Exhibition: ‘Photo-Poetics: An Anthology’ at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York

Exhibition dates: 20th November, 2015 – 23rd March, 2016

Curators: Jennifer Blessing, Senior Curator, Photography, with Susan Thompson, Assistant Curator, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

My apologies, I am feeling very poorly at the moment, so just a small comment on this exhibition.

After the trilogy of 19th century photography, now for something completely different… two consecutive postings on contemporary photography.

In this art, the photograph becomes a conceptual “speech” act, where the artists speak with photographs, working with the context of the image – the image as concept, as talk.

It’s not just that the artists make photographic objects, they push what the medium can do. As the press release observes, “Theirs is a sort of “photo poetics,” an art that self-consciously investigates the laws of photography and the nature of photographic representation, reproduction, and the photographic object.” It is art that requires contemplation and meditation on source by Self. I have included several videos and extra text to illuminate aspects of the work in the posting.

I like the intertextuality that the artists employ when pushing the boundaries of photographic practice and representation, particularly Claudia Angelmaier’s series Works on Paper (2008-) and Lisa Oppenheim’s series The Sun is Always Setting Somewhere Else (2006).

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

99 SECONDS OF: PHOTO-POETICS: An Anthology / Guggenheim New York

The exhibition and its accompanying catalogue examine an important new development in contemporary photography, offering an opportunity to define the concerns of a younger generation of artists and contextualise their work within the history of art and visual culture. Drawing on the legacies of Conceptualism, these artists pursue a largely studio-based approach to still-life photography that centres on the representation of objects, often printed matter such as books, magazines, and record covers. The result is an image imbued with poetic and evocative personal significance – a sort of displaced self-portraiture – that resonates with larger cultural and historical meanings. Driven by a profound engagement with the medium of photography, these artists investigate the nature, traditions, and magic of photography at a moment characterised by rapid digital transformation. They attempt to rematerialise the photograph through meticulous printing, using film and other disappearing photo technologies, and creating artist’s books, installations, and photo-sculptures. While they are invested in exploring the processes, supports, and techniques of photography, they are also deeply interested in how photographic images circulate. Theirs is a sort of “photo poetics,” an art that self-consciously investigates the laws of photography and the nature of photographic representation, reproduction, and the photographic object.

Text from the exhibition web page.

Anne Collier (American, b. 1970) 'Crying' 2005 from the exhibition 'Photo-Poetics: An Anthology' at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Nov 2015 - March 2016

Anne Collier (American, b. 1970)
Crying
2005
Chromogenic print
99.1 x 134cm
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
Purchased with funds contributed by Mr. and Mrs. Aaron M. Tighe
© Anne Collier

Collier’s photographs offer a straightforward presentation of found images and printed ephemera, and explore themes of appropriation, iconography, and surrogacy… Though implicitly layered with feminist critiques of mass media, Collier’s images of famous women – especially those of other artists, like Cindy Sherman, for example – can also be interpreted as oblique self-portraits.

Text from the Guggenheim artist’s web page

“Ephemera and mediation are at the quiet center of Collier’s Crying, one of her works in the exhibition. Seen from across the room, “Crying” looks like a photograph overlaid upon a painted surface, or perhaps a portrait integrated within a two-dimensional space. The image, indeed a photo, is divided horizontally; the upper two-thirds are white, the bottom third is black, and on the left-hand side there is a small square close-up of a distraught woman crying. The woman is Ingrid Bergman, and this is the cover of the LP that accompanied her 1943 film For Whom the Bell Tolls. The LP is upright, facing the viewer dead-on, and up close we can see that there are a number of records behind it and that the flat spaces above and below are actually a white wall and black floor. The work is in no way overwhelming; there is nothing bombastic about it. Rather, the thrill of it comes from the reading it requires. Collier deploys her references strategically – this brings to mind abstract painting, Bas Jan Ader’s I’m Too Sad to Tell You, Bergman’s films and unconventional life, and the joy of the collector in the record store. Should that not be enough, it also awakens the empathy centers that begin firing when we see someone cry. Crying is part of a series involving records – others are of The Smiths and Sylvia Plath – but it contains the tensions within all of her work: advertising and fine art, nostalgia and distance, the camera and the eye. Collier has said she is interested in photographing objects that have “had previous lives… been handed and used,” and these rely on a kind of slow intertextuality; the gradual unfolding of meaning and feeling working towards a dizzying remove. It’s disorienting and evocative, a poetics in which the camera is not just the set-up but the punchline, and all the previous lives can be felt lurking beneath the surface.”

Anonymous text from “Woman with Camera: Anne Collier’s Feminist Image Critique,” on the Deutsche Bank ArtMag 88 website Nd [Online] Cited 13/03/2016. No longer available online

Moyra Davey (American, b. 1958) 'Les Goddesses' 2011 from the exhibition 'Photo-Poetics: An Anthology' at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Nov 2015 - March 2016

Moyra Davey (American, b. 1958)
Les Goddesses (still)
2011
HD colour video, with sound, 61 min.
Courtesy the artist and Murray Guy, New York
© Moyra Davey

In the mid-2000s, the moving image took on a renewed prominence in Davey’s work. Inspired by her deep interest in the process of reading and writing, the artist’s essayistic video practice layers personal narrative with detailed explorations of the texts and lives of authors and thinkers she admires, such as Walter Benjamin, Jean Genet, and Mary Wollstonecraft. Davey’s own writing is central to her videos. The transcript of Fifty Minutes (2006), in which the artist reflects on her years in psychoanalysis, was published as a personal essay in the artist book Long Life Cool White: Photographs and Essays by Moyra Davey (2008), and her text “The Wet and the Dry” formed the basis of the narration of Les Goddesses (2011).

Text from the Guggenheim artist’s web page

Erin Shirreff (Canadian, b. 1975) 'UN 2010' 2010

Erin Shirreff (Canadian, b. 1975)
UN 2010 (still)
2010
HD color video, silent, 17 min.
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
Purchased with funds contributed by Erica Gervais
© Erin Shirreff

Erin Shirreff (Canadian, b. 1975)
UN 2010 (excerpt)
2010
HD color video, silent, 17 min.
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
Purchased with funds contributed by Erica Gervais
© Erin Shirreff

Shirreff’s work in photography, video, and sculpture reflects on the distance between an object and its representation, exploring the capacities of photography in conveying a sculptural experience.

Since scale and presence were central concerns of much mid-century abstract sculpture, Shirreff often draws on images of such works as she explores the disjunction between photographs and their subjects. Sculpture Park (Tony Smith) (2006), Shirreff’s first video work, features small cardboard maquettes the artist made of five Tony Smith sculptures. Filmed against a black background, their dark forms become discernible only as “snow” (Styrofoam) slowly accumulates on their surfaces. For subsequent video works, including Ansel Adams, RCA Building, circa 1940 (2009), Roden Crater (2009), and UN 2010 (2010), Shirreff photographed printed pictures of her subjects – often landscapes or iconic modernist buildings – under varying lighting conditions in the studio, inputting the resultant images into video editing software. These videos appear at first to be long, static shots of the subjects pictured, but eventually belie their own artifice as the viewer becomes gradually aware of the texture of the image surface.

Text from the Guggenheim artist’s web page

Lisa Oppenheim (American, b. 1975) 'The Sun is Always Setting Somewhere Else' 2006 (detail)

Lisa Oppenheim (American, b. 1975)
The Sun is Always Setting Somewhere Else (detail)
2006
Slide projection of fifteen 35 mm slides, continuous loop, dimensions variable
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
Purchased with funds contributed by the Photography Committee

Oppenheim’s work explores the interactions between an image, its source, and the context in which it is encountered. The Sun is Always Setting Somewhere Else (2006) originates from photographs of the setting sun taken by U.S. soldiers in Iraq, which Oppenheim found on the image-sharing website Flickr. Holding each photograph at arm’s length in such a way that it aligns with the horizon of the setting sun in the artist’s native New York, the artist reshot the images as the sun set within the frame. Presented as a 35 mm slide show, the significance of seemingly quotidian sunsets shifts with the knowledge of who captured them and where.

Text from the Guggenheim artist’s web page

Guggenheim Examines New Developments in Contemporary Photography with Photo-Poetics: An Anthology

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum presents Photo-Poetics: An Anthology, an exhibition documenting recent developments in contemporary photography and consisting of photographs, videos, and slide installations by ten international artists. With more than 70 works by Claudia Angelmaier, Erica Baum, Anne Collier, Moyra Davey, Leslie Hewitt, Elad Lassry, Lisa Oppenheim, Erin Shirreff, Kathrin Sonntag, and Sara VanDerBeek, the exhibition runs from November 20, 2015 – March 23, 2016, and presents a focused study into the nature, traditions, and magic of photography in the context of the rapid digital transformation of the medium.

Organised by Jennifer Blessing, Senior Curator, Photography, with Susan Thompson, Assistant Curator, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Photo-Poetics: An Anthology offers an opportunity to define the concerns of a new generation of photographic artists and contextualise their work within the history of art and visual culture. These artists mainly pursue a studio-based approach to still-life photography that centres on the representation of objects, often printed matter such as books, magazines, and record covers. The result is often an image imbued with poetic and evocative personal significance that resonates with larger cultural and historical meanings.

The artists in the exhibition attempt to rematerialise the photograph through meticulous printing, using film and other disappearing photo technologies. Drawing on the legacies of Conceptualism and invested in exploring the processes and techniques of photography, they are also deeply interested in how photographic images circulate. Theirs is a sort of “photo poetics,” an art that self-consciously investigates the laws of photography and the nature of photographic representation, reproduction, and the photographic object. The works in the exhibition, rich with detail, reward close and prolonged regard; they ask for a mode of looking that is closer to reading than the cursory scanning fostered by the clicking and swiping functionalities of smartphones and social media. Both the exhibition and its accompanying catalogue are conceived as anthologies, as independent vehicles to introduce each artist’s important and unique practice. #photopoetics

Press release from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

Sara VanDerBeek (American, b. 1976)
From the Means of Reproduction
2007
Chromogenic print
101.6 x 76.2cm
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
Purchased with funds contributed by the Photography Committee
© Sara VanDerBeek

VanDerBeek’s photographs utilise a variety of formal strategies and references yet remain consistently engaged with issues of memory and the experience of time and space.

VanDerBeek first became known in the mid-2000s for photographs featuring her own makeshift sculptural configurations in which appropriated photos were combined into collages that resounded with personal and political meaning. Constructed in the studio out of found images and pieces of wood, metal, and string, these works, such as From the Means of Reproduction (2007) and Calder and Julia (2006), were created solely for the camera and were disassembled after being photographed.

Text from the Guggenheim artist’s web page

Kathrin Sonntag (German, b. 1981) 'Mittnacht' 2008 (detail)

Kathrin Sonntag (German, b. 1981)
Mittnacht (detail)
2008
Slide projection of eighty one 35 mm slides, continuous loop, dimensions variable
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
Purchased with funds contributed by the Photography Committee and Manuel de Santaren
© Kathrin Sonntag

Encompassing sculpture, photography, film, and drawing, Sonntag’s work offers a complex analysis of the nature of objects and the division between fiction and reality. Using stools, tripods, tables, and mirrors to create unusual perspectives, her installations strip meaning from readily identifiable objects via photographic experiments within the confines of her studio. Mittnacht (2008) comprises eighty-one slides of found images of paranormal phenomena photographed among the artist’s studio tools and furniture. The supernatural elements are enhanced by their disorienting placement within the studio, which both creates illusions and allows errors and smudges in processing to cast an eerie shadow on certain images in the series.

Text from the Guggenheim artist’s web page

Claudia Angelmaier (German, b. 1972)
Betty
2008
Chromogenic print, face-mounted to acrylic
130 x 100cm
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
Purchased with funds contributed by the Photography Committee with additional funds contributed by Mr. and Mrs. Aaron M. Tighe, and Rona and Jeffrey Citrin
© Claudia Angelmaier

Taking art historical masterpieces – and, by extension, art history itself – as her referents, Angelmaier traces the photographic representation of artworks across the pages of textbooks, classroom slides, coffee table monographs, and postcards. Cognisant that major artworks are most often encountered via reproduction rather than in person, she highlights the analogue media that have facilitated the circulation of such images for many decades…

The larger scope of Angelmaier’s concerns is particularly evident in the series Works on Paper (2008- ). Here, the artist photographs the backlit versos of postcards from museum gift shops. The artwork pictured on a card’s front appears muted yet faintly discernible, while the caption information and museum insignia on the back remain fully legible. By foregrounding the text, logos, and barcodes, Angelmaier not only examines the material realities of the postcard, but the social and economic systems both the souvenir and the work it depicts inhabit.

Text from the Guggenheim artist’s web page

Erica Baum (American, b. 1961)
Jaws (from the series Naked Eye)
2008
Inkjet print
47 x 41.6cm
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
Purchased with funds contributed by Mr. and Mrs. Aaron M. Tighe
© Erica Baum

Baum takes the printed page as her primary subject, photographing fragments of found language at close range. Commingling image and text, her works often operate simultaneously as both photograph and poem… For the Naked Eye series (2008- ), Baum directs her camera into the partially opened pages of stipple-edged paperbacks from the 1960s and ’70s, capturing slivers of image and text separated by the vertical striations of adjacent pages’ brightly dyed edges. Although the compositions are each the result of a single, unaltered photograph, they operate visually as collages and veer toward abstraction.

Text from the Guggenheim artist’s web page

Elad Lassry (Israeli-American, b. 1977)
Bengal
2011
Chromogenic print in painted frame
36.8 x 29.2 x 3.8cm
A.P. 1/2, edition of 5
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Purchased with funds contributed by the Photography Committee
© Elad Lassry. Photo: Kristopher McKay © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation

Elad Lassry (Israeli-American, b. 1977)
Untitled (Woman, Blond)
2013
Chromogenic print in walnut frame with four-ply silk
36.8 x 29.2 x 3.8cm
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
Purchased with funds contributed by the Photography Committee
© Elad Lassry

Lassry positions his photographic works as “pictures,” entities that operate simultaneously as both objects and images. In doing so, he shifts their relationship to the viewer, inviting a broader examination of how photographs are seen and understood.

Lassry regularly presents his photographs in lacquered frames that match the colours of his bright, saturated images, or in warm walnut frames in the case of his work in black and white. The artist used this approach as early as 2008, in works such as Wolf (Blue) (2008). The continuity between frame and photo, heightened by the absence of matting, highlights the physicality of the picture without disrupting the illusion of depth in the photographic image. Lassry’s pictures derive from his own studio-based photographs as well as appropriated imagery. In both cases, the images reference the language of advertising and stock photography – and the attendant notions of desire therein. However, the would-be product is either obscured or excluded, removing the sense of purpose that drives such imagery. The artist sometimes employs techniques such as double exposure, blurring, superimposition, or collage that create an unsettling instability within his pictures. In more recent works, Lassry has incorporated sculptural elements, most often silk valances that cover significant sections of the image, as in Untitled (Woman, Blond) (2013), or looping coloured wires that penetrate it, as in Untitled (Dolphins, Two) (2014).

Text from the Guggenheim artist’s web page

Leslie Hewitt (American, b. 1977) 'Riffs on Real Time (3 of 10)', 2006-2009

Leslie Hewitt (American, b. 1977)
Riffs on Real Time (3 of 10)
2006-09
Chromogenic print
76.2 x 61cm
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
Purchased with funds contributed by the Photography Committee

Commingling photography and sculpture, Hewitt’s works often present arrangements of personally and politically charged materials – including historically significant books and magazines from the 1960s and ’70s as well as family photos (not necessarily her own) – that conjure associative meaning through juxtaposition.

In Hewitt’s series Riffs on Real Time (2006-2009), snapshots lay atop appropriated printed matter shot against a wood floor or carpet so that the contrasting textures of these layered materials build up and outward toward the viewer. In Hewitt’s various photo-sculptural series, the photographs begin to pointedly inhabit the space of the viewer. Positioned on the floor, their frames lean against the gallery walls, asserting their own materiality and calling attention to the space of the gallery.

Text from the Guggenheim artist’s web page

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Exhibition: ‘1932: Rare Photographs by George Grosz’ at the Akim Monet Side by Side Gallery, Berlin

Exhibition dates: 15th January – 19th March, 2016

George Grosz (German, 1893-1959) 'Zeitvertreib an Bord der "New York" / Pastime on board the "New York"' New York, 1932 from the exhibition '1932: Rare Photographs by George Grosz' at the Akim Monet Side by Side Gallery, Berlin, Jan - March, 2016

George Grosz (German, 1893-1959)
Zeitvertreib an Bord der “New York”
Pastime on board the “New York”
New York, 1932
© George Grosz Estate

While the photographs of the bridge, rigging and pastimes aboard the twin-screw turbine steamer New York are the most avant-garde and successful (in terms of composition, light and pictorial space) in this posting, it is very interesting to observe how a German immigrant artist viewed New York through the lens of a Leica camera upon his arrival.

These photographs could be seen as typical tourist snapshots but there is a certain vivacity (don’t you just love that word, vivacity – viva/city) and angular disposition about them that raises them above the status of snapshots. Grosz captures the spatial abstractness, intensity and excitement of the metropolis in displaced beats and accents – the sense of the buildings closing in looking uptown on 42nd street, or the flashing of bodies frozen in perpetual motion.

These images are precursors to the work of other great immigrant photographers who made the journey to America – the Hungarian André Kertész in 1936 and, later, the Swiss Robert Frank in 1947. Even though these latter photographers have a completely different style to Grosz, all three artists cast their dispassionate eye over American culture. They view it from the standpoint of an outsider, reinterpreting what they see from a different point of view.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Please note: I have added the postcard of the steamer SS New York, the photograph of the boxer Max Schmeling and the paintings by George Grosz to give some social, historical and artistic context to the photographs in the exhibition. These works are NOT included in the exhibition.

