Curators: Simon Baker & Laurie Hurwitz, MEP and Polly Fleury & Hope Kingsley, Wilson Centre for Photography
Installation view of the exhibition Edward Weston: Becoming Modern at Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP), Paris, 15th October, 2015 – 25th January, 2026 showing at left, Edward Weston’s ‘M’ on the Black Horsehair Sofa, 1921 (below); and at right, Tina Modotti (Nude in Studio), 1922 (below)
Shadow man
You can always learn from the great artists now matter how many times you have seen their work, especially when the photographs are simply, effectively hung ‘on the line’ in a beautiful space.
Here are photographs by Edward Weston I have never seen before: Pictorialist photographs of suffused and intimate beauty. An exhibition of Weston’s Pictorialist work would be magnificent to behold.
And then Weston’s Peppers (1929, below).
I don’t know why I have never seen this photograph before, why his Pepper (1930, below) is more famous, for this is a monstrous image of dark, writhing, semi-abstract figurative forms, just as valid an artistic statement (in a completely different way) than the more famous image.
Can you imagine holding a vintage print of this photograph in your hands!
Gloria virtutem tanquam umbra sequitur
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP) for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“Only rhythm, form and perfect detail to consider – first conceptions coming straight through unadulterated.”
“What I seek now is simplicity – the form reduced to its essence.”
Edward Weston. Daybooks II: California (1930-1945). Aperture, 1961
“The camera should be used for a recording of life, for rendering the very substance and quintessence of the thing itself.”
“To see the Thing Itself is essential: the Quintessence revealed direct without the fog of impressionism.”
Edward Weston. The Daybooks of Edward Weston, from Edward Weston: The Flame of Recognition. Aperture, 1965
Installation view of the exhibition Edward Weston: Becoming Modern at Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP), Paris, 15th October, 2015 – 25th January, 2026 showing at left, Edward Weston’s Shell 1927 (below); and right, Santa Monica (Nude in Doorway) 1936 (below)
Installation views of the exhibition Edward Weston: Becoming Modern at Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP), Paris, 15th October, 2015 – 25th January, 2026
The exhibition
The MEP presents Edward Weston: Becoming Modern, the most significant exhibition dedicated to Edward Weston in Paris in nearly thirty years. A pioneering figure of photographic modernism, Weston helped forge a new visual language – marked by clarity, formal rigour, and a profound engagement with the essential qualities of the photographic medium.
Originating from an idea by Michael Wilson – founder of the Wilson Centre for Photography in London and one of the world’s foremost collectors – Becoming Modern brings together a rare selection of vintage prints from his collection, many of which have never been exhibited in France. These works offer an exceptional insight into Weston’s evolving practice and the emergence of a distinctly photographic modernism.
Spanning more than three decades, from 1908 to 1945, the exhibition traces Weston’s artistic trajectory. His early pictorialist photographs, created in California during the 1910s and early 1920s, draw upon 19th-century artistic traditions, employing soft focus, carefully staged settings, and symbolic imagery. Over time, his vision transformed: his images became sharper, compositions more austere, with an increasing emphasis on form, surface, and structure. By the 1920s, many of his photographs approached geometric abstraction – though Weston was never confined to a single style. This transformation unfolded gradually, as motifs intertwined and techniques evolved in a subtle, ongoing dialogue, revealing an artist continuously refining and deepening his vision.
Highlights include works from Weston’s time in Mexico, where, in close collaboration with Tina Modotti – an artist, political activist, and his lover – he created portraits and nudes imbued with a newfound freedom and radicalism These are complemented by evocative landscapes of the dramatic California coastline near Point Lobos and Carmel. At the heart of the exhibition are his most iconic series: sensuous close-up studies of natural forms – peppers, shells, fruits, and vegetables – captured with an almost obsessive intensity; dune and rock landscapes from Point Lobos and Death Valley; and luminous nudes of his muse, Charis Wilson. Throughout, Weston reveals the universal beauty of everyday subjects, transforming them into pure, sculptural forms. Recurring themes – portraiture, the nude, still life, and nature – are placed in dialogue, uncovering deeper connections across his oeuvre. His work displays remarkable strength and variety, with many natural forms taking on subtle anthropomorphic qualities.
Becoming Modern invites audiences to rediscover a bold innovator whose visionary approach helped shape the course of photographic history. The exhibition also includes a selection of rare works by leading Pictorialist photographers, offering a broader context for Weston’s early influences and the artistic milieu from which his modernism emerged.
Edward Weston biography
Widely regarded as one of the masters of 20th-century photography, Edward Henry Weston (March 24, 1886 – January 1, 1958) reshaped the medium through a vision rooted in clarity, form, and a profound sensitivity to the physical world. Over a career spanning more than forty years, he forged a style that was both radically modern and deeply grounded in the landscapes and materials of the American West.
Born in Highland Park, Illinois, Weston spent his early years in the Chicago area, where his fascination with photography first took hold. By 1903, as a teenager, he was already exhibiting his early works. At sixteen, he received his first camera – a gift from his father that marked the beginning of a lifelong creative journey. He studied at the Illinois College of Photography from 1908 to 1911 before relocating to California, where, at age 25, he opened a portrait studio in Tropico, operating from 1911 to 1922. In his early career, Weston worked within the Pictorialist tradition – a popular style of the early 20th century characterised by soft focus and romantic, painterly effects. His portraits from this period brought him recognition from the art community. Yet by the early 1920s, he began to move away from this approach, embracing a sharper, more precise, and abstract visual language that emphasised form and detail.
A turning point in Weston’s artistic journey occurred in 1922 on a trip to New York, where he met influential modernist photographers such as Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, and Charles Sheeler. They recognised the originality of his work and encouraged him to fully embrace this new direction, which soon included close studies of fruits, vegetables, shells, and stones, rendered with astonishing clarity and sculptural intensity. Through close observation and meticulous composition, he revealed the inherent beauty of form, transforming the ordinary into the iconic.
In the mid-1920s, Weston travelled to Mexico with the photographer and political activist Tina Modotti, with whom he shared a studio and a deep creative partnership. Immersed in the vibrant cultural life of Mexico City, he engaged with a dynamic community of artists and thinkers whose ideas further catalysed his break from tradition.
Returning to California in 1928, Weston found new inspiration in the rugged coastal terrain of Point Lobos. The region’s intricate rock formations, windswept trees, and tide pools became a central focus of his work, offering endless opportunities for visual exploration and formal innovation. In 1932, Weston co-founded Group f/64 – a collective of West Coast photographers dedicated to “straight” photography, emphasising sharp focus, rich tonality, and the use of large-format cameras. The group championed an unmanipulated approach to the medium. Weston’s contributions during this period, especially his landscapes, remain among the most enduring images in American photography.
Becoming Modern traces Edward Weston’s evolution from the soft pictorialism of his early years to the clarity and precision that came to define modern photography. Spanning nearly three decades, the exhibition presents more than 100 rare vintage prints from the Wilson Centre for Photography. It invites viewers to rediscover one of photography’s most visionary pioneers through an extraordinary body of work.
The exhibition opens with two emblematic photographs that frame its central theme, reflecting a curatorial concept developed by Michael Wilson to highlight Weston’s extraordinary range and experimentation. On one side hangs M on the Black Horsehair Sofa (1921, above), a quintessential example of the Pictorialist style: a languid pose, softly diffused light, and a painterly atmosphere enriched by symbolic elements – a floral bouquet, a circular mirror. Opposite it, Tina Modotti (Nude in Studio) (1922, above) marks a striking departure. The figure sits upright, smoking, in a bare studio – captured with crisp focus and a stark, modern sensibility. Though created just a year apart, these works embody the transformative arc at the heart of Weston’s career: a restless search for new ways of seeing. From these beginnings, Weston’s exploratory approach soon dissolved strict categories, embracing a practice defined by an ongoing dialogue between subjects and forms.
From here, the exhibition situates Weston’s early work within the broader context of the Pictorialist movement. His prints are shown alongside key images by photographers who shaped or anticipated his early style – Edward Steichen, George Seeley, Anne Brigman, Dorothea Lange, Margrethe Mather, and Alfred Stieglitz. A tireless advocate for photography as a fine art, Stieglitz helped define the medium’s possibilities through his publications Camera Work and 291, and through his influential New York gallery of the same name. Weston’s own early prints – including a striking self-portrait – are exhibited alongside these historic works. These are placed in conversation with later photographs that capture Weston and his creative circle in 1920s California, evoking a distinct artistic atmosphere. Rooted in the landscape and rhythms of the West Coast, Weston’s early vision subtly diverged from that of his East Coast contemporaries.
The exhibition then turns to the pivotal decade of the 1920s, a period of remarkable transformation and experimentation in Weston’s practice. Rather than unfolding in a linear progression, this section reveals how Weston moved fluidly between subjects and styles – returning repeatedly to certain motifs while continually refining his formal vocabulary.
This section opens with works from Weston’s extended stays in Mexico from 1923 to 1926 with photographer and political activist Tina Modotti – his muse, lover, and collaborator – where he encountered a vibrant avant-garde community. Immersed in the artistic and political ferment of 1920s Mexico, Weston developed a bold new visual language focused on form, contrast, and a sense of immediate presence. A striking portrait of Modotti, presented in both gelatin silver and palladium prints, showcases Weston’s ongoing technical experimentation alongside his deepening sensitivity to tonal nuance. Modotti encouraged Weston toward an even more radical vision, challenging him to see the world anew through his camera.
