1804-1877) David Kinnebrook (English, 1819-1865) M.H. Nevil Story-Maskelyne (British, 1823-1911) Unknown maker Dessins photographiques sur Papier. Recueil No. 2. [The “Bayard Album”] showing at top left Hippolyte Bayard’s [Three Feathers] About 1842-1843 1839-1855 The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles Public domain
Hippolyte Bayard (French, 1801-1887) [Three Feathers] About 1842-1843 Part of Dessins photographiques sur Papier. Recueil No. 2. [The “Bayard Album”] 1839-1855 Cyanotype 13.8 x 11.1cm (5 7/16 x 4 3/8 in.) The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles Public domain
Hippolyte Bayard (French, 1801-1887) William Henry Fox Talbot (English, 1800-1877) Samuel Buckle (British, 1808-1860) Nicolaas Henneman (British, 1813-1893) Reverend Calvert Jones (British, 1804-1877) David Kinnebrook (English, 1819-1865) M.H. Nevil Story-Maskelyne (British, 1823-1911) Unknown maker Dessins photographiques sur Papier. Recueil No. 2. [The “Bayard Album”] showing at top right, Hippolyte Bayard’s Arrangement of Flowers about 1839-1843 1839-1855 The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles Public domain
Hippolyte Bayard (French, 1801-1887) Arrangement of Flowers About 1839-1843 Part of Dessins photographiques sur Papier. Recueil No. 2. [The “Bayard Album”] 1839-1855 Salted paper print 17.5 x 21.3cm (6 7/8 x 8 3/8 in.) The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles Public domain
Hippolyte Bayard (French, 1801-1887) William Henry Fox Talbot (English, 1800-1877) Samuel Buckle (British, 1808-1860) Nicolaas Henneman (British, 1813-1893) Reverend Calvert Jones (British, 1804-1877) David Kinnebrook (English, 1819-1865) M.H. Nevil Story-Maskelyne (British, 1823-1911) Unknown maker Dessins photographiques sur Papier. Recueil No. 2. [The “Bayard Album”] showing at bottom right, Hippolyte Bayard’s [Portrait of a Man] 1843-1845 1839-1855 The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles Public domain
Hippolyte Bayard (French, 1801-1887) [Portrait of a Man] 1843-1845 Part of Dessins photographiques sur Papier. Recueil No. 2. [The “Bayard Album”] 1839-1855 Salted paper print Image: 15.3 x 11.6 cm (6 x 4 9/16 in.) Sheet: 15.7 x 12 cm (6 3/16 x 4 3/4 in.) The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles Public domain
Hippolyte Bayard (French, 1801-1887) [In Bayard’s Studio] About 1845 Part of Dessins photographiques sur Papier. Recueil No. 2. [The “Bayard Album”] 1839-1855 Salted paper print 23.5 x 17.5cm (9 1/4 x 6 7/8 in.) The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles Public domain
Hippolyte Bayard is one of the earliest photographers to explore self-portraiture using a camera. The Getty Museum’s collection includes seven of Bayard’s self-portraits (see 84.XO.968.1, 84.XO.968.166, 84.XO.968.20).* While Bayard is not present in this image, it too can be considered a self-portrait of sorts as it offers the viewer a window onto his artistic world. The seemingly casual composition shows a make-shift photographic studio with wood doors leaning up against a brick wall to form the principal back wall. The floor is rough; it isn’t clear whether it is made of tile, wood, or simply dirt. Bayard featured the tools of his trade – glass bottles filled with chemicals, a beaker, a funnel, a dark canvas backdrop, and a light curtain or coverlet as well as some of his favourite subjects – three plaster casts and a porcelain vase. The Société française de photographie (SFP) collection in Paris has two versions of this image; one of them is hand-coloured. The overpainting with watercolour heightens the various patterns and adds colours that the photographic process was unable to capture.
Many of these same props can be found in a number of Bayard’s photographs. The vase with its elaborate floral design as well as the small figure with arms extended, the coverlet, backdrop, and bench are integral parts of Bayard’s most famous self-portrait, Le Noyé [The Drowned Man], now housed at the SFP.
*Four of the Getty’s Bayard self-portraits are part of a portfolio printed in 1965 by M. Gassmann and Son from Bayard’s original negatives that are housed in the SFP collection. (See: 84.XO.1166.1, 84.XO.1166.2, 84.XO.1166.8, and 84.XO.1166.25).
Carolyn Peter. J. Paul Getty Museum, Department of Photographs 2019. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Hippolyte Bayard (French, 1801-1887) William Henry Fox Talbot (English, 1800-1877) Samuel Buckle (British, 1808-1860) Nicolaas Henneman (British, 1813-1893) Reverend Calvert Jones (British, 1804-1877) David Kinnebrook (English, 1819-1865) M.H. Nevil Story-Maskelyne (British, 1823-1911) Unknown maker Dessins photographiques sur Papier. Recueil No. 2. [The “Bayard Album”] showing at bottom right, Hippolyte Bayard’s [Galerie de la Madeleine with Scaffolding, Place de la Madeleine] 1843 1839-1855 The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles Public domain
Hippolyte Bayard (French, 1801-1887) [Galerie de la Madeleine with Scaffolding, Place de la Madeleine] 1843 Part of Dessins photographiques sur Papier. Recueil No. 2. [The “Bayard Album”] 1839-1855 Salted paper print Image: 16.5 x 22cm (6 1/2 x 8 11/16 in.) Sheet: 16.8 x 22.3cm (6 5/8 x 8 3/4 in.) The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles Public domain
Hippolyte Bayard (French, 1801-1887) William Henry Fox Talbot (English, 1800-1877) Samuel Buckle (British, 1808-1860) Nicolaas Henneman (British, 1813-1893) Reverend Calvert Jones (British, 1804-1877) David Kinnebrook (English, 1819-1865) M.H. Nevil Story-Maskelyne (British, 1823-1911) Unknown maker Dessins photographiques sur Papier. Recueil No. 2. [The “Bayard Album”] showing at top right, Hippolyte Bayard’s [Rue des Batignolles] about 1845 1839-1855 The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles Public domain
Hippolyte Bayard (French, 1801-1887) [Rue des Batignolles] About 1845 Part of Dessins photographiques sur Papier. Recueil No. 2. [The “Bayard Album”] 1839-1855 Salted paper print 15.4 x 11 cm (6 1/16 x 4 5/16 in.) The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles Public domain
Hippolyte Bayard (French, 1801-1887) [Bitch in profile] About 1865 Part of Dessins photographiques sur Papier. Recueil No. 2. [The “Bayard Album”] 1839-1855 Albumen silver print Mount: 10 x 6.1cm (3 15/16 x 2 3/8 in.) J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles Public domain
Hippolyte Bayard (French, 1801-1887) [Unidentified woman standing, leaning against a credenza] About 1861 Albumen silver print Mount: 10.4 x 6.1 cm (4 1/8 x 2 3/8 in.) The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles Public domain
Hippolyte Bayard (French, 1801-1887) William Henry Fox Talbot (English, 1800-1877) Samuel Buckle (British, 1808-1860) Nicolaas Henneman (British, 1813-1893) Reverend Calvert Jones (British, 1804-1877) David Kinnebrook (English, 1819-1865) M.H. Nevil Story-Maskelyne (British, 1823-1911) Unknown maker Dessins photographiques sur Papier. Recueil No. 2. [The “Bayard Album”] 1839-1855 The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles Public domain
Hippolyte Bayard (French, 1801-1887) [Two Men and a Girl in a Garden] About 1847 Part of Dessins photographiques sur Papier. Recueil No. 2. [The “Bayard Album”] 1839-1855 Albumenised salted paper print 12.9 x 15.6cm (5 1/16 x 6 1/8 in.) The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles Public domain
Hippolyte Bayard
Frenchman Hippolyte Bayard was one of the earliest experimenters in photography, though few will recognise his name today. While working as a civil servant in the Ministry of Finance in the late 1830s and early 1840s, he devoted much of his free time to inventing processes that captured and fixed images from nature on paper using a basic camera, chemicals, and light. The announcement of the inventions of his fellow countryman Louis-Jacques Mandé Daguerre’s daguerreotype on January 7, 1839, and Englishman William Henry Fox Talbot’s photogenic drawing soon after greatly diminished opportunities for recognition of Bayard’s contributions. He was most likely persuaded by François Arago, the head of the French Academy of Sciences, to keep quiet about his own distinct process until after the announcement of Daguerre’s process and subsequent celebration in August of 1839.
Bayard nonetheless continued his investigations and submitted letters detailing three photographic recipes to the Academy of Sciences. Though he exhibited examples of his work in what has been recognised as the first public exhibition of photography in July 1839 and presented his direct positive process at the Academy of Fine Arts in November of 1839, where it was lauded as an important tool for artists, he remained in the shadows of Daguerre and Talbot.
Bayard is best known today for his 1840 self-portrait as a drowned man, to which he added text protesting the lack of recognition for his invention. The humorous, yet biting text read:
The corpse of the gentleman you see here…. is that of Monsieur Bayard, inventor of the process that you have just seen…. As far as I know this ingenious and indefatigable experimenter has been occupied for about three years with perfecting his discovery…. The Government, who gave much to Monsieur Daguerre, has said it can do nothing for Monsieur Bayard, and the poor wretch has drowned himself. Oh! The precariousness of human affairs! …
In reality, of the three inventors, it was Bayard who actively continued to photograph the longest. He was a founding member in the 1850s of the Société héliographique and its successor, the Société française de photographie. He kept up with the latest developments in the world of photography and integrated new processes into his practice. He was one of only five photographers selected to be part of the Missions héliographiques in 1851, charged with the task of documenting France’s historic architecture for the Commission des Monuments historiques. He exhibited regularly in the universal expositions and, in the 1860s after his retirement from the Ministry of Finance, opened a photographic portrait studio in Paris with Charles Albert d’Arnoux, known as Bertall (1820-1882). During his lifetime, Bayard was described as the “Grandfather of Photography” by several commentators. The Légion d’honneur (still considered today the highest order of military and civil decoration in France) awarded him the first level of merit – Chevalier – in 1863. In the late 1860s he left Paris and moved to Nemours near his lifelong friend, the actor and painter Edmond Geffroy (1804-1895). Bayard died there in 1887.
Hippolyte Bayard (French, 1801-1887) [Self-Portrait in the Garden] 1847 Salted paper print Image: 16.5 × 12.3cm (6 1/2 × 4 13/16 in.) Sheet: 17.1 × 12.5cm (6 3/4 × 4 15/16 in.) The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles Public domain
By October 1840, a little over a year after several competing photographic processes had been made public, Hippolyte Bayard began staging elaborate self-portraits in his garden and other locations. His best known, Le Noyé [The Drowned Man], was made on October 18, 1840 (three variants are now part of the collection of the Société française de photographie in Paris).
The Getty Museum’s collection includes six other self-portraits by Bayard in addition to this 1847 Self-portrait in the Garden (See: 84.XO.968.1, 84.XO.968.166).* In five of the seven self-portraits, he placed himself in garden settings. This was, in part, a practical decision since natural light was required to make photographs at the time. However, his choice of setting also reflects his passion for plants. He came from a family of gardeners – his maternal grandfather worked in the extensive grounds of the abbey in Breteuil, the village where Bayard grew up. His father, a justice of the peace, was a passionate amateur gardener who grew peaches in an orchard attached to the family home. The garden(s) featured in Bayard’s self-portraits may indeed be part of the family property in Breteuil or his own home in Batignolles – an area that was just on the outskirts of Paris.
The setting becomes an integral aspect of these portraits; Bayard, the man, merges with his environment. In this particular image, he is surrounded by vegetation and is seated in a wooden chair whose arms and legs resemble vine branches. The lower portion of his legs merges into the darkened lower foreground as if he too is rooted in the earth and has sprouted from it. He shares the foreground with a tall leafy plant that bursts into blossoms at the top. The artist’s choice of clothing, including his cravat, brimmed cap, as well as his direct gaze, all combine to convey a sense of confidence.
Another image found mounted on a separate page in the same album in which this one appears offers a slightly more distant view of almost all the same elements. Bayard is no longer part of the composition, which instead features a watering can and an extra pot (See 84.XO.968.85). Perhaps this photograph was a study in preparation for this self-portrait.
*Four of the Getty’s Bayard self-portraits are part of a portfolio printed in 1965 by M. Gassmann and Son from Bayard’s original negatives that are housed in the SFP collection. (See: 84.XO.1166.1, 84.XO.1166.2, 84.XO.1166.8, and 84.XO.1166.25).
Carolyn Peter, J. Paul Getty Museum, Department of Photograph 2019. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Hippolyte Bayard (French, 1801-1887) [Self-Portrait in the Garden] June 1845 Hand-coloured Salted paper print 12 1/4 × 9 13/16 in. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles Public domain
The 19th-Century Selfie Pioneer
Before Instagram influencers, there was Hippolyte Bayard
More than 160 years before smartphones and selfie sticks allowed even the most inexperienced shutterbug to snap a photo of themselves, Hippolyte Bayard was turning his camera on himself.
The year was 1840. Several competing photographic processes had just been made public for the first time the year before, effectively introducing the medium of photography to the world. Bayard, a bureaucrat who worked at the Ministry of Finance in Paris and took pictures on weekends or his lunch hour, was one of the first photographers to practice the art of the self-portrait. Examples of these are on view in the new Getty Center exhibition Hippolyte Bayard: A Persistent Pioneer.
With himself as the subject, Bayard could experiment with new photographic processes, set a scene, and pose in front of the camera, creating images that represented his hobbies, frustrations, and achievements. Sound familiar?
“The earliest photographers wanted to capture people in photographs. Bayard was one of the first to actually succeed,” says Carolyn Peter, the exhibition’s co-curator. He also demonstrated that photography was a new art form. “The public was so taken by the realistic depictions of the world in photography, but he was saying that you can also make things up. You can stage things.”
Bayard in the Garden
Self-portraits were an appealing solution in those early days of photography largely because taking a picture required a long, labor-intensive process, explains Peter. Photographers had to set their cameras in front of their (motionless) subjects for anywhere between 20 minutes and three hours – a daunting ask for any human being – to expose the sensitised surface (metal, paper, or glass) to enough light to create the image.
“He probably didn’t want to subject others to this endurance test, but he still wanted to try and work on his photography techniques. Gradually, the amount of time it took to make a photo shortened, maybe down to around 10 minutes, and finally down to seconds,” Peter said.
In a series of self-portraits from the 1840s, Bayard posed himself in his or his family’s gardens, among plants and tools, emphasising his passion for horticulture. The outdoor setting was a necessity as it offered plenty of natural light. He adopted several different configurations of items and positions in each portrait. Notice how in one image (above left) he hid his feet behind greenery, as if he were planted in the earth.
“Today artists, along with the rest of us, still try a lot of different positions and poses with slight variations when we are making self-portraits,” Peter says.
Hippolyte Bayard (French, 1801-1887) [Self-Portrait in the Garden] About 1845-1849 Salted paper print Image: 15.9 x 12.7 cm (6 1/4 x 5 in.) Sheet: 16.3 x 13.1 cm (6 7/16 x 5 3/16 in.) The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles Public domain
Bayard as Dramatist
Perhaps Bayard’s best-known photo is his Drowned Man (1840), in which he slumps over, partially covered by a sheet, eyes closed, as if he had perished. Bayard created three versions of the image, changing the pose and props in each one, and eventually added this over-the-top lament to the back of the final version:
“The corpse of the gentleman that you see here… is that of M. Bayard, inventor of the process you have just seen…. To my knowledge, for about three years this ingenious and indefatigable researcher has been working to perfect his invention…. The Government, which has given so much to M. Daguerre, said it could do nothing for M. Bayard, and the unfortunate man drowned himself. Oh! The precariousness of human affairs!”
Clearly, Bayard had a few frustrations about his position in the photography world and about how little respect he felt he had been given in comparison to fellow photographer Louis Daguerre. This self-portrait allowed him to express his woes in a humorous and, yes, dramatic way, perhaps inspired by his connections to the theater.
“One of his very best friends from childhood on was Edmond Geffroy, a famous actor, so Bayard hung out with actors and theater people as well as fine artists and writers,” Peter says. “He had this connection to theatricality and theater. He attended a lot of plays. So I think that influenced him.”
A Special Effects Pioneer
In the 1860s, Bayard opened a portrait studio where customers could pay to have their pictures taken. Exposure times had been dramatically reduced, making it significantly easier for ordinary folks to sit for photographs. Bayard continued to experiment, using himself as a subject. Here he combined two negatives to make it look as though he is having a conversation with himself (or an imaginary identical twin?). This is 100 years before The Parent Trap was released!
“He’s just got this sense of humour and this desire to keep playing around,” says Peter.
A Self-Portrait of Pride
Bayard might have felt profoundly under acknowledged for his work in the 1840s, but it turns out he just needed to wait a little to get his due. In 1863 he was awarded the cross of the French Legion of Honor, a prestigious award bestowed in recognition of his contributions to photography. He took the portrait above while wearing the badge, showing off what must have been one of his proudest achievements. Bayard retired from photography soon after.
Bayard’s selfies are now more than 160 years old, but selfie-takers of today seem to be (unconsciously) following the same principles Bayard experimented with. He was one of the first to show that photography could represent not just the literal world but also how you wanted to present yourself. While selfies may appear to be a new phenomenon spawned by the reverse-camera button on smartphones, selfie aficionados should pay proper homage to Bayard for pioneering this art form.
“Today, selfies often include humour. Photographers invest a lot of strategic thought into how they want to present themselves. Selfies are performative and create something that isn’t fully realistic. Bayard was also conscious of the power of photography to visually imagine other worlds and invent different versions of himself.”
Erin Migdol. “The 19th-Century Selfie Pioneer,” on the J. Paul Getty Museum website Apr 09, 2024 [Online] Cited 12/04/2024. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
The J. Paul Getty Museum 1200 Getty Center Drive Los Angeles, California 90049
Curators: the exhibition is curated by Karen Hellman, former associate curator in the Department of Photographs. Carolyn Peter, assistant curator in the Department of Photographs, Getty Museum, served as organising curator with assistance from Claire L’Heureux, former Department of Photographs graduate intern and Antares Wells, curatorial assistant
At left, Julia Margaret Cameron (British born India, 1815-1879) Florence after the Manner of the Old Masters 1872; and at right, Carrie Mae Weems (American, b. 1953) After Manet 2003 from the ‘Identity’ section of the exhibition
Magdalene Keaney, curator of the exhibition Francesca Woodman and Julia Margaret Cameron: Portraits to Dream In, observes that the exhibition “poses questions about how we might think in new ways about relationships between 19th and 20th century photographic practice…”
As does this exhibition:
~ Everything emerges from something. One must be “mindful of the origins and essence of photography.” (Moriyama)
~ History often repeats itself in different forms.
~ Memory often returns in fragmentary form.
~ The wisdom and spirit of the past speaks to the practitioners of the future.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
NB: Transubstantiation, an un/explainable change in form, substance, or appearance (from the Latin roots trans, “across or beyond,” and substania, “substance”)
Many thankx to the J. Paul Getty Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the website. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“Ms. Hellman, a former associate curator, inspired by her work with the Bayard materials, conceived “Nineteenth-Century Photography Now” as a way to access the influence that early photographers still have. The exhibition includes work from the past by 23 named and three anonymous photographers plus an additional 16 included in an album; there are 21 present-day artists. It is organised around five themes: Identity, Time, Spirit, Landscape and Circulation. The picture that serves as an introduction to the show is “Untitled ‘point de vue'” (1827) by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, a faded heliograph on pewter, that Daido Moriyama keeps a reproduction in his studio; the wall text quotes him saying, “it serves as a gentle daily reminder to be mindful of the origins and essence of photography.” There are two photographs by Mr. Moriyama prompted by Niépce’s bit of primitive technology.”
The earliest photographs – often associated with small, faded, sepia-toned images – may seem to belong to a bygone era, but many of the conventions established during photography’s earliest years persist today. Organised around five themes dating back to the medium’s beginnings, this exhibition explores nineteenth-century photographs through the work of twenty-one contemporary artists. These interchanges between the first decades of the medium and the most recent invite us to reimagine nineteenth-century photography while exploring its complexities.