Many thankx to the Akim Monet Side by Side Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

“After his emigration to the USA in 1933, Grosz “sharply rejected [his] previous work, and caricature in general.” In place of his earlier corrosive vision of the city, he now painted conventional nudes and many landscape watercolours. More acerbic works, such as Cain, or Hitler in Hell (1944), were the exception. In his autobiography, he wrote: “A great deal that had become frozen within me in Germany melted here in America and I rediscovered my old yearning for painting. I carefully and deliberately destroyed a part of my past.” Although a softening of his style had been apparent since the late 1920s, Grosz’s work assumed a more sentimental tone in America, a change generally seen as a decline.”

Text from the Wikipedia website

George Grosz (German, 1893-1959) 'Sendemast und Takelage der "New York" / Transmitter and rigging of the "New York"' New York, 1932 from the exhibition '1932: Rare Photographs by George Grosz' at the Akim Monet Side by Side Gallery, Berlin, Jan - March, 2016

George Grosz (German, 1893-1959)
Sendemast und Takelage der “New York”
Transmitter and rigging of the “New York”
New York, 1932
© George Grosz Estate

Akim Monet Side by Side Gallery presents a selection of 60 photographs by George Grosz taken in 1932 in partnership with Ralph Jentsch, director of the George Grosz Estate.

George Grosz is well known for his painting and drawing. The DADA MARSHAL, the moralist and angry observer, whose obsessive eye misses nothing and whose cutting, razor-sharp line, records the dangers and problems of his time like no other.

Lesser known is George Grosz the photographer, who in 1932, during his first voyage to America, took camera in hand and in just a few days shot almost 200 multi-layered photos. Right before his departure for America to accept a teaching position, George Grosz bought his first camera in Berlin especially for this trip. With it he started to take photographs during the Atlantic crossing on a ship tellingly called the New York. He chose specific subject matter with a clear emphasis on angles. Behind the viewfinder of the objective camera, finding the right crop became for him a fascinating, creative moment.

His photography profoundly changed after his arrival. In New York, instead of structured stills, his photography was dominated by dynamic movement. In rapid shots taken from moving double-decker buses or in sequences of moving subjects, George Grosz captured the restless metropolis that fascinated him, as if he wanted to imitate cinema with these syncopated images. Chance and detail take the place of balanced composition. The whole, pulsating life of New York is seen through the eyes of the artist.

Text after: Jentsch, Ralph, George Grosz. Eye of the Artist, Photographs New York 1932, Weingarten, 2002.

Press release from the Akim Monet Side by Side Gallery

George Grosz (German, 1893-1959)
Die Brücke der “New York”
The bridge of the “New York”
New York, 1932
© George Grosz Estate

Anonymous photographer. Knackstedt & Co (publisher) 'SS New York' Nd postcard

Anonymous photographer. Knackstedt & Co (publisher) 'SS New York' Nd postcard verso

Anonymous photographer
Knackstedt & Co (publisher)
SS New York (front and verso)
After 1926
Postcard

The Twin-Screw Turbine Steamer “New York”

Measurement: 21,500 tons gross • Length 633 ft. • Beam 79 ft. • Depth 56 ft. 5
Builders: Messrs. Blohm 6- Voss, of Hamburg (1926/27)

New York, the city after which the Hamburg-America Line (HAPAG) steamer “New York” was christened by the Lady Mayoress of the American metropolis on the occasion of her being launched in Hamburg on October 20, 1926. USA service, 1941 transferred to Deutsche Amerika Line, 1945 bombed at Kiel and capsized.

George Grosz (German, 1893-1959)
Lower Manhattan
c. 1934
Oil on cardboard
18 x 24 (45.7 x 61cm)
Gift of Dalzell Hatfield

George Grosz (German, 1893-1959)
Im Doppeldeckerbus auf der 5th Avenue, Höhe 48th Street, mit der Collegiate Church of St. Nicholas rechts
Aboard a double-decker on 5th Avenue at 48th street, with on the right the Collegiate Church of St. Nicholas
New York, 1932
© George Grosz Estate

George Grosz (German, 1893-1959)
Im Doppeldeckerbus Downtown 5th Avenue, mit Blick Uptown auf die 42th Street
Aboard a double-decker downtown on 5th Avenue looking uptown on 42nd street
New York, 1932
© George Grosz Estate

George Grosz (German, 1893-1959)
Herald Square
New York, 1932
© George Grosz Estate

George Grosz (German, 1893-1959)
Street Scene
1925
Oil on canvas
81.3 × 61.3cm

George Grosz (German, 1893-1959)
Eingang zur Subway Station 5th Avenue am Flat Iron Building
Entrance of the Subway Station at 5th Avenue and the Flat Iron Building
New York, 1932
© George Grosz Estate

George Grosz (German, 1893-1959)
Max Schmeling beim Schauboxen in Kingston, 5. Juni 1932
Max Schmeling at a boxing exhibition game in Kingston, 5th of June 1932
New York, 1932
© George Grosz Estate

The Greatest Boxing Fights of All Time – Max Schmeling vs Mickey Walker in 1932

Unknown photographer. 'Max Schmeling' 1929

Unknown photographer
Max Schmeling (German, 1905-2005)
“The Black Uhlan”
Heavyweight Champion
1930-1932

Maximillian Adolph Otto Siegfried “Max” Schmeling (September 28, 1905 – February 2, 2005) was a German boxer who was heavyweight champion of the world between 1930 and 1932. His two fights with Joe Louis in 1936 and 1938 were worldwide cultural events because of their national associations.

Starting his professional career in 1924, Schmeling came to the United States in 1928 and, after a ninth-round technical knockout of Johnny Risko, became a sensation. He became the first to win the heavyweight championship (at that time vacant) by disqualification in 1930, after opponent Jack Sharkey knocked him down with a low blow in the fourth round. Max retained his crown successfully in 1931 by a TKO victory over Young Stribling. A rematch in 1932 with Sharkey saw the American gaining the title from Schmeling by a controversial fifteen-round split decision. In 1933, Schmeling lost to Max Baer by a tenth-round TKO. The loss left people believing that Schmeling was past his prime. Meanwhile, Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party took over control in Germany, and Schmeling came to be viewed as a ‘Nazi puppet.’

In 1936, Schmeling knocked out American rising star Joe Louis, placing him as the number one contender for Jim Braddock’s title, but Louis got the fight and knocked Braddock out to win the championship in 1937. Schmeling finally got a chance to regain his title in 1938, but Louis knocked him out in one round. During World War II, Schmeling served with the German Air Force (Luftwaffe) as an elite paratrooper (Fallschirmjäger). After the war, Schmeling mounted a comeback, but retired permanently in 1948.

After retiring from boxing, Schmeling worked for The Coca-Cola Company. Schmeling became friends with Louis, and their friendship lasted until the latter’s death in 1981. Schmeling died in 2005 aged 99, a sporting icon in his native Germany. Long after the Second World War, it was revealed that Schmeling had risked his own life to save the lives of two Jewish children in 1938.

Text from the Wikipedia website

George Grosz (German, 1893-1959)
Sonntag in Manhattan
Sunday in Manhattan
New York, 1932
© George Grosz Estate

George Grosz (German, 1893-1959) 'New York street scene' Nd

George Grosz (German, 1893-1959)
New York street scene
c. 1930s
Watercolour

George Grosz (German, 1893-1959)
Madison Avenue
New York, 1932
© George Grosz Estate

Akim Monet Side by Side Gallery

This gallery has now closed but there is an archive website.

Akim Monet Side by Side Gallery website

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Text/Exhibition: ‘The multiple singularities of photography’ on the exhibition ‘Every Photograph is an Enigma’ at Fotomuseum Winterthur, Zurich

Exhibition dates: 24th October, 2015 – 14th February, 2016

Curator: Michel Frizot

Anonymous photographer. 'Untitled' c. 1930 from the exhibition 'Every Photograph is an Enigma' at Fotomuseum Winterthur, Zurich, October 2015 - February 2016

Anonymous photographer
Untitled
c. 1930
Silver gelatin print
13 x 18cm
© Private collection

The multiple singularities of photography

Photograph, photographer, negative, print

I have never thought of photography as a “singularity” – the singularity of photography. For me, photography has always been about possibilities, multiplicities rather than singularities.

In Kathrin Yacavone’s text below, the “singularity of photography” is defined as the relationship – the hierarchy – among valuable, perceptual and imaginative relations between the beholder and the image. It is the singularity of the individual and their response at any time to a photograph, but these responses cannot be systematically codified, in the sense that no response can ever be relied upon… certainly, no response to a photograph of a mother could be more singular than the response of a son (as claimed by Barthes Camera Lucida).

In other words, the singularity of photography is how the viewer engages and reads a photograph in a singular way at one point in time, from one “point of view.”

While this point of view is singular, it changes from moment to moment, from context to context, from different points of view. Hence, we have a multiplicity of singularities or, if you like, a multiple singularity of photography. Hasn’t it always seemed false to you in Camera Lucida where Barthes talks about his response to an image (for example, the supposed “lost” image of his mother*), he allows it to freeze in his text? Surely he would feel different later (another singularity). And yet the freezing is necessary for the arguments Barthes makes.

It continues to haunt me – much as photographs haunt our memory – why Barthes stuck with the singularity of a photograph, when at the same time he was pushing the multiplicity of readings in his other texts eg. S/Z (1970). Are we missing something really basic here? Why should a photograph be frozen and a text not?

In this exhibition, Michel Frizot defines a series of classifications (or themes, see below) that seek to organise the ambiguity and perplexity of vernacular and surprising photography. As Frizot himself puts it, “the photograph is not in its essence a transparency through which we gain access to a known reality but, on the contrary, a source of ambiguity and often, perplexity. The photographic image is a constellation of questions for the eye because it offers viewers forms and signs they have never perceived as such and which conflict with their natural vision”.

Frizot suggests questions for the eye offered through forms and signs that are in conflict with natural vision. Barthes pushes further, suggesting that it is not the forms and signs of the photograph that challenge natural vision, but a shift away from a semiology of photography to a phenomenology of photography. From guided message (forms/signs) to emotive response (imagination). Umberto Eco comments that, “Semiology shows us the universe of ideologies, arranged in codes and sub-codes, within the universe of signs, and these ideologies are reflected in our pre-constituted ways of using the language,”1 but Barthes, in works such as S/Z, stresses the multiplicity of a reading (its intertextuality). He contends that there can be no originating anchor of meaning in the possible intentions of the author, and that meaning must be actively created by the reader through a process of textual analysis.

An emotive response to a photograph is an “encounter with the represented other [is] a dialectical relationship between the specific and the general, between the personal and the universal, where the dialectic is seen in the psychologically unsettling potential of photographic images, the status of the photographic referent and the poignancy of the relation between time and image.” Thus the photograph can have a capacity for plurality of meaning which is not restrictive.

This response is based on an individuated, ‘feeling’ viewer whose encounter with the photograph is guided by desire and emotion, grounded in his or her unique experience and life history. It is to engage with the photograph in imaginative, affective, and emotional ways. Here, the codified reading is subsumed? by the emotive reading of an enlightened and fully “conscious” reader in the phenomenology of photography. Phenomenology is the study of structures of consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view. The central structure of an experience is its intentionality, its being directed toward something, as it is an experience of or about some object – a photograph for example – by the imagination, by thought. Phenomenology requires a bit to grasp – to read a phenomenologial text like Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space as its author intended requires a cultivated mindset – but a prepared reader has many pleasures.

This is one possible response by the viewer to unsettling photographs. But what of the photographer?

Les Walking (my lecturer at RMIT University for many years), used to ask “what are you pointing your camera at?”… so this would permit an imaginative journey on his part as he imagined the subject matter, what he knew of the person, and all possibilities. Sometimes everything happens at once (in photography), and sometimes we recognise the richness of where we are in photography’s ability to generate many singularities within us at rapid fire.

As a photographer we go on an imaginative journey when we take a photograph – we previsualise, snap, extend the “point” of exposure (long time exposure), double expose or do away with the camera altogether. Taking a photograph is a multiplicity before the moment of the pushing of the shutter (decisions, angles, camera, film, light, place etc..), and a multiplicity afterwards… but for that split second it is a singularity, “an encounter with the represented other” as Walter Benjamin puts it… as though time, history and memory are all focused through the lens (of the camera, of the enlarger, of the scanner) at the object – like a funnel – which then expands afterwards. At the point of “exposure” there is only ever one singularity. Multiple contexts before and after, multiple phenomena if you like, but only one outcome when the negative is exposed. Being aware of all that happens around us leads to that one singularity – the negative. That’s what photographers do, they focus that energy into a singularity.

But the resulting negative is NOT singular!

Of course, there are some things that are forever predetermined in the analogue negative, eg the depth of field, the focus, the grain. Even in the digital negative these determinations apply. But then you think, if I push this film or pull it back in development “other” things may appear. Probably the Leica manual is as good as any for what come after that – they say that when shooting a roll of film with a variety of tonal scales the exposure should be more than the meter indicated, and the development time less. In the Zone System this would be N-1. And a negative like this is what gives the greatest options with graded papers. Multiple options for printing, multiple options for interpreting a negative. I feel these multiple options have been more or less forgotten in the era of the digital print. What you see on the screen is what you aim to see in the print, which negates the multiplicity of the (digital) negative, often leading to bland and underwhelming digital prints. The pre-determination of the screen leads to an over-determination of the print.

While Minor White observed that there was a dragon in the negative that could be reached by careful printing, this locks you into looking for the “one road” in the negative. One person who didn’t was the English photographer Bill Brandt who printed first in a straight documentary style before “unlocking” the surrealist elements of his negs with very contrasty work. He was open to the multiple contexts of the point of exposure of the negative, and it is his later reprinting of his earlier work for which he has become famous.

While it comes down to only several elements when talking about the phenomena of the negative, it is our direct experience of it IN OUR IMAGINATION that, perhaps, gives the negative presence and transcendence. It is the direction of our thought towards the object of our being. And that is what makes us truly human.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

* Of course, the photograph of his mother did exist, it was just necessary for his argument that we never see it, and that he said that it did not exist.

Word count: 1,400.

1/ Eco, U. (1970). “Articulations of the Cinematic Code,” in Cinematics, 1(1), pp. 590-605

Many thankx to my mentor for his advice and thoughts on this text. Many thankx to the Fotomuseum Winterthur for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Anonymous (Press Photo) 'Rock and Mud 'Grand Finale',' California, c. 1930 from the exhibition 'Every Photograph is an Enigma' at Fotomuseum Winterthur, Zurich, October 2015 - February 2016

Anonymous (Press Photo)
Rock and Mud ‘Grand Finale’
California, c. 1930
Silver gelatin print
19.7 x 24.7cm
© Private collection

Photographs often seem familiar and understandable, a visual common sense intimately related to our daily lives. But they can also provoke a spark of amazement or generate a more sustained perplexity and inquiry. Curated by the renowned French photo historian, Michel Frizot, Every Photograph is an Enigma interrogates this paradox. Drawing exclusively from photographs in his private collection, many of them anonymous, he presents a selection of photographic moments at once ordinary and marvellous. Frizot develops a system of classification that explores the strangeness generated by the camera lens. Taken by family members, lovers, or unheralded professional and amateur photographers, the assembled images amount to nothing less than a phenomenology of photography.

The exhibition and book are divided into eleven themes, such as:

Ambiguous assemblages
The enigma of relationship
The enigma of context
The enigma of attentiveness
Challenging the figurative order
The aesthetic solution
Original configurations
The photographer’s options
The space of the gaze
The spirit of the place

Anonymous (Keystone) 'Professor Piccards Balloon' c. 1930

Anonymous (Keystone)
Professor Piccard’s Balloon Destroyed by Flames
25th May 1937
Silver gelatin print
13.4 x 18.5cm
© Private collection

The stratosphere balloon of Professor Piccard catches fire in the moment of ascending over the area of Brussels, Belgium.

Auguste Antoine Piccard (28 January 1884 – 24 March 1962) was a Swiss physicist, inventor and explorer known for his record-breaking helium-filled balloon flights, with which he studied the Earth’s upper atmosphere. Piccard was also known for his invention of the first bathyscaphe, FNRS-2, with which he made a number of unmanned dives in 1948 to explore the ocean’s depths.

“Every photograph is an enigma for the gaze: for the enigma is part of the photographic act itself. It ensues from the distance between the natural vision and the camera’s photosensitive capture process. By widening this gap, the modes of capture, the photographer’s intentions, and the reactions and involvement of the “photographer” together create new forms and perceptual requirements specific to photography. It is a question, above all, of understanding how much photographs, by transcending our visual capacities and going beyond our intuitions, also give rise to empathy and the need to project personal concerns. The element of enigma in photography bears witness, in fact, to what it is to “be human”.”

“The answer to the Sphinx’s riddle, it should be remembered, is humankind. And looking at a photograph means discovering oneself and the human species. Through the disparity and the dissonance between what it shows and what we experience, photography testifies above all, and at every moment, to what “being human” means. And the riddle, the enigma inherent in looking at a photograph is that of our presence in the world.”