His Mexican experience deepened Weston’s experimental impulse, introducing sharper contrasts and new formal rigor that reverberated through his portraits and nudes. His obsession with natural forms intensified. He photographed them repeatedly, seeking the perfect composition and meticulously refining his prints to reveal the interplay of light, shadow, and volume.
These subjects interact and reflect one another through Weston’s lens. The sinuous curves of a shell echo the lines of a nude; the gleaming porcelain of Excusado (Toilet) (1926) takes on the quiet sensuality of the human body. Shell (1927, above), one of Weston’s most iconic images, exemplifies his singular ability to elevate everyday objects into studies of luminous purity, rendering form, texture, and light with a precision so distilled that they verge on abstraction – not simply photographs of things, but meditations on form itself. During this period, his treatment of the nude also evolved dramatically: the body becomes fragmented and abstracted, its anatomy transformed into sculptural rhythm. This exploration reaches its pinnacle in Charis, Santa Monica (Nude in Doorway) (1936, above), one of Weston’s most celebrated images.
At the heart of the exhibition are many of Weston’s most exceptional works from the late 1920s and 1930s, in which he famously transformed the ordinary into something sensuous and unexpected. In his iconic studies of vegetables – particularly peppers – their curves and folds evoke the flesh and contours of the human torso, recalling both modernist sculpture and the body. Using the camera to express, in his words, “the very substance and the quintessence of the thing itself,” Weston also photographed in close-up what he saw around him: an egg-slicer, the plank from a barley sifter, a gnarled tree.
His portraits from this period grew sharper in focus and more daring in composition, echoing the dynamic perspectives emerging in European Modernist photography. By the late 1920s, after returning to California, his work had begun to appear in major exhibitions linked to the New Objectivity movement, which championed photographic clarity and rejected painterly effects. This evolution is also evident in his treatment of the nude: the body is fragmented and abstracted, its forms studied as sculptural elements.
Weston’s practice moved fluidly between subjects, embracing both the human body and the natural world, constantly refining his vision through intense study and formal innovation. Close-up studies of nature – sand patterns, rocks, and wood – verge on abstraction, including Rock Erosion and Sandstone Erosion (Point Lobos) – photographs made along the dramatic California coastline that Weston returned to repeatedly. Jagged rock formations, knotted seaweed, wind-twisted cypress trees, and bleached driftwood became recurring motifs, offering endless opportunities for formal exploration. These works also include a group of powerful portraits, from images of his future wife, Charis Wilson, and her brother Leon, to Weston’s son Brett and daughter-in-law Elinore Stone.
In my humble opinion Diane Arbus is the best portrait photographer of the 20th century.
As can be seen in the quotation from a 1939 high-school essay on Plato when Arbus was just 19 years old (below), latent inside her was an appreciation of difference, uniqueness, and the importance of life – all awaiting an out, an emanation of her spirit later manifested in her photographs through the picturing of her subjects.
Arbus found her mature voice as an artist, her métier if you like, when in 1962 she switched from a 35mm camera to a 2 1/4 inch twin-lens reflex (TLR) Rolleiflex (later a Mamiyaflex), a square format which became her iconic signature.
In the photograph Nancy Bellamy’s bedroom, N.Y.C. 1961 (1961, below) we therefore have evidence of the early results of the use of this new camera. In this photograph I believe you can feel how Arbus is still getting used to his new way of seeing the world, for you have to approach your visualisation of the world in a completely different way when constructing the image plane in a square format. Here she is still unsure as to where to place the camera. The light is fantastic coming in through the window and flooding the room but the out of focus left wall is weak and simply does not work with the image.
Fast forward to 1963-1965 and we see Arbus in complete control of her physical and emotional environment. In photographs from this period, whether medium distance portraits showing subjects in situ or tightly cropped portraits with minimal backgrounds, we see her undoubted mastery of natural light, flash, construction and tensioning of the image plane but, above all, in control of the feeling that emanates from the photographs that flows to the viewer.
Whether direct / acceptance / this is who I am (Interior decorator at the nudist camp in his trailer, New Jersey, 1963, 1963 below) to contained / introspective (Lucas Samaras, N.Y.C. 1966, 1966 below) – but never the dreaded “dead pan” – and on to the inscrutable / open / closed looks on each of the three faces in the photograph Triplets in their Bedroom, N.J., 1963 (1963, below), Arbus is the master at conjuring, no what is the word I’m looking for … Arbus is the master at materialising the energy of a person or place before our very eyes.
As the press release so eloquently states, “Through her singular combination of intelligence, charisma, intuition, and courage, Diane Arbus was frequently invited into homes and other private realms seldom seen by strangers. Though made in intimate settings, her photographs evidence no sense of intrusion or trespass. Instead, they reveal an unspoken exchange between photographer and subject, a moment of recognition in which confidences emerge freely and without judgment.”
An unspoken exchange between photographer and subject. A moment of revelation, or revelatio, where the curtain is pulled back to reveal our innermost secrets. Visualised by Arbus without judgement.
As the years progress towards 1968-1970 Arbus becomes bolder still. In photographs such as A naked man being a woman, N.Y.C., 1968 (1968, below), Girl sitting on her bed with her shirt off, N.Y.C., 1968 (1968, below) and Mexican Dwarf in his hotel room, N.YC., 1970 (1970, below) we see and feel such an intimate bond between the photographer and the subject – all crap cut out, all extraneous noise gone, just the baring of the soul of the sitter looking directly into the camera. As Minor White used to say, a communication / communion between the photographer and the subject, back through the lens of the camera and onto the film, forming a Zenian circle of energy, hoping for a revelation of spirit in the negative and subsequent print – whether that be from a rock, a landscape or a portrait.
And in two photographs from the same sitting, we can begin to understand how Arbus achieved her aim. In the photograph Transvestite at the birthday party, N.Y.C. 1969 (1969, below) we have the subject in situ, in context, laughing, happy, enjoying her birthday party surrounded by her things. Then things change. In Transvestite with her birthday cake, N.Y.C. 1969 (1969, below) Arbus closes in on this wonderful human being on her bed with her birthday cake. Isolating her from the background through the use of flash, there she is, fag in hand, staring directly into the camera in all her strength and vulnerability. Arbus evinces what it is to be this human being, she has empathy for the subject in these intimate settings.
I believe that Arbus’ empathy for her subjects was greatly enhanced by the waist level engagement with her sitters when using her medium format camera. Instead of bringing the camera up to the eye, Arbus looks down into the viewfinder to locate and ground the energy of her subjects, and the camera is nestled at solar plexus / belly button, with all the connection to mother, blood, energy and water (Amniotic Fluid) from which we all come. When singing and in yoga practice, breathing comes from the stomach and the energy flows in an out of the navel, the Manipura (solar plexus) in yoga, linked to personal power, emotional balance, and metabolism, acting as a hub for energy distribution.1 Having used an old Mamiya twin-lens C220 medium format camera myself I can totally appreciate the unique perspective and energy such a camera position brings to picturing the world.
“These archetypal images have become deeply embedded in the collective conscience where conscience is pre-eminently the organ of sentiments and representations. The snap, snap, snap of the shutter evinces the flaws of human nature, reveals the presence of a quality or feeling to which we can all relate. As Arbus states, the subject of the picture is always more important than the picture. And more complicated. That is why these photographs always capture our attention – because we become, we inhabit, we are the subject.”2
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ The (navel) is seen as a powerful energy centre in many traditions (Yoga, Ayurveda, TCM) and science, representing our origin, core strength, digestion (Agni/digestive fire), self-esteem, and life force (prana).
2/ Marcus Bunyan commenting on the exhibition Diane Arbus at Jeu de Paume, Paris, October 2011 – February 2012
Many thankx to David Zwirner for allowing me to publish the 5 images and installation photographs in the posting. All other photographs are used under fair use conditions for the purposes of eduction and research. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“For me the subject of the picture is always more important than the picture. And more complicated.”
Diane Arbus
“There are and have been and will be an infinite number of things on earth: individuals all different, all wanting different things, all knowing different things, all loving different things, all looking different. Everything that has been on earth has been different from any other thing. That is what I love: the differentness, the uniqueness of all things and the importance of life…. I see something that seems wonderful; I see the divineness in ordinary things.”
Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Installation view of the exhibition Diane Arbus: Sanctum Sanctorum at David Zwirner, London showing at left, Arbus’ Girl sitting on her bed with her shirt off, N.Y.C., 1968; at centre, Interior decorator at the nudist camp in his trailer, New Jersey 1963; at second right, Mrs. T. Charlton Henry in a negligee, Philadelphia, Pa. 1965; and at right, Triplets in their Bedroom, N.J., 1963
Installation view of the exhibition Diane Arbus: Sanctum Sanctorum at David Zwirner, London showing at second left, Arbus’ Two friends at home, N.Y.C., 1965; at second right, Brenda Diana Duff Frazier, 1938 Debutante of the Year, at home, Boston, Mass. 1966; and at right, Transvestite at her birthday party, N.Y.C., 1968
Installation view of the exhibition Diane Arbus: Sanctum Sanctorum at David Zwirner, London showing Arbus’ photograph A naked man being a woman, N.Y.C. 1968
Installation view of the exhibition Diane Arbus: Sanctum Sanctorum at David Zwirner, London showing in the centre distance, Arbus’ Mexican dwarf in his hotel room, N.Y.C. 1970; at second right, Lucas Samaras, N.Y.C. 1966; and at right, Bishop on her bed, Santa Barbara, Cal., 1964
Lucas Samaras (Greek: Λουκάς Σαμαράς; September 14, 1936 – March 7, 2024) was a Greek-born American photographer, sculptor, and painter. …
His “Auto-Interviews” were a series of text works that were “self-investigatory” interviews. The primary subject of his photographic work is his own self-image, generally distorted and mutilated. He worked with multi-media collages, and by manipulating the wet dyes in Polaroid photographic film to create what he calls “Photo-Transformations”.