Text from the J. Paul Getty Museum website
Julia Margaret Cameron (British born India, 1815-1879) Florence after the Manner of the Old Masters 1872 Albumen silver print Image: 34 x 25.6cm (13 3/8 x 10 1/16 in.) Mount: 43.3 x 32.4cm (17 1/16 x 12 3/4 in.) The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Portrait of Florence Fisher posing with a rose stem with the leaves attached. She holds the rose in place with one arm folded across her chest.
The black and white photograph – one from the nine-part series May Days Long Forgotten – depicts four African American girls in summer dresses, with garlands in their hair, reclining on a lawn. The piece is mounted in a circular frame prepared by the artist, and is number five of an edition of eight.
Joseph Nicéphore Niépce (French, 1765-1833) Untitled ‘point de vue’ 1827 Heliograph on pewter 16.7 x 20.3 x .15cm
The invention of photography was announced simultaneously in France and England in 1839, dazzling the public and sending waves of excitement around the world. These astonishing breakthroughs depended upon centuries of developments in chemistry, optics, and the visual arts, accelerating in the decades after 1790. The Niépce Heliograph was made in 1827, during this period of fervent experimentation. It is the earliest photograph produced with the aid of the camera obscura known to survive today.
Text from the Harry Ransom Center website
At left, André Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri (French, 1819-1889) Uncut Sheet of Cartes-de-Visite Portraits, 1860s; and at right, Paul Mpagi Sepuya (American, b. 1982) Daylight Studio with Garden Cuttings (_DSF0340) 2022
William Henry Fox Talbot (English, 1800-1877) [A Stem of Delicate Leaves of an Umbrellifer] Probably 1843-1846 Photogenic drawing negative Image: 18.1 x 22.1cm (7 1/8 x 8 11/16 in.) The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
The exceptional boldness of this image conveys a visual impression that at first may seem quite unlike other of William Henry Fox Talbot’s pictures. He made it with the same photogenic drawing process he used for much of his work by placing the stem of leaves directly on top of the prepared paper and then exposing to sunlight without the aid of a camera. Although the original plant was delicate, its sharply delineated white shadow on the rich dark brown background creates a graphic, two-tone effect. The same specimen was used in a slightly different orientation to make a negative that is preserved in one of the family albums formerly at the Fox Talbot Museum in Lacock and now at the British Library, London.
Other visually similar works in Talbot’s oeuvre help us to understand what we are seeing here. Some of them show the interior structure of the plant specimens he photographed, proving that the negatives at first had fuller details. Because the most vulnerable sections of the silver-based images are those that are light in tone, these areas will fade disproportionately faster than the darker parts. In this case, the lightest tones would have been in the interior spaces of the plant, and these at some point faded. It is unlikely that Talbot saw the same picture we see today, at least not when he first made it, but the boldness of the present state reminds us that changes over time can create as well as destroy.
“To look at Fox Talbot’s earliest experiments, the blurred and hazy images suffuse the excited anticipation of discovering how light could transfer the shape of things onto paper. … I decided to collect Fox Talbot’s earliest negatives, from a time in photographic history very likely before positive images existed, and print the photographs that not even he saw.”
~ Hiroshi Sugimoto (p. 349, in Hiroshi Sugimoto, Ostfildern-Ruit, 2005)
Hiroshi Sugimoto visited the Getty Museum in 2007 to study the earliest photographs in the collection. After photographing some of William Henry Fox Talbot’s photogenic drawing negatives, he produced large-scale prints and coloured them with toning agents to replicate the hues of the paper negatives. The scale of the enlarged prints reveals the fibers of the original paper, which create delicate patterns embedded in the images.
At left, Herbert Bell et al, [Amateur World Tour Album, taken with early Kodak cameras, plus purchased travel photographs by various photographers] (2 page spread); and at right, Stephanie Syjuco (American born Philippines, b. 1974) Herbaria 2021 (detail)
Herbert Bell (English, 1856-1946) Frederick Nutt Broderick (English, about 1854-1913) Gustave Hermans (Belgian, 1856-1934) Anthony Horner (English, 1853-1923) Michael Horner (English, 1843-1869) C. W. J. Johnson (American, 1833-1903) Léon & Lévy (French, active 1864-1913 or 1920) Léopold Louis Mercier (French, b. 1866) Neurdein Frères (French, founded 1860s, dissolved 1918) Louis Parnard (French, 1840-1893) Alfred Pettitt (English, 1820-1880) Francis Godolphin Osborne Stuart (British born Scotland, 1843-1923) Unknown maker Valentine & Sons (Scottish, founded 1851, dissolved 1910) L. P. Vallée (Canadian, 1837-1905) York and Son J. Kühn (French, active Paris, France 1885 – early 20th century) [Amateur World Tour Album, taken with early Kodak cameras, plus purchased travel photographs by various photographers] (2 page spread) Albumen silver print Closed: 35.4 x 28 x 3.5cm (13 15/16 x 11 x 1 3/8 in.) The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles Google Arts & Culture website
Includes amateur photographs taken with early Kodak cameras, including the original Kodak or Kodak no. 1, and Kodak no. 2 cameras, as well as commercially produced images.
A collage composed of diverse naturalist archival sources, including photographs of bones, foliage, and crystal formations.
At left, Paul-Marie-Léon Regnard (French, 1850-1927) Passionate Ecstatic Position/Expression 1878; and at right, Laura Larson (American, b. 1965) The Mind Is a Muscle 2019
Paul-Marie-Léon Regnard (French, 1850-1927) Passionate Ecstatic Position/Expression 1878 Part of Iconographie Photographique de la Salpetriere (Service de M. Charcot) Photogravure Image: 10.3 x 7.1cm (4 1/16 x 2 13/16 in.) The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
At first glance, photographs made in the 19th century may seem like faded relics of an increasingly distant and forgotten age, yet they persist in inspiring, challenging, and resonating with artists today.
Nineteenth-Century Photography Now, on view April 9 through July 7, 2024 at the Getty Center, offers new perspectives on early photography by looking through the lens of contemporary artists who respond directly to their historical themes and subject matter.
“This exhibition provides an opportunity to connect visitors with some of the earliest photographs in the Museum’s collection, now almost two centuries old, via the responses of contemporary makers,” says Timothy Potts, Maria Hummer-Tuttle and Robert Tuttle Director of the J. Paul Getty Museum. “The revelatory ability of early photography to capture images of the world around us still resonates with practitioners today, and bridges between past and present photography are as active and relevant as they have ever been.”
Organised around five themes, dating back to the medium’s beginnings, Identity, Time, Spirit, Landscape, and Circulation, this exhibition explores 19th-century photographs through the work of 21 contemporary artists. Reflecting the inventiveness of early practitioners as well as the more disturbing historical aspects of their era, these interchanges between the first decades of the medium and the most recent invite us to reimagine 19th century photography while exploring its complexities.
In their work, artists Daido Moriyama, Hanako Murakami, and Carrie Mae Weems look back to the invention of photography to convey a sense of how this revolutionary discovery changed people’s perceptions.
As is still the case today, the most popular subjects for the camera in the 19th century were people. In the galleries focused on Identity, Paul Mpagi Sepuya and Myra Greene respond to the complex history of photographic portraiture while Laura Larson, Stephanie Solinas, and Fiona Tan investigate the pseudosciences of the 19th century and how they reinforced stereotypes and identification systems that impact us today.
Photography and Time have been inextricably linked ever since early inventors struggled to permanently fix a fleeting moment on a sheet of paper. This section includes work by Lisa Oppenheim and Liz Deschenes exploring 19th-century photographers’ technical innovations and the ways in which the medium affects our perception of time.
The genre of Spirit photography emerged from the Victorian obsession with death in Europe and North America. Photographers exploited the ability to manipulate photographic images, employing multiple exposures and staged photography to create otherworldly scenes or to summon loved ones back from the dead. In this section, Khadija Saye and Lieko Shiga respond to the possibilities that spirit photography offers in rendering the unseen.
19th-century photographers went to great lengths to make images of remote Landscapes. Government-sponsored surveys and expeditionary programs employed the camera to justify the expansion and to record the resulting military conflicts. Mark Ruwedel, Michelle Stuart, and An-My Lê re-envision some of these same historical landscapes and offer up new ones that bring the past closer to our present.
By the middle of the 19th century, thousands of photographs were in Circulation worldwide, the result of photographers’ ability to reproduce the same image multiple times. Pictures of historical events, tourist destinations, and anthropological expeditions made the world seem more accessible, but with time and distance, they became disconnected from their original contexts. In this section, early photographs appear next to projects that make these historical absences present. Wendy Red Star, Stephanie Syjuco, Ken Gonzales-Day, and Andrea Chung recover what has been lost, calling out the residual effects of the 19th-century photograph on our present knowledge of global cultures and histories.
“Through the works of these visionary contemporary artists, 19th-century photography is not faded and dead but very much alive, an active material that enables us to rethink the medium and our relationship to it,” says Karen Hellman, curator of the exhibition.
Nineteenth-Century Photography Now is curated by Karen Hellman, former associate curator in the Department of Photographs. Carolyn Peter, assistant curator in the Department of Photographs, Getty Museum, served as organising curator with assistance from Claire L’Heureux, former Department of Photographs graduate intern and Antares Wells, curatorial assistant.
Related programming includes Who or What is Missing in Nineteenth-Century Photography?, a discussion featuring artists Laura Larson, Wendy Red Star, and Paul Mpagi Sepuya in a conversation about their artistic practices and how they are engaging with, and critiquing photography from the 19th century, and Art Break: The Precarious Nature of Photography, Society, and Life, June 6, 12pm. Artist Phil Chang talks with curator Carolyn Peter about his series “Unfixed” on view in Nineteenth-Century Photography Now and how an economic crisis and a pandemic inspired him to create photographs that will intentionally fade away to express the fragility of societal systems and life.
Press release from the J. Paul Getty Museum website
Introduction
At left, Maker unknown Kuroda Yasaburo, 50 Years Old January 6, 1882; and at right, Myra Greene (American, b. 1975) Undertone #10 2017-2018
Introduction
The earliest photographs – often associated with small, faded, sepia-toned images – may seem to belong to a bygone era, but many of the conventions established during photography’s earliest years persist today. Organised around five themes dating back to the medium’s beginnings, this exhibition explores nineteenth-century photographs through the work of twenty-one contemporary artists. Reflecting the inventiveness of early practitioners as well as the more disturbing historical aspects of their era, these interchanges between the first decades of the medium and the most recent invite us to reimagine nineteenth-century photography while exploring its complexities.
Maker unknown Kuroda Yasaburo, 50 Years Old January 6, 1882 Ambrotype Closed: 11.5 x 9 x 1cm (4 1/2 x 3 9/16 x 3/8 in.) The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles Gift of Virginia Heckert in memory of Gordon Baldwin
‘As an artist working almost entirely with time-based and lens-based media, time is one of my major tools … time is both tool with which to shape and chisel and material to fold, distort and configure.’
Fiona Tan (b. 1966, Pekanbaru) explores history and time and our place within them, working within the contested territory of representation. Deeply embedded in all of Tan’s works is her fascination with the mutability of identity, the deceptive nature of representation and the play of memory across time and space in a world increasingly shaped by global culture. She investigates how we represent ourselves and the mechanisms that determine how we interpret the representation of others. …
A testament to Tan’s passion for archives, her video installation Pickpockets (2020) stems from an album of photographs she came across when in residence at the Getty Research Center, Los Angeles. It contained early examples of mugshots taken of pickpockets apprehended at the World’s Fair in Paris in 1889. Fascinated by the subjects of these portraits, their names and countries of origin, and their unknown stories, she invited a group of writers to devise monologues from the point of view of these individuals, which were then performed and recorded by actors.
Anonymous. “Fiona Tan,” on the Frith Street Gallery website Nd [Online] Cited 29/04/2024
[The identity section] has “Affaire Alaux, Faubourg St. Honoré – L’Assassin” (Nov. 2, 1902), a print by Alphonse Bertillon, the inventor of the mug shot, showing the mustached villain full-face and in profile; it is accompanied by over 20 pictures of sites that played a significant role in Bertillon’s life taken in 2012 by Stéphanie Solinas employing a “crime scene” approach.
At left, Attributed to Alphonse Bertillon (French, 1853-1914) Affaire Alaux, Faubourg St. Honoré – L’Assassin November 2, 1902; and at right, Stéphanie Solinas (French, b. 1978) Untitled (M. Bertillon) – Two Faces 2012
Identity
As is still the case today, the most popular subjects for the camera in the nineteenth century were people. Early commercial portrait photographers set up studios and established standards for posing and props, serving clients who eagerly shared these prized images with family and friends. Other portraits of the time, however, such as the mug shot and studies of female “hysterics,” reinforced questionable forms of objectification. Paul Mpagi Sepuya and Myra Greene respond to the complex history of photographic portraiture. Fiona Tan, Laura Larson, and Stéphanie Solinas investigate the nineteenth century pseudosciences that relied on the perceived accuracy of the new medium.
Attributed to Alphonse Bertillon (French, 1853-1914) Affaire Alaux, Faubourg St. Honoré – L’Assassin November 2, 1902 Gelatin silver print Image: 7.9 x 12.7cm (3 1/8 x 5 in.) The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
The mugshot of Henri-Léon Scheffer, the man who murdered Joseph Reibel.
CAUGHT BY A FINGER PRINT
A unique piece of detective work has been accomplished in Paris by a retiring scientist. A mysterious murder had been committed. The detectives arrested one wrong man dis charged him, and were preparing .to arrest another when to their chief came the quiet scientist, saying,
“The assassin’s name is Henri Léon Scheffor. Here is his photograph, his description and past record.” M. Cochefert, chief of the police hesitated. “My men know nothing of this person.” he said. “How shall we accuse him ?”
“Arrest him,” insisted the other, “and should he prove to innocent I will pay him 1,000 francs as an indemnity.”
“But what basis have you for your certainty of his guilt ?” asked M. Cochefert.
“Some finger prints he left on a piece of broken glass,” replied the man of science.
It was not necessary to pay the indemnity. He who was thus strangely accused was arrested and confessed his crime. The quiet man of science was M. Alphonse Bertillon, already celebrated as the founder and present chief of tho anthropometric service of tho Paris prefecture of police. Alphonse Bertillon has the gentle, weary smile of the over-worked and nervous student. He speaks mildly, moves softly, like one on his guard against strain and haste, until now and again, his thoughtful face will light up with enthusiasm as he lets himself go. Then his conversation becomes rapid and eloquent ; he runs through books and documents with ardour, pulls down boxes from high shelves, spreads out charts, explains them, performs experiments to illustrate his statements and darts back by a short cut to tho point where he had left off; tho whole man is transformed. Thus we heard the tale of the Accusing Finger Prints.
“A man named Joseph Reibel, porter to tho dentist Allaux, in his apartment and offices in the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honore, was found choked to death and clumsily tied, lying in his master’s office,” began M. Bertillon. “The place had been looted hastily, closets and drawers being open and their contents tossed about. In particular a handsome cabinet holding a collection of coins was found with its glass door broken and its gold coins absent. There were- practically no clues to the identity of the assassin, the janitress at the street door, having a confused memory as to visitors, which set the detectives on more than one wrong scent. They arrested one man and the papers published his portrait. Then the newspapers at least began to suspect the innocent dentist himself.
“They had taken a flashlight photograph of the office,” continued M. Bertillon. “Looking at that photograph one day, I noticed two glittering little white marks on the edge of the broken glass of the coin cabinet. I asked my self what they could be. They might be defects in the printing ; but, on the other hand their situation suggested that they might be finger prints – and finger-prints are very much in my line ! The thought wore upon me until at last I jumped into a cab and drove to tho place. Examining the edge of the glass I found tho marks to be really finger-marks, and in spite of the thousand chances still in good condition.
“Being composed of tiny quantities of grease and dirt they made the glass slightly opaque, so that they came out bright by contrast in the photograph. Except when looked at in a favourable light they were practically invisible to the naked eye. There were marks of a right-hand thumb in one place and of the same thumb and four fingers in another. I had the two pieces of glass cut out with a diamond. I gave one to a policeman, instructing him to hold it just so, and saw him start off to my office with it in a cab. Then I gave tho other piece to a second policeman, with the same instructions, and started him off in a second cab, so that if an accident should happen to one of the pieces the other might be spared.
“In the workrooms of the anthropometric service I had the finger-marks immediately photographed. At first I admit I did not attach overmuch importance to them. They might be the prints of one of the detectives, or of the dentist Allaux – naturally solicitous of his broken cabinet – or even the finger-prints of M. Cochefert ! One by one I took their finger-prints for comparison. One by one I found that they did not at all correspond with those on the glass. This started me in earnest,” admitted M. Bertillon. “I began to ask myself, if among the thousands of criminals, swindlers and violent and suspicious characters photo-graphed, measured, and, finger-printed yearly by the anthropometric service the author of these finger-prints might not, at some time or other, himself have passed.” Here M. Bertillon called our attention to the thumb mark (“pouce”) of Scheffer, the assassin, Just below his full-face and profile photographs. Though small it was very distinct.
“Look at the central point of that thumb-print,” he exclaimed. “Look where the innermost loop moves up and over a single diagonal. Now jumping two loops from that interior diagonal, towards tho direct left you see a plain little fork in tho third loop. It is the exact reproduction of just such another in the thumb-mark on the broken glass ! Tho next thing was to arrest Scheffer though it took a little time to find him. Here, again, the information obtainable from his ‘fiche’ in the anthropometric service rendered service. It was seen that he had been a native of Aubervilliers (the Paris suburb and had worked in the government match factory. When arrested he confessed, at the same time trying to make out a case of extenuating circumstances. According to his story, Reibel planned that they should simulate a burglary of his master’s premises. They quarrelled over the division of the spoils and Scheffer says he thought he had merely choked his friend into un-consciousness and left him tied – according to original agreement. And all discovered through an accidental finger-print which the assassin had left as an index to the crime. “Science Siftings.”
Anonymous. “Caught by a Finger Print,” in the Balmain Observer and Western Suburbs Advertiser (NSW: 1884-1907), Sat 4 Mar 1905, Page 2 on the Trove website [Online] Cited 29/04/2024
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Time
Gustave Le Gray (French, 1820-1884) An Effect of Sunlight – Ocean No. 23 1857-1858 Albumen silver print from glass negatives 12 5/8 x 16 7/16 in. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Photography and time have been inextricably linked ever since early inventors such as William Henry Fox Talbot struggled to permanently fix a fleeting moment on a sheet of paper. The development of the camera coincided with new discoveries about how we perceive an instant in time or an object in motion, and people praised photography for its ability to “stop time” and record what the unaided eye could not see. Lisa Oppenheim and Liz Deschenes respond to nineteenth century photographers’ technical innovations and the ways in which the medium affects our perception of time. Phil Chang and Hiroshi Sugimoto address the fate of photographs across minutes or even centuries.
At left, Étienne-Jules Marey (French, 1830-1904) and Michel Berthaud (French, active 1860s-1880s) Walking/Running (La Marche/La Course Rapide) about 1890, published 1893; and at right, Liz Deschenes (American, b. 1966) FPS (120) 2018-2021
Étienne-Jules Marey (French, 1830-1904) and Michel Berthaud (French, active 1860s-1880s) Walking/Running (La Marche/La Course Rapide) About 1890, published 1893 Collotype Image: 11.3 x 17.6cm (4 7/16 x 6 15/16 in.) The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
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Spirit
At left, William H. Mumler (American, 1832-1884) Mrs. Swan 1869-1878; and at right, Khadija Saye (Gambian-British, b. 1992) Nak Bejjen [Cow’s Horn] 2017-2018
Spirit
The genre of spirit photography – which used photographic tricks to insert ghostly figures among the living – emerged during the nineteenth century from the Victorian obsession with death, séances, and mediums in Europe and North America and from the losses of the Civil War in the United States. Photographers exploited the ability to manipulate photographic images, employing multiple exposures and staged photography to create otherworldly scenes or to summon loved ones back from the dead. Khadija Saye and Lieko Shiga respond to the possibilities that spirit photography offers in rendering the unseen.