Michel Frizot

Kathrin Yacavone. "Photography and Subjectivity," in 'Benjamin, Barthes and the Singularity of Photography'. Bloomsbury Academic, 2012, pp. 123-124

Kathrin Yacavone. Benjamin, Barthes and the Singularity of Photography. Bloomsbury Academic, 2012, pp. 123-124

Mr. Brodsky
Marchand ties, Paris
1935
Silver gelatin print
© Private collection

Anonymous photographer
Untitled
c. 1930
Silver gelatin print
5.9 x 8.1cm
© Private collection

Anonymous photographer
Untitled
c. 1950
Silver gelatin print
6.5 x 9cm
© Private collection

Anonymous photographer (Hollywood Press photo) 'The Photographer set on by His "Victim",' Hollywood Press photo 1938

Anonymous photographer (Hollywood Press photo)
The Photographer set on by His “Victim”
1938
Silver gelatin photograph
16.9 x 22cm
© Private collection

Anonymous photographer (International News Photos)
Untitled
Nd
Silver gelatin print
16.5 x 21.5cm
© Private collection

Anonymous photographer (International News Photos). 'Untitled' Nd (detail)

Anonymous photographer (International News Photos)
Untitled (detail)
Nd
Silver gelatin print
16.5 x 21.5cm
© Private collection

France-Presse. 'C’est demain mardi-gras', 5 mars 1935

France-Presse
C’est demain mardi-gras / Tomorrow is Shrove Tuesday
March 5, 1935
Silver gelatin photograph
© Private collection

Interpress. 'Avant l’ouverture du Salon des Surindépendants' Paris, 1952

Interpress
Avant l’ouverture du Salon des Surindépendants / Prior to the opening of Superintendent’s Fair
Paris, 1952
Silver gelatin photograph
© Private collection

Mondial Photo-Presse
Réunion de modélistes
c. 1930
Silver gelatin photograph
12.8 × 17.6cm
© Private collection

NYT Photo
Wind Tunnel in Chalais Meudon
1935
Silver gelatin print
18 x 24cm
© Private collection

Immediately a photograph is taken it generates a distance between what the image reveals and what we have seen for ourselves only seconds before. This observation of disparity is central to the phenomenon of photography, creating a sense of indeterminacy that we might describe as the singularity of the photographic. As Frizot himself puts it, “the photograph is not in its essence a transparency through which we gain access to a known reality but, on the contrary, a source of ambiguity and often, perplexity. The photographic image is a constellation of questions for the eye because it offers viewers forms and signs they have never perceived as such and which conflict with their natural vision”. Every Photograph is an Enigma draws out the full implications of this disparity, everything which constitutes the singularity of the photographic process. This begins with the selection procedure itself: Frizot has collected the photographs over many years, with no predetermined objective, finding scraps and castoffs at flea markets and jumble sales. Abandoned photographs escape traditional standards of classification and judgement and are often the work of anonymous photographers. For Frizot, this artlessness offers ‘an extra touch of photographic naturalness which is not shrouded in conventions’. It is the work of the exhibition to reveal, and the role of the visitor to discover, this photographic supplement.

The exhibition explores the modalities of photographic capture and the out-distancing of the senses that results, above all in the relationship between photographer, subject photographed and the operations of the camera, a technical device. Recording different intensities of light on a photosensitive surface, photography is an index of states of light rather than the reality perceived by the eye. The formal consequences of photographic technique are considerable, whether determined by exposure time, framing, exhaustive detail, or the projection of three-dimensional space onto a two-dimensional surface. At the same time, what are fundamentally physical processes are also determined by the split-second decisions taken by the camera operator. It is precisely this that gives rise to the puzzle of photography: the contradictions between the precision of a physical world and the decision-making of the photographer.

Every Photograph is an Enigma explores other aspects of the riddle of photography, including the complexity of the exchange with the subject of the photograph, embodied by a reciprocal glance. The ability of the camera to record human form and gesture is what lends it its quasi-magical vocation. However, that act of recording is dependent on a vast array of potentialities and constraints, including perhaps the demeanour of the participants. The photographic act transforms emotionally-charged, interpersonal experience into uncertain, interpretable signs, a distillation of affect. At the same time, those signs are also dependent on the astuteness of the eyes that scrutinise the photograph, igniting, perhaps, an empathy with others. A photograph is a fragmentary capture and the gaze of the viewer operates in similarly fragmentary bursts. A viewer’s optical capacities are decisive, interpreting, for example, the photograph’s excess of data. The enigma of photography also emerges from the inadequacies and impasses of the energetic viewer’s scrutiny. These, and many other riddles, are explored across eleven separate chapters in the exhibition, which together provide a method for specifically photographic viewing. They probe the way the photographic device is used to celebrate the subject, or the way that processes unique to photography and the photographer’s command of his or her equipment help determine the final image. A further theme investigates the way that viewers are involved in a perceptual relationship which ordinary vision has not accustomed them to, including a display of stereo images. We encounter the myriad ways that photography overwhelms our senses and the many puzzles it presents.

Every Photograph is an Enigma brings together a remarkable selection of everyday photographs, selected over many years by one of the sharpest eyes in the history photography. It offers us the opportunity of a liberated escape into a ‘pure’ photographic act stripped of artistic pretension or historical portent. As Frizot proposes, there are no hierarchies in photography – it is the activity of the gaze that reveals the richness of the image. For the eye, every photograph is an enigma.

Catalogue

The exhibition is accompanied by the fully-illustrated catalogue Toute photographie fait énigme/Every photography is an enigma, by Michel Frizot, in collaboration with Cédric de Veigy. Published by Éditions Hazan. English/French with a German translation of the main texts. Price 45 CHF.

Credits

The exhibition is curated by Michel Frizot and organised by the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris and the Musée Nicéphore Niépce, Chalon-sur-Saône in collaboration with Fotomuseum Winterthur.”

Text from the Fotomuseum Winterthur website

B.W. Kilburn (American, 1827-1909)
The Surging Sea of Humanity at the Opening of the Columbian Exposition, Chicago
1893
Stereocard
Albumen photographs
© Private collection

B.W. Kilburn (American, 1827-1909) 'The Surging Sea of Humanity at the Opening of the Columbian Exposition, Chicago' 1893 (detail)

B.W. Kilburn (American, 1827-1909)
The Surging Sea of Humanity at the Opening of the Columbian Exposition, Chicago (detail)
1893
Stereocard
Albumen photograph
© Private collection

Anonymous photographer
Untitled
c. 1900
© Private collection

Anonymous photographer. 'Untitled' c. 1955

Anonymous photographer
Untitled (Flagrants délits / Egregious crimes)
c. 1955
Silver gelatin print
5.5 x 5.5cm
© Private collection

Anonymous photographer. 'Untitled' c. 1970

Anonymous photographer
Untitled
Instamatic Kodak
c. 1970
© Private collection

Anonymous photographer
Children Watching the Apollo 12 Flight on Television
1969
Silver gelatin photograph
© Private collection

For many years, Michel Frizot the historian and theorist has been collecting neglected photographs which have been overlooked because they were taken by anonymous, unknown photographers, unheard-of or non-celebrated artists, throughout the entire history of photography. Avoiding “museumification” and classification, selected first of all for their capacity for surprise, these photographs are no less generous, moving and perhaps “photographic” than others. This exhibition reflects on the element of mystery in all photography.

“Because they are so familiar to us, because they are part of our visual space, photographic images seem to be immediately accessible and understandable. But everyone has experienced that sudden burst of amazement they can set off through suspended movements, the rendering of colours, unexpected coincidences or abruptly frozen expressions. If we pay attention to such features, they provoke the feeling that we are faced at once with something obvious and with a question. When we can look at a photograph as soon as we have “taken” it, we immediately, moreover, sense the distance between what the image tells us and what we have been able to see for ourselves only seconds before. The observation of this disparity, recognisable at every moment, is proper to the photographic phenomenon. We grant each photograph an element of truth but suspect its indeterminacy and sense its contradictions.

The photographic image is a constellation of questions for the eye because it offers viewers forms and signs they have never perceived as such and which conflict with their natural vision.

The enigma, the riddle, the puzzle would thus be fundamental to the photographic act itself.

Inherent in the photographic process, it results from the irreducible distance between the human senses and the camera’s light-sensitive capture: it arises from the split between visual perception and the photographic process.

For the eye, every photograph is an enigma.

Whether they are kept in archives, family albums or agencies, or dumped in the street, photographs are virtual objects which only begin to exist when they find a viewer. The selective collecting process is thus carried out “by eye” and not the eye of the connoisseur or the historian, but the paradoxical eye which goes against the tide of the canonically “good” photograph, it is a slow eye which opens itself to the pleasure of choice. The pursuit of irreplaceable strangeness. A determined eye, in search of what it does not yet know and yet perceives as the baring of the “photographic”, the liberated escape into a “pure” photographic act stripped of its eloquence. By repeating the selections, the eye discovers the unknown properties of the photographic image: it spots the elements of a puzzle to be savoured without anticipation of any solution. As a kind of practical application, when we look closely, these photographs seem more “photographic” than so many other images with more conventional features that quickly lose their interest. They reveal what escapes us in the recognition of the world, what lies beyond its photographic figures repeated over and over again.

The answer to the Sphinx’s riddle, it should be remembered, is humankind. And looking at a photograph means discovering oneself and the human species. Through the disparity and the dissonance between what it shows and what we experience, photography testifies above all, and at every moment, to what “being human” means. And the riddle, the enigma inherent in looking at a photograph is that of our presence in the world.”

Michel Frizot
Extract from the book Toute photographie fait énigme / Every photograph is an enigma, Hazan, 2014

Michel Frizot quoted in “Every Photograph is an enigma,” on the Musée Nicéphore Niépce website [Online] Cited 07/20/2021

Marius, Paris
Photomontage
c. 1865
Albumen print
© Private collection

Anonymous photographer
Untitled
c. 1910
© Private collection

Anonymous photographer
Photomontage (photographic postcard)
c. 1920
Silver gelatin print
© Private collection

Anonymous photographer
Studio Portrait (Photographic postcard)
c. 1910
Silver gelatin print
9 x 14cm
© Private collection

Anonymous photographer
Untitled
c. 1930
Silver gelatin print
© Private collection

Anonymous photographer. 'Transcendental photography with faces of ectoplasm' 1939

Anonymous photographer
Photographie transcendetale avec visages d’ectoplasms / Transcendental photography with faces of ectoplasm
1939
Silver gelatin print
© Private collection

Anonymous photographer. 'Untitled' c. 1935

Anonymous photographer
Untitled (Surimpression)
c. 1935
Silver gelatin photograph
8.2 × 5.4cm
© Private collection

L. Olivier
Recherches sur l’appareil tégumentaire des racines Marsilea Quadrifolia
(Photomicrographic plate)
1881
© Private collection

Anonymous photographer (Press photo)
Patriot Missile Warheads Promoters
1991
Gelatin silver print
25.3 x 20.2cm
© Private collection

Anonymous photographer. 'Members of the State Protection Authority, ÁVH', Budapest, 1956

Anonymous photographer
Dans un local désaffecté de Budapest, les corps de patriotes hongrois voisinent avec une statue déboulonnée à la gloire du sport soviétique
In some abandoned premises in Budapest, the bodies of Hungarian patriots lie beside a statue removed from its base [dedicated] to the glory of Soviet sports
Members of the State Protection Authority, ÁVH
Budapest, 1956
Gelatin silver print
29.8 × 22.6cm
© Private collection

Victims of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 brutally put down by the Russians.

Addendum

According to the experts at Fortepan, an open access public resource of the Hungarian audio-visual culture, the dead men in the photograph above are very likely (~99%) not patriots, but members of the State Protection Authority, ÁVH- Államvédelmi Hatóság. The State Protection Authority was the secret police of the People’s Republic of Hungary from 1945 until 1956.

The photograph below recently found on the Fortepan website showing the above sculpture at second back left of the image.

Ismeretlen fotós. 1956. Magyarország, Budapest XIII. Jász utca 74., a Képzőművészeti Kivitelező és Iparvállalat szoboröntödéjének udvara. Sóváry János Táncoló gyerekek alkotása és a mögötte lévő Pátzay Pál Integető című alkotása Budapesten, Antal Károly Birkózók és Mikus Sándor Labdarúgók szobra a Népstadion szoborkertjében, Szomor László Kígyóölő szobra Szolnokon a vérellátónál, Kisfaludi Strobl Zsigmond Kossuth Lajost ábrázoló szobra a Hősök terén került később felállításra.

Unknown photographer. 1956 Hungary, Budapest XIII. Jász utca 74, the yard of the sculptural foundry of the Fine Art Designer and Industrial Company. János Sóváry Creation of Dancing Children and the Pátzay Pál Integető, behind the Antal Károly Birkozók and Mikus Sándor Football Sculpture in the Népstadion Sculpture Garden, The Statue of László Szomor, The Snake Statue in Szolnok, The statue of Kisfaludi Strobl Zsigmond Kossuth Lajost was later erected in the Heroes’ Square.

The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 or the Hungarian Uprising of 1956 (Hungarian: 1956-os forradalom or felkelés) was a nationwide revolt against the government of the Hungarian People’s Republic and its Soviet-imposed policies, lasting from 23 October until 10 November 1956. Though leaderless when it first began, it was the first major threat to Soviet control since the USSR’s forces drove out Nazi Germany from its territory at the end of World War II and broke into Central and Eastern Europe.

The revolt began as a student demonstration, which attracted thousands as they marched through central Budapest to the Parliament building, calling out on the streets using a van with loudspeakers via Radio Free Europe. A student delegation, entering the radio building to try to broadcast the students’ demands, was detained. When the delegation’s release was demanded by the demonstrators outside, they were fired upon by the State Security Police (ÁVH) from within the building. One student died and was wrapped in a flag and held above the crowd. This was the start of the revolution. As the news spread, disorder and violence erupted throughout the capital.

The revolt spread quickly across Hungary and the government collapsed. Thousands organised into militias, battling the ÁVH and Soviet troops. Pro-Soviet communists and ÁVH members were often executed or imprisoned and former political prisoners were released and armed. Radical impromptu workers’ councils wrested municipal control from the ruling Hungarian Working People’s Party and demanded political changes. A new government formally disbanded the ÁVH, declared its intention to withdraw from the Warsaw Pact, and pledged to re-establish free elections. By the end of October, fighting had almost stopped and a sense of normality began to return.

After announcing a willingness to negotiate a withdrawal of Soviet forces, the Politburo changed its mind and moved to crush the revolution. On 4 November, a large Soviet force invaded Budapest and other regions of the country. The Hungarian resistance continued until 10 November. Over 2,500 Hungarians and 700 Soviet troops were killed in the conflict, and 200,000 Hungarians fled as refugees. Mass arrests and denunciations continued for months thereafter. By January 1957, the new Soviet-installed government had suppressed all public opposition. These Soviet actions, while strengthening control over the Eastern Bloc, alienated many Western Marxists, leading to splits and/or considerable losses of membership for Communist Parties in the West.

Text from the Wikipedia website

International Newsreel Photo. 'Governor of Alabama Arrested for Breaking Prohibition Laws' 24 november 1926

International Newsreel Photo
Governor of Alabama Arrested for Breaking Prohibition Laws
24th November 1926
Gelatin silver print
20 x 15cm
© Private collection

Anonymous photographer
Untitled
c. 1950
Gelatin silver print
7 x 4.5cm
© Private collection

Fotomuseum Winterthur
Grüzenstrasse 44 + 45 CH-8400
Winterthur (Zürich)

Opening hours:
Tuesday to Sunday 11am – 6pm
Wednesday 11am – 8pm
Closed on Mondays

Fotomuseum Winterthur website

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Exhibitions: ‘Coney Island: Visions of an American Dreamland, 1861-2008’ and ‘Forever Coney: Photographs from the Brooklyn Museum Collection’ at the Brooklyn Museum, New York

Exhibition dates: 20th November, 2015 – 13th March, 2016

Curator of Coney Island exhibition: Dr Robin Jaffee Frank

Samuel S. Carr (American, 1837-1908). 'Beach Scene' c. 1879 from the exhibition 'Coney Island: Visions of an American Dreamland, 1861-2008', Nov 2015 - March 2016

Samuel S. Carr (American, 1837-1908)
Beach Scene
c. 1879
Oil on canvas
12 x 20 in. (30.5 x 50.8cm)
Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts; Bequest of Annie Swan Coburn (Mrs. Lewis Larned Coburn)

The first posting of 2016, and it is a doozy – a multimedia extravaganza of sight and sound showcasing exhibitions that focus on that eclectic playground, Coney Island.

Featuring images supplied by the gallery – plus videos, other art work featured in the exhibitions and texts that I sourced myself – this posting documents “the luridness of the sideshow acts, the drunk sailors, the amorous couples and the scantily dressed bathers who were so much a part of the allure and menace of Coney Island.” I spent many hours scouring the internet, undertaking research and cleaning poor quality images to bring this selection to you.

The exhibition is divided into five sections, and I have attempted to keep the posting in this chronological order.

~ Down at Coney Isle, 1861-1894
~ The World’s Greatest Playground, 1895-1929
~ The Nickel Empire, 1930-1939
~ A Coney Island of the Mind, 1940-1961
~ Requiem for a Dream, 1962-2008

There are some interesting art works in both exhibitions. The correspondence between elephant / handler and mural is delightful in Edgar S. Thomson’s Coney Island (1897, below), while Joseph Stella’s Battle of Lights, Coney Island, Mardi Gras (1913-1914, below) is a revelation to me, considering the date of production and the portrayal of contemporary life which is akin to our own. Walker Evans’ Couple at Coney Island, New York (1928, below) seems staged and confused in its pictorial construction, not one of his better photographs, while Edward J. Kelty’s photographs of sideshow revues including a “coloured revue” are interesting for their social context and formalism.

Paul Cadmus’ satirical view of American vacationers Coney Island (1934, below) is a riot of colour, movement and social commentary, including references to homosexuality and Hitler, while his friend Reginald Marsh’s effusive Coney Island paintings play with “reimagined bathers and sideshow audiences in poses derived from Michelangelo and Rubens” packed into compressed, collage like spaces. Particular favourites are photographs by Garry Winograd, Bruce Davidson, Diane Arbus and Robert Frank. Surprise of the posting are the black and white photographs of Morris Engel.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to the Brooklyn Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Strobridge Lithographing Company. 'The great Forepaugh & Sells Brothers shows combined' c. 1899 from the exhibition 'Coney Island: Visions of an American Dreamland, 1861-2008', Nov 2015 - March 2016

Strobridge Lithographing Company
The great Forepaugh & Sells Brothers shows combined. Terrific flights over ponderous elephants by a company of twenty five splendid artists in a great contest for valuable prizes, introducing high, long distance, layout, twisting, single and double somersault leapers, enlivened by mirth provoking comedy surprises.
c. 1899
Promotional poster for Forepaugh & Sells Brothers circus
Colour lithograph poster

“The mixed-media exhibit captures Coney Island’s campy, trippy aesthetic with a hodgepodge of photographs by the likes of Walker Evans, Weegee, Bruce Davidson, and Diane Arbus (since Coney Island was basically tailor-made for a Diane Arbus photo shoot). Also on view are pastoral seascapes from the 1800s; sideshow posters galore; a turn-of-the-century gambling wheel and carousel animals presented like sculpture; film stills from Woody Allen’s Annie Hall and Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream; and a modernist abstract composition by Frank Stella. With red and yellow stripes around a blue square, Stella distills the sand and sea and sun into a primary-colored flag for Brooklyn’s most famous destination.