~ Sanctum Sanctorum: a sacred room or inner chamber; a place of inviolable privacy
Diane Arbus: Sanctum Sanctorum, an exhibition of forty-five photographs made in private places across New York, New Jersey, California, and London between 1961 and 1971, is on view at David Zwirner, London, from 6 November to 17 January 2025, and travels to Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco in spring 2026. The exhibition will be accompanied by a comprehensive monograph reproducing all works in the exhibition, jointly published by both galleries.
Through her singular combination of intelligence, charisma, intuition, and courage, Diane Arbus was frequently invited into homes and other private realms seldom seen by strangers. Though made in intimate settings, her photographs evidence no sense of intrusion or trespass. Instead, they reveal an unspoken exchange between photographer and subject, a moment of recognition in which confidences emerge freely and without judgment.
Arbus’s desire to know people embraced a vast spectrum of humanity. Her subjects in Sanctum Sanctorum include debutantes, nudists, celebrities, aspiring celebrities, socialites, transvestites, babies, widows, circus performers, lovers, female impersonators, and a blind couple in their bedroom.
The exhibition brings together little-known works, such as Girl sitting in bed with her boyfriend, N.Y.C. 1966; Ozzie and Harriet Nelson on their bed, Los Angeles1970; and Interior decorator at the nudist camp in his trailer, New Jersey 1963, alongside celebrated images like Mexican dwarf in his hotel room, N.Y.C. 1970 and A naked man being a woman, N.Y.C. 1968.
While many of Arbus’s photographs have become part of the public’s collective consciousness since her landmark retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1972, seen in this context, viewers may discover aspects of even familiar works that have previously gone unnoticed.
Sanctum Sanctorum follows two recent major exhibitions of the artist’s work: Cataclysm: The 1972 Diane Arbus Retrospective Revisited at David Zwirner New York (2022) and Los Angeles (2025), and Diane Arbus: Constellation at LUMA, Arles (2023–2024) and the Park Avenue Armory, New York (2025).
Exhibition Catalogue
This new title ‘Sanctum Sanctorum’ illuminates Diane Arbus’s singular ability to enter private worlds.
Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research.
One of Arbus’s lesser known pictures, this photograph is of the bedroom of Nancy Bellamy, the wife of Richard Bellamy, a leading gallerist in 1960s New York who influentially championed Pop Art and Minimalism. Before she began her personal projects, Arbus worked in fashion photography with her husband, Allan, and she first met Nancy when she modelled for the Arbuses on a fashion shoot. As well as modelling, Bellamy also worked as a dancer, painter and costume designer, and had a keen interest in spiritualism. Like ‘Xmas Tree in a Living Room in Levittown 1963’, Arbus uses an empty room to create a portrait of the person – the dressmaker’s dummy, the canvas on the wall, the photographs by the mirror and the simple, yet elegant furnishings together create an impression of Arbus’s friend’s personality.
Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research.
The bishop in Diane Arbus’s photograph “Bishop on her bed, Santa Barbara, Cal.” (1964, above) was Bishop Ethel Predonzan, a unique figure who believed she was in Santa Barbara to await the Second Coming of Christ and wore elaborate robes, described by Arbus as a “small lady in damask robes with hair of phosphorescent pink”.
Predonzan was a key subject in Arbus’s exploration of individuals on the fringes, showcasing the artist’s ability to find deep personal connection and reveal inner strangeness.
Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research.
Mrs T. Charlton Henry was a Philadelphia socialite, a philanthropist, and a fashion icon – often top of the ‘best-dressed’ lists. She was the kind of wealthy upper-class woman that Arbus’s father would have hoped to see in his Fifth Avenue department store buying the latest furs.
“Mrs. Henry, born Julia Rush Biddle of Philadelphia’s Main Line, weighs approximately 88 pounds. She will be 82 years old this month. She has been on the best-dressed list so often that she is now a member of fashion’s Hall of Fame. She still lives in Philadelphia, but commutes to New York for luncheon, shopping, theater. She sits, with the posture of another era, on a bound-to-be-seen banquette at La Caravelle restaurant and delves into a curry (“I’ll have jellied soup for dinner tonight”). Her silver and gold “57 varieties” hair is meticulously coifed; the fingernails that blow delicate little kisses of greeting to friends are tinted a deep pink. Her brown and white gingham Mainbocher is perked up with her favorite day jewels. There are marble-size pearls around the neck and one wrist, and massive yellow sapphires at the other wrist, the ears, and flashing away on a ring and a brooch.”
Around the world, 2025 hasn’t been a great year for photography exhibitions. As a friend of mine said on Facebook it has been a dreary year and I would tend to agree with him.
Curatorially, everything was pretty cut and dried, relying on the usual one artist show or group exhibition on a theme with nobody prepared to take a risk on anything creative, inventive even.
I found little to inspire me in terms of idiosyncratic but illuminating pairings of photographers or unusual insights into the conditions and conceptualisation of photographic production and presentation – other than a few of the exhibitions noted below: costume, gesture and expression – yes! the development of colour photography pre the ubiquitous American artists – yes! and the life in self-portraits of a photobooth operator in Melbourne, part magician, part artist – YES!
Out of the 60 postings on Art Blart in 2025 I’ve picked what I think are the 11 best exhibitions, plus a couple of honourable mentions.
I hope you enjoy the selection and a Happy New Year to you all!
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ Marcus Bunyan. “Past present,” on the exhibition Still Performing: Costume, Gesture, and Expression in 19th Century European Photography at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, August 2024 – January 2025
Victor Plumier (Belgian, 1820-1878) Lady in Costume About 1850 Daguerreotype, half plate 5 1/2 × 4 1/2 inches The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art Gift of the Hall Family Foundation
“The emotions and the sentiments, the gestures and the expressions. The actor and the stage, the photographer and the sitter. The staged photograph and the tableaux vivant. The Self and the Other.” ~ MB
2/ A Long Arc: Photography and the American South since 1845 at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, October 2024 – January 2025
Andrew Joseph Russell (American, 1829-1902) Slave Pen, Alexandria, Virginia 1863 Albumen silver print High Museum of Art Purchased with funds Lucinda Weill Bunnen Fund and the Donald and Marilyn Keogh Family
“Photographs are containers of, fragments of, memories of, histories of, events – remembrances of events – brought from past into present, informing the future, showing only snippets of the stories of both past and present lives. Parallel to the usual thought that photographs are about death, they are also memory containers for (still) living people.” ~ MB
3/ Marcus Bunyan. “Out in the midday sun,” on the exhibition Martin Parr. Early Works at Fotografie Forum Frankfurt (FFF), September 2024 – February 2025
“I am always fascinated with the early work of an artist. In essence, the photographs tell you what are the primary concerns for the artist and these themes usually remain with them for the rest of their career. These early black and white photographs provide a window into that ongoing investigation, that golden path. They are more subtle in their modulation of British life than in the later colour work – it’s as though the artist had to change gears with the use of colour developing a more ironic way of seeing British life through a different spatial relationship to his subjects – but in these photographs there is still that deprecating humour that is often missing in the work of his contemporaries…” ~ MB
“There are the things that are out in the open, and there are the things that are hidden, and life has more to do, the real world has more to do with what is hidden.” ~ Saul Leiter
5/ True Colors: Color in Photography from 1849 to 1955 at Albertina Modern, Vienna, January – April, 2025
Léon Vidal (French, 1833-1906) Oriental Onyx Sardonyx Cup (16th century) 1876 Photomechanical proof (photochromy using the Léon Vidal process) mounted on cardboard H. 20.8 ; L. 26.2 cm. Don Fondation Kodak-Pathé, 1983
“What a wonderful exhibition. It’s so exciting to see the history and development of colour photography pre the ubiquitous, American artists William Eggleston and Stephen Shore, much as I like both artists.” ~ MB
6/ The basement: photography from Prahran College (1968-1981) at the Museum of Australian Photography, Wheelers Hill, Melbourne, March – May 2025
Julie Millowick (Australian, b. 1948) Mother and child from 46 Blanche Street, St Kilda 1977 Gelatin silver print 15.9 x 23.7cm Museum of Australian Photography, City of Monash Collection donated by Julie Millowick 2024
“Prahran College itself played a critical role in the legitimisation of photography as an art form within Australia. It spearheaded the integration of art photography into tertiary education curricula, fostering an environment where young artists … could experiment formally and conceptually.”