William H. Mumler (American, 1832-1884) Mrs. Swan 1869-1878 Albumen silver print Image: 8.9 x 5.7cm (3 1/2 x 2 1/4 in.) The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles Public domain
At left, Unknown maker (American) [Seated Woman with “Spirit” of a Young Man] about 1865-1875; and at right, Lieko Shiga (Japanese, b. 1980) Talking with Me 2005 From the series Lilly
Unknown maker (American) [Seated Woman with “Spirit” of a Young Man] About 1865-1875 Tintype Image: 8.7 x 6.4cm (3 7/16 x 2 1/2 in.) The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Lieko Shiga (Japanese, b. 1980) Talking with Me 2005 From the series Lilly
‘Lilly’ is a photographic essay that was initiated in 2005 when Lieko Shiga was living in London. During that period she produced a series of images of her neighbours that lived alongside her in a block of East London council flats, drawing techniques and inspiration from paranormal photographs that were popular in the early days of photography. Haunting, mysterious, playful and captured in an array of muted colours, the photographs [are] grouped around different subjects…
Publisher’s Description
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Landscape
At left, Roger Fenton (English, 1819-1869) Plateau of Sebastopol II 1855; and at right, An-My Lê (Vietnamese American, b. 1960) Security and Stabilization Operations, Iraqi Police 2003-2004
Roger Fenton (English, 1819-1869) Plateau of Sebastopol II 1855 Albumen silver print Image: 22.2 x 34.4cm (8 3/4 x 13 9/16 in.) The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles Public domain
Nineteenth-century photographers went to great lengths to make images of remote landscapes, which required traveling with large format cameras, glass plates, and chemicals. Ideological forces drove many of these journeys, with the ultimate goal of imperial expansion through industrial development and war. Government sponsored surveys and expeditionary programs employed the camera to justify the expansion and to record the resulting military conflicts. Mark Ruwedel, Michelle Stuart, and An-My Lê re-envision some of these same historical landscapes and offer up new ones that bring the past closer to our present.
At left, Timothy O’Sullivan (American, about 1840-1882) Desert Sand Hills Near Sink of Carson, Nevada 1867; and at right, Michelle Stuart (American, b. 1933) Timeless Land 2021
Timothy O’Sullivan (American, about 1840-1882) Desert Sand Hills Near Sink of Carson, Nevada 1867 Albumen silver print The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles Public domain
Timothy O’Sullivan’s darkroom wagon, pulled by four mules, entered the frame at the right side of the photograph, reached the center of the image, and abruptly U-turned, heading back out of the frame. Footprints leading from the wagon toward the camera reveal the photographer’s path. Made at the Carson Sink in Nevada, this image of shifting sand dunes reveals the patterns of tracks recently reconfigured by the wind. The wagon’s striking presence in this otherwise barren scene dramatises the pioneering experience of exploration and discovery in the wide, uncharted landscapes of the American West.
O’Sullivan’s photographs from the 1867 Geological Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel expedition were intended to provide information for the purpose of expanding railroads and industry, yet they demonstrate his eye for poetic beauty.
A.J. Russell (American, 1830-1902) Embankment No. 3 West of Granite Cannon [Wyoming] April 1868 Albumen silver print Image: 21.9 x 29.4 cm (8 5/8 x 11 9/16 in.) Mount: 34.1 x 43.1 cm (13 7/16 x 16 15/16 in.) The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Mark Ruwedel’s statement in a wall text notes that “The legacy of nineteenth-century expeditionary photography was most important to me when working on my Westward series.” He cites Timothy O’Sullivan, Alexander Gardner and A.J. Russell. The Landscape section has a print by A.J. Russell, “Embankment No. 3 West of Granite Cannon. [Wyoming]” (April 1868), and seven pictures by Mr. Ruwedel: “Union Pacific #39 (After A.J. Russell)” and “Union Pacific #67 (After A.J. Russell)” (1994 and 1996, respectively) and five others with no specific acknowledgments but clearly influenced by his 19th-century mentors.
At left, Carleton Watkins (American, 1829-1916) Cathedral Spires – Yo Semite 1861; and at right, Ken Gonzales-Day (American, b. 1964) At daylight the miserable man was carried to an oak… Negative 2002; print 2021
Carleton Watkins (American, 1829-1916) Cathedral Spires – Yo Semite 1861 Albumen silver print Image (Dome-Topped): 52.2 x 40.3cm (20 9/16 x 15 7/8 in.) The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
When Carleton Watkins photographed the remote Yosemite wilderness, America was not yet a century old. Conscious of their country’s lack of a national cultural identity, Americans adopted particularly dramatic geologic formations such as Cathedral Spires as their version of ancient ruins and soaring Gothic churches. The great pine tree in the foreground here became another form of this uniquely American history. Watkins’s images helped define America’s preference for landscape views depicting rugged wilderness and celebrating spectacular landforms on the grandest of scales.
This print: Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase through the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen Endowment
Through meticulous research, Gonzales-Day documented approximately 350 lynching incidents that occurred in California between 1850 and 1935, most of which involved victims of Mexican descent. To create the series Searching for California Hang Trees, the artist visited many of these sites and captured the likeness of trees that may have borne witness to these events. Gonzales-Day’s landscapes unearth traces of this little-known history.
Our America: The Latino Presence in American Art, 2013
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Circulation
Charles M. Bell (American, 1848-1893) Manulitó, Chief of the Navajos 1874 Albumen silver print Image (Arched): 18.4 x 14.9cm (7 1/4 x 5 7/8 in.) The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles Public domain
Artist-manipulated digitally reproduced photograph by C.M. (Charles Milton) Bell, National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution, 24 x 16 9/20 inches
Circulation
By the middle of the nineteenth century, thousands of photographs were in circulation worldwide, the result of photographers’ ability to reproduce the same image multiple times. Pictures of historical events, tourist destinations, and anthropological expeditions made the world seem more accessible, but with time and distance, they became disconnected from their original contexts. Many eventually ended up in archives (including at Getty). Early photographs appear next to projects that make these historical absences present. Wendy Red Star, Stephanie Syjuco, Ken Gonzales-Day, and Andrea Chung recover what has been lost, calling out the residual effects of the nineteenth-century photograph on our present knowledge of global cultures and histories.
Text from the J. Paul Getty Museum
At left, Anna Atkins (British, 1799-1871) possibly with Anne Dixon (British, 1799-1877) Ceylon/Fern about 1854; and at right, Andrea Chung (American, b. 1978) Untitled 2016
Anna Atkins (British, 1799-1871) possibly with Anne Dixon (British, 1799-1877) Ceylon/Fern About 1854 Cyanotype Image: 34.8 x 24.7cm (13 11/16 x 9 3/4 in.) Sheet: 48.3 x 37.5cm (19 x 14 3/4 in.) The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles Public domain
Cyanotypes of British and Foreign Flowering Plants
After completing the highly ambitious, decade-long project Photographs of Blue Algae: Cyanotype Impressions in the summer of 1853, Anna Atkins turned to new botanical subjects. She would eventually produce several unique presentation albums with cyanotypes of ferns and flowering plants. Atkins most likely collaborated on these albums with her dear friend, Anne Dixon. Dixon came to Halstead Place for an extended stay in the summer of 1852 to comfort Atkins who was deeply shaken by the death of her father and frequent scientific partner John George Children earlier that year. Photo historian Larry Schaaf suggests that it was during this stay or perhaps one the next summer that Dixon began assisting Atkins and creating her own cyanotypes. Thus, it becomes difficult to know whether surviving works from this time period were created by Atkins, Dixon, or both.1
These seven pieces in the J. Paul Getty Museum Collection (figs. 1-7) were extracted from an 1854 presentation album Cyanotypes of British and Foreign Flowering Plants given by Anna Atkins to Anne Dixon in 1854. The album remained intact until sometime around 1981, when it was broken up after being sold at auction.
Atkins and Dixon shared a deep interest in botany, a science that was considered well suited to women since it could be studied locally, even in one’s own garden. Serious “lady botanists” could join the Botanical Society in London, one of the first scientific organisations to admit women. Atkins joined in 1839. The two friends’ interest in botany is documented in a letter of 1851 from Children to Sir William Hooker in which he discussed the two women’s longtime plant collecting. Later, in a letter that Atkins wrote to Hooker in 1864, she extended an offer from Dixon to send him samples of any of the plants from her own collection.2
“In both artist’s work the notion of materialisation (the process of coming into being) and transformation is a powerful creative tool.” Dr Marcus Bunyan
Exhibition dates: 21st March – 16th June, 2024
Curator: Magdalene Keaney
Julia Margaret Cameron (British born India, 1815-1879)
The Dream (Mary Hillier)
1869
Albumen silver print
Wilson Centre for Photography
Mary Ann Hilliar was born on the Isle of Wight, and as well as being Julia Margaret Cameron’s favourite model was employed by her as a house maid. She often poised in religious themed photos looking noble and melancholy. As well as modelling for Mrs Cameron she was painted by G F Watts.
She married Thomas Gilbert and had 8 children, descendants of whom still live on the Isle of Wight. Mary Ann lived to the age of 88, although in her later years she suffered badly from rheumatism and was almost blind due to cataracts. She is buried just a few feet away from the Tennyson grave.
Otherworldy beings: the materialisations and transformations of Francesca Woodman and Julia Margaret Cameron
To pair these two artists together is curatorial inspiration from the gods!
In both artist’s work the notion of materialisation (the process of coming into being) and transformation is a powerful creative tool.
Cameron‘s photographs are exterior to the artist, outward facing creations which capture in the sitter an emanation of spirit. These ethereal creatures mainly based on biblical, mythological, or literary figures … these beautiful apparitions who seem to hover before us were, at the time, seen as radical photographs. Their striking presences and emotive sensibility create a psychological connection with the viewer, photographs imaged / imagined as if they were seen in a dream.
“Cameron’s portraits are famously a pictorialist stagecraft: a pantomime of Christian archetypes, Pre-Raphaelite aesthetics, and the influence of contemporary poets such as Shelley, Keats and Tennyson. What would be considered as potential subject matter for this nascent thirty-year-old medium was formative and cautious, and the conventions of beauty and gender, static” opines Stephen Frailey in an article commenting on the exhibition on the Aperture website (see below). Nothing could be further from the truth.
The artist envisions CHIMERICAL CREATURES. At the time of their production, Cameron’s shimmering portraits were seen as anything but cautious, they were seen as radical and ephemeral: a unique vision, different from everyone else: “directed light, soft focus, and long exposures that allowed the sitters’ slight movement to register in her pictures, instilling them with a sense of breath and life.”1 And, despite their soft focus, I believe that they are never “Pictorialist” photographs – they are “modern” photographs of a radical nature which may have later influenced the Pictorialist aesthetic. As I have commented before,
“She has, of course, been seen as a precursor to Pictorialism, but personally I do not get that feeling from her photographs, even though the artists are using many of the same techniques. Her work is based on the reality of seeing beauty, whereas the Pictorialists were trying to make photography into art by emulating the techniques of etching and painting. While the form of her images owes a lot to the history of classical sculpture and painting, to Romanticism and the Pre-Raphaelites, she thought her’s was already art of the highest order.She did not have to mask its content in order to imitate another medium. Others, such as the curator of the exhibition Marta Weiss, see her as a proto-modernist, precursor to the photographs of Stieglitz and Sander and I would agree. There is certainly a fundamental presence to JMC’s photographs, so that when you are looking at them, they tend to touch your soul, the eyes of some of the portraits burning right through you; while others, others have this ambiguity of meaning, of feeling, as if removed from the everyday life.”2
Contemporary commentators condemned Cameron’s photographs for sloppy craftsmanship (they were out of focus, the plates contained fingerprints, dust, debris, streak marks and swirls of collodion on her negatives). Others mocked her for claiming to have photographed a historical figure ‘from the life’. The kinds of images being made at the time did not interest Cameron. The artist would focus her lens until she thought the subject was beautiful “instead of screwing on the lens to the more definite focus which all other photographers insist upon.” (JMC) “Her photographic vision was a rejection of ‘mere conventional topographic photography – map-making and skeleton rendering of feature and form’ in favour of a less precise but more emotionally penetrating form of portraiture.”3
Woodman‘s photographs are interior to the artist, inward facing creations which capture her/self and the female form in space as a flux or metamorphosis of spirit.
“Francesca Woodman’s photographs explore issues of gender and self, looking at the representation of the body in relation to its surroundings. She puts herself in the frame most often, although these are not conventional self-portraits as she is either partially hidden, or concealed by slow exposures that blur her moving figure into a ghostly presence.”4
They promote in the attentive viewer a ghostly insistence that you could be her – in vulnerability, in presence, in fear of suffering, for our death. Who are we that is represented, what is our place in this lonely world, how do we interact with our shadow? They offer glimpses of another, dream-like world, the microcosm of a life focusing a lens on (her) infinite spirit.
“The artist is a CHIMERICAL CREATURE. Imaginary, visionary. Woodman’s transformations, her interior elements, become part of the wall or the house. She vanishes “from the room, out of the picture, at any given second.”5 A preoccupation with the body / her own body, and the dichotomy of subject-object, also adds multiple meanings and complexity to Woodman’s work. Her many angel images (and also images of umbrellas – Mary Poppins was released in 1964 when Woodman was growing up) suggest movement and the ability to fly, a fascination that found its ultimate expression when she jumped off a building in lower Manhattan at the age of 22.”6
Both Cameron, a woman taking photographs for just fifteen years within the first twenty five years of the birth of commercial photography, using rudimentary technology and chemicals – and Woodman, a woman taking photographs for just eight years, whose practice of staging her body and her face in interior spaces so influenced a later generation of female artists – have left an indelible mark on the history of photography and identity formation.
Working “at times when women were marginal in the history of art and photography” both women are now regarded as important artists, in the upper echelons of photographers who have ever lived. The unique quality of their work shines through, each materialising a distinctive handwriting which could only ever be a Cameron or a Woodman (the atmospheric radiance of the one and a sense of vulnerability in the other). In their photographs I feel the transformative potential of that vision (it rumbles through my body, it impinges on my consciousness). Their ability to see things not as others see them, away from the too-rough fingers of the world.
Oh how I would like to see this exhibition in the flesh, to observe the synergies and differences between both artist’s works, to listen to the conversations across time and space through centuries of art practice. I will just have to buy the catalogue instead, but that is no substitute for physically standing in front of their “beautiful, subtle, intricate, and beguiling” prints.
To feel the vibrations of energy from these otherworldy beings…
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ Press release from the exhibition Julia Margaret Cameron at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, August 2013 – January 2014
2/ Marcus Bunyan. “The road less travelled,” on the exhibition ‘Julia Margaret Cameron: from the Victoria and Albert Museum, London’ at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW), Sydney on the Art Blart website 24th October 2015 [Online] Cited 11/06/2024
6/ Marcus Bunyan. “The artist as chimerical creature,” on the exhibition ‘Francesca Woodman. On Being an Angel’ at Moderna Museet, Stockholm on the Art Blart website 4th December 2015 [Online] Cited 11/06/2024
Other exhibitions on Julia Margaret Cameron and Francesca Woodman on Art Blart
Many thankx to the National Portrait Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
The Dream Keeper
Bring me all of your dreams, You dreamers, Bring me all of your Heart melodies That I may wrap them In a blue cloud-cloth Away from the too-rough fingers Of the world
Langston Hughes
Major exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery to showcase rare vintage prints by two of art history’s most influential photographers – Francesca Woodman and Julia Margaret Cameron
More than 160 rare vintage prints will be exhibited as part of Francesca Woodman and Julia Margaret Cameron: Portraits to Dream In, as the two photographers – who worked 100 years apart – are presented in parallel for the first time.
The exhibition will present a thematic exploration of the photographic work produced throughout both artists’ entire careers, including their best known and less familiar work. Artist’s books by Francesca Woodman, which have never been exhibited in the UK, will be on display.
This spring, the National Portrait Gallery in London has staged an unexpected pairing of Francesca Woodman and Julia Margaret Cameron, whose bodies of photographic work were made a hundred years apart. The lushly titled Portraits to Dream In, the result of a thoughtful and imaginative curatorial inquiry, provides a compelling guide to their posthumous resemblances and describes a cultural arc of Romanticism from the mid-nineteenth-century to the turn of the twentieth, from luminous and pastoral to haunted and opaque. Both artists were engaged with the past, and the exhibition places them in a shared classicism of figuration and myth – a revelatory insight for Woodman. Both practiced photography for less than fifteen years. Both of their biographies often eclipse their critical reception. At times their congruence feels magnetic; at times their differences are as illuminating as their similarities.
The exhibition is organised by curator Magda Keaney in tidy themes that support affinities between the two women, among them “Angels and Otherworldly Beings,” “Mythology,” “Doubling,” and “Nature and Femininity.” Much of this is informative and, indeed, suggests a universal lexicon beyond this survey of dual sensibilities. Some of the rhymes are less plausible: a section entitled “Men” fails to persuade that Cameron’s depictions of eminent male political and cultural figures mirror Woodman’s male portraits. Unclothed men make rare appearances in Woodman’s photographs, where they do little to diminish the images as self-portraits. Festooned with a seashell, egg, pomegranate, or dead bird, the men serve as playful surrogates for the photographer herself.
Portraits to Dream In is an occasion to revel in the sumptuous texture of the photographic print, born from technologies decades apart. For both photographers, darkroom manipulation and tactility contribute to the pictures’ emotional mood, however diametric. For Cameron, the shallow depth of field and long shutter speed of the glass plate negative and wet collodion process renders a picture that flutters as if provisional, a vision subject to light glinting off an immaterial surface. They are as ethereal and transparent as Woodman’s are submersed in shadow; a moth bounding away from flame. One body of work, despite its soft patina, feels rooted in a sense of presence, the other by absence: fraught and confessional without evident disclosure.
Julia Margaret Cameron (British born India, 1815-1879) Annie (My very first success in Photography) 1864 Albumen silver print A photographic portrait of Annie Wilhemina Philpot (1857-1936) The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
A photographic portrait of Annie Wilhemina Philpot (1857-1936), taken by Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879) in 1864. This albumen print forms part of the Herschel Album, created by Cameron for her friend Sir John Herschel (1792-1871). Annie was the daughter of Rev. William Benamin Philpot, a poet and friend of Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892).
Julia Margaret Cameron is one of the most significant figures in nineteenth century photography. Born in Calcutta, she moved to Britain where she lived at Freshwater on the Isle of Wight. In 1863, aged forty-eight, she was given a camera by her daughter as a gift. From then on she took portraits of her family, friends and servants, as well as many eminent Victorians. Cameron was strongly influenced by classical art and many of her portraits are pictorial allegories based on religious or literary themes. In 1875 Cameron moved to Sri Lanka (Ceylon), where she died.
From 21 March to 16 June 2024, the National Portrait Gallery will display a major retrospective exhibition of work by two of the most significant photographers in the history of the medium – Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879) and Francesca Woodman (1958-1981). Bringing their work together for the first time in an exhibition of this scale, it will showcase more than 160 rare vintage prints from galleries, museums and private collections, including 96 works by Woodman and 71 by Cameron, spanning the entire careers of both photographers – who worked 100 years apart.
Francesca Woodman and Julia Margaret Cameron: Portraits to Dream In will offer a new way to consider these two artists, by moving away from the biographical emphasis that has often been the focus of how their work is understood. The exhibition challenges this approach in its insistence on experiencing the physical print, taking the picture making of Woodman and Cameron as a starting point for consideration of their work. While neither artist aimed for technical perfection in their printing, for each it was a dynamic and essential aspect of their creative process used to explore and extend the possibilities of photographic image making.
After an extensive curatorial research period, works by Julia Margaret Cameron have been selected for loan from major museums internationally including the Getty, Los Angeles; the Metropolitan Museum, New York City; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; the National Science and Media Museum, Bradford; the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; and the National Portrait Gallery’s own Collection. Prints made by Francesca Woodman in her lifetime, nearly 20 of which have not been previously published or exhibited, have been loaned primarily from the Woodman Family Foundation in New York, who have collaborated closely on the making of the exhibition and accompanying publication, with further loans from Tate and the Rhode Island School of Design
The exhibition’s title, Portraits to Dream In, suggests that when seen side by side, both artists conjure a dream state within their work as part of their shared exploration of appearance, identity, the muse, gender and archetypes. The title of the exhibition comes from an observation made by Woodman that photographs could be ‘places for the viewer to dream in’. Both Woodman and Cameron produced work that was deeply rooted in mythology and storytelling and each made portraits of those close to them to represent these narratives. Further, both women explored portraiture beyond its ability to record appearance.