In these pictures, Coney Island serves as a microcosm of American mass culture as a whole, and the chronology of 140 art objects here chart major societal shifts, from the dawn of the Great Depression to desegregation. “The modern American mass-culture industry was born at Coney Island, and the constant novelty of the resort made it a seductively liberating subject for artists,” Dr Robin Jaffee Frank, curator of the exhibit, which Wadsworth Athenaeum helped organize, said in a statement. “What these artists saw from 1861 to 2008 at Coney Island, and the varied ways in which they chose to portray it, mirrored the aspirations and disappointments of the era and the country. Taken together, these tableaux of wonder and menace, hope and despair, dreams and nightmares become metaphors for the collective soul of a nation.”

Carey Dunne. “Dreamland as Muse: A Look Back at 150 Years of Coney Island Art, Photography, and Film,” on the Brooklyn Magazine website 17/08/2015 [Online] Cited 02/01/2016

Strobridge Lithographing Company
The Barnum & Bailey Greatest Show on Earth /The Great Coney Island Water Carnival /Remarkable Head-Foremost Dives from Enormous Heights into Shallow Depths of Water
1898
Colour lithograph poster
30 1/6 x 38 3/4 in. (76.6 x 98.4 cm)
Cincinnati Art Museum; Gift of the Strobridge Lithographing Company

Strobridge Lithographing Company
Beach and boardwalk scenes, Coney Island
c. 1898
Colour lithograph foldout poster
approx. 21 feet long

George Bradford Brainerd (American, 1845-1887)
Bathers, Steel Pier, Coney Island
c. 1880-1885, printed 1940s
Gelatin silver photograph
7 5/8 x 12 in. (19.4 x 30.5cm)
Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn Museum Collection
Photo: Sarah DeSantis, Brooklyn Museum

Edgar S. Thomson (American, active 1890s-1900s)
Coney Island
1897
Gelatin dry glass plate negative
4 x 5 in. (10.2 x 12.7cm)
Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn Museum/Brooklyn Public Library, Brooklyn Collection
Photo: Althea Morin, Brooklyn Museum

Edgar S. Thomson (American, active 1890s-1900s) 'Coney Island' 1897 (detail)

Edgar S. Thomson (American, active 1890s-1900s)
Coney Island (detail)
1897
Gelatin dry glass plate negative
4 x 5 in. (10.2 x 12.7cm)
Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn Museum/Brooklyn Public Library, Brooklyn Collection
Photo: Althea Morin, Brooklyn Museum

William Merritt Chase (American, 1849-1916)
Landscape, near Coney Island
c. 1886
Oil on panel
8 1/8 x 12 5/8 in. (20.6 x 32cm)
The Hyde Collection, Glens Falls, New York; Gift of Mary H. Beeman to the Pruyn Family Collection

Joseph Stella (American born Italy, 1877-1946)
Battle of Lights, Coney Island, Mardi Gras
1913-1914
Oil on canvas
77 by 84 3/4 inches
Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Conn.

“In 1913, to celebrate Mardi Gras, Joseph Stella took a bus ride to Coney Island that changed his life. The Italian immigrant painter remembered that up until this point he had been “struggling … working along the lines of the old masters, seeking to portray a civilization long since dead.” He continued:

“Arriving at the Island I was instantly struck by the dazzling array of lights. It seemed as if they were in conflict. I was struck with the thought that here was what I had been unconsciously seeking for so many years… On the spot was born the idea for my first truly great picture.” (Joseph Stella, “I Knew Him When (1924),” in Barbara Haskell, ed., Joseph Stella, New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, distributed by Harry N. Abrams, 1994, p. 206)

The result of Stella’s revelation, the enormous oil painting Battle of Lights, Coney Island, Mardi Gras (1913-1914), was the inspiration for the traveling exhibition Coney Island: Visions of an American Dreamland, 1861-2008…

If the broken planes and neon coloring of Stella’s painting suggest the exhilaration of contemporary life, they also express dislocation and alienation. Stella himself spoke of the “dangerous pleasures” of Coney Island, implying that its unleashing of desires could provoke anxiety (Joseph Stella, “Autobiographical Notes (1946),” in Barbara Haskell, ed., Joseph Stella, p. 213). And yet for all of the dynamism of Stella’s aesthetic, his painting’s sweeping arabesques are checked by the rectangle of the picture plane, and its decorative unity distances the disruptive power of its discordant subjects. The contained anarchy of Stella’s painting is the perfect metaphor for Coney Island’s manipulation and control of the unruly masses, who, at the end of the day, go back to their homes and their ordered existence.

Looking closely at Battle of Lights we might be able to make out fragments of actual rides and even shapes that suggest people, but Stella’s abstraction obscures the luridness of the sideshow acts, the drunk sailors, the amorous couples and the scantily dressed bathers who were so much a part of the allure and menace of Coney Island.”

Text from Jonathan Weinberg “Coney Island Forever,” on the Art in America website, October 1st 2015 [Online] Cited 14/12/2015.

Irving Underhill (American, 1872-1960)
Luna Park and Surf Avenue, Coney Island
1912
Gelatin dry glass plate negative
Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn Museum/Brooklyn Public Library, Brooklyn Collection
Photo: Althea Morin, Brooklyn Museum

Irving Underhill (American, 1872-1960). 'Luna Park and Surf Avenue, Coney Island' 1912 (detail)

Irving Underhill (American, 1872-1960)
Luna Park and Surf Avenue, Coney Island (detail)
1912
Gelatin dry glass plate negative
Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn Museum/Brooklyn Public Library, Brooklyn Collection
Photo: Althea Morin, Brooklyn Museum

Roscoe Fatty Arbuckle (director)
Fatty Arbuckle and Buster Keaton (actors)
Coney Island
1917
25 mins – short, comedy

The 5th film starring the duo of Buster Keaton & Fatty Arbuckle, who also directed. Taking place at the Coney Island amusement park of New York City, it’s notable as the only film where Buster Keaton is seen laughing as this is before he developed his “Great Stoneface” persona.

Gambling Wheel
1900-1920
Wood, glass, metal
65 x 14 in. (165.1 x 35.6cm)
Collection of The New-York Historical Society; Purchase

Charles Carmel (American born Russia, 1865-1931)
Carousel Horse with Raised Head, Coney Island, Brooklyn, New York
c. 1914
Paint on wood, jewels, glass eyes, horsehair tail
62 x 58 x 14 in. (157.5 x 147.3 x 36.6cm)
Collection of American Folk Art Museum, New York; Gift of Laura Harding

Born in Russia in 1865, Charles Carmel and his young bride immigrated to the U.S. in 1883 and lived in Brooklyn for most of their lives. Charles was a perfectionist in his work and a disciplinarian with his family. Their home was located close to Prospect Park and its stable of riding horses, which served as a source of inspiration for Charles’ carousel horse carving work. It is generally accepted that Charles Carmel carved carousel horses from 1905 to 1920, and sold his work to all of the major carousel manufacturers of the time including Dolle, Borelli, Murphy, and Mangels.

In 1911 Charles invested most of his money in a newly constructed carousel that he intended to operate on Coney Island. The day before the park was to open, a fire totally destroyed the amusement park along with the uninsured carousel. This was a devastating financial blow to the Carmel family. Later his health deteriorated due to diabetes and arthritis until Charles closed his shop and carved a few hours a day at home, filling orders. Charles died in 1933 of cancer, but his legacy lives on with the exquisite carousel animals that he produced throughout his life.

Text from the Gesa Carousel of Dreams website [Online] Cited 01/01/2016. No longer available online

Anonymous artist
Looping the Loop, Coney Island
1901-1910
Postcard
Private Collection

Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975)
Couple at Coney Island, New York
1928
Gelatin silver print
8 x 5 13/16 inches
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Ford Motor Company Collection. Gift of Ford Motor Company and John C. Waddell, 1987

Edward J. Kelty (American, 1888-1967)
X-ray of Ajax, “The Sword Swallower”
1928
20 x 20 inches
Collection of Ken Harck

Edward J. Kelty (American, 1888-1967)
Wonderland Circus Sideshow, Coney Island
1929
Collection of Ken Harck
© Edward J. Kelty

Edward J. Kelty (American, 1888-1967)
Harlem Black Birds, Coney Island
1930
12 x 20 in. (30.5 x 50.8cm)
Collection of Ken Harck
© Edward J. Kelty

Edward J. Kelty (American, 1888-1967) 'Harlem Black Birds, Coney Island' 1930 (detail)

Edward J. Kelty (American, 1888-1967)
Harlem Black Birds, Coney Island (detail)
1930
12 x 20 in. (30.5 x 50.8cm)
Collection of Ken Harck
© Edward J. Kelty

Milton Avery (American, 1885-1965)
The Steeplechase, Coney Island
1929
Oil on canvas, 32 x 40 in. (81.3 x 101.6cm)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Gift of Sally M. Avery, 1984
Photo: © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, courtesy of Art Resource, New York
© 2013 Milton Avery Trust/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Paul Cadmus (American, 1904-1999)
Coney Island
1934
Oil on canvas
32 7/16 x 36 5/16 inches
Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Gift of Peter Paanakker

Paul Cadmus’s “Coney Island” takes a satirical view of American vacationers. The fleshy members of the human pyramid seem carefree and frivolous in light of the ominous rise to power of the Nazi Party in Germany (Hitler’s face can be seen printed on the magazine resting on the sleeping man’s chest at the bottom of the painting).

“… Paul Cadmus, who shared Marsh’s use of old-master forms and techniques but not his heterosexuality, filled his beach painting with purposely ugly women and mostly beautiful men. The main action in Cadmus’s Coney Island (1934) is the human pyramid of men and women at its center. And yet the Adonis who lies on his stomach in the foreground has no interest in this heterosexual game. Instead, he looks off at another muscular youth farther down the beach. For Marsh, Cadmus and their fellow Coney Island artists, the chance to gaze unabashedly at the body of a stranger was one of the great pleasures of the milieu.

… traditional figuration, like that of Cadmus and Marsh, is so dominant that the exhibition arguably offers an alternate history of American art – one in which the modernist painting of Milton Avery or Frank Stella seems like a sideshow. Breaking out of the canon of modernism, “Coney Island” puts new focus on neglected realist painters like Harry Roseland, Robert Riggs, George Tooker and a particular favorite of mine, Henry Koerner.”

Text from Jonathan Weinberg “Coney Island Forever,” on the Art in America website, October 1st 2015 [Online] Cited 14/12/2015.

Curator notes

Coney Island was the first painting Cadmus made after he ceased working for the federally sponsored Public Works of Art Project. It is typical of his paintings of the period in both theme and form. Cadmus viewed the prosaic activity of bathing on a beach in devastatingly satirical terms. Poking fun at the bathers’ carefree pleasures, Cadmus accumulated an odd assortment of bulging, burnt bodies. The bathers are oblivious to their ridiculous appearance and uncouth behaviour. Swarming the beach, their bodies are strangely intertwined, their faces smiling inanely. Everything is exaggerated, the color verging on the garish to intensify their grossness. In the 1930s Cadmus used oil paint almost as if it were a graphic medium, consequently Coney Island looks more like a tinted drawing than a painting. His small, exacting brushstrokes impart a flickering quality to the surface, which intensifies the impression that the figures are in constant motion. Cadmus actually began to sketch the scene on Martha’s Vineyard, before he visited Coney Island. He was attracted to the Brooklyn beach because it offered him the opportunity to delineate the human figure with as little clothing as possible. Moreover, he considered the beach scene to be a classical subject. His treatment, however, is rather baroque.

As was his friend Reginald Marsh, Cadmus was attracted to the elaborate compositions of old master paintings. Coney Island, with its seminude figures arranged in complex groupings, their bodies twisted and in constant motion, was for Cadmus the twentieth-century version of a baroque allegorical composition. Cadmus claimed that his intent was not to be sensational, but when the painting was exhibited in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s second biennial, it suffered the same hostile reception as did his earlier The Fleet’s In!. The Coney Island Showmen’s League, a local trade group, denounced the painting as offensive and inaccurate and threatened a libel suit if the painting was not removed from the exhibition. According to the artist’s incomplete records, it seems that the painting was rejected from several annual exhibitions to which it was submitted soon after it was shown at the Whitney biennial, probably because of the controversy it stirred. In 1935 Cadmus produced an etching from a photograph of the painting in the hope that it would reach a larger public. In the etching the image is reversed but otherwise differs only in a few minor details.

Exhibition Label, 1997

Cadmus was one of the most controversial American artists of the 1930s. His satirical perspective made people uncomfortable, and consequently reviewers sometimes questioned the decency of his rollicking scenes of New York City life. Coney Island, with its amusement park and beach on the south shore of Brooklyn, was a favourite destination of working-class people. Rather than glamorise labourers enjoying their day off, Cadmus poked fun at these beachgoers and their bulging, entangled bodies. They seem oblivious to their sunburnt flesh and the silliness of their activities. Coney Island met a particularly hostile reception when it was first exhibited. A businessman organisation associated with the amusement park denounced the painting as offensive, resulting in its rejection from subsequent exhibitions. Cadmus’s meticulous painting technique – pigments applied with thin, pencil like strokes – enabled him to delineate minute detail. For example, the viewer can read the headline about Hitler in the newspaper held by the reclining man in the foreground. This subtle reference to the horrifying political developments abroad underscores the inanities of the beachgoers. Carved in wood, this simple frame was rubbed with pigment rather than gilded, a treatment that came into fashion during World War I, as gold became scarce.

Text from the LACMA website [Online] Cited 01/01/2016.

Reginald Marsh (American, 1898-1954)
Pip and Flip
1932
Tempera on paper mounted on canvas
48 1/4 x 48 1/4 in.
Terra Foundation for American Art, Chicago
Daniel J. Terra Collection

“Such bodies were the great subjects of Reginald Marsh. Instead of Stella’s spirals of lights abstracted and seen from a distance, Marsh’s George C. Tilyou’s Steeplechase Park (1936) gives us a close-up view of the Human Roulette Wheel where young women are spun into all kinds of unladylike postures. For the Yale-educated Marsh, Coney Island was a chance to go “slumming,” to mingle with the lower classes on the beach and in the amusement parks. Hostile to modernism and abstract art, he reimagined bathers and sideshow audiences in poses derived from Michelangelo and Rubens. And yet, like Stella, Marsh overpacked his Coney Island paintings so that every inch is activated and in motion like a carnival ride. The highly compressed space of a Marsh painting like Pip and Flip (1932, above), with its collage-like play of rectangular billboards advertising human-oddity sideshows, would be unthinkable without the precedent of Cubism that he supposedly detested.”

Text from Jonathan Weinberg “Coney Island Forever,” on the Art in America website, October 1st 2015 [Online] Cited 14/12/2015.

Human Roulette Wheel at Steeplechase Park, Coney Island, early 1900s

Reginald Marsh (American, 1898-1954)
Wooden Horses
1936
Tempera on board, 24 x 40 in. (61 x 101.6cm)
Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut; The Dorothy Clark Archibald and Thomas L. Archibald Fund, The Krieble Family Fund for American Art, The American Paintings Purchase Fund, and The Ella Gallup Sumner and Mary Catlin Sumner Collection Fund
Photo: © 2013 Estate of Reginald Marsh/Art Students League, New York/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Reginald Marsh (American, 1898-1954)
George Tilyou’s Steeplechase Park
1936
Oil and egg tempera on linen mounted on fiberboard
30 1/8 x 40 1/8 in. (76.5 x 101.8cm)
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Gift of the Sara Roby Foundation

Steeplechase Mechanical Horse Ride at Steeplechase Park, Coney Island, early 1900s

The spirit of Coney Island comes alive with Coney Island: Visions of an American Dreamland, 1861-2008 on view at the Brooklyn Museum. The exhibition traces the evolution of the Coney Island phenomenon from tourist destination during the Civil War to the World’s Greatest Playground to a site of nostalgia. Covering a period of 150 years, the exhibition features 140 objects, including paintings, drawings, photographs, prints, posters, artefacts, carousel animals, ephemera, and film clips. Also on view is Forever Coney, 42 photographs from the Brooklyn Museum collection.

An extraordinary array of artists have viewed Coney Island as a microcosm of the American experience and used their works to investigate the area as both a place and an idea. Coney Island: Visions of an American Dreamland offers up early depictions of “the people’s beach” by Impressionists William Merritt Chase and John Henry Twachtman; modernist depictions of the amusement park by Joseph Stella; Depression-era scenes of cheap thrills by Reginald Marsh; photographs by Walker Evans, Diane Arbus, Weegee, and Bruce Davidson; and contemporary works by Daze and Swoon.

“The modern American mass-culture industry was born at Coney Island, and the constant novelty of the resort made it a seductively liberating subject for artists,” said Dr Robin Jaffee Frank, exhibition curator. “What these artists saw from 1861 to 2008 at Coney Island, and the varied ways in which they chose to portray it, mirrored the aspirations and disappointments of the era and the country. Taken together, these tableaux of wonder and menace, hope and despair, dreams and nightmares become metaphors for the collective soul of a nation.”

Coney Island: Visions of an American Dreamland, 1861-2008 is organised by the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut. The Brooklyn presentation is organised by Connie H. Choi, Assistant Curator, Arts of the Americas and Europe, Brooklyn Museum. A fully illustrated 304-page catalogue, co-published by Yale University Press and the Wadsworth Athenaeum, incorporates the first continuous visual analysis of great works of art about Coney Island by Dr Frank as well as essays by distinguished cultural historians.

Forever Coney

As one of America’s first seaside resorts, Coney Island has attracted adventurous visitors and undergone multiple transformations, inspiring photographers since the mid-nineteenth century. Forever Coney: Photographs from the Brooklyn Museum Collection features forty-two images that celebrate the people and places that make up Coney Island. The earliest works, taken by photographers such as George Bradford Brainerd and Irving Underhill, document the resort from the post-Civil War period through the turn of the twentieth century. Later artists such as Harry Lapow and Stephen Salmieri have photographed the many personalities that have passed through the site.