James McArdle. “Epoch,” on the On This Date in Photography website, 25th April, 2025 [Online] Cited 28/04/2025
“The wit, the humour (pigeons sitting outside the racing pigeon shop), the stiff upper lip, the carry on regardless, the working class pantomime of life and death – the public commission flats where people formed caring communities that were destroyed through redevelopment – the integrity of an existence that has largely come and gone pictured with warmth and empathy.” ~ MB
8/ Auto-Photo: A Life in Portraits at RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, June – August 2025
Installation view of the exhibition Auto-Photo: A Life in Portraits at RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, June – August, 2025 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
“Through the strip self-portraits Adler took while servicing and then testing the photobooths that he operated in Melbourne, Australia we become immersed in an archive of his world, the exhibition becoming a joyous ode to a man who devoted his life to photography (not in the traditional sense): in turns humorous and historical, a travelogue, his travelogue, through time and space.’ ~ MB
“Rodríguez’s moody, high contrast photographs of humanity and street scenes pictured from behind the wheel of his taxi in New York proffer an intuitive, empathetic and subjective view of the city and its people at a time of great economic and social upheaval…
Uncertain times, uncertain angles and perspectives, uncertain light give rise to a powerful body of work made certain by the talent of an impressive photographer. Glorious work.” ~ MB
10/ Marcus Bunyan. “Myths of the American West,” on the exhibition Richard Avedon ‘In the American West’ 1979-1984 at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris, April – October 2025
“Avedon, while undercutting the myth of the American West through his storytelling, doesn’t seek to document, exploit or misrepresent his subjects, but to subjectively present them as on a theatrical set devoid of scenery – where their very appearance becomes scene / seen. As he himself said, “My concern is… the human predicament; only what I consider the human predicament may simply be my own.”” ~ MB
“The Bechers’ typologies and grids, their topographic state, their same same photographs and perspectives of industrial sculptures and landscapes are anything but objective. Their pictorial grammar, underlaid by a conceptual approach to subject matter, continuously reflected in the systematics of capture and display (the juxtaposition of works together), is constantly undermined by the ghost in the machine – those viral codes of mutation and difference which cannot be controlled.” ~ MB
“Weems blends the poetic and conceptual in photographs and bodies of work which investigate history, identity, racism, executive and patriarchal power from the perspectives of female / Black American.
What a fabulous artist, a guide into circumstances seldom seen, now revealed.” ~ MB
Curators: Stephanie D’Alessandro, Leonard A. Lauder Curator of Modern Art and Senior Research Coordinator in Modern and Contemporary Art at The Met, and Stephen C. Pinson, Curator in the Department of Photographs at The Met, with the assistance of Micayla Bransfield, Research Associate, Modern and Contemporary Art.
“Like the undisturbed ashes of an object consumed by flames these images are oxidized residues fixed by light and chemical elements of an experience, an adventure, not an experiment. They are the result of curiosity, inspiration, and these words do not pretend to convey any information.”
Man Ray1
The rayographs
Although not the inventor of the photogram, a photograph made without the use of a camera by placing objects directly onto sensitised photographic paper and then exposing the paper to light, Man Ray’s rayographs have become the most recognisable and famous form that photograms have taken. This is because of their inventiveness, their subliminal connection to the psyche, and the use of “objects from the real world to make ambiguous dreamscapes.”7
It is interesting that Man Ray called his images rayographs, for a graph implies a topographical mapping, a laying out of statistics, whereas Lucia Moholy and László Moholy-Nagy’s photograms imply in the title of their technique the transmission of some form of message, like a telegram. The paradox is that, as the quotation above states, Man Ray always insisted that his rayographs imparted no information at all; perhaps they are only dreams made (un)stable. Contrary to this the other two artists believed that, “photographic images – cameraless and other – should not deal with conventional sentiments or personal feelings but should be concerned with light and form,”8 quite the reverse of the title of their technique.
After his arrival in Paris Man Ray started experimenting in his darkroom and discovered the technique for his rayographs by accident. With the help of his friend the Surrealist poet Tristan Tzara, he published a portfolio of twelve Rayographs in 1922 called Les champs délicieux (The delicious fields). “This title is a reference to ‘Les champs magnétiques’, a collection of writings by André Breton and Philippe Soupault composed from purportedly random thought fragments recorded by the two authors.”9 The rayographs are visual representations of random thought fragments, “photographic equivalents for the Surrealist sensibility that glorified randomness and disjunction.”10
Man Ray, “denied the camera its simplest joy: the ability to capture everything, all the distant details, all the ephemeral lights and shadows of the world”11 but, paradoxically, the rayographs are the most ephemeral of creatures, only being able to be created once, the result not being known until after the photographic paper has been developed. In fact, for Man Ray to create his portfolio Les champs délicieux (The delicious fields), he had to rephotograph the rayographs in order to make multiple copies.12
Man Ray “insisted in nearly every interview that the rayograph was not a photogram in the traditional sense. He did something that a photogram didn’t; he introduced depth into the images,”13 which denied the images their photographic objectivity by depicting an internal landscape rather than an external one.14 What the rayographs do not deny, however, is the subjectivity of the artist, his skill at placing the objects on the photographic paper, expressed in their dream-like nature, both a subjective ephemerality (because they could only be produced once) and an ephemeral subjectivity (because they were expressions of Man Ray’s fantasies, and therefore had little substance).
Through an alchemical process the latent images emerge from the photographic paper, representations of Man Ray’s fantasies as embodied in the ‘presence’ of the objects themselves, in the surface of the paper. Perhaps these objects offer, in Heidegger’s terms, ‘a releasement towards things’,15 “a coexistence between a conscious and unconscious way of perceiving which sustains the mystery of the object confusing the distinction between real time and sensual time, between inside and outside, input and output becoming neither here nor there.”16
Finally, within their depth of field the rayographs can be seen as both dangerous and delicious, for somehow they are both beautiful and unsettling at one and the same time. As Surrealism revels in randomness and chance these images enact the titles of other Man Ray photographs: Danger-Dancer, Anxiety, Dust Raising, Distorted House. The rayographs revel in chance and risk; Man Ray brings his fantasies to the surface, an interior landscape represented externally that can be (re)produced only once – those dangerous delicious fields.
1/ Man Ray quoted in Janus (trans. Murtha Baca). Man Ray: The Photographic Image. London: Gordon Fraser, 1980, p. 213
7/ Mark Greenberg (ed.,). In Focus: Man Ray: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum. Los Angeles, The J. Paul Getty Museum, 1998, p. 38
8/ Naomi Rosenblum. A World History of Photography. New York: Abbeville Press, 1997, 394
9/ Greenberg, op. cit., p. 28
10/ Jed Perl (ed.,). Man Ray: Aperture Masters of Photography. New York: Aperture, 1997 pp. 11-12
11/ Perl, op. cit., pp. 5-6
12/ Greenberg, op. cit., p. 28
13/ Greenberg, op. cit., p. 112
14/ Greenberg, op. cit., p. 28
15/ “We stand at once within the realm of that which hides itself from us, and hides itself just in approaching us. That which shows itself and at the same time withdraws is the essential trait of what we call the mystery … Releasement towards things and openness to the mystery belong together. They grant us the possibility of dwelling in the world in a totally different way…”
Martin Heidegger. Discourse on Thinking. New York: Harper & Row, 1966, pp. 55-56 quoted in Mauro Baracco. “Completed Yet Unconcluded: The Poetic Resistance of Some Melbourne Architecture,” in Leon van Schaik (ed.,). Architectural Design Vol. 72. No. 2 (‘Poetics in Architecture’). London: John Wiley and Sons, 2002, 74, Footnote 6.
Many thankx to The Metropolitan Museum of Art for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“Stepping into the exhibition Man Ray: When Objects Dream at The Metropolitan Museum of Art feels like entering the bellows of an old camera. Through a rectangular frame cut into the entry, the darkened walls unfold, accordion-like, to reveal a visual feast of the artist’s work, as Man Ray’s earliest film, “Retour à la raison (Return to Reason)” (1923), flickers across the screen opposite. Although the exhibition brings together approximately 160 works from an impressive array of lenders, it reveals itself gradually, taking the viewer through several turns before one can grasp its sheer enormity. When Objects Dream proves, thrillingly, that anyone left feeling jaded from the many, many recent exhibitions surrounding Surrealism’s centennial in 2024 can still see the movement’s key photographer with a fresh set of eyes.”
“Objects to touch, to eat, to crunch, to apply to the eye, to the skin, to press, to lick, to break, to grind, objects to lie, to flee from, to honor, things cold or hot, feminine or masculine, objects of day or night which absorb through your pores the greater part of our life. … These are the projections surprised in transparence, by the light of tenderness, of objects that dream and talk in their sleep.”
. Tristan Tzara, “When Objects Dream,” 1934
“One sheet of paper got into the developing tray – a sheet unexposed that had been mixed with those already exposed under the negatives. … Regretting the waste of paper, I mechanically placed a small glass funnel, the graduate, and the thermometer in the tray on the wetted paper. I turned on the light; before my eyes an image began to form, not quite a simple silhouette of the objects as in a straight photograph, but distorted and refracted by the glass more or less in contact with the paper and standing out against a black background. … I remembered when I was a boy, placing fern leaves in a printing frame with proof paper, exposing it to sunlight, and obtaining a white negative of the leaves. This was the same idea, but with an added three-dimensional quality and tone graduation. I made a few more prints … taking whatever came to hand; my hotel-room key, a handkerchief, some pencils, a brush, a candle, a piece of twine … excitedly, enjoying myself immensely. In the morning I examined the results. … They looked startlingly new and mysterious.”
American artist Man Ray (1890-1976) was a visionary known for his radical experiments that pushed the limits of photography, painting, sculpture, and film. In the winter of 1921, he pioneered the rayograph, a new twist on a technique used to make photographs without a camera. By placing objects on or near a sheet of light-sensitive paper, which he exposed to light and developed, Man Ray turned recognisable subjects into wonderfully mysterious compositions. Introduced in the period between Dada and Surrealism, the rayographs’ transformative, magical qualities led the poet Tristan Tzara to describe them as capturing the moments “when objects dream.”
The exhibition will be the first to situate this signature accomplishment in relation to Man Ray’s larger body of work of the 1910s and 1920s. Drawing from the collections of The Met and more than 50 U.S. and international lenders, the exhibition will feature approximately 60 rayographs and 100 paintings, objects, prints, drawings, films, and photographs – including some of the artist’s most iconic works – to highlight the central role of the rayograph in Man Ray’s boundary-breaking practice.