Following a thematic approach, visitors will experience the work of Woodman and Cameron moving forward and back in time between the nineteenth and twentieth century; and also within the relatively short span of years that each artist was active – neither worked for more than fifteen years. Themes on display will comprise: Declaring intentions & claiming space; Angels & Otherworldly Beings; Mythology; Doubling; Nature & femininity; Caryatids & the classical form; Men and Models & Muses.
Key works on display will include the first forays both artists made into the medium of photography, as they began to portray their unique perspectives and carve out distinctive styles. These include Cameron’s self-declared ‘first success’, a portrait of Annie Wilhemina Philpot in 1864, accompanied by Woodman’s ‘Self-portrait at thirteen’, taken during a summer holiday in Antella, Italy in 1972. Photographs depicting angelic and otherworldly figures will be presented in a dense constellation with pieces from Woodman’s evocative and often abstracted Angels series contrasted against Cameron’s more direct representations of cherubic beings and winged cupids. Not to be missed images by Francesca Woodman will include Polka Dots #5 and House #3 both made in 1976, seen alongside ethereal portraits of the British actress Ellen Terry made by Julia Margaret Cameron in 1864.
Other defining works by Woodman include Caryatid pieces from a major photographic project developed in the last year of her life in which she experimented with large scale diazotype prints, including depictions of herself and other models as caryatids – carved female figures which take the place of columns in ancient Greek temples. The exhibition will be the first to draw significant attention to Woodman’s portraits of men as well as exploring the importance of her ongoing photographs of friends. Providing additional insight into her practice, contact sheets and examples of Woodman’s artist’s books will be on display, exhibited in the UK for the first time.
The exhibition will include many of Julia Margaret Cameron’s most famous and much loved portraits, including those of her niece and favourite model, Julia Jackson, who would later be the mother to Bloomsbury artists Virginia Wolf and Vanessa Bell; her striking depiction of Alice Liddell as the goddess Pomona; her portraits of prominent Victorian men including John Frederick William Herschel who she captured as he posed dramatically in The Astronomer (1867); and her frequent muses, May Prinsep and Mary Ann Hillier.
“It is a great pleasure to bring together the work of Francesca Woodman and Julia Margaret Cameron for the first time in this innovative and imaginative exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. Though, of course, Cameron could not have known Woodman, and Woodman did not explicitly reference Cameron, they shared thematic and formal interests uncovered through the exhibition. Paired in this way, we see their work – individually and together – in a new light; one that feels contemporary and timeless. We are immensely grateful to our lead curator Magdalene Keaney for conceptualising this exhibition with great expertise and for the team at the Woodman Family Foundation in New York who have been wonderfully collaborative partners.”
Dr. Nicholas Cullinan OBE Director, National Portrait Gallery
“Both Francesca Woodman and Julia Margaret Cameron were utterly committed to the practice of photography and to their practice as artists without reservation. They both worked incredibly hard at times when women were marginal in the history of art and photography. I hope that visitors relish the physical experience of seeing such a large collection of prints that each artist made. They are beautiful, subtle, intricate, and beguiling. Then of course to come away knowing more about these two women artists who have defined the history of photography. I hope it poses questions about how we might think in new ways about relationships between 19th and 20th century photographic practice and what a portrait is and can be.”
Magdalene Keaney Curator, Francesca Woodman and Julia Margaret Cameron: Portraits to Dream In
The exhibition will be accompanied by the publication, Francesca Woodman and Julia Margaret Cameron: Portraits to Dream In by curator Magdalene Keaney, which will include essays and contributions from the collections curator of the Woodman Family Foundation, Katarina Jerinic, and leading photography historian, Helen Ennis.
Julia Margaret Cameron (British born India, 1815-1879) I Wait (Rachel Gurney) 1872 Albumen silver print 32.7 x 25.4cm (12 7/8 x 10 in.) The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Throughout her career, the young American photographer Francesca
Woodman revisited the theme of angels. In On Being an Angel (1976), she is
seen bending backward as light falls on her white body. A black umbrella is
in the distance. The following year she made a new version – an image with
a darker mood in which she shows her face. Woodman developed the angel
motif during a visit to Rome, where she photographed herself in a large,
abandoned building. In these images, she is wearing a white petticoat, but
her chest is bare. White pieces of cloth in the background are like wings. She
called these photographs From Angel series (1977) and From a series on
Angels (1977). There are also a number of pictures simply called Angels
(1977-1978), and among them is one where again she is bending backward, but this time in front of a graffitied wall. These angels are but a few examples of Francesca Woodman’s practice of staging her body and her face.
Julia Margaret Cameron (British born India, 1815-1879) Cherub and Seraph 1866 Albumen silver print A photographic study of William Frederick ‘Freddy’ Gould (born 1861) and Elizabeth ‘Topsy’ Keown (born 1859) National Science and Media Museum
A photographic study of William Frederick ‘Freddy’ Gould (born 1861) and Elizabeth ‘Topsy’ Keown (born 1859), taken by Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879) in 1866. This albumen print forms part of the Herschel Album, created by Cameron for her friend Sir John Herschel (1792-1871).
Julia Margaret Cameron (British born India, 1815-1879) Sadness (Ellen Terry) 1864 Albumen silver print 22.2 x 17.6cm (8 3/4 x 6 15/16 in.) Albumen silver print The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Dame Ellen Terry (English, 1847-1928)
Dame Alice Ellen Terry GBE (27 February 1847 – 21 July 1928) was a leading English actress of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Born into a family of actors, Terry began performing as a child, acting in Shakespeare plays in London, and toured throughout the British provinces in her teens. At 16, she married the 46-year-old artist George Frederic Watts, but they separated within a year. She soon returned to the stage but began a relationship with the architect Edward William Godwin and retired from the stage for six years. She resumed acting in 1874 and was immediately acclaimed for her portrayal of roles in Shakespeare and other classics.
In 1878 she joined Henry Irving’s company as his leading lady, and for more than the next two decades she was considered the leading Shakespearean and comic actress in Britain. Two of her most famous roles were Portia in The Merchant of Venice and Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing. She and Irving also toured with great success in America and Britain.
In 1903 Terry took over management of London’s Imperial Theatre, focusing on the plays of George Bernard Shaw and Henrik Ibsen. The venture was a financial failure, and Terry turned to touring and lecturing. She continued to find success on stage until 1920, while also appearing in films from 1916 to 1922. Her career lasted nearly seven decades.
Julia Margaret Cameron (British born India, 1815-1879) Julia Prinsep Stephen (née Jackson, formerly Mrs Duckworth) 1867 Albumen silver print National Portrait Gallery, London
Julia Prinsep Stephen (née Jackson; formerly Duckworth; 7 February 1846 – 5 May 1895) was an English Pre-Raphaelite model and philanthropist. She was the wife of the biographer Leslie Stephen and mother of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell, members of the Bloomsbury Group.
Julia Prinsep Jackson was born in Calcutta to an Anglo-Indian family, and when she was two her mother and her two sisters moved back to England. She became the favourite model of her aunt, the celebrated photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, who made more than 50 portraits of her. Through another maternal aunt, she became a frequent visitor at Little Holland House, then home to an important literary and artistic circle, and came to the attention of a number of Pre-Raphaelite painters who portrayed her in their work.
Married to Herbert Duckworth, a barrister, in 1867 she was soon widowed with three infant children. Devastated, she turned to nursing, philanthropy and agnosticism, and found herself attracted to the writing and life of Leslie Stephen, with whom she shared a friend in Anny Thackeray, his sister-in-law.
After Leslie Stephen’s wife died in 1875 he became close friends with Julia and they married in 1878. Julia and Leslie Stephen had four further children, living at 22 Hyde Park Gate, South Kensington, together with his seven-year-old mentally disabled daughter, Laura Makepeace Stephen. Many of her seven children and their descendants became notable. In addition to her family duties and modelling, she wrote a book based on her nursing experiences, Notes from Sick Rooms, in 1883.
She also wrote children’s stories for her family, eventually published posthumously as Stories for Children and became involved in social justice advocacy. Julia Stephen had firm views on the role of women, namely that their work was of equal value to that of men, but in different spheres, and she opposed the suffrage movement for votes for women. The Stephens entertained many visitors at their London home and their summer residence at St Ives, Cornwall. Eventually the demands on her both at home and outside the home started to take their toll. Julia Stephen died at her home following an episode of rheumatic fever in 1895, at the age of 49, when her youngest child was only 11. The writer Virginia Woolf provides a number of insights into the domestic life of the Stephens in both her autobiographical and fictional work.
Julia Margaret Cameron (British born India, 1815-1879) The Astronomer (Sir John Frederick William Herschel) 1867 Albumen silver print Courtesy of the RISD Museum, Providence, RI
Sir John Frederick William Herschel, 1st Baronet KH FRS (7 March 1792 – 11 May 1871) was an English polymath active as a mathematician, astronomer, chemist, inventor, and experimental photographer who invented the blueprint and did botanical work.
Herschel originated the use of the Julian day system in astronomy. He named seven moons of Saturn and four moons of Uranus – the seventh planet, discovered by his father Sir William Herschel. He made many contributions to the science of photography, and investigated colour blindness and the chemical power of ultraviolet rays. His Preliminary Discourse (1831), which advocated an inductive approach to scientific experiment and theory-building, was an important contribution to the philosophy of science. …
Photography
Herschel made numerous important contributions to photography. He made improvements in photographic processes, particularly in inventing the cyanotype process, which became known as blueprints, and variations, such as the chrysotype. In 1839, he made a photograph on glass, which still exists, and experimented with some colour reproduction, noting that rays of different parts of the spectrum tended to impart their own colour to a photographic paper. Herschel made experiments using photosensitive emulsions of vegetable juices, called phytotypes, also known as anthotypes, and published his discoveries in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London in 1842. He collaborated in the early 1840s with Henry Collen, portrait painter to Queen Victoria. Herschel originally discovered the platinum process on the basis of the light sensitivity of platinum salts, later developed by William Willis.
Herschel coined the term photography in 1839. Herschel was also the first to apply the terms negative and positive to photography.
Herschel discovered sodium thiosulfate to be a solvent of silver halides in 1819, and informed Talbot and Daguerre of his discovery that this “hyposulphite of soda” (“hypo”) could be used as a photographic fixer, to “fix” pictures and make them permanent, after experimentally applying it thus in early 1839.
Herschel’s ground-breaking research on the subject was read at the Royal Society in London in March 1839 and January 1840.
Julia Margaret Cameron (British born India, 1815-1879) Pomona (Alice Liddell) 1872 Albumen silver print The Metropolitan Museum of Art., New York David Hunter McAlpin Fund, 1963
Pomona was the goddess of fruit trees, gardens, and orchards. Unlike many other Roman goddesses and gods, she does not have a Greek counterpart, though she is commonly associated with Demeter. She watches over and protects fruit trees and cares for their cultivation.
Symbolically, Pomona and her fruit garden represent abundance, nurture and the simple pleasure derived from nature. She is often depicted in a garden full of life, colour and opulence, with her milky soft flesh on display and a cornucopia of fruit and flowers on her lap.
Julia Margaret Cameron (British born India, 1815-1879) The Gardener’s Daughter 1867 Albumen silver print A photographic study of Mary Ryan (1848-1914) National Science and Media Museum
A photographic study of Mary Ryan (1848-1914), taken by Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879) in 1867. This albumen print forms part of the Herschel Album, created by Cameron for her friend Sir John Herschel (1792-1871).
‘The Gardener’s Daughter’ was the title of a poem by Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892). Cameron’s photograph was inspired by the lines: ‘Gown’d in pure white, that fitted to the shape, Holding the bush, to fix it back, she stood.’
Julia Margaret Cameron (British born India, 1815-1879) Iago – study from an Italian 1867 Albumen silver print A photographic portrait of the artist’s model, Angelo Colarossi (born about 1839) National Science and Media Museum
A photographic portrait of the artist’s model, Angelo Colarossi (born about 1839), taken by Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879) in 1867. The print forms part of the Herschel Album, created by Cameron for her friend Sir John Herschel (1792-1871).
This is the only existing print known of ‘Iago’. The negative may have been destroyed intentionally by Cameron, and it is believed that the print was taken for George Frederic Watts (1817-1904) to work from for a painting.
Iago was the villain of Shakespeare’s play ‘Othello’.
Francesca Woodman and Julia Margaret Cameron: Portraits to Dream In book front cover
Francesca Woodman and Julia Margaret Cameron: Portraits to Dream In book back cover
Francesca Woodman and Julia Margaret Cameron: Portraits to Dream In book p. 11
Francesca Woodman and Julia Margaret Cameron: Portraits to Dream In book back cover pp. 70-71
Francesca Woodman and Julia Margaret Cameron: Portraits to Dream In
Magdalene Keaney (Editor), Katarina Jerinic (Contributor), Helen Ennis (Contributor)
Hardcover – 26 June 2024
Francesca Woodman and Julia Margaret Cameron: Portraits to Dream In draws parallels between two of the most significant practitioners in the history of photography, presenting fresh research, rare vintage prints, and previously unseen archival works.
‘I feel that photographs can either document and record reality or they can offer images as an alternative to everyday life: places for the viewer to dream in.’ ~ Francesca Woodman, 1980
Living and working over a century apart, Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879) and Francesca Woodman (1958-1981) experienced very different ways of making and understanding photographs. Francesca Woodman and Julia Margaret Cameron: Portraits to Dream In accompanies the exhibition of the same name opening at the National Portrait Gallery, London, in March 2024. Spanning the careers of both artists, the beautifully illustrated catalogue includes their best-known photographs as well as less familiar images. The exhibition works are arranged into eight thematic sections with feature essays, offering an accessible, engaging opportunity to consider both artists in a new light.
This publication presents the artists’ exploration of portraiture as a ‘dream space’. It makes new connections between their work, which pushed the boundaries of the photographic medium and experimented with ideas of beauty, symbolism, transformation and storytelling to produce some of art history’s most compelling and admired photographs.
“So the spirit of past times echoes down to us through these photographs, ripples in a pond caused by a pebble dropped into water.” Dr Marcus Bunyan
Exhibition dates: 9th March – 2nd June, 2024
Curators: Jessica S. McDonald, the Ransom Center’s Nancy Inman and Marlene Nathan Meyerson Curator of Photography
Hill & Adamson (Scottish, active 1843-1847) Robert Adamson (Scottish, 1821-1848) David Octavius Hill (Scottish, 1802-1870) 100 Calotypes by D. O. Hill, R.S.A., and R. Adamson album front cover 1845 60.9 x 43.1cm Hill & Adamson Photography Collection Gernsheim Collection Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin Public domain
Album of 109 salted paper prints from calotype negatives by Hill & Adamson (Scottish, active 1843-1847). Assembled and sold to marine painter Clarkson Stanfield (English, 1793-1867) in 1845. Six prints tipped in over other prints; these are likely the prints sent by Hill to Stanfield in January 1846.
The spirit of past times
The Clarkson Stanfield Album: an album of 109 salted paper prints from calotype negatives compiled by Hill & Adamson (Scottish, active 1843-1847), the photographs created by the painter (Hill) and photographer (Adamson) during a four year partnership that only ended with the untimely death of Robert Adamson at the age of 26 years. What a truly beautiful album full of the most meditative portrait photographs that you could ever lay your eyes on.
Reminiscent of the characteristics of Mannerism in the Renaissance, the figures and hands dance in convoluted poses of asymmetrical elegance. Witness the sway of body and sinuousness of hands in James Drummond, Artist, Edinburgh (1843-1845, below) with the oppositional direction of the hands, one pointing up and the other down. Or the directional composition of My Sister (1843-1845, below) where the sitter looks left in profile, the hand clutching a book (probably the bible) points in the other direction, whilst the other hand touches the earth. The use of chiaroscuro is magnificent. Other masterpieces of the photographic art are replete with the sensitivity of both artists: the double profile portrait of Jas & Thomas Duncan; A Study (1843-1844, below), both staring intently out of the pictorial frame, one brother clutching the other’s shoulder and arm along with his spectacles. Wonderfully intense and atmospheric.
“As artistic director, Hill composed each picture, placing his sitters as they might appear in the finished painting. Adamson operated the camera and carried out the chemical manipulations. Hill and Adamson were a perfect team. Hill, twenty years older than Adamson, was trained as a painter and had important connections in artistic and social circles in Edinburgh; he easily attracted a distinguished clientele to the team’s portrait studio at Adamson’s home, Rock House… Both men had a profound understanding of the way the world would translate into monochrome pictures.”1
Hill & Adamson also had a profound understanding of how the spirit of a person could be captured by the camera. The Newhaven portraits of fishermen and fishwives – “part of a social-documentary project, the first in photography, that the team carried out in Newhaven and other small but vital fishing towns near Edinburgh”2 – are still to this day some of the most engaging of the early portrait photographs in the history of photography. They capture the character of these people who after all this time still speak to us of their tough life and work through romantic photographs such as the barefooted boy “King Fisher” with his willow basket on a low table or Jeanie Wilson, Newhaven (1843-1845, below) dressed in traditional striped apron and woollen petticoat.
“Hill and Adamson presented Newhaven as a model community bound by tradition, honest labor, and mutual support – qualities emphasised by the careful posing of figures and by the graphic strength and gritty effect of the medium itself.”2
But as Fraser Linklater observes in his article, “‘They put a creel aroond my back and bid me call my haddies’: The Newhaven Fishwives, Preserving Lost Community History and Cultural Transmission Through Generations,” these were staged photographs: “the fact that the Newhaven fisherwomen were wearing ‘gala-dress’ in these pictures reveals it was not an accurate portrayal of them going about their daily work, but instead a picture of a romanticised and imagined community based on some form of semi-truth… Understanding these small details greatly assists us in, once again, grounding their experiences in reality, avoiding polishing their stories to an image that dissuades further thinking and investigation.”
“Nowadays, the village sits subsumed within it’s larger neighbours, Edinburgh and Leith, both in physicality but also, in the last half century culturally…”3
So all we have left of this culture, much like the romanticised photographs of the “Vanishing Race” of the North American Indian by Edward S. Curtis, or the gritty, realist photographs of Skinningrove by Cris Killip eighty or so years later, are these remembrances of times past.
During their brief but prolific partnership Hill & Adamson captured the spirit of these people living in an Industrial Age, photographs that don’t necessarily represent reality but are a performative view of their life and existence at that time (they were performing for the camera, dressed up in their best, posed for effect). But this romanticisation of the people in Hill & Adamson’s Newhaven portraits doesn’t make them any less valuable as representations of that time and place, for that is now all we have.
Indeed, their photographs “show us today some things that we may no longer have access to and give us a window into eyes of real human beings”4 as they go about their daily lives, however staged the photographs might be. Even as evolution would ultimately destroy that way of life forever, so the spirit of past times echoes down to us through these photographs, ripples in a pond caused by a pebble dropped into water.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ Daniel, Malcolm. “David Octavius Hill (1802-1870) and Robert Adamson (1821-1848).” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/hlad/hd_hlad.htm (October 2004)
2/ Anonymous. “Newhaven Fishwives,” on The Metropolitan Museum of Art website Nd [Online] Cited 31/05/2024
4/ Shannon Keller O’Loughlin (Choctaw) of the Association on American Indian Affairs (AAIA) in an email to the author, 1 June 2018
Many thankx to the Harry Ransom Center for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image. The photographs in the posting are in the order they appear in the album. You can view all 109 photographs on the Harry Ransom Center website.
PLEASE NOTE: the photographs in the posting are not necessarily the photographs in the exhibition. I have selected my favourite photographs from the online resources of the complete album which are free to download and are in the public domain.