The photographers included in this exhibition are George Bradford Brainerd, Lynn Hyman Butler, Anita Chernewski, Victor Friedman, Kim Iacono, Sidney Kerner, Harry Lapow, Nathan Lerner, Jack Lessinger, H.S. Lewis, John L. Murphy, Ben Ross, Stephen Salmieri, Edgar S. Thomson, Arthur Tress, Irving Underhill, Breading G. Way, Eugene Wemlinger, and Harvey R. Zipkin. Forever Coney: Photographs from the Brooklyn Museum Collection is organized by Connie H. Choi, Assistant Curator of American Art, Brooklyn Museum. It is presented in conjunction with the exhibition Coney Island: Visions of an American Dreamland, 1861-2008.

Text from the Brooklyn Museum website

Morris Engel (American, 1918-2005)
Coney Island Embrace, New York City
1938
Gelatin silver print
10 9/16 x 11 1/2 inches
Orkin/Engel Film and Photo Archive, New York
© Morris Engel

Morris Engel (American, 1918-2005)
Mother with Children
1938
Gelatin silver print
8 x 10 inches
Orkin/Engel Film and Photo Archive, New York

Nieman Studios, Inc., Chicago
Shackles the Great
1940
Sideshow banner
118 x 108 inches
Collection of Ken Harck

Quito, Human Octopus
1940
Sideshow banner
140 x 117 inches
Collection of Ken Harck

Anonymous maker. 'Steeplechase Funny Face' Nd

Steeplechase Funny Face
Nd
Painted metal
23 inches
Collection of Ken Harck

Henry Koerner (American born Austria, 1915-1991)
The Barker’s Booth
1948-1949
Oil on Masonite
26 x 40 1/2 in. (66 x 102.9cm)
Collection of Alice A. Grossman

George Tooker (American, 1920-2011)
Coney Island
1948
Egg tempera on gesso panel
19 1/4 x 26 1/4 inches
Curtis Galleries, Minneapolis

George Tooker’s thought-provoking “Coney Island” places traditional beach goers in a Pietà tableau.

Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American, 1899-1968) 'Coney Island' 1940

Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American, 1899-1968)
Coney Island Beach
1940
Gelatin silver print
8 1/8 x 10 inches
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Ford Motor Company Collection, Gift of Ford Motor Company and John C. Waddell, 1987

Looking at Weegee’s photograph, it is easy to be carried away with longing for what seems like a simpler and happier time. Undoubtedly, the picture’s sense of naïve jubilation was part of its appeal for Red Grooms, who essentially copied the image in paint for Weegee 1940 (1998-1999). And yet, like much at Coney Island, Weegee’s photograph is an illusion. Taken when Europe was already at war and the Depression had not yet ended, its merriment was only a momentary respite.

Text from Jonathan Weinberg “Coney Island Forever,” on the Art in America website, October 1st 2015 [Online] Cited 14/12/2015.

Unknown artist
Modern Venus of 1947
Coney Island, 1947
Gelatin silver photograph
10 3/4 x 13 7/8 in. (27.3 x 35.2cm)
Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn Museum Collection
Photo: Christine Gant, Brooklyn Museum

Unknown artist. 'Modern Venus of 1947, Coney Island, 1947' (detail)

Unknown artist
Modern Venus of 1947 (detail)
Coney Island, 1947
Gelatin silver photograph
10 3/4 x 13 7/8 in. (27.3 x 35.2cm)
Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn Museum Collection
Photo: Christine Gant, Brooklyn Museum

Homer Page (American, 1918-1985)
Coney Island
July 30, 1949
Gelatin silver print
11 x 14 in. (27.9 x 35.6cm)
The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri; Gift of the Hall Family Foundation
© Homer Page
Photo: John Lamberton

Morris Engel (American, 1918-2005) 'Little Fugitive', production still, 1953

Morris Engel (American, 1918-2005)
Under the Boardwalk, Coney Island [Production still from Little Fugitive]
1953
Gelatin silver print
8 x 10 inches
Orkin/Engel Film and Photo Archive, New York

Raymond Abrashkin (as “Ray Ashley”), Morris Engel and Ruth Orkin (directors)
Little Fugitive
1953

Joey, a young boy, runs away to Coney Island after he is tricked into believing he has killed his older brother. Joey collects glass bottles and turns them into money, which he uses to ride the rides.

“Little Fugitive (1953), one of the most beautiful films featured in the exhibition, conveys the feeling of moving through the enormous crowds in Weegee’s photograph. The creation of two master still photographers, Morris Engel and Ruth Orkin, and writer Ray Ashley, the film tells the story of Joey, a seven-year-old boy who runs away to Coney Island. But if Joey initially exalts in the freedom of being lost in the crowd, he feels abandoned when the amusement park closes down. Robert Frank’s photograph from the same year of a man asleep on a deserted beach with the Parachute Tower at his back [see below] echoes the film’s invocation of the resort’s fleeting joys. When Coney Island empties out it reveals the superficiality and pathos of the fantasies it evokes. In 1894, even before the big amusement parks were built, Stephen Crane mused about how in winter the “mammoth” hotels became “gaunt and hollow, impassively and stolidly suffering from an enormous hunger for the public.” (Stephen Crane, “Coney Island’s Failing Days,” in A Coney Island Reader, p. 69).”

Text from Jonathan Weinberg “Coney Island Forever,” on the Art in America website, October 1st 2015 [Online] Cited 14/12/2015.

Installation of view of the exhibition 'Coney Island: Visions of an American Dreamland, 1861-2008' at the Brooklyn Museum

Installation of view of the exhibition 'Coney Island: Visions of an American Dreamland, 1861-2008' at the Brooklyn Museum showing at centre left, 'Cyclops Head from Spook-A-Rama' c. 1955

Installation of view of the exhibition 'Coney Island: Visions of an American Dreamland, 1861-2008' at the Brooklyn Museum showing 'Cyclops Head from Spook-A-Rama' c. 1955

Installation of views of the exhibition Coney Island: Visions of an American Dreamland, 1861-2008 at the Brooklyn Museum, New York

Cyclops Head from Spook-A-Rama
c. 1955
Mixed media
60 x 47 x 42 inches
The Vourderis Family. Deno’s Wonder Wheel

Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984)
Coney Island, New York City, N.Y.,
1952
Silver bromide
8 1/2 x 13 inches
Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Conn. Gift of Barbara and James L. Melcher

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933) 'Two Youths, Coney Island'From the series 'Brooklyn Gang, 1958' print c. 1965

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933)
Untitled (Cathy and Cigarette Machine), from the series Brooklyn Gang
1959, printed later
Gelatin silver print
Image: 8 3/8 x 12 5/8
Sheet: 11 x 14 inches
Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Conn. The Heinz Family Fund

Diane Arbus (American, 1923-1971)
The House of Horrors
1961
Gelatin silver print
14 1/2 x 14 inches
Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

“As its carnival rides and sideshows became increasingly dated in the 1960s, Coney Island was unable to maintain even the phony thrills that Miller derided in the 1930s. In Diane Arbus’s The House of Horrors (1961), the fake skeleton and the cartoon ape mask aren’t as scary as the ride’s sorry state and the impression that something terrible has driven all the people away. (The 1970 low-budget slasher film Carnival of Blood, not included in the exhibition, brilliantly uses this seediness to create a sense of uncanny doom.) In Arnold Mesches’s painting Anomie 1991: Winged Victory (1991), the creaky rides mingle with images of war, turning dreamland into an apocalyptic nightmare.”

Text from Jonathan Weinberg “Coney Island Forever,” on the Art in America website, October 1st 2015 [Online] Cited 14/12/2015.

Diane Arbus (American, 1923-1971)
Couple Arguing, Coney Island, N.Y.,
1960
Vintage gelatin silver print
Image: 8 1/2 x 6 5/8 inches
Sheet: 14 x 11 inches
Collection Thomas H. Lee and Ann Tenenbaum

Robert Frank (American, 1924-2019) ‘Coney Island' 4th of July, 1958

Robert Frank (American, 1924-2019)
Coney Island
July 4, 1958
15 5/8 x 11 9/16 inches
Gelatin silver print
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Robert Frank Collection. Gift of the Richard Florsheim Art Fund and an Anonymous Donor

Frank Stella (American, b. 1936)
Coney Island
1958
Oil on canvas
85 1/4 x 78 3/4 inches
Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Conn. Gift of Larom B. Munson, B.A. 1951

Harry Lapow (American, 1909-1982)
Untitled (Buried Alive)
c. 1960s or 1970s
Gelatin silver photograph
12 1/8 x 9 1/16 in. (30.8 x 23cm)
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of the artist
© Estate of Harry Lapow
Photo: Sarah DeSantis, Brooklyn Museum

Harry Lapow began frequenting Coney Island to capture quirks of the beach and boardwalk after receiving a Ciroflex camera on his forty-third birthday. He was intrigued by the camera’s ability to isolate details and fleeting moments of everyday life. Here, a toddler’s crossed legs appear above the head of a buried woman whose eyes are covered by a floral towel. In cropping this beach sighting, Lapow crafts a surprising juxtaposition, forming an unlikely dynamic between the lively child and the masked adult.

Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933)
Untitled
July 4, 1962
Gelatin silver print
11 x 14 inches
Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

Stephen Salmieri (American, b. 1945)
Coney Island
1971
Gelatin silver photograph
8 x 10 1/8 in. (20.3 x 25.7cm)
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Edward Klein
© Stephen Salmieri
Photo: Sarah DeSantis, Brooklyn Museum

Harvey Stein (American, b. 1941)
The Hug: Closed Eyes and Smile
1982
Digital, inkjet archival print
13 x 19 in. (33 x 48.3cm)
Collection of the artist
© Harvey Stein, 2011

Red Grooms (American, b. 1937)
Weegee 1940
1998-1999
Acrylic on paper
56 1/8 x 62 in. (142.6 x 157.5cm)
Private Collection
© 2013 Red Grooms/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Photo: Courtesy of Marlborough Gallery, New York

Arnold Mesches (American, 1923-2016)
Anomie 1991: Winged Victory
1991
Acrylic on canvas
92 x 135 in. (233.7 x 342.9cm)
The San Diego Museum of Art; Museum purchase with partial funding from the Richard Florsheim Art Fund
© 2013 Arnold Mesches

Daze (American, b. 1962)
Coney Island Pier
1995
Oil on canvas
60 x 80 in. (152.4 x 203.2cm)
Collection of the artist

Daze (American, b. 1962) 'Kiddlyand Spirits' 1995

Daze (American, b. 1962)
Kiddyland Spirits
1995
Oil on canvas
42 x 71 inches
Collection of the artist

Requiem for a Dream, production still, directed by Darren Aronofsky, 2000

Marie Roberts (American, b. 1954)
A Congress of Curious Peoples
2005
Acrylic on unstretched canvas
84 x 120 in. (213.4 x 304.8cm)
Collection of Liz and Marc Hartzman

Swoon
Coney, Early Evening
2005
Linoleum print on Mylar
Variable; overall: 213 x 39 x 113 inches
Brooklyn Museum. Healy Purchase Fund B, Emily Winthrop Miles Fund, and Designated Purchase Fund

Swoon’s “Coney, Early Evening” suspends youthful figures intertwined throughout the iconic tracks of a Coney Island roller coaster.

Frederick Brosen (American, b. 1954)
Fortune Teller, Jones Walk, Coney Island
2008
Watercolor over graphite on paper
17 7/8 x 11 1/4 in. (45.4 x 28.6cm)
Courtesy of Hirschl & Adler Modern, New York
© 2013 Frederick Brosen/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Photo: Joshua Nefsky, courtesy of Hirschl & Adler Modern, New York

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Exhibition: ‘When we share more than ever’ at Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg

Exhibition dates: 19th June – 20th September, 2015

A project for the Triennial of Photography Hamburg 2015

Curators: Dr des. Esther Ruelfs and Teresa Gruber

Invited artists: Laia Abril, Ai Weiwei, Regula Bochsler, Natalie Bookchin, Heman Chong, Aurélien Froment, David Horvitz, Trevor Paglen, Doug Rickard, Taryn Simon, Jens Sundheim, Penelope Umbrico | From the Photography and New Media Collection of the MKG: Fratelli Alinari, Hanns-Jörg Anders, Nobuyoshi Araki, Francis Bedford, Félix Bonfils, Adolphe Braun, Natascha A. Brunswick, Atelier d’Ora / Benda, Minya Diez-Dührkoop, Rudolf Dührkoop, Harold E. Edgerton, Tsuneo Enari, Andreas Feininger, Lotte Genzsch, Johann Hamann, Theodor und Oscar Hofmeister, Thomas Höpker, Lotte Jacobi, Gertrude Käsebier, Kaku Kurita, Atelier Manassé, Hansi Müller-Schorp, Eardweard Muybridge, Arnold Newman, Terry Richardson, Max Scheler, Hildi Schmidt-Heins, Hiromi Tsuchida, Carl Strüwe, Léon Vidal, and more

Doug Rickard (American, b. 1968) '95zLs' 2012 from the exhibition 'When we share more than ever' at Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg, June - Sept, 2015

Doug Rickard (American, b. 1968)
95zLs
2012
From the series N.A., 2011-2014
Archival Pigment Print
Courtesy Yossi Milo Gallery, New York
© Doug Rickard

A fascinating exhibition about the processes of archiving and transferring images and the associated interaction, combining historic and contemporary images to illuminate various chapters: “Sharing a Portrait,” “Sharing a Group,” “Sharing Memories,” “Sharing a Product,” “Sharing Lust,” “Sharing Evidence,” “Sharing Knowledge,” “Sharing the World,” “Sharing a Collection,” and “Sharing Photographs”.

“The chapters juxtapose historical and contemporary works in order to illuminate how the use and function of photographic images have changed and which aspects have remained the same despite the digital revolution. The exhibition begins with photography used in the service of people: to record a life, create a sense of community, or share memories. The following chapters deal with applied contexts, such as advertising photographs, erotic photography, photojournalism, scientific photography, and travel photos.”

“Conceived in archive format, the exhibition explores the archive’s possible forms and uses. The featured works from the collection were selected from the MKG’s holdings of some 75,000 photographs to show how different photographic practices have been assimilated over the years. The springboard for our reflections was the question of how the digital era of picture sharing has changed the function of a museum collection of photography, seeing as today digital image collections are just a mouse click away on online archives such as Google Images.”

But it could have been so much more, especially with 75,000 photographs to choose from. Looking at the plan for the exhibition and viewing the checklist would suggest that the small amount of work in each of the ten chapters leaves little room for any of the themes to be investigated in depth. Any one of these chapters would have made an excellent exhibition in its own right. What an opportunity missed for a series of major exhibitions that examined each important theme.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Text in the posting is from the booklet When We Share More Than Ever.

Editors: Sabine Schulze, Esther Ruelfs, Teresa Gruber
Text editors: Esther Ruelfs, Teresa Gruber
Authors: Teresa Gruber (TG), Beate Pittnauer (BP), Esther Ruelfs (ER), Sven Schumacher (SS), Annika Sellmann (AS), Taryn Simon (TS), Johan Simonsen (JS), Emma Stenger (ES) Grafikdesign
Graphic design exhibition and booklet: Studio Mahr
Translation German-English: Jennifer Taylor

Sharing memories

Creating mementoes is one of the central functions of photography. In David Horvitz’s case, it is the mobile phone camera that gives two people a feeling of togetherness. The bond is created through an action. On two different continents, both people stand at the seaside at the same time, recording and sending images of the sunrise and sunset with their iPhones.

Photography connects us with the subject or the person depicted – even beyond the bounds of the time. The photo is an imprint; it transmits to us something that was once really there. Like a fingerprint or a footprint, it remains closely related to what it captures. This special quality of photography predestined it from the start to be a medium of memory. The daguerreotype of a little girl presented in the exhibition is framed by a braid of the child’s hair. The idea of carrying part of a loved one with us and thus generating a special feeling of closeness is reflected in the practice of making friendship or mourning jewellery out of hair – and in the way we treasure portrait photographs as keepsakes of those we love.

Emotional relationships can also be expressed by a certain photographic motif or by the body language of the sitters. The arms of the sisters in the photo by Gertrude Käsebier are closely intertwined, as are the hands of the couple in the daguerreotype by Carl Ferdinand Stelzner. The relationship between photographer and subject may also be the focus of the work. Natascha Brunswick as well as Rudolf Dührkoop and Käsebier use the camera, for example, to capture and hold onto intimate moments with their own families.

Dr des. Esther Ruelfs

David Horvitz (American, b. 1982)
The Distance of a Day
2013
Digital video on two iPhones, 12 min.
Courtesy Chert, Berlin
© David Horvitz

David Horvitz

With artworks in the form of books, photographs, installations, and actions, David Horvitz often explores varying conceptions of time and space, as well as interpersonal relationships and the dissemination of images via the internet. His work The Distance of a Day brings together all of these topics. With reference to the linguistic origin of the word “journey,” which defined the distance a traveler could cover in a day, Horvitz looks for two places located at opposite ends of the globe that are exactly one day apart. While his mother watches the sun set on a beach in his native California, the artist observes the sun rising over a Maldives island. Both document their simultaneous impressions with an iPhone, a device that today serves both for temporal and spatial orientation and which, as a communication medium, enables us to overcome the limits of space and time. Because it is a conceptual part of the performance, the iPhone is also used in the exhibition as a playback device.

Teresa Gruber

Carl Ferdinand Stelzner (German, 1805-1894)
Unknown couple
1830-1880
Framed daguerrotype
15.2 x 17.2cm
© Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg

Carl Ferdinand Stelzner (German, 1805-1894) 'Unknown couple' 1830-1880 (detail)

Carl Ferdinand Stelzner (German, 1805-1894)
Unknown couple (detail)
1830-1880
Framed daguerrotype
15.2 x 17.2cm
© Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg

Sharing a portrait

“Maxime carried portraits of actresses in every pocket. He even had one in his cigarette case. From time to time he cleared them all out and moved the ladies into an album (…) which already contained the portraits of Renee’s friends.”