“Before my eyes an image began to form, not quite a simple silhouette of the objects as in a straight photograph, but distorted and refracted … In the morning I examined the results, pinning a couple of the rayographs – as I decided to call them – on the wall. They looked startlingly new and mysterious.” ~ Man Ray
Text from The Metropolitan Museum of Art website
Installation views of the exhibition Man Ray: When Objects Dream at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, September 2025 – February 2026
In the 1923 silent short of the same title, Man Ray filmed barely discernible scenes of Paris at night along with his own enigmatic photograms and conglomerations of spiraling or gyrating objects. The resulting sequence of near-total abstractions seems devoid of sense or purpose. The “return to reason” in the film comes finally in the form of a woman’s torso – modelled by cabaret personality Kiki de Montparnasse – turning to and fro beside a rain-covered windowpane. Man Ray reproduced the seductive finale, as well as other moments from the film, as photographs, singly and in strips. A still from Man Ray’s film, this particular photograph appeared on its own in the first issue of the key avant-garde journal La Révolution surréaliste, in 1924.
Le retour à la raison (Return to Reason), Man Ray, 1923
Emak-Bakia (1926) – directed by Man Ray
Emak-Bakia (Basque for Leave me alone) is a 1926 film directed by Man Ray. Subtitled as a cinépoéme, it features many techniques Man Ray used in his still photography (for which he is better known), including rayographs, double exposure, soft focus and ambiguous features.
Emak-Bakia shows elements of fluid mechanical motion in parts, rotating artifacts showing his ideas of everyday objects being extended and rendered useless. Kiki of Montparnasse (Alice Prin) is shown driving a car in a scene through a town. Towards the middle of the film Jacques Rigaut appears dressed in female clothing and make-up. Later in the film a caption appears: “La raison de cette extravagance” (the reason for this extravagance). The film then cuts to a car arriving and a passenger leaving with briefcase entering a building, opening the case revealing men’s shirt collars which he proceeds to tear in half. The collars are then used as a focus for the film, rotating through double exposures.
The film features sculptures by Pablo Picasso, and some of Man Ray’s mathematical objects both still and animated using a stop motion technique.
Originally a silent film, recent copies have been dubbed using music taken from Man Ray’s personal record collection of the time. The musical reconstruction was by Jacques Guillot.
When the film was first exhibited, a man in the audience stood up to complain it was giving him a headache and hurting his eyes. Another man told him to shut up, and they both started to fight. The theatre turned into a frenzy, the fighting ended up out in the street, and the police were called in to stop the riot.
Emak bakia can also mean “give peace” (“emak” is the imperative form of the verb “eman”, which means “give”) in Basque.
The film was based on Robert Desnon’s surrealist poem L’Étoile de mer.
The Met Presents First Major Exhibition on Man Ray’s Radical Reinvention of Art through the rayograph
Featuring 160 rayographs, paintings, objects, prints, drawings, films, and photographs, Man Ray: When Objects Dream highlights the principal place of the rayograph – a type of cameraless photograph – within the context of many of the artist’s most important works
This exhibition includes thirty-five works by Man Ray which are part of the major promised gift of nearly 200 works of Dada and Surrealist art from Trustee John Pritkzer
Man Ray: When Objects Dream at The Metropolitan Museum of Art is the first major exhibition to examine the radical experimentation of American artist Man Ray (1890-1976) through one of his most significant bodies of work, the rayograph. Man Ray coined the term rayograph to name his version of the 19th-century technique of making photographs without a camera. He created them by placing objects on or near a sheet of light-sensitive paper, which he then exposed to light and developed. These photograms – as they are also called – appear as reversed silhouettes, or negative versions, of their subjects. They often feature recognisable items that become wonderfully mysterious in the artist’s hands. Their transformative nature led the Dada poet Tristan Tzara to describe rayographs as capturing the moments “when objects dream.” While Man Ray acknowledged the photographic origins of his new works, he did not think of them as strictly bound by medium. Taking Man Ray’s lead, this presentation is the first – more than a century since he introduced the rayograph – to situate this signature accomplishment in relation to his larger artistic output. The exhibition is on view September 14, 2025, through February 1, 2026.
“As one of the most fascinating and multi-faceted artists in the avant-garde movements of the early 20th century, Man Ray challenged traditional narratives of modernism through his daring experimentation with diverse artistic mediums,” said Max Hollein, The Met’s Marina Kellen French Director and Chief Executive Officer. “Anchored by Man Ray’s innovative and mesmerising rayographs along with new research and discoveries, this exhibition invites visitors to explore his ground-breaking manipulation of objects, light, and media, which profoundly reframed his artistic practice and impacted countless other artists. We’re so thrilled to include thirty-five works by Man Ray in this exhibition as part of John’s incredible promised gift.”
Drawing from the collections of The Met and more than 50 U.S. and international lenders, the presentation includes more than 60 rayographs, many of which were featured in important publications and exhibitions at the time of their making, and 100 paintings, objects, prints, drawings, collages, films, and photographs to highlight the central role of the rayograph in Man Ray’s boundary-breaking practice. The exhibition marks a collaboration with the recently closed Lens Media Lab, Yale University, under the direction of Paul Messier, and with photography conservators and curators at various lending institutions, to study more than fifty rayographs.
In the winter of 1921, while working late in his Paris darkroom, Man Ray inadvertently produced a photogram by placing some of his glass equipment on top of an unexposed sheet of photographic paper he found among the prints in his developing tray. As he wrote in his 1963 autobiography, “Before my eyes an image began to form, not quite a simple silhouette of the objects as in a straight photograph, but distorted and refracted … In the morning I examined the results, pinning a couple of the rayographs – as I decided to call them – on the wall. They looked startlingly new and mysterious.” This supposed accident, now the stuff of legend, has obscured the fact that rayographs might be seen as the culmination of Man Ray’s work up to 1921 as well as the frame through which he would redefine his work thereafter. They harnessed his interests in working between dimensions, media, and artistic traditions, fittingly at the moment between Dada and Surrealism, which writer Louis Aragon once called the mouvement flou (flou means “hazy, blurry, or out of focus” in French).
Unfolding in a series of spaces that intersect with a central, dramatic presentation of rayographs, the exhibition illuminates their connections with Man Ray’s work in other media, including assemblage, painting, photography, and film. In approaching the rayograph in this expansive way, the exhibition also offers a reappraisal of the most productive and creatively significant period of his long career, beginning in New York around 1915 with his ambitious paintings and concluding in Paris in 1929 with his fine-tuning of the solarization process with Lee Miller. A critical factor across the exhibition is the central role of objects for Man Ray’s career, both in the creation of many of the rayographs and in his work more generally.
At its core, Man Ray: When Objects Dream focuses new attention on some of the artist’s most recognised, but little-studied, works, most particularly the rayograph. The exhibition opens with Champs délicieux (Delicious Fields) (1922), a portfolio of 12 rayographs which marks the first time Man Ray presented his photograms to the public. Critics hailed them for putting photography on the same plane as original pictorial works. The presentation concludes with the working copy of Champs délicieux, which the artist canceled and dedicated to his friend, Dada artist Tristan Tzara, in 1959.
Between these two works, twelve thematic sections of the exhibition explore such concepts as the silhouette, the dream, the body, the object, and the game, which are inspired by Man Ray’s experimentation with the rayograph. Other groupings will focus on specific media and techniques, and the artist’s studio, as well as watershed moments in the artist’s production, such as the years of 1923 and 1929, when Man Ray unexpectedly returned to painting. Three of his newly restored films, Retour à la raison (Return to Reason) (1923), Emak Bakia (1926), and L’étoile de mer (The Starfish) (1928), will be screened within the exhibition.
Highlights include such iconic objects like Man Ray’s iron studded with tacks, known as Cadeau (Gift) (1921), and his metronome, Object to be Destroyed (1923), that keeps time with the swinging eye of his companion, the photographer Lee Miller. Celebrated photographs, including his landmark Le violon d’Ingres (1924), in which the torso of the artist and performer Kiki de Montparnasse (Alice Prin) is depicted as a musical instrument, are also featured. The exhibition brings together some of his boldest but most refined experimental works – compositions like Aerograph (1919), a painting made with an airbrush and pigment sprayed through and around items from his studio. For Man Ray, objects could function as metaphors for the body, as demonstrated in works such as Catherine Barometer (1920) and L’homme (Man). Rarely seen paintings in the exhibition, including Paysage suédois (Swedish Landscape) (1926) record the artist’s great experimentation, working paint without a brush and in an almost sculptural way, building up and scraping down the surface that reflects his experiments in the darkroom.
Man Ray: When Objects Dream is curated by Stephanie D’Alessandro, Leonard A. Lauder Curator of Modern Art and Senior Research Coordinator in Modern and Contemporary Art at The Met, and Stephen C. Pinson, Curator in the Department of Photographs at The Met, with the assistance of Micayla Bransfield, Research Associate, Modern and Contemporary Art.
Installation view of the exhibition Man Ray: When Objects Dream at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, September 2025 – February 2026 showing at centre, Man Ray’s photograph Le violon d’Ingres 1924 (below)
American artist Man Ray (1890-1976) was a visionary known for his radical experimentation that pushed the limits of art. His most iconic works – an iron studded with sharp tacks, a woman’s back reimagined as a violin – combine this boundary-breaking attitude with a singular belief in the transformative potential of everyday things.
In the 1920s, the most significant of Man Ray’s investigations – and the thing that connected much of his work – was what he called the rayograph, a new twist on an old technique for making photographs without a camera. By placing objects on or near a sheet of sensitised paper, which he then exposed to light and developed, he turned recognisable subjects into wonderfully mysterious compositions. This radical art form, inextricably linked to the era’s Dada and Surrealist movements, grew out of his early work in New York and redefined his groundbreaking career in Paris.