Hill & Adamson (Scottish, active 1843-1847) Robert Adamson (Scottish, 1821-1848) David Octavius Hill (Scottish, 1802-1870) 100 Calotypes by D. O. Hill, R.S.A., and R. Adamson album endpaper 1845 60.9 x 43.1cm Hill & Adamson Photography Collection Gernsheim Collection Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin Public domain
Hill & Adamson (Scottish, active 1843-1847) Robert Adamson (Scottish, 1821-1848) David Octavius Hill (Scottish, 1802-1870) Robert Adamson 1843-1844 Salted paper print 9 x 6.4cm (arched top) Hill & Adamson Photography Collection Gernsheim Collection Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin Public domain
Robert Adamson (1821-1848), photography pioneer. Page inscribed with Clarkson Stanfield’s initials and date
Hill & Adamson (Scottish, active 1843-1847) Robert Adamson (Scottish, 1821-1848) David Octavius Hill (Scottish, 1802-1870) D. O. Hill, R.S.A. 1843 Salted paper print 19.8 x 14.1cm Hill & Adamson Photography Collection Gernsheim Collection Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin Public domain
David Octavius Hill (1802-1870), artist and photography pioneer. Mounted on title page with lettering by Hill
Hill & Adamson (Scottish, active 1843-1847) Robert Adamson (Scottish, 1821-1848) David Octavius Hill (Scottish, 1802-1870) Rev Jas Julius Wood, Late of Greyfriars, Edinb. 1843 Salted paper print 20 x 14.4cm Hill & Adamson Photography Collection Gernsheim Collection Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin Public domain
Rev. Dr James Julius Wood (1800-1877), Free Church minister. Secondary inscription by Helmut Gernsheim
Hill & Adamson (Scottish, active 1843-1847) Robert Adamson (Scottish, 1821-1848) David Octavius Hill (Scottish, 1802-1870) Rev Jas Julius Wood, Late of Greyfriars, Edinb. (detail) 1843 Salted paper print 20 x 14.4cm Hill & Adamson Photography Collection Gernsheim Collection Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin Public domain
Hill & Adamson (Scottish, active 1843-1847) Robert Adamson (Scottish, 1821-1848) David Octavius Hill (Scottish, 1802-1870) Miss Rigby 1843-1845 20.3 x 14.4cm Hill & Adamson Photography Collection Gernsheim Collection Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin Public domain
Jane Rigby (1806-1896), sister of Elizabeth, Lady Eastlake (née Rigby)
Don’t miss this unprecedented exhibition of the Clarkson Stanfield Album, a superb volume of early photographs by the celebrated Scottish partnership of Hill & Adamson. Launching their collaboration in Edinburgh in 1843, the established painter David Octavius Hill (1802-1870) and the young photographer Robert Adamson (1821-1848) combined their aesthetic sensitivity and technical brilliance to produce an unparalleled body of portraits, architectural and landscapes scenes, and pioneering social documents. Their work endures today as one of the earliest sustained explorations of photography as an artform.
In the fall of 1845 Hill & Adamson prepared an album of their finest work, arranging over 100 salted paper prints from their calotype negatives into a folio bound in rich purple leather with intricate gold tooling, and sold it to the prominent English marine painter Clarkson Frederick Stanfield (1793-1867). Now known as the Clarkson Stanfield Album, it is one of only a few such unique albums assembled in the years before Adamson’s death at age 26.
More than 175 years later the album is undergoing structural repair, providing the first opportunity since 1845 to view several sections at once before conservators return them to the original binding. The exhibition includes 39 salted paper prints from the Clarkson Stanfield Album, as well as examples of Adamson’s earliest photographic trials and two of Hill’s painted landscapes. The exhibition is drawn entirely from the Gernsheim Collection, acquired by the Ransom Center in 1963.
Text from the Harry Ransom Center website
Hill & Adamson (Scottish, active 1843-1847) Robert Adamson (Scottish, 1821-1848) David Octavius Hill (Scottish, 1802-1870) James Drummond, Artist, Edinburgh 1843-1845 Salted paper print 20 x 14.4cm Hill & Adamson Photography Collection Gernsheim Collection Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin Public domain
James Drummond (1816-1877), history painter, Curator of the National Gallery of Scotland
Hill & Adamson (Scottish, active 1843-1847) Robert Adamson (Scottish, 1821-1848) David Octavius Hill (Scottish, 1802-1870) James Drummond, Artist, Edinburgh (detail) 1843-1845 Salted paper print 20 x 14.4cm Hill & Adamson Photography Collection Gernsheim Collection Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin Public domain
Hill & Adamson (Scottish, active 1843-1847) Robert Adamson (Scottish, 1821-1848) David Octavius Hill (Scottish, 1802-1870) My Sister 1843-1845 21.1 x 14.8cm Hill & Adamson Photography Collection Gernsheim Collection Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin Public domain
Mary Watson (née Hill), sister of David Octavius Hill. Secondary inscription by Helmut Gernsheim
Hill & Adamson (Scottish, active 1843-1847) Robert Adamson (Scottish, 1821-1848) David Octavius Hill (Scottish, 1802-1870) My Sister (detail) 1843-1845 21.1 x 14.8cm Hill & Adamson Photography Collection Gernsheim Collection Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin Public domain
Hill & Adamson (Scottish, active 1843-1847) Robert Adamson (Scottish, 1821-1848) David Octavius Hill (Scottish, 1802-1870) Miss Parker 1844-1845 20 x 14.4cm Hill & Adamson Photography Collection Gernsheim Collection Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin Public domain
Possibly Jane Sophia Barker (née Harden) (1807-1876)
Hill & Adamson (Scottish, active 1843-1847) Robert Adamson (Scottish, 1821-1848) David Octavius Hill (Scottish, 1802-1870 Jas & Thomas Duncan; A Study 1843-1844 11.5 x 14.9cm Hill & Adamson Photography Collection Gernsheim Collection Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin Public domain
James Duncan; Thomas Duncan (1807-1845), artist
Hill & Adamson (Scottish, active 1843-1847) Robert Adamson (Scottish, 1821-1848) David Octavius Hill (Scottish, 1802-1870) Jas & Thomas Duncan; A Study (detail) 1843-1844 11.5 x 14.9cm Hill & Adamson Photography Collection Gernsheim Collection Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin Public domain
“100 Calotypes by D. O. Hill, R.S.A., and R. Adamson,” commonly known as the Clarkson Stanfield Album, is a unique album assembled and sold to English marine painter Clarkson Stanfield (1793-1867) before October 1, 1845. The folio, bound in purple leather with gold tooling, contains a total of 109 salted paper prints from calotype negatives made between 1843 and 1845. As originally assembled, the album begins with portraits of Adamson and Hill, followed by 100 plates and a final photograph, perhaps serving as a visual epilogue or postscript. The major themes of Hill & Adamson’s work are represented: the 100 principal plates comprise, in this order, 44 portraits, including two presbytery groups; 10 scenes in Greyfriars churchyard; 2 scenes at Leith; 31 photographs of fisherfolk, mainly at Newhaven; 1 photograph at St. Andrews; and 11 views of monuments and architecture in and around Edinburgh. Titles of most plates are inscribed in Hill’s hand. Six additional salted paper prints were added later; these are likely the prints sent by Hill to Stanfield in January 1846, added to the album by Stanfield. Of these six prints, five are Newhaven photographs and one is a portrait. This is one of Hill & Adamson’s earliest albums, and one of only a few assembled in Adamson’s lifetime. It provides a view into their partnership at its midpoint, and into which images they understood to be some of their strongest thus far. As an object, the album offers a sense of what the partners may have envisioned for other deluxe volumes they announced but never realised. The album is part of the Gernsheim Collection, purchased in 1963.
While the title suggests there are 100 images contained in the album, there are actually 109 salted paper prints, most of which are accompanied by inscriptions provided by either Hill or Adamson. The images are of prominent men and women of the day, friends and acquaintances of Hill and Adamson, and scenes of Edinburgh, Newhaven and St. Andrews, and Scottish architecture and art. The nine additional images can explained in several ways. First, six images cover/originally covered other images. It appears that Hill and Adamson did not like their original choice of several images and later mounted different images over the originals. In most cases, the covered image is very similar to another image in the album (compare 964:0048:0044, a covered image, with 964:0048:0045). Second, the first two images in the book appear on the half-title and title page, and therefore may not have been counted as part of the “100” referred to on the title page. And, a third explanation may be that the cover for the album was printed before Hill and Adamson’s selection of images to be included.
Text from the Harry Ransom Center website
Hill & Adamson (Scottish, active 1843-1847) Robert Adamson (Scottish, 1821-1848) David Octavius Hill (Scottish, 1802-1870) Edinburgh Castle from the Greyfriars 1843-1845 11.6 x 15.9cm Hill & Adamson Photography Collection Gernsheim Collection Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin Public domain
Greyfriars Churchyard; a group of monuments including the Chalmers and Jackson Monuments, with Edinburgh Castle in the background
Hill & Adamson (Scottish, active 1843-1847) Robert Adamson (Scottish, 1821-1848) David Octavius Hill (Scottish, 1802-1870) Edinburgh Castle from the Greyfriars (detail) 1843-1845 11.6 x 15.9cm Hill & Adamson Photography Collection Gernsheim Collection Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin Public domain
Hill & Adamson (Scottish, active 1843-1847) Robert Adamson (Scottish, 1821-1848) David Octavius Hill (Scottish, 1802-1870) Newhaven Fisherman 1843-1845 20.1 x 14.7cm Hill & Adamson Photography Collection Gernsheim Collection Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin Public domain
James or “Sandy” Linton
Hill & Adamson (Scottish, active 1843-1847) Robert Adamson (Scottish, 1821-1848) David Octavius Hill (Scottish, 1802-1870) Newhaven Fisherman (detail) 1843-1845 20.1 x 14.7cm Hill & Adamson Photography Collection Gernsheim Collection Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin Public domain
Hill & Adamson (Scottish, active 1843-1847) Robert Adamson (Scottish, 1821-1848) David Octavius Hill (Scottish, 1802-1870) Jeanie Wilson & Annie Linton, Newhaven 1843-1845 19.2 x 14.7cm Hill & Adamson Photography Collection Gernsheim Collection Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin Public domain
Hill & Adamson (Scottish, active 1843-1847) Robert Adamson (Scottish, 1821-1848) David Octavius Hill (Scottish, 1802-1870) Jeanie Wilson & Annie Linton, Newhaven (detail) 1843-1845 19.2 x 14.7cm Hill & Adamson Photography Collection Gernsheim Collection Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin Public domain
David Octavius Hill (1802–1870) and Robert Adamson (1821-1848)
Malcolm Daniel
In the mid-1840s, the Scottish painter-photographer team of Hill and Adamson produced the first substantial body of self-consciously artistic work using the newly invented medium of photography. William Henry Fox Talbot’s patent restrictions on his “calotype” or “Talbotype” process did not apply in Scotland, and, in fact, Talbot encouraged its use there. Among the fellow scientists with whom he corresponded and to whom he sent examples of the new art, was the physicist Sir David Brewster, principal of the United Colleges of Saint Salvator and Saint Leonard at Saint Andrews University, just north of Edinburgh. By 1841, Brewster and his colleague John Adamson, curator of the College Museum and professor of chemistry, were experimenting with the calotype process, and the following year they instructed Adamson’s younger brother Robert in the techniques of paper photography. By May 1843, Robert Adamson, then just twenty-one years old, was prepared to move to Edinburgh and set up shop as the city’s first professional calotypist.
As important as Brewster’s introduction of Adamson to the calotype was, another introduction proved even more consequential. Just weeks after Adamson had established himself in Edinburgh, Brewster saw an opportunity to send business his way. On May 18, 1843, the Church of Scotland met in General Assembly amid great dispute over the role of the crown and landowners in appointing ministers. As the Assembly opened, the moderator, Rev. Dr. David Welsh, read an Act of Protest and led 155 ministers – more than one-third of those present – from the Assembly and through the streets of Edinburgh to Tanfield Hall, where in the days that followed they signed a Deed of Demission, resigning their positions and livelihoods, and established the Free Church of Scotland. Their act of conscience, at great personal risk and sacrifice, seemed heroic to many who were present, including Sir David Brewster and David Octavius Hill.
Hill was a locally prominent and well-connected painter of romantic landscapes and secretary of the Royal Scottish Academy of Fine Arts in Edinburgh. With the encouragement of the new Free Church, he resolved to paint a large historical painting of the signing of the Deed of Demission and, as was often the case for works of this nature, proposed to finance his painting through the sale of reproductive engravings of the finished work. In his advertisement for the engravings, issued within a week of the Disruption (as the upheaval was called), Hill wrote, “The Picture, the execution of which, it is expected will occupy the greater portion of two or three years, is intended to supply an authentic commemoration of this great event in the history of the Church … will contain Portraits, from actual sittings, in as far as these can be obtained, of the most venerable fathers, and others of the more eminent and distinguished ministers and elders.”
Brewster, sensing that Hill’s intention to sketch each of the several hundred ministers before they returned to the far corners of Scotland would be close to impossible, suggested that the painter use the services of the newly established Adamson to make photographic sketches instead. “I got hold of the artist,” Brewster wrote to Talbot in early June, “showed him the Calotype, & the eminent advantage he might derive from it in getting likenesses of all the principal characters before they were dispersed to their respective homes. He was at first incredulous, but went to Mr. Adamson, and arranged with him preliminaries for getting all the necessary portraits.” Within weeks Hill was completely won over, and the two were working seamlessly in partnership. As artistic director, Hill composed each picture, placing his sitters as they might appear in the finished painting.
Adamson operated the camera and carried out the chemical manipulations. Hill and Adamson were a perfect team. Hill, twenty years older than Adamson, was trained as a painter and had important connections in artistic and social circles in Edinburgh; he easily attracted a distinguished clientele to the team’s portrait studio at Adamson’s home, Rock House. Most of all, he possessed a geniality, a “suavity of manner and absence of all affectation,” that immediately set people at ease and permitted him to pose his sitters without losing their natural sense of posture and expression. Adamson was young but had learned his lessons well. He was a consummate technician, excelling in – and even improving upon – the various optical and chemical procedures developed by Talbot. Both men had a profound understanding of the way the world would translate into monochrome pictures.
If in May Hill had been incredulous, by June he was convinced; by July he was proud to exhibit the first photographs as “preliminary studies and sketches” for his picture, and by the end of the year he and his partner had photographed nearly all the figures who would have a place in his grand painting. Their hundreds of preparatory “sketches” ranged from single portraits to groups of as many as twenty-five ministers posed as Hill envisioned them in his ambitious composition. Some portraits, such as that of Thomas Chalmers, first moderator of the Free Church, were used as direct models for the finished work. However, at each sitting, Hill and Adamson made numerous photographs in various poses, and many photographs of the ministers have no direct correspondence with the painting. Still other portraits, of people who were not present for the signing of the Deed of Demission – but whom Hill apparently thought should have been – were used as models for the painting.
“The pictures produced are as Rembrandt’s but improved,” wrote the watercolorist John Harden on first seeing Hill and Adamson’s calotypes in November 1843, “so like his style & the oldest & finest masters that doubtless a great progress in Portrait painting & effect must be the consequence.” In actuality, though, it was so easy to make the portrait “sketches” by means of photography that Hill’s painting was ultimately overburdened by a surfeit of recognisable faces: 450 names appear on his key to the painting. The final composition – not completed for two decades and as dull a work as one can imagine – lacks not only the fiery dynamism of Hill’s first sketches of the event but also the immediacy and graphic power of the photographs that were meant to serve it.
By August 1844, Hill and Adamson clearly understood the value of their calotypes as works of art in their own right and decided to expand their collaboration far beyond the original mission, announcing a forthcoming series of volumes illustrated with photographs of subjects other than the ministers of the Free Church: The Fishermen and Women of the Firth of Forth; Highland Character and Costume; Architectural Structures of Edinburgh; Architectural Structures of Glasgow, &c.; Old Castles, Abbeys, &c. in Scotland; and Portraits of Distinguished Scotchmen. Although these titles were never issued as published volumes, photographs intended for each survive, and those made in the small fishing town of Newhaven are a particularly noteworthy group.
In a time as pervaded as ours is by photographic imagery, it is difficult to conceive that within the first few weeks of their collaboration, Hill and Adamson made more photographs than the two together had ever seen. In four-and-a-half years and nearly 3,000 images, they pioneered the aesthetic terrain of photography and created a body of work that still ranks among the highest achievements of photographic portraiture. Their collaboration ended not because of any artistic falling out between the partners but rather because Adamson, sickly from childhood, fell ill in late 1847 and returned to Saint Andrews to be cared for by his family. He died in January 1848.
Daniel, Malcolm. “David Octavius Hill (1802-1870) and Robert Adamson (1821-1848).” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/hlad/hd_hlad.htm (October 2004) Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Hill & Adamson (Scottish, active 1843-1847) Robert Adamson (Scottish, 1821-1848) David Octavius Hill (Scottish, 1802-1870) Newhaven 1843-1845 15.6 x 11.5cm Hill & Adamson Photography Collection Gernsheim Collection Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin Public domain
David Young (left); unidentified man
Hill & Adamson (Scottish, active 1843-1847) Robert Adamson (Scottish, 1821-1848) David Octavius Hill (Scottish, 1802-1870) Newhaven (detail) 1843-1845 15.6 x 11.5cm Hill & Adamson Photography Collection Gernsheim Collection Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin Public domain
Hill & Adamson (Scottish, active 1843-1847) Robert Adamson (Scottish, 1821-1848) David Octavius Hill (Scottish, 1802-1870) Jeanie Wilson, Newhaven 1843-1845 20.2 x 14.5cm Hill & Adamson Photography Collection Gernsheim Collection Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin Public domain
Hill & Adamson (Scottish, active 1843-1847) Robert Adamson (Scottish, 1821-1848) David Octavius Hill (Scottish, 1802-1870) Newhaven 1843-1845 19.9 x 14.5cm Hill & Adamson Photography Collection Gernsheim Collection Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin Public domain
Unidentified boy; has also been called “King Fisher” or “His Faither’s Breeks”
Hill & Adamson (Scottish, active 1843-1847) Robert Adamson (Scottish, 1821-1848) David Octavius Hill (Scottish, 1802-1870) Newhaven Fisherman 1843-1845 20.6 x 14.4cm Hill & Adamson Photography Collection Gernsheim Collection Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin Public domain
Willie Liston
Hill & Adamson (Scottish, active 1843-1847) Robert Adamson (Scottish, 1821-1848) David Octavius Hill (Scottish, 1802-1870) Newhaven Fisherman (detail) 1843-1845 20.6 x 14.4cm Hill & Adamson Photography Collection Gernsheim Collection Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin Public domain
Hill & Adamson (Scottish, active 1843-1847) Robert Adamson (Scottish, 1821-1848) David Octavius Hill (Scottish, 1802-1870) A Newhaven Pilot 1843-1845 20.3 x 14.6cm Hill & Adamson Photography Collection Gernsheim Collection Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin Public domain
Hill & Adamson (Scottish, active 1843-1847) Robert Adamson (Scottish, 1821-1848) David Octavius Hill (Scottish, 1802-1870) Newhaven 1843-1845 14.7 x 20.1cm Hill & Adamson Photography Collection Gernsheim Collection Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin Public domain
Group of unidentified women
Hill & Adamson (Scottish, active 1843-1847) Robert Adamson (Scottish, 1821-1848) David Octavius Hill (Scottish, 1802-1870) Newhaven (detail) 1843-1845 14.7 x 20.1cm Hill & Adamson Photography Collection Gernsheim Collection Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin Public domain
Harry Ransom Center 300 West 21st Street Austin, Texas 78712
What They Saw: Historical Photobooks by Women, 1843-1999 (Nueva York, 10×10 Photobooks, 2021) cover images Design: Ayumi Higuchi Photography: Jeff Gutterman
A mid-week posting!
I wouldn’t have forgiven myself if I had missed this important exhibition about an interesting subject, the “underexposed and undocumented photobooks by women made between 1843 and 1999.”
So I thought I would squeeze it into the posting schedule which stretches a couple of months into the future…
Other than the group photographs of the book covers and installation photographs of the exhibition (below), there were no individual book covers nor details about some of the books in the media images, so I have added a few were it has been possible along with accompanying text.
I have also included photographs from what I think is one of the most iconic photobooks, even though I am not sure it is in the exhibition: Marion Palfi’s There is No More Time: An American Tragedy (1949).