This scene from Émile Zola’s The Kill testifies to the fad that started in the 1860s for mass-produced photographic calling cards, or “cartes de visite.” Contemporaries spoke of “cartomania” – long before anyone could imagine an artist like Ai Weiwei, who has posted 7,142 photographs on his Instagram profile since 2014. With the “invasion of the new calling card pictures,” photography left the private sphere of the middle-class family and fostered new social relationships. The demand for images of celebrities from politics, art, and literature grew as well.

“Galleries of contemporaries” and artist portraits like those produced by Lotte Jacobi and Arnold Newman responded to an avid interest in the physical and physiognomic appearance of well-known people. The photographers tried to capture not only the person’s likeness but also his character, whether inclose-ups that zero in on individual facial expressions or in staged portraits in which the surroundings give clues to the sitter’s personality.

What has changed since then is above all how we handle such images. The photographs that Minya Diez-Dührkoop took of the upper-class daughter Renate Scholz trace her growth and development in pleasingly composed studio portraits. In today’s Internet communities and on smartphones by contrast we encounter the portrait as a profile picture. This signature image, changeable at any time, may be a selfie or selected from a steadily growing pool of snapshots shared among friends.

Dr des. Esther Ruelfs

Ai Weiwei (Chinese, b. 1957)
16 June, 2014
Photo posted on Instagram, (https://instagram.com/aiww/)
Courtesy Ai Weiwei Studio
© Ai Weiwei

Ai Weiwei (Chinese, b. 1957)
March 9, 2015
Photo posted on Instagram, (https://instagram.com/aiww/)
Courtesy Ai Weiwei Studio
© Ai Weiwei

Ai Weiwei (Chinese, b. 1957)
January 30, 2015
Photo posted on Instagram, (https://instagram.com/aiww/)
Courtesy Ai Weiwei Studio
© Ai Weiwei

Minya Diez-Dührkoop (German, 1873-1929)
Portraits of Renate Scholz
1920-1939
Silver gelatine prints, various formats
© Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg

Minya Diez-Dührkoop (German, 1873-1929) 'Portraits of Renate Scholz' 1920-1939 (detail)

Minya Diez-Dührkoop (German, 1873-1929)
Portrait of Renate Scholz (detail)
1920-1939
Silver gelatine prints, various formats
© Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg

Minya Diez-Dührkoop. 'Portraits of Renate Scholz' 1920-1939 (detail)

Minya Diez-Dührkoop (German, 1873-1929)
Portrait of Renate Scholz (detail)
1920-1939
Silver gelatine prints, various formats
© Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg

Sharing a group

The photography pioneer William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877) notes in his serialised book The Pencil of Nature, published in six parts between 1844 and 1846: “Groups of figures take no longer time to obtain than single figures would require, since the camera depicts them all at once, however numerous they may be.” For groups such as the middle-class family, colleagues in a profession or company, or leisure-time clubs – all of which took on renewed importance in the 19th century – the new technology provided an affordable way to preserve their feeling of community for posterity. The professional photographer was able to stage for the camera a picture designed to convey the self-image of the group. The Hamburg-based photographer Johann Hamann and the Studio Scholz were active around the turn of the 19th century, when the demand for professional group and family portraits reached a high point.

The classic commissioned group portrait still persists today in the form of class photos. These document each individual’s curriculum vitae while serving both as nostalgic souvenirs and as a basis for building a relationship network that can be maintained via websites such as stayfriends.com. On the Internet and especially on Facebook, new types of groups are being generated whose members share specific interests or traits. The artist Natalie Bookchin delves into the phenomenon of the virtual group in her work Mass Ornament, for which she collected amateur videos from YouTube showing people dancing alone and arranged them into an ensemble. She thus examines the possibilities offered by the World Wide Web to bring together crowds of people who are in reality each alone in front of their own screen.

Teresa Gruber

Natalie Bookchin (American, b. 1962)
Mass Ornament
2009
Video, 7 Min.
Courtesy of the artist
© Natalie Bookchin

Natalie Bookchin (American, b. 1962) 'Mass Ornament' 2009 (detail)

Natalie Bookchin (American, b. 1962)
Mass Ornament (detail)
2009
Video, 7 Min.
Courtesy of the artist
© Natalie Bookchin

Natalie Bookchin (American, b. 1962)
Mass Ornament
2009
Video, 7 Min.
Courtesy of the artist
© Natalie Bookchin

Natalie Bookchin (American, b. 1962)
Mass Ornament (detail)
2009
Video, 7 Min.
Courtesy of the artist
© Natalie Bookchin

Natalie Bookchin

Natalie Bookchin borrowed the title for her video from the prominent sociologist and film theorist Siegfried Kracauer. In his 1927 essay The Mass Ornament, Kracauer described the American dance troupe known as the Tiller Girls as the embodiment of capitalist production conditions after the First World War. He equated the automaton-like movements of the anonymous, interchangeable dancers with the assembly-line work in the factories. Bookchin’s work can likewise be understood as social commentary. She collects video clips of people dancing in front of webcams set up in their homes, which are posted on YouTube for all the world to see. The montage of such clips into a group choreography with almost synchronous dance moves paints a picture of individuals who share favourite songs, idols, and yearnings.

Instead of using today’s pop songs as soundtrack, Bookchin revives the movie music from Busby Berkeley’s Gold Diggers and Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (both from 1935). She thus generates an alienating effect while also reflecting on both the positive and negative connotations of movement in a group and of mass media.

Teresa Gruber

Johann Hamann (German, 1859-1935)
The Women’s Department Forms an Artful Pyramid
1903
Albumen print
8.6 x 11.4cm
© Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg

Johann Hamann

The Hamburg photographer Johann Hamann opened his first daylight studio in 1889 in Hamburg’s Gängeviertel but is better known for his work outside the studio. By using a magnesium powder flash, he succeeded in portraying individuals and especially groups in a natural environment even in poor lighting conditions. Butchers, cobblers, and gymnasts posed with their props and wearing their specific “uniforms” before his camera. From 1899 to 1906, Hamann produced a complete set of photos of ship captains working for the Hamburg-based shipping line HAPAG, on behalf of which he also photographed the emigration halls on Veddel Island in the Elbe River. His group photographs provide insights into the working life and club activities in the Hanseatic city around the turn of the century, and are often characterised by situational humour.

Teresa Gruber

Sharing knowledge

A droplet whirling off a rotating oil can, the impact of a falling drop of milk, or a bullet in flight are phenomena whose speed makes them imperceptible to the naked eye. With the help of a telescope or microscope, we can look into the distance and observe things that are too far away, or enlarge things that are too small to see, and with the aid of photography these things can then be captured in images that can be shared.

The objects of artist Trevor Paglen’s interest are military spy satellites, which he locates based on information on amateur websites and then captures using elaborate special cameras. His work draws on the aesthetics of scientific photography, inquiring into our faith in the objectivity of such images – a credibility that runs through the entire history of photography.

With the positivist mood pervading the 19th century, photography was associated much more closely with science than with art. Surveying and recording were central functions assigned to the new medium. The photographic work of Eadweard J. Muybrigde, Harold E. Edgerton, and Impulsphysik GmbH Hamburg-Rissen is associated with this applied context.

Already during the 19th century, however, the confidence invested in photography as a medium for capturing reality was being challenged by the exploration of borderline areas verging on the irrational and by metaphysical speculations. Myth and science overlapped here, especially when it came to recording invisible phenomena such as ultraviolet light, heat rays, and X-rays. These trends are evident in Carl Strüwe’s photomicrographs, which in his proclaimed “New Order” combine the aesthetics of scientific photography with esoteric notions of the archetype.

Dr des. Esther Ruelfs

Unknown photographer
Griffith & Griffith (publisher)
Full Moon
1850-1900
Albumen print on cardboard
8.8 x 17.8cm
© Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg

Unknown photographer. Griffith & Griffith (publisher). 'Full Moon' 1850-1900 (detail)

Unknown photographer
Griffith & Griffith (publisher)
Full Moon (detail)
1850-1900
Albumen print on cardboard
8.8 x 17.8cm
© Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg

One year after the invention of the daguerreotype in 1839, a photographic image was already made of the moon. The first stereographic photographs were presented by the chemist and amateur astronomer Warren de la Rue in 1858. Stereo images, which enjoyed great popularity in the latter half of the 19th century, consist of two photographs, which display a scene from slightly different perspectives, thus imitating the viewing angle of the human eyes and generating a spatial impression of the subject when viewed through a stereoscope.

Because the moon is too far from the earth to be able to photograph it from two different angles at once, a stereo photograph is only possible by taking into account optical libration, or the apparent “oscillation” of the moon. Due to the earth’s elliptical orbit, the half of the moon visible from earth is not always exactly the same. For a stereo photograph like the one the publisher Griffith & Griffith offered – certainly not as a scientific document – the shots that were combined were taken at an interval of several months.

Teresa Gruber

Trevor Paglen (American, b. 1974)
MISTY 2/DECOY near Altair (Decoy Stealth Satellite; USA 144db)
2010
C-Print
101.6 x 127cm
Courtesy Galerie Thomas Zander, Köln
© Trevor Paglen

More pictures are being taken and digitised than ever before, innumerable snapshots pile up on hard disks and in clouds, are shared via the Internet and commented on. But portals such as Facebook and Flickr as well as professional databases only supersede older forms of archiving, transferring material, and interaction. For the Triennial of Photography Hamburg 2015, the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg (MKG) is examining these new collections and forms of usage. The MKG sees the future-oriented motto of the Triennial, “The Day Will Come,” as an opportunity to reflect on the sharing of images, under the title: When We Share More Than Ever. The exhibition shows how today’s rampant exchange of digital photos links in with the history of the analogue medium. In fact, photography has been a means of capturing, storing, and communicating visual impressions ever since its early days in the 19th century. In ten chapters, selected contexts are examined in which collecting and sharing images has played – and still plays – a role. More than 200 historical works from the MKG’s collection are set in counterpoint against twelve contemporary artistic projects. The present-day artists reflect in their works on the ways digital photography is used as well as on the mechanisms and implications of new media. They focus on the Internet as a new picture archive, with collections of images such as Apple Maps or photos on eBay, and on images such as those exchanged via mobile phones. Important aspects are the digital image collection as a research resource and inspiration for contemporary art, and the relevance of the classic analogue collection in relation to today’s often-invoked image overkill.

The exhibition is conceived as a kind of archive in order to explore the archive’s possible forms and uses. The featured works from the collection were selected from the MKG’s holdings of some 75,000 photographs to show how different photographic practices have been assimilated over the years. Rather than being a collection of only art photography, the MKG archive reflects the everyday uses of the medium. It gathers together various photographic applications, whether the scientific photos taken at an institute for impulse physics, the fashion spread created by Terry Richardson for Sisley, or Max Scheler’s report on Liverpool’s club scene for Stern magazine.

The chapters “Sharing a Portrait,” “Sharing a Group,” “Sharing Memories,” “Sharing a Product,” “Sharing Lust,” “Sharing Evidence,” “Sharing Knowledge,” “Sharing the World,” “Sharing a Collection,” and “Sharing Photographs” juxtapose historical and contemporary works in order to illuminate how the use and function of photographic images have changed and which aspects have remained the same despite the digital revolution. The exhibition begins with photography used in the service of people: to record a life, create a sense of community, or share memories. The following chapters deal with applied contexts, such as advertising photographs, erotic photography, photojournalism, scientific photography, and travel photos.

We share memories: While in the old days a manageable number of photographs found their way into albums, which were then taken out and perused on special family occasions, on today’s sharing platforms thousands of images are constantly being shared and “liked” around the clock. The works on view include pictures of Renate Scholz, whose affluent parents had the studio photographer Minya Diez-Dührkoop record each stage of her growth and development for fifteen years in annual portrait sessions. Studio portraits have been replaced today by snapshots, while the family photo album is complemented by the Internet portal Instagram. Ai Weiwei began in 2006 to post his diary photos in a text/image blog, which was taken offline by the Chinese authorities in 2009. Since 2014 he has been publishing daily picture messages on Instagram which are readable across language barriers.

We share the world: Starting in 1860, the Fratelli Alinari produced photographs that brought the art treasures of Italy to living rooms everywhere. As an armchair traveler, the 19th-century burgher could feel like a conqueror of far-off lands. Today, the same kind of cultural appropriation takes place instead on computer screens. Regula Bochsler and Jens Sundheim explore landscapes and cities via webcams and Apple Maps. And instead of traveling like a photojournalist to real-world hotbeds of social ferment, Doug Rickard journeys to the dark reaches of the YouTube universe. He shows us ostensibly private scenes not meant for public consumption – drug abuse, racial and sexual violence. The low-resolution, heavily pixelated stills excerpted from mobile phone videos suggest authenticity and turn us into silent witnesses and voyeurs.

We share knowledge: From its earliest days, photography has been indispensable for storing and sharing the results of scientific research and military expeditions. Trevor Paglen uses powerful precision astronomical telescopes to make “invisible” things visible, for example the American “Misty 2” stealth satellites used for reconnaissance, or a dummy put in place by the military intelligence service. In order to locate these satellites, Paglen actively participates in various networks set up by amateur satellite observers.

We share image collections: Before the invention of Google Image Search, analogue photo collections provided an opportunity to compare images. Museum archive cabinets can be seen as a precursor to today’s digital image databases. The Internet is increasingly taking on the function of a picture library, opening up new possibilities for classification and research. Artists like Taryn Simon investigate image collections to ascertain their ordering systems and their implications. Who controls what images we get to see and which ones vanish in the depths of the archives? Part of this chapter is the project “Sharing Blogs“.

The exhibition is dedicated to the broader question of how the function of a museum collection of photography has changed in the digital era, when vast digital image archives are only a mouse click away thanks to Google Image Search. The exhibits are arranged on a horizontal axis, in keeping with modern notions of how a database is set up. Everything is thus presented on a “neutral” plane, and the visitors are tasked with placing the images in context with the help of a “search aid” in the form of a booklet.”

Press release from Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg

Sharing the World

Google Earth and the 3D Flyover feature of the Apple Maps software make the world accessible to all of us through images. The idea of a comprehensive photographic world archive that would be available to the general public began to spread soon after the invention of photography. In parallel with the expansion of the railway network in the mid-19th century, photographic societies were founded in France and the United Kingdom with plans to make, archive, and preserve pictures of cities, cultural heritage, and landscapes. Governments organised expeditions to photograph their dominions, and photographers and companies began specialising in producing picturesque scenes echoing the tradition of painted landscapes and engraved vedutes, developing a successful business model with international sales channels. Views of popular tourist attractions – for example famous buildings in Italy – were offered as an early form of souvenir. At the same time, such pictures allowed the Biedermeier burgher back home in his living room to become an armchair traveler without taking on the exertions and expense of visiting far-off places – just as the Internet surfer is able to do today.

Artistic works such as those by Regula Bochsler confront representations of reality on the World Wide Web that are ostensibly democratic and yet are in fact controlled by corporations. Bochsler has culled subjective images from the liquefied, constantly updated parallel universe and given them a lasting material form.

Teresa Gruber

Jens Sundheim (German, b. 1970)
From the series 100100 Views of Mount Fuji
2008-2010
Digital C-type prints
100 x 130cm
© Jens Sundheim

Regula Bochsler (Swiss, b. 1958)
Downtown # 1
2013
From the series The Rendering Eye, 2013
Inkjet print
80 x 100cm
© Regula Bochsler
Images based on Apple Maps

Regula Bochsler

For her project The Rendering Eye, the historian Regula Bochsler has been traveling through a virtual parallel universe since 2013 using the 3D flyover feature in Apple Maps. Unlike Google Streetview, Apple Maps gives the viewer a volumetric impression of cities and landscapes. In order to create these views, the mapped zones are scanned from an airplane using several cameras aligned at different angles. With the help of vector graphics as well as actual maps and satellite images, the software then automatically merges the countless overlapping photographs into a realistic view. The program was developed for the purpose of steering military rockets by the Swedish defence company Saab, which sold it to Apple in 2011 for around 240 million dollars. Under the pressure of competition from Google, Apple released its app before some major development bugs could be fixed. In her surreal-looking, carefully composed views of American cities, Bochsler preserves for posterity the image errors ( so-called “glitches”) in the program, which are gradually being corrected and disappearing, as well as the still-visible areas where photographs taken at different times are patched together. The result is an apocalyptic vision of a world of technoid artificiality and absolute control.

Teresa Gruber

Unknown photographer
Wissower Klinken, Photochrom Zürich
1890
Photochromic print
16.5 x 22.2cm
© Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg

Trevor Paglen (American, b. 1974)
Detachment 3, Air Force Flight Test Center #2 Groom Lake, NV/ Distance ~ 26 Miles
2008
C-Print
101.6 x 127cm
Courtesy Galerie Thomas Zander, Köln
© Trevor Paglen

Sharing evidence

Catastrophes and events are documented today by eyewitnesses at close range and communicated over the Internet. Mobile phone cameras even enable images to be transmitted directly: people involved in the incidents can share their perspective with a wide audience, the poor quality of the pixelated images often being perceived as a guarantee of their authenticity and credibility. The artist Doug Rickard also relies on this effect when he provides inside glimpses of marginal areas of American society on YouTube, assembling them to create picture stories that can be compared to classic photo reportage. By the early 1900s, photographic images were already established as evidence and information material that could be printed in newspapers. During World War II, the suitability of the medium as a means for objective documentation was then fundamentally called into question as photos were exploited for political propaganda purposes. Nevertheless, photojournalism experienced a heyday in the 1960s and 70s, before serious competition in the form of television posed a threat to print media and many magazines discontinued publication. Photographers such as Thomas Hoepker and Max Scheler supplied personal picture essays to Stern magazine in Hamburg that gave readers a look at different countries and told of the destinies of various individuals. With today’s citizen journalism, the evidential value of the photographic image seems to have once again regained its importance.