Introduction
This exhibition’s subtitle, When Objects Dream, comes from a phrase by Tristan Tzara, a poet, artist, and early champion of Man Ray. Witness to some of the earliest rayographs, Tzara understood perhaps better than anyone else their physical and metaphorical link to objects reimagined through art. In a similar spirit, the current presentation reconsiders the role of the rayograph within Man Ray’s practice, especially its ability to extend his ideas across diverse media. The loosely chronological installation unfolds across a series of interconnected galleries organized around ideas that motivated the artist; to that end, visitors are invited to explore it in any number of ways.
All works in the exhibition are by Man Ray (American, 1890-1976).
Champs délicieux
In April 1922, readers of a French literary journal discovered a curious announcement for an album titled Champs délicieux (Delicious Fields). Its twelve “original photographs” by Man Ray feature objects from his studio – tongs, a comb, string, a hotel room key – composed in groupings. The images are ordered without clear logic or narrative. Instead, as advertised, they mark a “state of mind,” the artist’s free play, alone at night and without work obligations, in his studio darkroom.
Man Ray introduced Champs délicieux in the period between two revolutionary movements that arose in the wake of World War I: Dada and Surrealism. Both challenged conventional art and society by upending traditional subjects, techniques, and expectations. Inspired in part by a collection of unconsciously driven, automatic writings by poets André Breton and Philippe Soupault, Man Ray sought to render everyday objects unfamiliar. As early subscriptions attest, the album found an enthusiastic audience who appreciated the language of the rayograph and its ability to open up a new visual world.
A New Art
Before Man Ray first picked up a camera in 1915, he was focused on painting. He set out to stake his claim in the exhilarating avant-garde scene, his interest fueled by cutting-edge exhibitions at Alfred Stieglitz’s gallery, 291, and thrilling examples of Cubism, Expressionism, Fauvism, and Futurism at the modern art presentation known as The Armory Show in 1913. Unexpectedly, photography offered Man Ray a path forward. Noting the way a camera lens could compress and flatten space, he determined to endow art with a similar “concentration of life” while simultaneously freeing it from the burden of illusionism. “The creative force and the expressiveness of painting,” he wrote at the time, “reside materially in the colour and texture of pigment, in the possibilities of form invention and organisation, and in the flat plane on which these elements are brought to play.” He made paintings using palette knives and other tools instead of brushes and employed patterns, cutouts, and collage to create a self-proclaimed “new art of two dimensions.”
Objects At Hand
NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR GOODS LEFT OVER THIRTY DAYS. So reads a sign in a photo, displayed nearby, of Man Ray’s West Eighth Street studio in New York. It was one of several items the artist discovered in the trash heap at his apartment building and brought up to his top-floor space. He considered retooling the sign to read LEFT OVER GOODS NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR THIRTY DAYS but decided it was perfect as is. This act – of elevating junk to art – is a familiar one in histories of the avant-garde, especially for the Dada movement. Art did not have to be painted or modelled or made with traditional materials and tools; it could be found in the everyday world and appreciated for the idea that it introduced, not for its beauty.
As Man Ray developed his “new art,” he came to see the latent potential of all the objects within his studio. This spurred further investigations that likewise tested the limits of two and three dimensions and blurred the boundaries between media. At the same time, he continued to explore how the camera could be used not only to document his work but to open new perspectives onto ordinary objects and their creative possibilities.
Clichés-verre
While the rayograph is often described as Man Ray’s first experiment with cameraless photography, that moment occurred years earlier. Around 1917 he explored several photographically based techniques, including the cliché-verre, or “glass-plate” print. A nineteenth-century reproductive process that incorporates both photography and printmaking, a cliché-verre is traditionally made by covering a plate of glass with a darkened medium and drawing into it to produce clear lines. When set onto sensitised paper and exposed to a light source, the plate transmits the scratched away areas as dark lines. Man Ray chose to incise directly into the emulsion of an exposed photographic plate, which he then subjected to light again with paper below it to make a contact print.
Photography
Man Ray first picked up a camera in 1915, to document his art. Through this experience, he discovered that the works acquired new qualities when reproduced in black and white. He made photographic portraits, too, which in Paris would become a dependable source of income. Revelling in the camera’s transformative optical abilities, Man Ray soon used it as a tool to facilitate his self-appointed role as a “marvellous explorer of those aspects that our retinas will never record.” He sought to reveal the creative potential of objects in his studio and in 1918 began a series of photographs using specifically arranged everyday items.
Aerographs
Still grappling with how to paint without a brush, Man Ray found inspiration at his day job working for an advertising agency, where he was introduced to an airbrush. He later brought the equipment back to his attic studio and began to experiment. Using an air compressor, the artist directed pigment through stencils and around masked areas and objects, which he rested on the composition board and repositioned as he worked. “It was thrilling,” he would later recount, “to paint a picture, hardly touching the surface – a purely cerebral act.” These works, which he termed “aerographs” were made, in effect, before they hit the paper. Objects were carved, shaped, and modeled in the air. Voids register as substance, and what we see on the paper is residue fused to the surface. “I tried above all,” Man Ray explained, “to create three-dimensional paintings on two-dimensional surfaces.”
Flou
Man Ray introduced his rayographs during a transitional period between the Dada and Surrealism movements that the French writer Louis Aragon called the mouvement flou – flou translating to “blurry” or “out of focus.” The term also suits these works, which viewers initially deemed curious and captivating but difficult to pin down. Rayographs, as cameraless photographs, exist in an indistinct place between photography and painting, the mechanical and the handmade, documentation and dream.
During the 1920s Man Ray also explored blurriness in his camera images. Even as technical improvements facilitated increased focus and detail, and the preference for sharp photographs grew, he generally pursued a flattering, soft-focus technique in his growing business of portrait commissions. At other times, he sought more radical effects, which the director Claude Heymann described as “strange, troubling blurs” produced “through distortions, prolonged poses or special focusing techniques.” The anomalies in the resulting photographs are visible signs of the effort and time Man Ray spent to realise the images – even if he later called them unplanned or accidental.
A New Field of Gravity
In his preface introducing the album Champs délicieux (Delicious Fields), Tristan Tzara remarked that rayographs “present to space an image that exceeds it, and the air, with its clenched fists and superior intelligence, seizes it and holds it next to its heart.” Indeed, objects in Man Ray’s images beckon us in but keep us thrillingly at the edge – or put another way, they test our senses of proximity and location. His experiments in New York expanded the bounds of the photograph, object, painting, and installation, and he developed a novel relationship between object and viewer. These works demonstrate in their construction what the French writer Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes would identify in the artist’s rayographs as a “new field of gravity.”
The rayograph
The term rayograph designates Man Ray’s version of a technique for making photographs without a camera: by setting objects on or near sensitised paper and exposing it to light. In his autobiography, the artist described happening upon the process by chance, late one night, while developing prints in his makeshift darkroom. For subjects, he looked no further than the things in his studio. When exposed to a directed flash of light, they appear as reversed silhouettes – but in Man Ray’s hands they also gained new life. The nature of the image depended on the items’ translucency, reflectivity, density, placement, and distance from the sheet, as well as the source and location of the illumination and the number of exposures. Surfaces could cast unexpected reflections or eclipse elements in darkness. Forms might multiply or transform. Sometimes Man Ray’s objects and the space between them acquired an insistent, compressed volume that registered on the paper. The resulting works present what writer Pierre Migennes described as a “metamorphosis of the most vulgar utensils.” Everyday things became wonderfully unfamiliar as Man Ray wielded light in the darkroom like a brush in paint.
As he prepared to launch his rayographs in Champs délicieux, Man Ray also considered how to disseminate them for reproduction in magazines. On November 1, 1922, he wrote to Harold Loeb, editor of Broom: “Each print is an original, no plate or duplicate exists, as the process is manipulated directly on the paper, like a drawing. If you could assure me that the … originals would be safely handled and returned, I shall gladly send them on [to Berlin]. If, however, you cannot guarantee their safe return, I can re-photograph them … which, while not having the intensity and contrast of the originals, would nevertheless reproduce well.” Loeb offered to transport them personally and published these four in Broom the following March.
Man Ray transformed and energised ordinary objects in his rayographs by tapping their powers of translucency or reflectance. Bodies and their proxies, however, remain stubbornly recognisable. Hands reach out, hold things, and interact with objects; heads turn to kiss and drink, even if the action might be staged. The artist’s rayographs tie the body to a kind of specificity that his objects do not experience; this might explain why there are fewer of these works with bodies than without. As Tristan Tzara explained in his appreciation of the rayographs in 1934, Man Ray approached objects in a manner that allowed them to be free “to dream.”
Dangerous Games
Reactions to Man Ray’s cameraless photographs consistently identified them with the realm of play. The first to comment on the rayograph was French poet Jean Cocteau, who wrote in an open letter, “You, my dear Man Ray, will nourish our minds with those dangerous games it craves.” He was soon joined by Tristan Tzara, who likened the rayograph to a “game of chess with the sun.”
Man Ray had a strong sense of the game as a strategy for producing art. For him, play was a state of readiness to engage. This comes through in the provocative humour of his objects and collages and in the invitation to chance embedded in the rayograph process – the “discovery” of which, he recounted, entailed real amusement. Marcel Duchamp once playfully defined his friend as synonymous with the joy of the game: “MAN RAY, n.m. synon. de joie, jouer, jouir” (joy, to play, to enjoy).