So many important photobooks by so many glorious photographers.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
What They Saw: Historical Photobooks by Women, 1843-1999 (Nueva York, 10×10 Photobooks, 2021) cover images (detail) Design: Ayumi Higuchi Photography: Jeff Gutterman
What They Saw: Historical Photobooks by Women, 1843-1999 (Nueva York, 10×10 Photobooks, 2021) cover images (detail) Design: Ayumi Higuchi Photography: Jeff Gutterman
What They Saw: Historical Photobooks by Women, 1843-1999 (Nueva York, 10×10 Photobooks, 2021) cover images (detail) Design: Ayumi Higuchi Photography: Jeff Gutterman
What They Saw project, a touring exhibition accompanied by a publication and series of public programs, is a means to ignite interest in underexposed and undocumented photobooks by women made between 1843 and 1999 and to begin a process of filling in the gaps. The present show is organised in collaboration with 10×10 Photobooks, a nonprofit organisation with a mission to share photobooks globally and encourage their appreciation and understanding.
In seeking out the omissions in photobook history, the standard definition of the photobook: a bound volume with photographic illustrations published by the author, an independent publisher or a commercial publisher, needed to be expanded to incorporate those who do not call themselves photographers or artists but who nevertheless put together a “book” composed of photographs taken by themselves or others: individual albums, slim exhibition pamphlets, scrapbooks, mock-ups, fanzines and artists’ books to be more inclusive.
This iteration of the What They Saw exhibition includes 60 books of the more than 250 volumes highlighted in the associated publication. Most of these publications are from the collection of the Museo Reina Sofía’s Library and Documentation Centre. They are presented chronologically and show examples of books from around the globe. From the pioneers, such as Anna Atkins, who was the first person ever to print and distribute a photobook, or Isabel Agnes Cowper, who used photography to document museum objects, subsequently reproduced in numerous books, to the independent and self-published photobooks of the 1990s, including Colored People: A Collaborative Book Project by Adrian Piper or Twinspotting by Ketaki Seth, this selection allows for greater inclusion of previously marginalised photographic communities, including women, queer communities, people of colour and artists from outside Europe and North America.
Although only twenty-five years old, photobook history has been written primarily by men and has focused on publications authored by men. Very few books by women photographers appear in past anthologies documenting photobook history, and those included are already quite well known. This exhibition of women’s role in the production, dissemination, and authoring of photobooks is a necessary step in unwriting the current photobook history and rewriting an updated photobook history that is more equitable and inclusive.
Text from the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía website
Anna Atkins, Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions, 1843
Claude Cahun (Lucy Schwob) (French, 1894-1954) Aveux non avenus (Disavowals or Cancelled Confessions) 1930
In her 1930 publication, Aveux non Avenus, Claude Cahun used the relationship between her inwardly focused poetic writing and symbolic photomontages to construct a unique reality for self-expression. This article focuses on three chapters and respective photographic images from the publication to relate Cahun’s, and by association her partner Marcel Moore’s, discussion on sexuality and gender expression. The utopian dreamscape created investigates issues of narcissism and otherness, female homosexuality, dandyism and going beyond gender, individual and social critique, mocking the antiquated views of art and writing, accepting and breaking taboos, while allowing for other departures from the accepted norm. Through analysis of the publication and supporting evidence from early influences, it can be seen that Cahun created a world in Aveux non Avenus where she could exist in a space between the established feminine–masculine binary of 20th-century Europe.
Germaine Krull (photographer) Cover design by M. Tchimoukow. MÉTAL cover 1928
Germaine Krull (1897-1985) Image from the portfolio MÉTAL 1928, p. 33
I did not have a special intention or design when I took the Iron photographs. I wanted to show what I see, exactly as the eye sees it. ‘MÉTAL’ is a collection of photographs from the time. ‘MÉTAL’ initiated a new visual era and open the way or a new concept of photography. ‘MÉTAL’ was the starting point which allowed photography to become an artisanal trade and which made an artist of the photographer, because it was part of this new movement, of this new era which touched all art.
Germaine Krull. Extract from the Preface to the 1976 edition of ‘MÉTAL’
Germaine Krull (1897-1985) Image from the portfolio MÉTAL 1928 p. 37
Eyes on Russia by Margaret Bourke-White. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1931
In 1951, Westbrook Pegler wrote numerous articles attacking Margaret Bourke-White for her associations with leftist politics in the 1930s. It is probably for this reason that in her autobiography, Portrait of Myself, written about ten years later, Bourke-White didn’t mention her first book, Eyes on Russia, published in 1931. And yet, this book is of extraordinary interest, not only as a landmark in Bourke-White’s career but also as a source, both visual and narrative, on the Soviet Union during its first Five Year Plan. With letters of recommendation from influential people, including the Russian film maker, Sergei Eisenstein, Bourke-White arrived in Moscow in the fall of 1930, where she obtained the official endorsement of A.B. Khalatoff, chief of the Soviet publishing house (he was later liquidated in the 1937 purges). Khalatoff supplied her with a thick roll of rubles and a guide. Bourke-White then toured some of the most important industrial and other sites and came back with stellar images of Russia under construction, which she complemented by a spritely and charming narrative of her experiences as the first foreign photographer to photograph in the Soviet Union with official permission. On her trip, she made 800 negatives, of which 40 were published in Eyes on Russia in a sepia tone. This book, along with at least eight related illustrated articles in Fortune, the New York Times Sunday Magazine, and other periodicals, significantly enhanced Bourke-White’s reputation (and commercial business). They also helped initiate relationships she established both with Soviet officials and Americans sympathetic to the U.S.S.R. She returned to Russia in 1931 and 1932 for additional photography, but Eyes on Russia, a fascinating book for a variety of reasons, remains the largest single published collection of her work in that country. It was very well received in numerous book reviews when it appeared. For a more detailed review, see my article, Gary D. Saretzky “Margaret Bourke-White: Eyes on Russia,” The Photo Review, 22: 3-4 (Summer & Fall 1999)
Text from a comment on the Amazon website
Roll, Jordan, Roll by Julia Peterkin (text) and Doris Ulmann (photographs) New York: Robert O. Ballo, 1933
Doris Ulmann’s photographic collaboration with Julia Peterkin focuses on the lives of former slaves and their descendants on a plantation in the Gullah coastal region of South Carolina. Peterkin, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1929, was born in South Carolina and raised by a black nursemaid who taught her the Gullah dialect before she learned standard English. She married the heir to Lang Syne in today’s Calhoun County, SC, one of the state’s richest plantations, which became the setting for Roll, Jordan, Roll. Ulmann’s soft-focus photos-rendered as tactile as charcoal drawings in the superb gravure reproductions here-straddle Pictorialism and Modernism even as they appear to dissolve into memory.
Text from the Amazon website
Leni Riefenstahl Schönheit im olympischen Kampf [Beauty in the Olympic Games] Berlin: Im Deutschen Verlag, (1937)
Leni Riefenstahl Schönheit im olympischen Kampf [Beauty in the Olympic Games] Berlin: Im Deutschen Verlag, (1937) pp. 220-221
Berenice Abbott and Elizabeth McCausland. Changing New York. New York: E. P. Dutton & Company, 1939
“The camera alone can catch
the swift surfaces of the
cities today and speaks a
language intelligible to all.”
~ Berenice Abbott
Abbott’s landmark work on New York, illustrated with 97 halftone plates that display “the historical importance of the documentary model its power as a medium of personal expression” (Parr & Badger).
In January 1929, after eight years in Europe, Abbott boarded an ocean liner to New York City for what was meant to be a short visit. Upon arrival, she was struck by the rapid transformation of the built landscape and saw the city as ripe with photographic potential. “When I saw New York again, and stood in the dirty slush, I felt that here was the thing I had been wanting to do all my life,” she recalled. “Old New York is fast disappearing,” Abbott observed. “At almost any point on Manhattan Island, the sweep of one’s vision can take in the dramatic contrasts of the old and the new and the bold foreshadowing of the future. This dynamic quality should be caught and recorded immediately in a documentary interpretation of New York City. The city is in the making and unless this transition is crystallised now in permanent form, it will be forever lost…. The camera alone can catch the swift surfaces of the cities today and speaks a language intelligible to all.”
On the eve of the Great Depression, she began a series of documentary photographs of the city that, with the support of the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project from 1935 to 1939, debuted in 1939 as the traveling exhibition and publication Changing New York.
With a handheld camera, Abbott traversed the city, photographing its skyscrapers, bridges, elevated trains, and neighbourhood street life. She pasted these “tiny photographic notes” into a standard black-page album, arranging them by subject and locale.
Consisting of 266 small black-and-white prints arranged on thirty-two pages, Abbott’s New York album marks a key turning point in her career – from her portrait work in Paris to the urban documentation that became one of her lasting legacies.
From 1935 to 1965, Berenice Abbott and art critic Elizabeth McCausland (1899-1965) lived and worked in two flats they shared on the fourth floor of the loft building at 50 Commerce Street.
Lannyl Stephens. “Berenice Abbott’s Changing New York,” on the Village Preservation website July 17, 2023 [Online] Cited 26/05/2024. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Berenice Abbott and Elizabeth McCausland. Changing New York. New York: E. P. Dutton & Company, 1939
An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion. Photographs by Dorothea Lange; text by Paul Taylor. New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1939
“We need to be reminded these days about what women have been, and can be. It’s a question of their really deep and fundamental place in society. I have a feeling that women need to be reminded of it. They are needed.”
~ Dorothea Lange
First published in 1939, An American Exodus is one of the masterpieces of the documentary genre. Produced by incomparable documentary photographer Dorothea Lange with text by her husband, Paul Taylor, An American Exodus was taken in the early 1930s while the couple were working for the Farm Security Administration (FSA) The book documents the rural poverty of the depression-era exodus that brought over 300,000 migrants to California in search of farm work, a westward mass migration driven by economic deprivation as opposed to the Manifest Destiny of 19th century pioneers.
Text from the Google Books website
In 1938, Dorothea Lange and her husband Paul Taylor began sorting through the stacks of photographs she had made documenting migrant farmworkers and homeless drought refugees. Their goal was to create a book that would reveal the human dimension of the crisis to the American people and, hopefully, prompt government relief. One of several books released in the late 1930s that made use of the Farm Security Administration photo archive, An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion was innovative in several ways. Rather than tell the story from their own perspective, Lange and Taylor used direct quotes from the migrants themselves, which Lange had painstakingly collected in the field. Released as war tensions were building in Europe and Asia, An American Exodus was largely overlooked at the time. In the years since its publication, the book has gained power, presenting an iconic image of the Dust Bowl era that has shaped the way we think of those difficult years.
Text from the Dorothea Lange Digital Archive, Oakland Museum of California website
Eslanda Goode Robeson. African Journey. New York: John Day Company, 1945
Eslanda Robeson’s 1936 African journal with her own photographs. Africa seen through the eyes of an African American. She went to South Africa, Kenya, Uganda, and Congo, and visited African kings and British governors, villages, gold mines, plantations, herdswomen, and modern African leaders.
Eslanda Goode Robeson (1895-1965) was an American anthropologist, author, actress, and civil rights activist. She was born in Washington, D.C., graduated from Columbia University in 1917 with a degree in chemistry, and in 1921 married the singer and actor Paul Robeson. In 1936, she received her degree in anthropology from the London School of Economics, and in 1946, the year following the publication of African Journal, earned her anthropology Ph.D. from Hartford Seminary where she specialised in African studies and race relations.
Text from the Boyd Books website
Wrens in Camera by Lee Miller (London: Hollis and Carter, 1945)
During the Second World War Lee Miller was the official war photographer for Vogue magazine. The images contained in Wrens in Camera were commissioned by the Admiralty and show the female navy officers and workers fulfilling their war duties. There are signallers, technicians, trainers, housekeepers and transport crews. The whole is an important document of women’s roles in war-time Britain.
Text from the Beaux Books website
Wrens in Camera by Lee Miller (London: Hollis and Carter, 1945) p. 47
“As a photographer, she was as interested in the discriminator as in the victims of discrimination. Long before what we tend to think of as the crux of the civil rights struggle in the 1960s, Palfi went to Georgia at a particularly dangerous time. In 1949, she was drawn to do an in-depth portrait of Irwinton, a small community where a young black man had been torn out of jail and shot by a lynch mob. The tremendous public outcry over this barbaric incident included front-page coverage and editorials by the New York Times. Obviously, the presence of a photographer in such a community would attract unwanted attention and might have endangered her life. But by a happy stroke of luck, the Vice-President of the Georgia Power Company was interested in her work. Warning her that she must “photograph the South as it really is, not as the North slanders it,” he wanted her to get to meet the “right” people. As it happened, the “right” people turned out to be the very discriminators she wanted to photograph. Left in the protection of the local postmistress, she proceeded to take terms, objective pictures of overseers and white-suited politicians.
Even if the press had not indicted Irwinton for its racism, the extreme conservatism and tension were evident in the faces of its citizens. She found a white supremacist group, “The Columbians,” whose insignia was a thunderbolt, the symbol of Hitler’s elite guard. “Mein Kampf was their bible,” she believed. Meanwhile, the wife of the lunch victim said, simply, “Caleb was a good man … he believed in his rights and therefore he died.”
Elizabeth Lindquist-Cock. “Marion Palfi: An Appreciation,” in The Archive Research Series Number 19, September 1983, Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, pp. 7-8. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Acapulco en el sueño by Francisco Tario (text) with photographs by Lola Alvarez Bravo, 1951
“If my photographs have any meaning, it’s that they stand for a Mexico that once existed.”
~ Lola Alvarez Bravo
Dare Wright. The Lonely Doll. New York: Doubleday & Co, 1957
Once there was a little doll. Her name was Edith. She lived in a nice house and had everything she needed except someone to play with. She was lonely! Then one morning Edith looked into the garden and there stood two bears! Since it was first published in 1957, The Lonely Doll has established itself as a unique children’s classic. Through innovative photography Dare Wright brings the world of dolls to life and entertains us with much more than just a story. Edith, the star of the show, is a doll from Wright’s childhood, and Wright selected the bear family with the help of her brother. With simple poses and wonderful expressions, the cast of characters is vividly brought to life to tell a story of friendship.
Mourka, the autobiography of a Cat, by Tanaquil Le Clercq and Martha Swope. Stein and Day 1964
Le Clercq is the wife of choreographer George Balanchine; she wrote this book after Mourka became famous because of the photograph of Martha Swope in Life magazine, where George Balanchine assists Mourka in his grand jeté. Mourka writes about his exercises in dance and his aspirations to travel in outer space.
Text from the Cats in Books albums Facebook page
Mourka, the autobiography of a Cat, by Tanaquil Le Clercq and Martha Swope. Stein and Day 1964
A Way of Seeing, 1965. Photographs by Helen Levitt
Dublin: A Portrait by V.S. Pritchett (text) and Evelyn Hofer (photographs). New York: Harper & Row, 1967
The starting point for this book is Evelin Hofer’s Dublin: A Portrait, which features an in-depth essay by V. S. Pritchett and photos by Hofer, and enjoyed great popularity upon its original publication in 1967. Dublin: A Portrait is an example of Hofer’s perhaps most important body of work, her city portraits: books that present comprehensive prose texts by renowned authors alongside her self-contained visual essays with their own narratives. Dublin: A Portrait was the last book published in this renowned series. …
In Dublin Hofer repeatedly turned her camera to sights of the city, but mainly to the people who constituted its essence. She made numerous portraits – be they of writers and public figures or unknown people in the streets. Her portraits give evidence of an intense, respectful engagement with her subjects, who participate as equal partners in the process of photographing.
When Diane Arbus died in 1971 at the age of forty-eight, she was already a significant influence-even something of a legend-among serious photographers, although only a relatively small number of her most important pictures were widely known at the time. The publication of Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph in 1972 – along with the posthumous retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art – offered the general public its first encounter with the breadth and power of her achievements. The response was unprecedented.
The monograph of eighty photographs was edited and designed by the painter Marvin Israel, Diane Arbus’s friend and colleague, and by her daughter Doon Arbus. Their goal in making the book was to remain as faithful as possible to the standards by which Diane Arbus judged her own work and to the ways in which she hoped it would be seen. Universally acknowledged as a classic, Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph is a timeless masterpiece with editions in five languages and remains the foundation of her international reputation.
Nearly half of a century has done nothing to diminish the riveting impact of these pictures or the controversy they inspire. Arbus’s photographs penetrate the psyche with all the force of a personal encounter and, in doing so, transform the way we see the world and the people in it.
Jill Freedman. Circus Days. New York: Harmony Books/Crown, 1975
A photographic documentation of the Beatty-Cole Circus, recording and portraying the customs, activities, animals, and singular personalities of an endangered way of life.
Jill Freedman. Circus Days. New York: Harmony Books/Crown, 1975
Susan Meiselas. Carnival Strippers book cover 1975
From 1972 to 1975, Susan Meiselas spent her summers photographing women who performed striptease for small-town carnivals in New England, Pennsylvania and South Carolina. As she followed the shows from town to town, she captured the dancers on stage and off, their public performances as well as their private lives, creating a portrait both documentary and empathetic: “The recognition of this world is not the invention of it. I wanted to present an account of the girl show that portrayed what I saw and revealed how the people involved felt about what they were doing.” Meiselas also taped candid interviews with the dancers, their boyfriends, the show managers and paying customers, which form a crucial part of the book.
Meiselas’ frank description of these women brought a hidden world to public attention, and explored the complex role the carnival played in their lives: mobility, money and liberation, but also undeniable objectification and exploitation. Produced during the early years of the women’s movement, Carnival Strippers reflects the struggle for identity and self-esteem that characterised a complex era of change.
Text from the Booktopia website [Online] Cited 22/04/2022
Claudia Andujar, Amazônia, 1978
Since the early 1970s, Claudia Andujar has been committed to the cause of the Yanomami Indians living in the heart of the Amazon rainforest and is the author of the most important photographic work dedicated to them to date. A founding member of the Brazilian NGO Comissão Pró Yanomami (CCPY), the photographer has played a fundamental role in the recognition of their territory by the Brazilian government. …
Claudia Andujar first met the Yanomami in 1971 while working on an article about the Amazon for Realidade magazine. Fascinated by the culture of this isolated community, she decided to embark on an in-depth photographic essay on their daily life after receiving a Guggenheim fellowship to support the project. From the very beginning, her approach differed greatly from the straightforward documentary style of her contemporaries. The photographs she made during this period show how she experimented with a variety of photographic techniques in an attempt to visually translate the shamanic culture of the Yanomami. Applying Vaseline to the lens of her camera, using flash devices, oil lamps and infrared film, she created visual distortions, streaks of light and saturated colors, thus imbuing her images with a feeling of the otherworldly.
Cover image of Eye to Eye: Portraits of Lesbians (1979). Photographs by JEB (Joan E. Biren)
In 1979, JEB (Joan E. Biren) self-published her first book, Eye to Eye: Portraits of Lesbians. Revolutionary at that time, JEB made photographs of lesbians from different ages and backgrounds in their everyday lives-working, playing, raising families, and striving to remake their worlds. The photographs were accompanied by testimonials from the women pictured in the book, as well as writings from icons including Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich and a foreword from Joan Nestle. Eye to Eye signalled a radical new way of seeing – moving lesbian lives from the margins to the centre, and reversing a history of invisibility. More than just a book, it was an affirmation of the existence of lesbians that helped to propel a political movement. Reprinted for the first time in forty years and featuring new essays from photographer Lola Flash and former soccer player Lori Lindsey, Eye to Eye is a faithful reproduction of a work that continues to resonate in the queer community and beyond.
Text from the Amazon website
Jo Spence. Putting Myself In The Picture: A Political, Personal, and Photographic Autobiography. London: Camden Press Ltd, 1986
Photographer Jo Spence challenges the assumptions of conventional photography in this groundbreaking visual autobiography, which traces her journey from self-censorship to self-healing.
Nan Goldin, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, 1986
Cristina García Rodero. España Oculta. 1989
When Spanish photographer Cristina Garcia Rodero went to study art in Italy, in 1973, she fully understood the importance of home. Yet her time abroad formented a deeper interest in was happening in her own country and, as a result, at the age of 23, Garcia Rodero returned to Spain and started a project that she hoped would capture the essence of the myriad Spanish traditions, religious practices and rites that were already fading away. What started as a five-year project ended up lasting 15 years and came to be the book España Oculta (Hidden Spain) published in 1989. At 39 years old, Garcia Rodero had managed to compile a kind of anthropological encyclopedia of her country. The work also captured a key moment in Spain’s history – with Spanish dictator Franco dying in 1975, and the country commencing a period of transition – something that would come to have a huge effect on the way the nation’s cultural traditions and rites were experienced and performed from then on.