Teresa Gruber

Hanns-Jörg Anders (German, b. 1942)
Riots in Northern Ireland
1969
Silver gelatine print
25.8 x 38.8cm
© Hanns-Jörg Anders – Red. STERN

Hanns-Jörg Anders (b. 1942) 'Unrests in Northern Ireland (Londonderry)' 1969

Hanns-Jörg Anders (German, b. 1942)
We want peace, Londonderry, Northern Ireland
May 1969
Silver gelatine print
25.8 x 38.8cm
© Hanns-Jörg Anders – Red. STERN

Sharing lust

In 1859, Charles Baudelaire derided the “thousands of greedy eyes” indulging in the shameless enjoyment of “obscene” photographs. He was referring in particular to stereoscopic images, which convey a realistic corporeal impression of piquant subjects when seen through a special optical device. In parallel with the spread of the photographic medium, the sales of erotic and pornographic pictures grew into a lucrative business. European production centres for such material were located around 1900 in the cities of Paris, Vienna, and Budapest. Illegal pictures could be had from vendors operating near train stations or through discreet mail-order. Two daguerreotypes in the Photography and New Media Collection bear witness to the early days of this pictorial tradition.

Starting in the 1910s, the new vogue for magazines and pin-ups coming out of the USA served to democratise and popularise erotic imagery. Studio Manassé in Vienna, for example, supplied numerous magazines with such photographs. While erotic imagery was increasingly co-opted by advertising, a new industry arose: the pornographic film, which increasingly competed with print media. Today, the spread of pornographic imagery on the Internet has taken on immense proportions, while digital technology has led to a boom in the sharing of amateur photos and films, as well as their commercialisation. Laia Abril shows by-products of this online marketing of private sex in her video work Tediousphilia.

Teresa Gruber

William H. Rau (American, 1855-1920)
An Intruder
1897
Albumen print on cardboard
8.8 x 17.8cm
© Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg

Nobuyoshi Araki (Japanese, b. 1940)
From the series Kimbaku
1983
Silver gelatin print
26 x 33.4cm
© Nobuyoshi Araki

Nobuyoshi Araki

Fragmented through artfully knotted ropes, the nude bodies of young women in Nobuyoshi Araki’s photographs are turned into objects of voyeuristic curiosity. Critical opinions in the literature are divided, with some emphasising the pictorial character of the images and others accusing the photographer of a sexist point of view catering to the exotic tastes of the European public. Araki’s photographs have thus set off a discussion on where to draw the line between pornography and art.

Araki’s photos were exhibited in the West for the first time in 1992. The show featured views of Tokyo, still lifes, and female nudes that dealt with love, loss, and sexuality – all intertwined into a very personal narration. From that point forward, the perception of Araki’s images became very selective, and at the latest with Tokyo Lucky Hole (1997) the obscene aspect came to the fore. In the 1980s, the photographer explored the escalating sex and entertainment boom in Tokyo. Araki himself insists on varied applications for his photographs. He displays them in a wide range of exhibition venues, from soup kitchens to museums, and publishes his images in art books as well as in porn magazines, S&M periodicals, and popular calendars. The images in the collection of the MKG were acquired in the mid-1980s, at a time when Araki was still unknown in Europe. The choices made already anticipate the selective perception of his work in the 1990s.

Dr des. Esther Ruelfs

Laia Abril

Laia Abril’s series Tediousphilia shows young couples who set up a webcam in their bedroom in order to earn money by giving customers an intimate peek at their ostensibly private sex lives. This online peepshow concept is a phenomenon of the commercialisation of private sex on the internet. Abril is interested in the moments before the sexual act, taking a look behind the scenes, as it were, where the couples succumb to the lethargy of waiting while the camera is already rolling. The title is thus composed of the word tedious and the Greek term philia, indicating a preference or inclination, referring to the embracing of boredom before the impending performance. These “pre-intimate” moments seem almost more real and personal than what we imagine the pseudo-private performances must be like. The images of the waiting lovers illuminate the voyeuristic relationship between audience and performer, between private and public, focusing, as in other works by Abril, on themes such as sexuality, intimacy, and the media representation of human bodies.

Emma Stenger

Sharing products

Since the 1920s, consumer products have been advertised primarily through photographic images. Fuelled by the rapidly developing field of advertising and by advances in printing techniques, advertising photos began to proliferate in newspapers and magazines and on billboards. Advertisers increasingly relied on the suggestive power of the photographic images rather than on text or drawings as before.

Johannes Grubenbecher had his students take pictures of objects of daily use as a way of preparing them for work in the advertising field. The arrangement of object shots demonstrates the form and materiality of the items and reflect the image language of the 1920s, which focused on functionality and faithfulness to materials. By contrast, the commercial photographs by Hildi Schmidt-Heins and Arthur Benda from the 1930s stylise the objects as consumer fetishes. Benda has draped a silk nightgown as though it had just slipped off a woman’s shoulders and onto the floor in order to whet the observer’s desires, which he should then transfer onto the goods.

Today, nothing has changed in the fetishisation of merchandise through professional product photography. New, however, are the non-professional snapshots on consumer-to-consumer platforms such as eBay. Household items that are no longer needed are photographed by the owners themselves for sale to others. Penelope Umbrico uses this imagery in her work. She has collected photographs of tube televisions – an outdated technique – and presents them as a comment on the changes in our use of images brought about by inexpensive and ubiquitous digital photography, making pictures easy to upload to the appropriate platforms.

Dr des. Esther Ruelfs

Hildi Schmidt-Heins (German, b. 1915)
Gartmann Schokolade
1937
Tempera on silver gelatine print
17.3 x 23cm
© Archiv Schmidt Heins

The sandwich boards created by Hildi Schmidt-Heins for the Stuhr Coffee Roastery and the Gartmann Chocolate Factory appeared as still images on Hamburg’s movie screens in 1937. She used open packaging so that potential customers could see the food product inside and also recognise it easily in the store. Her few commissions for advertisements came from her photography lecturer Johannes Grubenbecher during her studies at the Hansa Academy for Visual Arts. Schmidt-Heins focused in her studies on typeface design, attending the class conducted by the graphic designer Hugo Meier-Thur. Her silver gelatin prints with tempera lettering present a method of visual communication that fuses typography with product photography. Later, the photographer dedicated herself to the documentation of workspaces, taking pictures of workshops.

Annika Sellmann

Penelope Umbrico (American, b. 1957)
Signals Still
2011
C-Prints
23 x 30cm
Courtesy Mark Moore Gallery, USA, and XPO Gallery, Paris
© Penelope Umbrico

In her tableau Signals Still, Penelope Umbrico presents a collection of six sets of eleven photographs each of illuminated, imageless screens. The product photos were taken by the owners of the devices in order to provide proof of their working order to potential buyers. Umbrico scours consumer-to-consumer marketplaces like eBay and Craigslist for such images and groups them into individual types. By transforming the intangible pixel images into C-prints on Kodak paper, Umbrico then distances them from their original function as digital communication media. The artist appropriates the found material and imposes on it a shift in meaning. Minimal deviations in the angle of the shot and variations in the forms and colours of the monochromatic snowy light surfaces combine to form a collective template. The promise of modern technology – progress and mass availability – is juxtaposed with its somber flip side of obsolescence and superfluity. Umbrico’s use of contemporary digital media unites the tired flicker of the television screens into a chorus singing the requiem of an era.

Annika Sellmann

Sharing collections

“According to which criteria should a collection be organised? Perhaps by individual lectures, by masters, chronologically, topographically, or by material?” asked the curator Wilhelm Weimar in 1917. His query was prompted by the production of a slide cabinet holding 7,600 slides. His solution was to furnish each image carrier with a numerical code, so that they could be cross-referenced with a card catalogue in which the objects were filed under various keywords. His search aid was an early form of database.

Like this slide collection, the photographic reproductions created by Léon Vidal and Adolphe Braun to record and disseminate art treasures can also be understood as precursors to digital databases. Today, search engines such as Google Images are available to anyone with an Internet connection, presenting with their infinite number of comparison pictures a plethora of new possibilities for ordering and research, and supplanting the function of the photographic collection as image database. Photographs are no longer bound as physical media to a single storage location but have become immaterial and thus available anytime, anywhere. Images that once slumbered in archives, organised by strict criteria for ease of retrieval, become in Aurélien Froment’s film weightless ephemera. A magician moves them through space with a sweep of his hand, just as the modern user swipes his pictures across the digital interface.

Taryn Simon is also interested in such image ordering systems and how the images in them are accessed. By entering identical search terms in various national image search engines in her Image Atlas and then examining the standardised search results, she inquires into what the new archives remember and what they forget.

Dr des. Esther Ruelfs

'Glass diapositives for slide lectures from the archive of the MKG' Nd

'Glass diapositives for slide lectures from the archive of the MKG' Nd (detail)

In the late 1890s, photography’s triumphant advance also had an impact on the everyday work of the MKG. Under Justus Brinckmann, the museum’s first director, the objects in the collection were regularly recorded for the files with the help of a camera. The self-taught photographer Wilhelm Weimar, initially employed by the museum as a draftsman, thus managed in the course of fifteen years to produce some 1,700 shots of pieces in the collection. The prints were mounted on cardboard and filed according to functional groups. In case of theft or suspected counterfeiting, the object photos also served Brinckmann as evidence hat could be sent by post within a network of museums.

Art history as an academic discipline worked from the outset with photographic reproductions, which made it possible to compare far-flung works and to bring them together in a shared historical context. In his essay Le Musée imaginaire, author André Malraux even makes the claim that the history of art has been tantamount since the 19th century to the “history of the photographable.” The over 7,000 slides the museum has preserved of its own holdings and other objects, together with architectural images and exhibition photographs, were assembled for use in slide presentations, compellingly illustrating this idea of a museum without walls which can be rearranged at will according to prevailing contemporary thinking.

Annika Sellmann

Aurélien Froment (France, b. 1976)
Théâtre de poche
2007
with Stéphane Corréas
HD video with sound, c. 12 min.
Courtesy of the artist and Marcelle Alix, Paris
© Aurélien Mole

Aurélien Froment

The work Théâtre de Poche (2007) showcases in a seemingly infinite black space a contemporary form of magic with images. A magician in a trance-like state pushes photographs across an invisible surface like an iPhone user swiping through information on his touch screen. His sweeping motions pass through thin air, like those of a player at a Wii station. Froment thus connects these gestures, obviously influenced by contemporary electronic user interfaces, with a centuries old magic technique. The images, consisting of family photos, playing cards, found film stills, reproductions of non-European art, and arts and crafts items, are rearranged in new juxtapositions. They are resorted, lined up, and rethought, recalling Aby Warburg’s panels for his Mnemosyne Atlas. The artist is interested here in the discrepancy between sign and meaning, exploring how it shifts when the images are placed in new contexts and new, weightless archives.

Dr des. Esther Ruelfs

Sharing photographs

At the end of the 19th century, more and more amateur and professional photographers came together in the major cities of Europe to form groups. They shared the conviction that photography should be seen as an independent artistic medium, and they sought a forum in which to present their works. Magazines such as Camera Work, which was distributed internationally, as well as joint exhibitions, encouraged lively exchanges about stylistic developments and technical procedures while serving to expand and strengthen the network. The Pictorialists saw their pictures not as a mere medium for communicating information or as illustrations: they instead shared the photographs themselves as pictures in their own right, with a focus on their composition and the details of their execution.

The Hofmeister brothers put their artworks into circulation as photo postcards. The artist Heman Chong picks up on this popular tradition of collecting and sharing images by reproducing his numerous photographs as cards, taking recourse to the “old” medium of the postcard to highlight the fact that photographs are today mainly immaterial images shared via the Internet.

Platforms like Instagram and Flickr define themselves as global “photo communities” with millions of users and thousands of uploads per second. Image data is archived there, groups founded, albums curated, and an interactive space created through keywording with tags and comment functions. For the exhibition When We Share More Than Ever, examples of such virtual galleries are presented with commentary on the blog http://sharingmorethanever.tumblr.com/.

Teresa Gruber

Theodor (German, 1868-1943) and Oscar Hofmeister (German, 1871-1937)
Postcards
1910s and 1920s
Silver gelatine prints
14.8 x 10.6cm
3 Intaglio prints
14 x 8.9cm
© Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg

Theodor (German, 1868-1943) and Oscar Hofmeister (German, 1871-1937) 'Postcards' 1910s and 1920s (detail)

Theodor (German, 1868-1943) and Oscar Hofmeister (German, 1871-1937)
Postcards (details)
1910s and 1920s
Silver gelatine prints
14.8 x 10.6cm
3 Intaglio prints
14 x 8.9cm
© Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg

Theodor and Oscar Hofmeister

Theodor and Oscar Hofmeister, one a merchant and the other a judicial employee, discovered their passion for photography in the 1890s. Upon viewing international photography exhibitions at the Hamburger Kunsthalle, they became acquainted with the Viennese Pictorialists and were inspired to adopt similarly picturesque imagery coupled with advanced technical implementation. Starting in 1895, they began to exhibit their work and were soon recognised internationally as specialists in the multicolour gum bichromate printing process. Some of their large-format one-off images are found in the collection of the MKG.

A good idea of the brothers’ prodigious productivity and clever marketing is however supplied by their landscape scenes, which Munich publisher Hermann A. Wiechmann reproduced using the rotogravure process. He published these scenes taken on rambles through the countryside, meant to reflect the “characteristic effect” of various parts of the country and hence the “German soul,” in over twenty “homeland books,” combining them with poems by German authors, as well as in portfolios and as “Hofmeister picture postcards.” The Hofmeister brothers themselves amassed an extensive collection of postcards of their own making – addressed in some cases to family members – as well as copies of postcards by other photographers.

Teresa Gruber

Heman Chong

In his conceptual works, the artist, writer, and curator Heman Chong often deals with social practices and different kinds of archives. The installation God Bless Diana presents 550 postcards as if in a museum shop display. The artist is alluding here to the contemporary flood of commercial and private photographs, inviting the viewer to respond and make his own selections. Chong offers viewers scenes evoking ephemeral traces and grotesque situations he has filtered out of the daily big-city jungle in Beijing, London, New York, and Singapore and captured on analogue 35mm film. In contrast to the data in an Internet image archive, the postcards are actual material objects: for one euro, as symbolic antipode to the exorbitant art market prices, the exhibition visitor can purchase his favourites among these works, take them home with him, and use them to curate his own “show” or as the bearer of a written message, thus sharing them with friends.

Teresa Gruber

Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg
Steintorplatz, 20099 Hamburg

Opening hours:
Tuesday to Sunday 10am – 6pm
Thursday 10am – 9pm
Closed Mondays

Museum fur Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg website

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Postcards: This is a real photograph

June 2015

Léon & Lévy (French) 'Paris - Le Palais de Justice - La Facade' c. 1901-1920

Léon & Lévy (French)
Paris – Le Palais de Justice – La Façade
c. 1901-1920
LL 802 of the theme France
Levy Fils & Cie, Paris to verso
Carte Postale

A selection of black and white postcards that I recently purchased in a secondhand shop. It was fun investigating the publishers and places, especially as three of them contain my surname (and probably ancestor), John Bunyan.

I particularly like the series by Raphael Tuck & Sons of the Guards Chapel at the bottom of the posting… and the fact that some of them state and guarantee: ‘This is a real photograph’.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Please click on the photograph for a larger version of the image.

Léon & Lévy (French)
Dunkerque – L’Eglise Saint-Eloi
c. 1901-1920
LL 10 of the theme France
Carte Postale

Léon & Lévy was a French printer and a photograph editing company located in Paris. It was founded in 1864 and specialized in stereoscopic views and picture postcards of locations in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas. The trade mark of the enterprise was “L.L.” (“LL”). The firm was one of the most important postcard editors in France… Léon & Lévy was founded in 1864 by Isaac and his son-in-law Moyse Léon. Isaac was also known as “Georges Lévy” at that time (to increase profits, he is known as J. Lévy, 1833-1913) .

With Levy sons, Abraham Lucien and Gaspard Ernest, the company will resolutely move towards the market of the postcard: the brand “LL” is filed in 1901 – we often confuse it with the signature “L & L” studio Lehnert & Landrock which was created three years later in Tunis: Lévy publishes numerous clichés and uses the same recipes and the same patterns as Lehnert. But Levy became the second largest publisher of postcards in France, producing 40 to 50,000 snapshots.

Léon & Lévy (French)
Amiens – Le Cathédrale – Vie de Saint-Jean-Baptiste
c. 1901-1920
LL 194 of the theme France
Levy Fils & Cie, Paris to verso
Carte Postale

J. Valentine & Co. Ltd (British, 1825-1963)
Inveraray Castle and Duniquaich
Nd
Valentine Series
Lithograph post card

J. Salmon Ltd, Sevenoaks (British, 1880 -)
The Moot Hall, Elstow, Nr. Bedford
After 1912
Salmon Series
Real Photo. Printed in England
Post card

Unknown maker (Denmark) 'Horsens. Caroline Amelie Lund' Nd

Unknown maker (Danish)
Horsens. Caroline Amelie Lund
Nd
Lithograph post card

Caroline Amalie park is in everyday speech called “The Grove”. The park beautifully connects Horsens Museum and Horsens Art Museum. In the park, you can find the old water tower, designed by the known architect Viggo Norn. In the spring, a colour symphony of crocus sprouts through the grass, and later you can enjoy yourself in the shades of the beeches.

James Valentine, photographer (Scottish, 12 June 1815 – 19 June 1879)
Rosslyn Castle and Chapel
Nd
Lithograph post card

H. Coates, Wisbech (British)
The Derwent and Heights of Abraham, Matlock Bath
Nd
Lithograph post card

The Heights of Abraham, based in Matlock Bath, Peak District, offers stunning views of the surrounding landscape as well as providing a wonderful location for a family day out. The park first opened its gates in 1780 and boasts having the country’s first ‘Alpine Style’ cable car system, which was installed in 1984… The Heights of Abraham was named after the area of Quebec where Major General James P. Wolfe met his end during the Seven Years War, the British victory of which paved the way for the further expansion of the British Empire in Canada.

Originally designed as a Regency style ‘Savage Garden’ the park reflects the thoughts of the day from such as Shelley and Wordsworth, who extolled the virtues of promoting the wonderment of nature and the beauty of the environment. Even 200 years after opening the gates for the first time, many of the routes around the gardens remain as originally intended.