Chemical Paintings
In April 1922, the same month that the Champs délicieux album was announced, Man Ray proudly reported to friends and patrons that he had freed himself “from the sticky medium of paint.” His rayographs claimed a rebellious position aimed at the traditional hierarchy of fine art – and particularly its apex, painting. Critics asserted they had equal status, and New York’s Little Review even called them “chemical paintings.”
Just a year later, however, while his rayograph production remained steady, Man Ray quietly returned to painting. The works here show how his practice had changed. Abstract and relatively small, they were made on commercially available boards, wood, sandpaper, or metal supports. With their overlapping pictorial elements and dramatic contrasts of luminosity and shadow, angled and geometric forms, the compositions emulate aspects of rayographs. Each is a thorough exploration of depth on a flat surface and a bid to make paint reflect its own material reality.
Objects and Bodies
Man Ray’s experience of making rayographs informed his consideration of the human body, which he handled, at times, like an object, devoid of personhood and open for manipulation. Writing about the artist’s portraits and rayographs, André Breton noted that Man Ray considered the bodies of women in his work no different from the objects at hand in his darkroom:
The very elegant, very beautiful women who expose their tresses night and day to the fierce lights in Man Ray’s studios are certainly not aware that they are taking part in any kind of demonstration. How astonished they would be if I told them that they are participating for exactly the same reasons as a quartz gun, a bunch of keys, hoar-frost or fern!
For Man Ray, a body could function as a kind of concentrated equivalence, like the essence represented by an object. This attitude is visible in some of the most iconic works of his career, in which his presentation of female models such as the artist and performer Kiki de Montparnasse (Alice Prin) also involved darkroom manipulation. While his approach to men’s bodies was notably less sexualised, they too were posed and set up like the objects in his rayographs.
Darkroom Manoeuvres
Like other pictures of Kiki de Montparnasse in this gallery, Le violon d’Ingres involved multiple darkroom campaigns. For the version published in Littérature, Man Ray worked on a print to sharpen the contours and smooth the forms; he added f-shaped sound holes directly onto it with dark ink.
The version here, larger than the first, is the result of further experimentation. Man Ray covered the entire print with a mask from which he hand cut two f-shaped forms. He then made a second exposure, which turned the exposed spaces black. Instead of ink shapes that disrupt the surface, these marks read as deep, dark space compressed within the flat surface of the photograph. Man Ray described this version as “a combination of a photo and a rayograph.” As such, the f-holes are eerily – seamlessly – part of the woman’s body. She appears as a kind of dreamlike human-instrument hybrid, a whole object to be visually taken in and possessed.
Dreams
Even before the Surrealist manifesto of 1924 claimed the fertile ground of the unconscious, many poets and artists in Man Ray’s circle focused on dreams. The same group, two years earlier, had followed André Breton’s experiments with hypnosis and trance states. They practiced séances and so‑called sleeping fits, writing down or drawing what came to them in order to reveal hidden desires. The poet Louis Aragon wrote of these slumberous escapades: “Dreams, dreams, dreams, the domain of dreams expands with every step.”
Apart from photographing the sleep sessions, Man Ray remained an independent supporter of the group, explaining, “It has never been my object to record my dreams, just the determination to realise them.” Even so, Aragon included him in his multipage inventory of dreamers, with a nod to the rayographs: “Man Ray … dreams in his own way with knife rests and salt cellars: he gives meaning to light, which now knows how to speak.” The artist found great support among the Surrealist circle in Paris, whose members acquired his work and included him in exhibitions and publications.
Dream Objects
Man Ray’s dreamlike rayographs have counterparts in the new kinds of hybrid objects he began to make at the same time. These mysterious works seize upon unexpected transformations: a fragile soap bubble rendered solid; the taut strings on a musical instrument’s neck turned loose and sensuous; or a budding plant metamorphosed into a pudgy hand.
The strange bundle wrapped with string has long been associated with the power of objects to stir the unconscious. In 1920 Man Ray assembled, photographed, and deconstructed the original object. The Untitled photograph appeared in the first issue of La revolution surréaliste, in 1924, with the text “Surrealism opens the door of the dream to all those for whom night is miserly.” Over the next decade, the image came to embody another phrase popular among the Paris Surrealist group, by the poet Isidore Ducasse: “as beautiful … as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table.”
“Objects to touch, to eat, to crunch, to apply to the eye, to the skin, to press, to lick, to break, to grind, objects to lie, to flee from, to honor, things cold or hot, feminine or masculine, objects of day or night which absorb through your pores the greater part of our life. … These are the projections surprised in transparence, by the light of tenderness, of objects that dream and talk in their sleep.” (Tristan Tzara, “When Objects Dream,” 1934)
Returns
In 1929 Man Ray found himself “longing to touch paint again.” By the fall, he had taken a second Paris studio, near the Luxembourg Gardens, where he painted in the mornings before returning home to oversee photographic portraits and magazine work. In his new compositions, he let paint drip across a canvas from a poured line and squeezed pigment directly from the tube onto a support in a loose, calligraphic manner. Trading on narratives of chance and automatism, he later called these paintings “unpremeditated.”
Another return accompanied the arrival in Paris of Lee Miller, who became Man Ray’s apprentice in photography and then his personal and professional partner. As a result, he again embraced the camera as his primary tool of photographic experimentation, after years of making rayographs without one. Together, Miller and Man Ray discovered a creative synergy that led to their joint development of the solarization process. The same year signalled the near culmination of Man Ray’s exploration of the rayograph: by some accounts, he made one hundred in 1922, but just one in 1929.
Solarization
Together with Lee Miller, Man Ray developed a darkroom technique that complemented his return to painting. Like the rayograph, solarization was not entirely new, and both he and Miller claimed that it similarly resulted from an accident. The process involves exposing a negative a second time during development, which causes a reversal of the expected tonalities. Honed by Miller and Man Ray and applied to their portraits and nudes beginning in fall 1929, the process often endowed subjects with subtly glowing black contours that Miller called “halos.” This feature became so well-known – largely through reproductions of the solarized portrait of Miller shown nearby – that a 1932 article called it both “the beacon and despair of experimenters.” Like the drips and skeins in Man Ray’s 1929 paintings, these lines create a friction between the subject and surface of the image – a noted departure from the artist’s earlier approach to the flat plane.
Revisiting Champs délicieux
Man Ray completed his Champs délicieux project nearly forty years after its debut. A handwritten inscription to Tristan Tzara in the final copy (number 41, displayed here) refers to the sparks set off by their initial exploration of the rayograph; he added an almost identical inscription in his 1922 working copy. This suggests a Dada game between the two artists: the announcement laid out the rules and the inscriptions signified its end.
As promised in the 1922 first announcement of the album, the last copy features the canceled proofs (a practice meant to show that no further prints can be made from the originals). A canceled print edition is not unusual. In this case, however, a purposeful ambiguity was in play from the beginning of the project – when it was presented as an album of “original photographs” copied from unique rayographs – to the end. Only the negatives used to produce the album were canceled, meaning that the primary rayographs might still exist. Ever the prankster, Man Ray ensured that the game continues.
Man Ray (American, 1890-1976) Catherine Barometer 1920 Glass, metal, felt, washboard, tube, wire, wood, steel wool, gouache on paper, and paper stamp 48 1/8 × 12 × 2 1/8 in. (122.2 × 30.5 × 5.4cm) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Bluff Collection, Promised Gift of John A. Pritzker Photo courtesy of The Bluff Collection, photo by Ian Reeves
Curators: The exhibition is co-curated by Philip Brookman, consulting curator of the department of photographs at the National Gallery of Art, and Deborah Willis, university professor and chair of the department of photography and imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts and director of the Center for Black Visual Culture at New York University.
Thomas Ellis (American, 1963-2025) The Game 1947 Gelatin silver print 21 x 31.8cm (8 1/4 x 12 1/2 in.) Courtesy of the Darrel Ellis Estate, Hannah Hoffman, Los Angeles, and Candice Madey, New York Photo: Adam Reich
Thomas Sayers Ellis (October 5, 1963 – July 17, 2025) was an American poet, photographer, musician, bandleader and teacher.
“There’s nothing like a photograph for reminding you about difference. There it is. It stares you ineradicably in the face”
~ Professor Stuart Hall, 2008
This looks to be a “worthy” exhibition on photography and the Black Arts movement but without having seen it in person there is little specific comment I can make about the exhibition. However, some thoughts on the photographs in this posting are possible.
It is a joy for me to be able to learn more about an important area in photographic history, vis a vis “the role of African American photographers and artists working with photographs in developing and fostering a distinctly Black perspective on art and culture.” (Text from the NGA website)
There are many photographers in the posting who I have never heard of before, whose work I have never seen, and I always like learning, for in learning you may gain some small amount of wisdom and appreciation of different cultures and points of view. I have added biographical information for each artist to their images where possible.
The photographs from the period 1955-1985 mark a shift away from an aesthetic and formalist way of looking at the image where the role of the photographer and the reception of the print was in its primacy (the 1950s-1960s) “towards a more polemical, critical and cultural analysis by Tagg, Sekul, Solomon-Godeau and others in the 1980s and 90s. These shifts from the pictorial to the political … decentre the photographer and bring into focus the photographed and viewing subjects…”1
In these photographs it is not so much the primacy of the artist, the aesthetics of the image, nor the photographs status as art objects, but the people within the images that are the focus of attention. They bring to the forefront of the viewer’s consciousness (or should do) the racial politics at work within photography in the context of discussions around race and representation and the ongoing legacies of Western imperialism.