Text from the Google Books website
Barbara Kruger: Thinking of You. The MIT Press & The Museum of Contemporary Art, 1999
This is the most comprehensive publication ever produced on the work of American artist Barbara Kruger. Kruger, one of the most influential artists of the last three decades, uses pictures and words through a wide variety of media and sites to raise issues of power, sexuality, and representation. Her works include photographic prints on paper and vinyl, etched metal plates, sculpture, video, installations, billboards, posters, magazine and book covers, T-shirts, shopping bags, postcards, and newspaper op-ed pieces.
This book serves as the catalog for the first major one-person exhibition of Kruger’s work to be mounted in the United States. The book, designed by Lorraine Wild in collaboration with the artist, contains texts by Rosalyn Deutsche, Katherine Dieckmann, Ann Goldstein, Steven Heller, Gary Indiana, Carol Squiers, and Lynne Tillman on subjects associated with Kruger’s work, including photography, graphic design, public space, power, and representation, as well as an extensive exhibition history, bibliography, and checklist of the exhibition. The cover features a new piece by Kruger, entitled Thinking of You, created especially for the catalog.
Text from the Amazon website
Graciela Iturbide. Juchitán de las Mujeres. Mexico: Ediciones Toledo, 1991
In 1979 Graciela Iturbide took a series of photographs of the Zapotec culture, published as Juchitán de la mujeres. This is certainly the best known of all her works. It is the result of ten years of work, numerous trips to the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, and a prolonged experience of living among its inhabitants. None of the subjects of these photographs was captured candidly; all were carefully posed.
Photobook history is a relatively recent area of study, with one of the first “book-on-books” anthologies published in 1999 with the release of Fotografía Pública / Photography in Print 1919-1939, a catalogue associated with an exhibition of the same title at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía. Over the past two decades, a virtual cottage industry of books-on-photobooks has emerged, documenting photographically illustrated books based on geography or around a theme. Photobooks by women are in short supply in most of these anthologies, which is why 10×10 Photobooks launched the How We See: Photobooks by Women touring reading room and associated publication in 2018. Focusing on contemporary photobooks by women from 2000 to 2018, the project was the first step in 10×10 Photobooks’ ongoing interest in reassessing photobook history as it relates to women. Although only twenty-five years old, photobook history has been written primarily by men and has focused on publications authored by men. Very few books by women photographers appear in past photobook anthologies, and those included are already quite well known.
As a nonprofit organisation with a mission to share photobooks globally and encourage their appreciation and understanding, the 10×10 Photobooks team frequently discusses how photobook history was – and continues to be – written from a skewed perspective and that a “new” history needs to emerge. Early in our discussions, we recognised photobook history as needing to be “rewritten,” but this implied we accepted the partial history already in existence, which we did not. Instead, we concluded that photobook history needs to be “unwritten,” as the existing history is riddled with omissions. What is left out is not by mistake – it indicates bias and incomplete research by the current gatekeepers. To present a more inclusive and diverse vision, we must collectively address these omissions.
What They Saw: Historical Photobooks by Women, 1843-1999, a touring reading room accompanied by a publication and series of public programs, is a means to ignite interest in some of the underexposed and undocumented photobooks by women made between 1843 and 1999 and to begin a process of filling in the gaps. We say “some photobooks” because we are keenly aware that much work is still required, and we have only opened the door a crack. In several cases, particularly for books done before 1900 in regions other than North America and Europe or by women of colour, we heard about an artist who may have produced a photographically illustrated book or album, but we were unable to find any further documentation other than a brief mention before the trail went cold. Other impediments emerged among the cohort of women who collaborated with their husbands. Many of their collaborative books are credited only with their husbands’ names, and their contributions, if mentioned at all, are included as footnotes. In some cases, women authors marked their works with a gender-neutral signature that used only their studio name or first initial and last name. In addition, our initial research was impeded by the standard definition of a photobook: a bound volume with photographic illustrations published by the author, an independent publisher, or a trade publisher.
We found that we had to widen the frame to include individual albums, slim exhibition pamphlets, scrapbooks, maquettes, zines, and artists’ books in order to be more inclusive. This wider frame necessitated redefining a photobook author to incorporate those who may not call themselves a photographer or artist but who nonetheless assembled a “book” composed of photographs taken by themselves or others. Funding was another limitation. Many women photographers who actively exhibited their work either lacked the personal resources to produce a book or could not find anyone willing to underwrite such a venture.
This iteration of the What They Saw reading room includes 60 books of the more than 250 volumes highlighted in the associated publication. Most of these publications are kept in the collection of the Museo Reina Sofía’s Library and Documentation Centre. They are presented chronologically and show examples of books from around the globe. We begin with Anna Atkins, a British botanist, who was the first person ever to print and distribute a photobook. Her simple desire to share images of her algae specimens ushered in a new art form that presents photography in the book format. In the following years, women such as Isabel Agnes Cowper, the Official Museum Photographer at the South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria and Albert Museum), used photography to document museum objects, subsequently reproduced in numerous books. Until recently, her name was forgotten, as none of the South Kensington Museum publications credit her as the photographer.
In the early twentieth-century, women authors of photobooks gained some visibility. Fine-art photographer Germaine Krull published numerous books that approached photography from a creative and inventive perspective. Margaret Bourke-White emerged as a well-regarded photojournalist who traveled worldwide photographing for Fortune and Life magazines and producing countless books. In the 1930s, in Russia, Varvara Stepanova collaborated with her husband, Aleksandr Rodchenko, to create books filled with experimental photomontages. As the century progressed, women in other parts of the world also found their voices in photobooks. African American anthropologist Eslanda Cardozo Goode Robeson traveled to Uganda and South Africa and published African Journey in 1945, one of the earliest books written on Africa by a female scholar of color. In Mexico in 1951, Lola Álvarez Bravo contributed photographs to Acapulco en el sueño, a bold publication created to attract tourism to Acapulco. A few years later, Fina Gómez Revenga, a Venezuelan photographer, worked in Paris with the famed French printing house Draeger Frères to illustrate the poems of Surrealist poet Lise Deharme.
With the arrival of the 1960s, women emerged from the sidelines and began to produce widely distributed, often socially focused, photobooks. A New York City street photographer, Helen Levitt, published A Way of Seeing in 1965, while Carla Cerati collaborated on Morire di classe in 1969, a visually compelling commentary on the appalling conditions in Italian psychiatric hospitals. With the women’s movement finding its full voice in the 1970s, women photographers took center stage in the last three decades of the twentieth-century, releasing a steady flow of photobooks. A year after her death in 1971, Aperture published Diane Arbus’s monograph, a photobook that continues to influence generations of photographers. Barbara Brändli, a Swiss immigrant to Venezuela, documents the energy and rapid transformations of Caracas, while activist-photographer JEB (Joan E. Biren) toured the United States, capturing lesbian pride events. In South Africa, Lesley Lawson, a member of the Afrapix photo agency, combined interviews and her photographs to reveal the working conditions of Black women in Johannesburg. Cameroonian Angèle Etoundi Essamba shares the beauty and spirit of Black women in Passion (1989), while American Donna Ferrato unflinchingly explores domestic violence in Living with the Enemy (1991), and Nan Goldin exposes violent love and loss in her personal narrative, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1986). In books centered on cultural explorations, Wang Hsin photographs the fading traditions of Lanyu (Orchid Island) off the coast of Taiwan, Cristina García Rodero records religious festivals and rituals in her native Spain, and Ketaki Sheth documents twins and triplets in the Indian Gujarati community.
In reaching out to the far corners of the world, we uncovered numerous forgotten books, but many remain undiscovered. For example, we learned about a nineteenth-century woman in Iran who kept her husband’s diary and most probably added her photographs to the volume, but no visual documentation of this diary could be found. We also discovered several books that featured the participation of women in collaboration with male photographers where the women’s contributions were ambiguous. There were several “leads” of this nature, and we decided that leaving them out would be a missed opportunity. Therefore, in the associated anthology, we have included a “timeline” that presents several historically significant publishing, magazine, small press, photography, and feminist events that may or may not have produced a photobook, but have undoubtedly influenced its history. To support further exploration of these unresolved “leads,” 10×10 Photobooks has launched a research grant program to encourage scholarship on underexplored topics in photobook history.
From its inception, What They Saw has sought to include a diverse group of photographically illustrated publications by women. For photobook history to become more inclusive, it requires everyone (men, women, nonbinary, white, Black, Asian, African, Latinx, Indigenous, Western, Eastern, etc.) to contribute. We see this reading room of women’s role in the production, dissemination, and authoring of photobooks as a necessary step in the unwriting of the current photobook history and a rewriting of a photobook history that is more equitable and inclusive. We invite future researchers to take the next steps to explore further women and other marginalised people’s historical impact in the realm of photobooks and to expand upon the books we present in this reading room and its associated anthology.
Text from the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía
Installation views of the exhibition What They Saw: Historical Photobooks by Women, 1843-1999 at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía Sabatini Building Santa Isabel, 52 Nouvel Building Ronda de Atocha (with plaza del Emperador Carlos V) 28012 Madrid Phone: (34) 91 774 10 00
![David Goldblatt (South African, 1930-2018) 'The son of an ostrich farmer waits with a labourer for the day's work to begin, near Oudtshoorn, Cape Province (Western Cape)' [El hijo de un criador de avestruces espera junto a un jornalero a que comience la jornada de trabajo, cerca de Oudtshoorn, Provincia del Cabo Occidental] 1966](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/01.jpg "David Goldblatt (South African, 1930-2018) 'The son of an ostrich farmer waits with a labourer for the day's work to begin, near Oudtshoorn, Cape Province (Western Cape)' [El hijo de un criador de avestruces espera junto a un jornalero a que comience la jornada de trabajo, cerca de Oudtshoorn, Provincia del Cabo Occidental] 1966")
![David Goldblatt (South African, 1930-2018) 'Gang on surface work, Rustenberg Platinum Mine, Rustenburg, North-West Province' [Cuadrilla en trabajos de superficie, mina de platino de Rustenberg, Provincia del Noroeste] 1971](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/02.jpg "David Goldblatt (South African, 1930-2018) 'Gang on surface work, Rustenberg Platinum Mine, Rustenburg, North-West Province' [Cuadrilla en trabajos de superficie, mina de platino de Rustenberg, Provincia del Noroeste] 1971")
![David Goldblatt (South African, 1930-2018) 'In the office of the funeral parlour, Orlando West, Soweto' [En la oficina de la funeraria, Orlando West, Soweto] 1972](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/03.jpg "David Goldblatt (South African, 1930-2018) 'In the office of the funeral parlour, Orlando West, Soweto' [En la oficina de la funeraria, Orlando West, Soweto] 1972")
![David Goldblatt (South African, 1930-2018) 'Lulu Gebashe and Solomon Mlutshana, who both worked in a record shop in the city, Mofolo Park' [Lulu Gebashe y Solomon Mlutshana, que trabajaban en una tienda de discos de la ciudad, Mofolo Park] 1972](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/04.jpg "David Goldblatt (South African, 1930-2018) 'Lulu Gebashe and Solomon Mlutshana, who both worked in a record shop in the city, Mofolo Park' [Lulu Gebashe y Solomon Mlutshana, que trabajaban en una tienda de discos de la ciudad, Mofolo Park] 1972")
![David Goldblatt (South African, 1930-2018) 'Miriam Diale, 5357 Orlando East, Soweto, 18 October 1972' [Miriam Diale, Orlando East n.º 5357, Soweto, 18 de octubre de 1972] 1972](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/05.jpg "David Goldblatt (South African, 1930-2018) 'Miriam Diale, 5357 Orlando East, Soweto, 18 October 1972' [Miriam Diale, Orlando East n.º 5357, Soweto, 18 de octubre de 1972] 1972")
![David Goldblatt (South African, 1930-2018) ;Sylvia Gibbert in her apartment, Melrose, Johannesburg; [Sylvia Gibbert en su apartamento, Melrose, Johannesburgo] 1974](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/06.jpg "David Goldblatt (South African, 1930-2018) ;Sylvia Gibbert in her apartment, Melrose, Johannesburg; [Sylvia Gibbert en su apartamento, Melrose, Johannesburgo] 1974")
![David Goldblatt (South African, 1930-2018) 'Ozzie Docrat with his daughter Nassima in his shop before its destruction under the Group Areas Act, Fietas, Johannesburg' [Ozzie Docrat con su hija Nassima en su tienda antes de ser destruida en virtud de la Ley de Agrupación por Áreas, Fietas, Johannesburgo] 1977](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/07.jpg "David Goldblatt (South African, 1930-2018) 'Ozzie Docrat with his daughter Nassima in his shop before its destruction under the Group Areas Act, Fietas, Johannesburg' [Ozzie Docrat con su hija Nassima en su tienda antes de ser destruida en virtud de la Ley de Agrupación por Áreas, Fietas, Johannesburgo] 1977")
![David Goldblatt (South African, 1930-2018) 'Sunday morning: A not-White family living illegally in the "White" group area of Hillbrow, Johannesburg' [Domingo por la mañana: una familia no blanca viviendo ilegalmente en la zona "blanca" de Hillbrow, Johannesburgo] 1978](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/08.jpg "David Goldblatt (South African, 1930-2018) 'Sunday morning: A not-White family living illegally in the \"White\" group area of Hillbrow, Johannesburg' [Domingo por la mañana: una familia no blanca viviendo ilegalmente en la zona \"blanca\" de Hillbrow, Johannesburgo] 1978")
![David Goldblatt (South African, 1930-2018) 'Saturday morning at the hypermarket: Semifinal of the Miss Lovely Legs Competition, 28 June 1980' [Sábado por la mañana en el hipermercado: semifinal del concurso Miss Piernas Bonitas, 28 de junio de 1980] 1980](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/09.jpg "David Goldblatt (South African, 1930-2018) 'Saturday morning at the hypermarket: Semifinal of the Miss Lovely Legs Competition, 28 June 1980' [Sábado por la mañana en el hipermercado: semifinal del concurso Miss Piernas Bonitas, 28 de junio de 1980] 1980")
![David Goldblatt (South African, 1930-2018) 'Apostolic Faith Mission (AGS), Birchleigh, Kempton Park, 28 December 1983' [Misión de la Fe Apostólica (AGS, en afrikáans), Birchleigh, Kempton Park, 28 de diciembre de 1983] 1983](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/10.jpg "David Goldblatt (South African, 1930-2018) 'Apostolic Faith Mission (AGS), Birchleigh, Kempton Park, 28 December 1983' [Misión de la Fe Apostólica (AGS, en afrikáans), Birchleigh, Kempton Park, 28 de diciembre de 1983] 1983")
![David Goldblatt (South African, 1930-2018) 'Thirteen kilometres of this coastline were a White Group Area, Bloubergstrand, Cape Town, 9 January 1986' [Trece kilómetros de esta costa eran una zona reservada para blancos, Bloubergstrand, Ciudad del Cabo, 9 de enero de 1986] 1986](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/11.jpg "David Goldblatt (South African, 1930-2018) 'Thirteen kilometres of this coastline were a White Group Area, Bloubergstrand, Cape Town, 9 January 1986' [Trece kilómetros de esta costa eran una zona reservada para blancos, Bloubergstrand, Ciudad del Cabo, 9 de enero de 1986] 1986")
![David Goldblatt (South African, 1930-2018) 'Swerwers, nomadic sheep shearers and farmworkers descended from the San hunter-gatherers and Khoi pastoralists. Without work for four months they lived in the gang, the corridor between farms, fences and roads, hunting, fishing when they could, and eating roadkill, near Nuwe Rooiberg, Northern Cape, 18 September 2002' [Swerwers, esquiladores de ovejas y trabajadores agrícolas nómadas, descendientes de los cazadores-recolectores san y de los pastores khoi. Sin trabajo durante cuatro meses, vivían en el paso, el corredor que hay entre las vallas de las granjas y las carreteras, cazando, pescando cuando podían y comiendo animales atropellados, cerca de Nuwe Rooiberg, Cabo Septentrional, 18 de septiembre de 2002] 2002, printed 2005](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/12.jpg "David Goldblatt (South African, 1930-2018) 'Swerwers, nomadic sheep shearers and farmworkers descended from the San hunter-gatherers and Khoi pastoralists. Without work for four months they lived in the gang, the corridor between farms, fences and roads, hunting, fishing when they could, and eating roadkill, near Nuwe Rooiberg, Northern Cape, 18 September 2002' [Swerwers, esquiladores de ovejas y trabajadores agrícolas nómadas, descendientes de los cazadores-recolectores san y de los pastores khoi. Sin trabajo durante cuatro meses, vivían en el paso, el corredor que hay entre las vallas de las granjas y las carreteras, cazando, pescando cuando podían y comiendo animales atropellados, cerca de Nuwe Rooiberg, Cabo Septentrional, 18 de septiembre de 2002] 2002, printed 2005")
![David Goldblatt (South African, 1930-2018) 'Incomplete houses, part of a stalled municipal development of 1,000 houses. The funding allocation was made in 1998, building started in 2003. Officials and a politician gave various reasons for the stalling of the scheme: Shortage of water, theft of materials, problems with sewage disposal, problems caused by the high clay content of the soil, and shortage of funds. By August 2006, 420 houses had been completed, Lady Grey, Eastern Cape, 5 August 2006' [Casas sin terminar, parte de una promoción municipal de 1.000 viviendas paralizada. La financiación se consignó en 1998 y la construcción empezó en 2003. Los funcionarios y un político dieron varias razones para la paralización del proyecto: escasez de agua, robo de materiales, problemas con la evacuación de aguas residuales, problemas causados por el alto contenido de arcilla del suelo y escasez de fondos. En agosto de 2006 se habían terminado 420 viviendas, Lady Grey, Cabo Oriental, 5 de agosto de 2006] 2006](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/13.jpg "David Goldblatt (South African, 1930-2018) 'Incomplete houses, part of a stalled municipal development of 1,000 houses. The funding allocation was made in 1998, building started in 2003. Officials and a politician gave various reasons for the stalling of the scheme: Shortage of water, theft of materials, problems with sewage disposal, problems caused by the high clay content of the soil, and shortage of funds. By August 2006, 420 houses had been completed, Lady Grey, Eastern Cape, 5 August 2006' [Casas sin terminar, parte de una promoción municipal de 1.000 viviendas paralizada. La financiación se consignó en 1998 y la construcción empezó en 2003. Los funcionarios y un político dieron varias razones para la paralización del proyecto: escasez de agua, robo de materiales, problemas con la evacuación de aguas residuales, problemas causados por el alto contenido de arcilla del suelo y escasez de fondos. En agosto de 2006 se habían terminado 420 viviendas, Lady Grey, Cabo Oriental, 5 de agosto de 2006] 2006")