Unknown maker (British)
Bedford. The Bunyan Meeting
Nd
This is a real photograph
Post card

Dallaporte (Portugal)
Batalha – Mosteiro, Fachada das Capelas Imperfeitas [Monastery of Batalha, façade of the Imperfect Chapels]
Nd
Colecçâo passaporte “LOTY”
Photograph, post card

The Monastery of Batalha (Portuguese: Mosteiro da Batalha), literally the Monastery of the Battle, is a Dominican convent in the civil parish of Batalha, in the district of Leiria, in the Centro Region region of Portugal. Originally, and officially known, as the Monastery of Saint Mary of the Victory (Portuguese: Mosteiro de Santa Maria da Vitória), it was erected in commemoration of the 1385 Battle of Aljubarrota, and would serve as the burial church of the 15th-Century Aviz dynasty of Portuguese royals. It is one of the best and original examples of Late Gothic architecture in Portugal, intermingled with the Manueline style.

F. Frith & Co. Ltd., Reigate (British, 1959 – 1970)
Old Sarum, Chapel Of St Nicholas at angle of Wall, Castle well in foreground
1913
Frith’s series, Negative 65298
Lithograph postcard

Francis Frith (British, 1822-1898)

Francis Frith (also spelled Frances Frith, 7 October 1822 – 25 February 1898) was an English photographer of the Middle East and many towns in the United Kingdom. Frith was born in Chesterfield, Derbyshire, attending Quaker schools at Ackworth and Quaker Camp Hill in Birmingham (c. 1828-1838), before he started in the cutlery business. Leaving in 1850 to start a photographic studio in Liverpool, known as Frith & Hayward. A successful grocer, and later, printer, Frith fostered an interest in photography, becoming a founding member of the Liverpool Photographic Society in 1853. Frith sold his companies in 1855 in order to dedicate himself entirely to photography. He journeyed to the Middle East on three occasions, the first of which was a trip to Egypt in 1856 with very large cameras (16″ x 20″). He used the collodion process, a major technical achievement in hot and dusty conditions…

When he had finished his travels in the Middle East in 1859, he opened the firm of Francis Frith & Co. in Reigate, Surrey, as the world’s first specialist photographic publisher. In 1860, he married Mary Ann Rosling (sister of Alfred Rosling, the first treasurer of the Photographic Society) and embarked upon a colossal project – to photograph every town and village in the United Kingdom; in particular, notable historical or interesting sights. Initially he took the photographs himself, but as success came, he hired people to help him and set about establishing his postcard company, a firm that became one of the largest photographic studios in the world. Within a few years, over two thousand shops throughout the United Kingdom were selling his postcards.

His family continued the firm, which was finally sold in 1968 and closed in 1970. Following closure of the business, Bill Jay, one of Britain’s first photography historians, identified the archive as being nationally important, and “at risk”. Jay managed to persuade Rothmans, the tobacco company, to purchase the archive to ensure its safety. Frith was re-launched in 1976 as The Francis Frith Collection by John Buck, a Rothmans executive, with the intention of making the Frith photographs available to as wide an audience as possible. In 1977, John Buck bought the archive from Rothmans and has continued to run it as an independent business since that time – trading as The Francis Frith Collection. The company website enables visitors to browse free of charge over 125,000 Frith photographs depicting some 7,000 cities, towns and villages.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Photochrom Co. Ltd., Tunbridge Wells, Kent (British) 'Ely Cathedral, Choir, East' Nd

Photochrom Co. Ltd., Tunbridge Wells, Kent (British) 'Ely Cathedral, Choir, East' Nd (verso)

Photochrom Co. Ltd., Tunbridge Wells, Kent (British)
Ely Cathedral, Choir, East (front and verso)
Nd
Photograph, postcard 3826

Léon & Lévy (French)
Carisbrooke Castle – King Charles I Window
c. 1901-1920
LL 18 of the theme Britain
Printed in France
Lithograph post card

Léon & Lévy (French)
Armentières – L’Eglise Saint Roch
c. 1883-1916
LL 13 of the theme France
Levy Fils & Cie, Paris to verso
Carte Postale

According to a brochure published for the centenary of the Saint-Roch church, it was built in the heart of a working-class neighbourhood in 1883 and 1884, at the initiative of the Dean Berteloot, who also built the churches of the Sacred Heart (1879) and St. Joseph (1884), in other districts of Armentières workers; the land is given free by the contractor César Debosque-Donte; the construction of the church is financed by a family of textile industrialists, the Cardon; the building is due to the architect Paul Destombes Roubaix, who is also the author of the churches of St. Joseph and the Sacred Heart; Simple originally emergency church, it was erected in parish church from 1886. Devastated in 1916 by the bombings of World War II, it was rebuilt in 1930 on the same plane as that of the original church and within a similar style.

Luigi Grassi, Milano (Italian)
Milano, Facciata della Cattedrale [Facade of Milan Cathedral]
Nd
Cartolina Postale, 07 19042
Lithograph post card

Unknown maker (F.W.H.) (British)
Roof of Chancel, Rosslyn Chapel
Nd
Lithograph post card

L. Roisin, Barcelona (Lucien Édouard Roisin Besnard, Paris, 1876 – Paris or Barcelona, 1943)
Gibraltar – Southport Gate
Nd
Lithograph post card, 53. 425

Edward Lucien Roisin Besnard (L. Roisin) (French, 1876-1943)

Edward Lucien Roisin Besnard (L. Roisin) (Paris, 1876 – Paris or Barcelona, 1943) French photographer and editor, based in Barcelona at the end of the First World War. Known in Spain for his trade postcards: La casa de la postal. Thanks to the high production work Roisin, it is possible to see the evolution of Spanish landscapes over thirty years. Most of his work is preserved with historical photographic archives of the Institute of Photographic Study of Catalonia.

His first Spanish postcards date from 1918. Roisin was not only in Barcelona, as in World War II, much of his family perished and our photographer was accompanied by two of his nephews, who held an important role in the family business and in the fate of the archives. His contract with Toldra finished he chose to remain on Spanish soil, and he acquires a local business in the Rambla de Santa Monica where he founded his magazine “the postal casa.” He specialises in postcards of a geographical nature. Accompanied by his nephew, they will make many trips by sharing tasks. Throughout the Spanish peninsula, Edward Lucien Roisin Besnard, with his urban experience, is responsible for photographing cities, shooting of the smallest villages and countryside and delegates to his nephew the task to photograph the inhabitants. The niece meanwhile will sell the cards in the family trade.

The beginning of the second war contributes to damage the health of Lucien Roisin Besnard who returns to France where he dies in 1943. At his death, his family continues to hold his stock until the year 1962. Roisin’s work then almost disappears even going for a short stay on the shelves of a secondhand store, to finally find refuge in the Institute’s archives Photographic Studies of Catalonia (it is not let less than 30,000 negatives, 77,000 photos or 40,000 postcards). The remaining shots are preserved in the National Archives of the Generalitat of Catalonia.

La casa de la postal

“The house of the postcard” was an eminently famous place whose reputation was well established and which featured prominently in all tourist guides. Roisin sold hundreds of thousands of postcards drawn from the photographs taken during his long wanderings through all Spain (Catalonia, Pontemeude, Andalusia, Malaga) over a period of more than twenty years. Roisin boasted to offer the public a comprehensive view, a complete inventory of sites and places of interest in all the Spanish provinces. The business was a success and at certain times over 10 vendors were recruited to deal with the request of a customer as well as local tourism. In the 1930s, “The postal casa”, always at the cutting edge, inaugurated the sale of completely innovative products such as postcard accordions which associated a choice of a dozen postcards and gathering views of the same subject taken from different angles. The counterfeiting phenomenon is not new, and to preserve [his copyright], Roisin was soon appear on its productions, a stamp that guaranteed its customers the authenticity of the products they were acquiring. The fame of Roisin was such that when a publication was published concerning Spain in the world, it was almost certain that the photographic credit the photo was derived from “the postal casa”.

Text Google translated from the French Wikipedia

Lilywhite Ltd., (British)
Bunyan’s Door. Elstow Church. Bedford
Nd
Guaranteed Real Photo and British Manufacture
Post card 28A

Unknown maker (British)
Bunyan’s Chair and Prison Door
Nd
Photograph, post card

Unknown maker (Italian)
Milano – Arco della Pace
Nd
Lithograph post card

Porta Sempione (“Simplon Gate”) is a city gate of Milan, Italy. The name “Porta Sempione” is used both to refer to the gate proper and to the surrounding district (“quartiere”), a part of the Zone 1 division (the historic city centre), including the major avenue of Corso Sempione. The gate is marked by a landmark triumphal arch called Arco della Pace (“Arch of Peace”), dating back to the 19th century, but its origins can be traced back to a gate of the Roman walls of Milan.

The Arch of Peace is a monument neoclassical Milan, located in the centre of the large area of Piazza Sempione. It was started in 1807 by Luigi Cagnola under the pressure of the town of Milan and of Napoleon. It was completed in 1838. The bronze chariot of Peace is by Abbondio Sangiorgio (1798-1879), the four wins equestrian bronze were made on the model of John Putti (1771-1847) while the marble sculptures are works of most representative neoclassical sculptors present in Milan in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, many of whom trained at the school of Camillo Pacetti (1758-1826); among these, we note the statues of History and Poetry of Louis Purchasing.

F. Frith & Co. Ltd., Reigate (British, 1959-1970)
Windsor Castle, Long Walk, Copper Horse
Nd
Frith’s series
Lithograph postcard

The R. A. (Postcards) Ltd., (British)
The Guildhall, Worcester
Nd
The Seal of Excellence Series
This is a Real Photograph
Photograph, post card

Nels (Belgium, 1898 – )
S. A. des Grottes de Han-sur-Lesse et de Rochefort – Le Trophée
[Caves of Han-sur-Lesse and Rochefort – The Trophy]
Nd
Lithograph post card

This publishing house was founded by Edward Nels in 1898. Their goal was to spread geographic knowledge while producing maps, guide books, and photographic and printed souvenirs. They soon became the largest producer of postcards in Belgium, and they also published many cards of the Congo and of Luxembourg. Though they produced a variety of card types, most were as collotypes, many of which were hand coloured in a dull pallet. Ernest Thill, who had ben the manager of the firm took over from Nels in 1913 and added his name to the company. In the 1960’s to 1975 they were purchased by a French firm, but they are now publishing postcards under their own name again, though for the most part they are now printed in Italy.

L. Caron (French, editor) B & G, Lyon (Publisher) 'Amiens – Cathedral' Nd

L. Caron (French, editor)
B & G, Lyon (Publisher)
Amiens – Cathedral
Amiens et les environs – Cathédrale dans sous ses détails – Eglises et Châteaux de Picardie
[Amiens and surrounding area – Cathedral detail – Churches and castles of Picardie]
Nd
3000 Vues éditées par L. Caron, photo, a Amiens
3000 views edited by L. Caron, photo, in Amiens
Lithograph post card

The Cairo Postcard Trust (Joseph Max Lichtenstern, Egypt)
Heliopolis – Monument of the first Aviateur (Oseri)
c. 1910
Serie 634
Lithograph post card

Joseph Max Lichtenstern moved to Egypt from Vienna in 1893 and took up permanent residence there in 1897. In 1899 he began publishing postcards under the name, Cairo Postcard Trust, but also issued black & white postcards under his own name. Two years later he teamed up with David Harari to form an importing business. They would also take up the publishing of postcards. Between 1904 and 1908 they seem to have taken on another partner, changing their name to Lichtenstern, Harari & Co., but they continued to use their original name, Lichtenstern & Harari on postcards. After Harari left in 1912 the firm was sold to Max H. Rudman, who had been a publisher from at least 1905. Lichtenstern continued to have some business dealings with Rudman, but after he returned to Vienna in 1914 for a visit, he ended up serving in the Austrian Army for the duration of World War One. There was a continuing relationship between this firm and the Cairo Postcard Trust but the specifics are uncertain.

Raphael Tuck & Sons (British) 'The Guard's Chapel, West End' Nd

Raphael Tuck & Sons (British)
The Guard’s Chapel, West End (front and verso)
Nd
The Guard’s Chapel Series A
Tuck’s Post Card
Art publishers to their majesties the King and Queen and to H.R.H. The Prince of Wales
Carte Postale
Photogravure Postcard

Raphael Tuck & Sons

Raphael Tuck & Sons was a business started by Raphael Tuck and his wife in Bishopsgate in the City of London on October 1866, selling pictures and greeting cards, and eventually selling postcards, the latter being the most successful. Their business was one of the most well known in the ‘postcard boom’ of the late 1800s and early 1900s. Their contributions left a lasting effect on most of the artistic world. During The Blitz, the company headquarters, Raphael House, was destroyed including the originals for most of their series. The company never fully recovered.

Raphael was married to the former Ernestine Lissner in March 1848. She gave birth to seven children, four boys and three girls, all born in Prussia prior to their migration to England. As the family of seven children grew, the children provided more help to the business. Raphael sent out his sons, Herman, Adolph and Gustave to bring in more business. Herman and Adolph also went on selling trips, and at the end of the day they would check the results of the day’s work. The one with the higher sales would have the bigger egg next morning for breakfast. Three of the four sons participated in the firm established by their father. Their second son, Adolph, was chairman and managing director of Raphael Tuck and Sons, Ltd. until his death on 3 July 1926…

Raphael had received training in graphic arts in his home country; and, although he was not an artist himself, he had a flair for commercial art that prompted his interest in this new field. Upon coming to England, he caught the imagination of the public in such a way that he was able to create a new graphic arts business. He was so successful at it that, according to the The Times, he “opened up a new field of labor for artists, lithographers, engravers, printers, ink and paste board makers, and several other trade classes.”

Tuck’s continued to run very successful postcard competitions through the early 1900s with the focus changing to collectors of Tuck postcards rather than the artists whose work was depicted. The top part of the 1903 Tuck Exchange Register pictured above announces the second of Tuck’s prize competitions which began in 1900. The prize competitions aroused much interest. The first contest winner turned in a collection of 20, 364 cards over the 18-month duration of the contest. The second prize competition winner submitted 25, 239 cards. In 1914 the fourth prize competition was announced. The competitions were a novel and effective marketing technique.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Raphael Tuck & Sons (British) 'The Guard's Chapel, The Font' Nd

Raphael Tuck & Sons (British) 'The Guard's Chapel, The Font' Nd (verso)

Raphael Tuck & Sons (British)
The Guard’s Chapel, The Font (front and verso)
Nd
The Guard’s Chapel Series B
Tuck’s Post Card
Art publishers to their majesties the King and Queen and to H.R.H. The Prince of Wales
Carte Postale
Photogravure Postcard

Raphael Tuck & Sons (British) 'The Guard's Chapel, South East corner of Nave' Nd

Raphael Tuck & Sons (British) 'The Guard's Chapel, South East corner of Nave' Nd (verso)

Raphael Tuck & Sons (British)
The Guard’s Chapel, South East corner of Nave (front and verso)
Nd
The Guard’s Chapel Series B
Tuck’s Post Card
Art publishers to their majesties the King and Queen and to H.R.H. The Prince of Wales
Carte Postale
Photogravure Postcard

Raphael Tuck & Sons (British) 'The Guard's Chapel, The Pulpit' Nd

Raphael Tuck & Sons (British) 'The Guard's Chapel, The Pulpit' Nd (verso)

Raphael Tuck & Sons (British)
The Guard’s Chapel, The Pulpit (front and verso)
Nd
The Guard’s Chapel Series A
Tuck’s Post Card
Art publishers to their majesties the King and Queen and to H.R.H. The Prince of Wales
Carte Postale
Photogravure Postcard

Raphael Tuck & Sons (British) 'The Guard's Chapel, Roberts & Kitchener Memorials' Nd

Raphael Tuck & Sons (British) 'The Guard's Chapel, Roberts & Kitchener Memorials' Nd (verso)

Raphael Tuck & Sons (British)
The Guard’s Chapel, Roberts & Kitchener Memorials (front and verso)
Nd
The Guard’s Chapel Series B, South West Corner
Tuck’s Post Card
Art publishers to their majesties the King and Queen and to H.R.H. The Prince of Wales
Carte Postale
Photogravure Postcard

Raphael Tuck & Sons (British) 'The Guard's Chapel, Nave Mosaics' Nd

Raphael Tuck & Sons (British) 'The Guard's Chapel, Nave Mosaics' Nd (verso)

Raphael Tuck & Sons (British)
The Guard’s Chapel, Nave Mosaics (front and verso)
Nd
The Guard’s Chapel Series A
Tuck’s Post Card
Art publishers to their majesties the King and Queen and to H.R.H. The Prince of Wales
Carte Postale
Photogravure Postcard

Raphael Tuck & Sons (British) 'The Guard's Chapel, Credence Table and Pissina' Nd

Raphael Tuck & Sons (British) 'The Guard's Chapel, Credence Table and Pissina' Nd (verso)

Raphael Tuck & Sons (British)
The Guard’s Chapel, Credence Table and Pissina (front and verso)
Nd
The Guard’s Chapel Series A
Tuck’s Post Card
Art publishers to their majesties the King and Queen and to H.R.H. The Prince of Wales
Carte Postale
Photogravure Postcard

Raphael Tuck & Sons (British) 'The Guard's Chapel, S. E. Wall of Sanctuary' Nd

Raphael Tuck & Sons (British) 'The Guard's Chapel, S. E. Wall of Sanctuary' Nd (verso)

Raphael Tuck & Sons (British)
The Guard’s Chapel, S. E. Wall of Sanctuary (front and verso)
Nd
The Guard’s Chapel Series A
Tuck’s Post Card
Art publishers to their majesties the King and Queen and to H.R.H. The Prince of Wales
Carte Postale
Photogravure Postcard

Raphael Tuck & Sons (British) 'The Guard's Chapel, The East End' Nd

Raphael Tuck & Sons (British)
The Guard’s Chapel, The East End (front and verso)
Nd
The Guard’s Chapel Series A
Tuck’s Post Card
Art publishers to their majesties the King and Queen and to H.R.H. The Prince of Wales
Carte Postale
Photogravure Postcard

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