![David Goldblatt (South African, 1930-2018) 'The dethroning of Cecil John Rhodes, after the throwing of human feces on the statue and the agreement of the university to the demands of students for its removal, the University of Cape Town, 9 April 2015' [El derrocamiento de Cecil John Rhodes después de arrojar heces humanas contra la estatua y de que la universidad accediera a las demandas de los estudiantes para su retirada, Universidad de Ciudad del Cabo, 9 de abril de 2015] 2015](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/14.jpg "David Goldblatt (South African, 1930-2018) 'The dethroning of Cecil John Rhodes, after the throwing of human feces on the statue and the agreement of the university to the demands of students for its removal, the University of Cape Town, 9 April 2015' [El derrocamiento de Cecil John Rhodes después de arrojar heces humanas contra la estatua y de que la universidad accediera a las demandas de los estudiantes para su retirada, Universidad de Ciudad del Cabo, 9 de abril de 2015] 2015")
![Mark Anthony (Marc Antoine Gaudin) (French, 1804-1880)(attributed) '[Staged scene featuring five women, their fingers pointing upwards]' England c. 1855-1865](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/mark-anthony-staged-scene.jpg "Mark Anthony (Marc Antoine Gaudin) (French, 1804-1880)(attributed) '[Staged scene featuring five women, their fingers pointing upwards]' England c. 1855-1865")
![Freeman Brothers, Sydney (Australian) '[Portrait of two girls in fancy dress]' c. 1855-1865](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/hp2012.23.5-web.jpg "Freeman Brothers, Sydney (Australian) '[Portrait of two girls in fancy dress]' c. 1855-1865")
![G.H. Nicholas, Sydney (Australian) '[Portrait of a child holding a stereoscope]' c. 1870](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/hp82.17.1-web.jpg "G.H. Nicholas, Sydney (Australian) '[Portrait of a child holding a stereoscope]' c. 1870")
![Lorna Studios, Glebe (Australian) '[Sunlight Soap Girl]' 1905-1915](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/hp2023.8.1-web.jpg "Lorna Studios, Glebe (Australian) '[Sunlight Soap Girl]' 1905-1915")
![George Henry Hawkins, Sydney (Australian) '[Four children in fancy dress featuring the products, Jelline and Silver Drop Flour]' 1910-1930](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/hp88.21.165-web.jpg "George Henry Hawkins, Sydney (Australian) '[Four children in fancy dress featuring the products, Jelline and Silver Drop Flour]' 1910-1930")
![George Henry Hawkins, Sydney (Australian) '[Lily dressed in costume as 'Victoria']' 1910-1930](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/hp88.21.767-web.jpg "George Henry Hawkins, Sydney (Australian) '[Lily dressed in costume as 'Victoria']' 1910-1930")
![J.G. Park, Leichhardt (Australian) '[Portrait of a young Jean Cunningham and Master Hurlstone in English court costumes]' c. 1914-1920s](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/hp80.49.319-web.jpg "J.G. Park, Leichhardt (Australian) '[Portrait of a young Jean Cunningham and Master Hurlstone in English court costumes]' c. 1914-1920s")
![J.G. Park, Leichhardt (Australian) '[Portrait of Miss Orr in fancy dress as Britannia]' c. 1914-1920s](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/hp80.49.696-web.jpg "J.G. Park, Leichhardt (Australian) '[Portrait of Miss Orr in fancy dress as Britannia]' c. 1914-1920s")
![J.G. Park, Leichhardt (Australian) '[Portrait of Miss Larsen wearing a Silver Star Starch costume]' c. 1914-1920s](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/hp80.49.965-web.jpg "J.G. Park, Leichhardt (Australian) '[Portrait of Miss Larsen wearing a Silver Star Starch costume]' c. 1914-1920s")
![Oliver Emery, Sydney (Australian) '[Three boys posed outside against a makeshift backdrop]' c. 1914-1930](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/hp83.43.26-web.jpg "Oliver Emery, Sydney (Australian) '[Three boys posed outside against a makeshift backdrop]' c. 1914-1930")
![Hippolyte Bayard (French, 1801-1887) William Henry Fox Talbot (English, 1800-1877) Samuel Buckle (British, 1808-1860) Nicolaas Henneman (British, 1813-1893) Reverend Calvert Jones (British, 1804-1877) David Kinnebrook (English, 1819-1865) M.H. Nevil Story-Maskelyne (British, 1823-1911) Unknown maker. 'Cover of Dessins photographiques sur Papier. Recueil No. 2. [The "Bayard Album"]' 1839-1855](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/the-bayard-album-cover.jpg "Hippolyte Bayard (French, 1801-1887) William Henry Fox Talbot (English, 1800-1877) Samuel Buckle (British, 1808-1860) Nicolaas Henneman (British, 1813-1893) Reverend Calvert Jones (British, 1804-1877) David Kinnebrook (English, 1819-1865) M.H. Nevil Story-Maskelyne (British, 1823-1911) Unknown maker. 'Cover of Dessins photographiques sur Papier. Recueil No. 2. [The \"Bayard Album\"]' 1839-1855")
![Hippolyte Bayard (French, 1801-1887) William Henry Fox Talbot (English, 1800-1877) Samuel Buckle (British, 1808-1860) Nicolaas Henneman (British, 1813-1893) Reverend Calvert Jones (British, 1804-1877) David Kinnebrook (English, 1819-1865) M.H. Nevil Story-Maskelyne (British, 1823-1911) Unknown maker. 'Title page of Dessins photographiques sur Papier. Recueil No. 2. [The "Bayard Album"] with Hippolyte Bayard 's [Self-Portrait in the Garden] June 1845' 1839-1855](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/title-page-of-the-bayard-album-with-bayards-self-portrait-in-the-garden.jpg "Hippolyte Bayard (French, 1801-1887) William Henry Fox Talbot (English, 1800-1877) Samuel Buckle (British, 1808-1860) Nicolaas Henneman (British, 1813-1893) Reverend Calvert Jones (British, 1804-1877) David Kinnebrook (English, 1819-1865) M.H. Nevil Story-Maskelyne (British, 1823-1911) Unknown maker. 'Title page of Dessins photographiques sur Papier. Recueil No. 2. [The \"Bayard Album\"] with Hippolyte Bayard 's [Self-Portrait in the Garden] June 1845' 1839-1855")
![Hippolyte Bayard (French, 1801-1887) William Henry Fox Talbot (English, 1800-1877) Samuel Buckle (British, 1808-1860) Nicolaas Henneman (British, 1813-1893) Reverend Calvert Jones (British, 1804-1877) David Kinnebrook (English, 1819-1865) M.H. Nevil Story-Maskelyne (British, 1823-1911) Unknown maker. 'Dessins photographiques sur Papier. Recueil No. 2. [The "Bayard Album"]' 1839-1855 showing at top left Hippolyte Bayard's '[Three Feathers]' about 1842-1843](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/bayard-album-a.jpg "Hippolyte Bayard (French, 1801-1887) William Henry Fox Talbot (English, 1800-1877) Samuel Buckle (British, 1808-1860) Nicolaas Henneman (British, 1813-1893) Reverend Calvert Jones (British, 1804-1877) David Kinnebrook (English, 1819-1865) M.H. Nevil Story-Maskelyne (British, 1823-1911) Unknown maker. 'Dessins photographiques sur Papier. Recueil No. 2. [The \"Bayard Album\"]' 1839-1855 showing at top left Hippolyte Bayard's '[Three Feathers]' about 1842-1843")
![Hippolyte Bayard (French, 1801-1887) '[Three Feathers]' About 1842-1843 from the exhibition Exhibition: 'Hippolyte Bayard: A Persistent Pioneer' at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, April - July, 2024](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/gm_10846601_web.jpg "Hippolyte Bayard (French, 1801-1887) '[Three Feathers]' About 1842-1843 from the exhibition Exhibition: 'Hippolyte Bayard: A Persistent Pioneer' at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, April - July, 2024")
![Hippolyte Bayard (French, 1801-1887) William Henry Fox Talbot (English, 1800-1877) Samuel Buckle (British, 1808-1860) Nicolaas Henneman (British, 1813-1893) Reverend Calvert Jones (British, 1804-1877) David Kinnebrook (English, 1819-1865) M.H. Nevil Story-Maskelyne (British, 1823-1911) Unknown maker. 'Dessins photographiques sur Papier. Recueil No. 2. [The "Bayard Album"]' 1839-1855 showing at top right, Hippolyte Bayard's 'Arrangement of Flowers' about 1839-1843](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/bayard-album-b.jpg "Hippolyte Bayard (French, 1801-1887) William Henry Fox Talbot (English, 1800-1877) Samuel Buckle (British, 1808-1860) Nicolaas Henneman (British, 1813-1893) Reverend Calvert Jones (British, 1804-1877) David Kinnebrook (English, 1819-1865) M.H. Nevil Story-Maskelyne (British, 1823-1911) Unknown maker. 'Dessins photographiques sur Papier. Recueil No. 2. [The \"Bayard Album\"]' 1839-1855 showing at top right, Hippolyte Bayard's 'Arrangement of Flowers' about 1839-1843")
![Hippolyte Bayard (French, 1801-1887) William Henry Fox Talbot (English, 1800-1877) Samuel Buckle (British, 1808-1860) Nicolaas Henneman (British, 1813-1893) Reverend Calvert Jones (British, 1804-1877) David Kinnebrook (English, 1819-1865) M.H. Nevil Story-Maskelyne (British, 1823-1911) Unknown maker. 'Dessins photographiques sur Papier. Recueil No. 2. [The "Bayard Album"] showing at bottom right, Hippolyte Bayard's [Portrait of a Man] 1843-1845' 1839-1855](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/bayard-album-d.jpg "Hippolyte Bayard (French, 1801-1887) William Henry Fox Talbot (English, 1800-1877) Samuel Buckle (British, 1808-1860) Nicolaas Henneman (British, 1813-1893) Reverend Calvert Jones (British, 1804-1877) David Kinnebrook (English, 1819-1865) M.H. Nevil Story-Maskelyne (British, 1823-1911) Unknown maker. 'Dessins photographiques sur Papier. Recueil No. 2. [The \"Bayard Album\"] showing at bottom right, Hippolyte Bayard's [Portrait of a Man] 1843-1845' 1839-1855")
![Hippolyte Bayard (French, 1801-1887) '[Portrait of a Man]' 1843-1845](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/bayard-portrait-of-a-man.jpg "Hippolyte Bayard (French, 1801-1887) '[Portrait of a Man]' 1843-1845")
![Hippolyte Bayard (French, 1801-1887) '[In Bayard's Studio]' About 1845](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/bayard-in-bayards-studio.jpg "Hippolyte Bayard (French, 1801-1887) '[In Bayard's Studio]' About 1845")
![Hippolyte Bayard (French, 1801-1887) William Henry Fox Talbot (English, 1800-1877) Samuel Buckle (British, 1808-1860) Nicolaas Henneman (British, 1813-1893) Reverend Calvert Jones (British, 1804-1877) David Kinnebrook (English, 1819-1865) M.H. Nevil Story-Maskelyne (British, 1823-1911) Unknown maker. 'Dessins photographiques sur Papier. Recueil No. 2. [The "Bayard Album"] showing at bottom right, Hippolyte Bayard's [Galerie de la Madeleine with Scaffolding, Place de la Madeleine] 1843' 1839-1855](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/bayard-album-e.jpg "Hippolyte Bayard (French, 1801-1887) William Henry Fox Talbot (English, 1800-1877) Samuel Buckle (British, 1808-1860) Nicolaas Henneman (British, 1813-1893) Reverend Calvert Jones (British, 1804-1877) David Kinnebrook (English, 1819-1865) M.H. Nevil Story-Maskelyne (British, 1823-1911) Unknown maker. 'Dessins photographiques sur Papier. Recueil No. 2. [The \"Bayard Album\"] showing at bottom right, Hippolyte Bayard's [Galerie de la Madeleine with Scaffolding, Place de la Madeleine] 1843' 1839-1855")
![Hippolyte Bayard (French, 1801-1887) '[Galerie de la Madeleine with Scaffolding, Place de la Madeleine]' 1843](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/bayard-galerie-de-la-madeleine-with-scaffolding.jpg "Hippolyte Bayard (French, 1801-1887) '[Galerie de la Madeleine with Scaffolding, Place de la Madeleine]' 1843")
![Hippolyte Bayard (French, 1801-1887) William Henry Fox Talbot (English, 1800-1877) Samuel Buckle (British, 1808-1860) Nicolaas Henneman (British, 1813-1893) Reverend Calvert Jones (British, 1804-1877) David Kinnebrook (English, 1819-1865) M.H. Nevil Story-Maskelyne (British, 1823-1911) Unknown maker. 'Dessins photographiques sur Papier. Recueil No. 2. [The "Bayard Album"] showing at top right, Hippolyte Bayard's [Rue des Batignolles] about 1845' 1839-1855](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/bayard-album-f.jpg "Hippolyte Bayard (French, 1801-1887) William Henry Fox Talbot (English, 1800-1877) Samuel Buckle (British, 1808-1860) Nicolaas Henneman (British, 1813-1893) Reverend Calvert Jones (British, 1804-1877) David Kinnebrook (English, 1819-1865) M.H. Nevil Story-Maskelyne (British, 1823-1911) Unknown maker. 'Dessins photographiques sur Papier. Recueil No. 2. [The \"Bayard Album\"] showing at top right, Hippolyte Bayard's [Rue des Batignolles] about 1845' 1839-1855")
![Hippolyte Bayard (French, 1801-1887) '[Rue des Batignolles]' about 1845](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/gm_04476001_web.jpg "Hippolyte Bayard (French, 1801-1887) '[Rue des Batignolles]' about 1845")
![Hippolyte Bayard (French, 1801-1887) '[Bitch in profile]' about 1865](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/gm_09531001_web.jpg "Hippolyte Bayard (French, 1801-1887) '[Bitch in profile]' about 1865")
![Hippolyte Bayard (French, 1801-1887) '[Unidentified woman standing, leaning against a credenza]' about 1861](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/gm_09860801_web.jpg "Hippolyte Bayard (French, 1801-1887) '[Unidentified woman standing, leaning against a credenza]' about 1861")
![Hippolyte Bayard (French, 1801-1887) William Henry Fox Talbot (English, 1800-1877) Samuel Buckle (British, 1808-1860) Nicolaas Henneman (British, 1813-1893) Reverend Calvert Jones (British, 1804-1877) David Kinnebrook (English, 1819-1865) M.H. Nevil Story-Maskelyne (British, 1823-1911) Unknown maker. 'Dessins photographiques sur Papier. Recueil No. 2. [The "Bayard Album"]' 1839-1855](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/bayard-album-c.jpg "Hippolyte Bayard (French, 1801-1887) William Henry Fox Talbot (English, 1800-1877) Samuel Buckle (British, 1808-1860) Nicolaas Henneman (British, 1813-1893) Reverend Calvert Jones (British, 1804-1877) David Kinnebrook (English, 1819-1865) M.H. Nevil Story-Maskelyne (British, 1823-1911) Unknown maker. 'Dessins photographiques sur Papier. Recueil No. 2. [The \"Bayard Album\"]' 1839-1855")
![Hippolyte Bayard (French, 1801-1887) '[Two Men and a Girl in a Garden]' About 1847](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/bayard-two-men-and-a-girl-in-a-garden.jpg "Hippolyte Bayard (French, 1801-1887) '[Two Men and a Girl in a Garden]' About 1847")
![Hippolyte Bayard (French, 1801-1887) '[Self-Portrait in the Garden]' 1847](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/bayard-self-portrait-in-the-garden1.jpg "Hippolyte Bayard (French, 1801-1887) '[Self-Portrait in the Garden]' 1847")
![Hippolyte Bayard (French, 1801-1887) '[Self-Portrait in the Garden]' June 1845](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/bayard-self-portrait-in-the-garden-june-1845.jpg "Hippolyte Bayard (French, 1801-1887) '[Self-Portrait in the Garden]' June 1845")
![Hippolyte Bayard (French, 1801-1887) '[Self-Portrait in the Garden]' About 1845-1849](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/bayard-self-portrait-in-the-garden.jpg "Hippolyte Bayard (French, 1801-1887) '[Self-Portrait in the Garden]' About 1845-1849")
![William Henry Fox Talbot (English, 1800-1877) '[A Stem of Delicate Leaves of an Umbrellifer]' probably 1843-1846](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/talbot-a-stem-of-delicate-leaves-of-an-umbrellifer.jpg "William Henry Fox Talbot (English, 1800-1877) '[A Stem of Delicate Leaves of an Umbrellifer]' probably 1843-1846")
![At left, Herbert Bell et al, '[Amateur World Tour Album, taken with early Kodak cameras, plus purchased travel photographs by various photographers]' (2 page spread); and at right, Stephanie Syjuco (American born Philippines, b. 1974) 'Herbaria' 2021 (detail)](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/bell-and-syjuco-herbaria.jpg "At left, Herbert Bell et al, '[Amateur World Tour Album, taken with early Kodak cameras, plus purchased travel photographs by various photographers]' (2 page spread); and at right, Stephanie Syjuco (American born Philippines, b. 1974) 'Herbaria' 2021 (detail)")
![Herbert Bell (English, 1856-1946) Frederick Nutt Broderick (English, about 1854-1913) Gustave Hermans (Belgian, 1856-1934) Anthony Horner (English, 1853-1923) Michael Horner (English, 1843-1869) C. W. J. Johnson (American, 1833-1903) Léon & Lévy (French, active 1864-1913 or 1920) Léopold Louis Mercier (French, b. 1866) Neurdein Frères (French, founded 1860s, dissolved 1918) Louis Parnard (French, 1840-1893) Alfred Pettitt (English, 1820-1880) Francis Godolphin Osborne Stuart (British born Scotland, 1843-1923) Unknown maker Valentine & Sons (Scottish, founded 1851, dissolved 1910) L. P. Vallée (Canadian, 1837-1905) York and Son J. Kühn (French, active Paris, France 1885 - early 20th century) '[Amateur World Tour Album, taken with early Kodak cameras, plus purchased travel photographs by various photographers]' (2 page spread)](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/amateur-world-tour-album.jpg "Herbert Bell (English, 1856-1946) Frederick Nutt Broderick (English, about 1854-1913) Gustave Hermans (Belgian, 1856-1934) Anthony Horner (English, 1853-1923) Michael Horner (English, 1843-1869) C. W. J. Johnson (American, 1833-1903) Léon & Lévy (French, active 1864-1913 or 1920) Léopold Louis Mercier (French, b. 1866) Neurdein Frères (French, founded 1860s, dissolved 1918) Louis Parnard (French, 1840-1893) Alfred Pettitt (English, 1820-1880) Francis Godolphin Osborne Stuart (British born Scotland, 1843-1923) Unknown maker Valentine & Sons (Scottish, founded 1851, dissolved 1910) L. P. Vallée (Canadian, 1837-1905) York and Son J. Kühn (French, active Paris, France 1885 - early 20th century) '[Amateur World Tour Album, taken with early Kodak cameras, plus purchased travel photographs by various photographers]' (2 page spread)")
![At left, William H. Mumler (American, 1832-1884) 'Mrs. Swan' 1869-1878; and at right, Khadija Saye (Gambian-British, b. 1992) 'Nak Bejjen' [Cow's Horn] 2017-2018](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/mumler-mrs.-swan-and-saye-nak-bejjen.jpg "At left, William H. Mumler (American, 1832-1884) 'Mrs. Swan' 1869-1878; and at right, Khadija Saye (Gambian-British, b. 1992) 'Nak Bejjen' [Cow's Horn] 2017-2018")
![Khadija Saye (Gambian-British, b. 1992) 'Nak Bejjen' [Cow's Horn] 2017-2018](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/saye-nak-bejjen.jpg "Khadija Saye (Gambian-British, b. 1992) 'Nak Bejjen' [Cow's Horn] 2017-2018")
![At left, Unknown maker (American) '[Seated Woman with "Spirit" of a Young Man]' about 1865-1875; and at right, Lieko Shiga (Japanese, b. 1980) 'Talking with Me' 2005 From the series 'Lilly'](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/seated-woman-and-shiga-talking-with-me.jpg "At left, Unknown maker (American) '[Seated Woman with \"Spirit\" of a Young Man]' about 1865-1875; and at right, Lieko Shiga (Japanese, b. 1980) 'Talking with Me' 2005 From the series 'Lilly'")
![Unknown maker (American) '[Seated Woman with "Spirit" of a Young Man]' about 1865-1875](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/seated-woman-with-spirit.jpg "Unknown maker (American) '[Seated Woman with \"Spirit\" of a Young Man]' about 1865-1875")
![A.J. Russell (American, 1830-1902) 'Embankment No. 3 West of Granite Cannon [Wyoming]' April 1868](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/russell-embankment-no.-3-west-of-granite-cannon.jpg "A.J. Russell (American, 1830-1902) 'Embankment No. 3 West of Granite Cannon [Wyoming]' April 1868")
![Leni Riefenstahl 'Schönheit im olympischen Kampf' [Beauty in the Olympic Games] Berlin: Im Deutschen Verlag, (1937)](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/leni-riefenstahl-schonheit-im-olympischen-kampf.jpg "Leni Riefenstahl 'Schönheit im olympischen Kampf' [Beauty in the Olympic Games] Berlin: Im Deutschen Verlag, (1937)")
!['Leni Riefenstahl Schönheit im olympischen Kampf' [Beauty in the Olympic Games] Berlin: Im Deutschen Verlag, (1937) pp. 220-221](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/leni-riefenstahl-schonheit-im-olympischen-kampf-a.jpg "'Leni Riefenstahl Schönheit im olympischen Kampf' [Beauty in the Olympic Games] Berlin: Im Deutschen Verlag, (1937) pp. 220-221")
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