The photographs demonstrate “that if we do not recognise the historical and political conjunctures of racial politics at work within photography, and their effects on those that have been culturally erased, made invisible or less than human by such images, then we remain hemmed within established orthodoxies of colonial thought concerning the racialised body, the subaltern and the politics of human recognition.”2
They bring to light (aha!) “new ways of seeing that bring the Other into focus”, photographs that challenge us to acknowledge the structural racism that is embedded in daily life which produces adverse outcome for people of color. Through such an acknowledgement we may open up a personally and culturally transformative dialogic space, “a “space of possibilities” where participants listen, engage with, and even transcend their own viewpoints to see issues from multiple angles” – as there can never be a single view point when we “examine” social groups that are subaltern (groups that have been marginalised or oppressed).
From a distance this seems to be one of the problems of the exhibition. It’s all so worthy and righteous, full of the injustice of it all, and perhaps that’s as it should be for those were the times and the culture from which these photographs emerged. But I can’t help but get the feeling that this exhibition seems to feel and read more like a study in cultural anthropology, more a sociological statement than any celebration of Black history and culture from the period. Speaking from the standpoint of a white, middle class artist and writer, there seems to be little joy to be had here – to me one of the essential elements of Black culture, the joy of gospel, jazz, laughter, love – but I’m supposedly on the inside looking out (or is it the outside looking in!). Who am I to say.
What is undeniable is that, as Professor Stuart Hall so succinctly observes, there is nothing like a photograph to remind you of difference, to challenge your perceptions on how you view and interact with the world around you, to open up new ways of seeing. As such, the photographs in this exhibition may allow us deeper insight into the “conditions of our own becoming” (while human beings have agency, the circumstances under which they act and develop their humanity are largely shaped by existing material, social, and historical conditions that they did not choose) of the people that live around us, even as we acknowledge that there is no singular point of view, that cultural forms have no single determinate meaning, and that no one, and “no discipline, whether art- or photo-history, or ethnography or geography, speaks with a single voice.”1
Not one way of seeing, but multiple ways of seeing our fellow human beings.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ Catherine De Lorenzo. “Oceanian imaginings in French photographic archives,” in History of Photography, Issue 2, Volume 28, 2004, pp. 137-184
The book examines how Western photographic practice has been used as a tool for creating Eurocentric and violent visual regimes, and demands that we recognise and disrupt the ingrained racist ideologies that have tainted photography since its inception in 1839.
Many thankx to the National Gallery of Art, Washington for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“The work that was done by artists and photographers before, during, and after the Black Arts Movement establishes a strategy of community engagement. It is that engagement that allows communities to define themselves and also to engage people in new forms of looking.”
Co-curator Philip Brookman
Cultural forms set the wider terms of limitation and possibility for the (re)presentation of particularities and we have to understand how the latter are caught in the former in order to understand why such-and-such gets (re)presented in the way it does. Without understanding the way images function in terms of, say, narrative, genre or spectacle, we don’t really understand why they turn out the way they do.
Secondly, cultural forms do not have single determinate meanings – people make sense of them in different ways, according to the cultural (including sub-cultural) codes available to them. For instance, people do not necessarily read negative images of themselves as negative …
Richard Dyer. The Matter of Images: Essays on Representations. London: Routledge, 1993, pp.2-3
Adger Cowans (American, b. 1936) Coltrane at the Gate 1961 Gelatin silver print National Gallery of Art, Washington Charina Endowment Fund
Adger Cowans (American, b. 1936)
Adger Cowans is a pioneering photographer and one of the founding members of the Kamoinge Workshop, a collective that played a key role in shaping Black photography in the 1960s and beyond.
In 1958 Cowans worked as an assistant to renowned photographer Gordon Parks. Throughout the 1960s Cowans became involved with influential groups associated with the Black Arts Movement, including Group 35 and Afri-COBRA, which he joined in 1968.
His photographic work spans a wide range of approaches and subjects, from street photography in Harlem to documenting major historical events like the rallies and the funeral of Malcolm X. He also captured iconic jazz musicians, including John Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders.
Frank Dandridge is a freelance photojournalist who worked mainly for Life Magazine in the 60’s. He covered numerous assignments, including, The Harlem Riots in 1964, Dr. King’s March on Washington, in 1963, and the terrible Birmingham Bombing in 1963. His photos also appeared in Look, Saturday Evening Post, Pageant, Paris Match, Good Housekeeping, Quick Magazine, the Canadian Film Board, Playboy, and many other national magazines. He won an Art Director’s Award for his photo essay, “The Two Faces of Harlem”, that appeared in Look magazine. His work included photographing many celebrities, including, Bobby Kennedy, Muhammad Ali, President Johnson, Dr. Martin Luther King, Frank Sinatra, The Supremes, Sammy Davis, Jr., and Jimmy Hoffa.
The photos that Frank Dandridge shot for LIFE magazine paint a vivid portrait of violence and race in 1960s America. He reported on riots in Harlem, in Watts, and in Newark,. He was in Selma, Alabama when Martin Luther King marched in the days immediately after Bloody Sunday. Dandridge’s most famous photo is of Sarah Collins, a 12-year-old girl whose eyes were in bandages after the bombing of a Sunday school class at the16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. That bombing killed four girls, including Collins’ sister, while wounding many others and leaving Collins blind in one eye. The image of Collins in her hospital bed made vivid for America the cruelty of this horrific bombing by four men who were members of a splinter group of the Klu Klux Klan.
Used under fair use for the purposes of education and research
Racism
Racism, when it is embedded in the structures, policies and practices of our social and political institutions can be termed “institutional”. Institutional racism, which will be described by the authors more fully below, is reflected in professional practice and working methods that result in racialized disparities. Frantz Fanon, psychiatrist and political philosopher, stands out as one of the earliest academics to explore the nature of racism from a psychosocial perspective. Fanon (1967) talked of “vulgar racism in its biological form”, which was evident for several hundreds of years, being replaced in the mid-20th century by “more subtle forms” (p. 35). In a study of Fanon’s clinical psychology and social theories, McCulloch (1983) refers to this new racism as “cultural racism” – describing this as “a more sophisticated form [of racism] in which the object is no longer the physiology of the individual but the cultural style of a people” (p. 120). Cultural racism believes that the dominant group’s culture is superior to the seemingly “lower” minority groups.
Cultural racism champions the supremacy of cultures. Commonly, some version of European culture or, more specifically, white European culture, rather than the white “race” (Amin, 1989), thereby producing a situation of racism without “races” (Balibar, 1991). It was the American civil leaders Stokely Carmichael (later Kwame Ture) and Charles V. Hamilton in their 1967 book, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation (Carmichael & Hamilton, 1967), who first described institutional racism:
It takes two, closely related forms … we call these individual racism and institutional racism. The first consists of overt acts by individuals … the second type is less overt, far more subtle, less identifiable in terms of specific individuals committing acts … and thus receives far less public condemnation than the first type. (p. 2)
Institutional racism forms an array of broader structural racism processes “that exclude … substantial numbers of members of particular groups from significant participation in major social institutions” (Henry & Tator, 2005, p. 352). According to minority mental health models like the racism-induced reactive negative emotionality cycle (Lazaridou & Heinz, 2021), structural racism and institutional racism result in experiences of rejection and emotional alienation in public spaces for Black people and People of Color (Lentin, 2015).
Structural racism in employment, earnings and credit may mutually limit equal access to quality, affordable accommodation. However, when public spaces are sites of surveillance, intimidation and frequent hostility by the police or by ordinary citizens, then the structure of social situations, such as even leaving one’s house and speaking in public, are filled with stress, anxiety, and fear (Chou et al., 2012; Sibrava et al., 2013). There is pervasive evidence that structural racism has destructive impacts on the health and wellbeing of patients from minority groups, including migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers (Alvarez et al., 2016; Bailey et al., 2017; Graham et al., 2016; Noh & Kaspar, 2003).
Felicia Lazaridou and Suman Fernando. “Deconstructing institutional racism and the social construction of whiteness: A strategy for professional competence training in culture and migration mental health,” in Transcult Psychiatry, 2022 Apr 4; 59(2), pp. 175-187.
Installation view of the exhibition Photography and the Black Arts Movement, 1955-1985 at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, September 2025 – January 2026
In the tradition of Black African photographers such as Malick Sidibé, Seydou Keïta and Sanlé Sory, Barnor’s photographs present people of all ages and all walks of life – whether in Accra, Ghana or in the suburbs of London, England – through direct and honest studio portraits or in more candid documents of the communities that surrounded him. …
Barnor’s photographs plant the seed of equality and happiness as a way of transmitting this knowledge to others. “He is a living archive, a link between the birth of photography in West Africa and the development of the discipline for the modern era.”2 It is his passion and feeling for the practice of photography, the stories that it tells and his engagement with the spirit of the people that he encounters – as a conversation between equals – that intuitively ground his work in the history of photography and the history of Black culture and makes them forever young.
Ralph Arnold (American, 1928-2006) Above this Earth, Games, Games 1968 Collage and acrylic on canvas Overall: 114.3 x 114.3 cm (45 x 45 in.) Collection of Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College, Chicago Photo: P.D. Young / Spektra Imaging
During the tumultuous 1960s and 70s, the prolific artist Ralph Arnold (1928-2006) made photocollages that appropriated and commented upon mass media portrayals of gender, sexuality, race and politics. Arnold’s complex visual arrangements of photography, painting and text were built upon his own multilayered identity as a black, gay veteran and prominent member of Chicago’s art community…
Text from the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago
Ralph Arnold (American, 1928-2006) Soul Box 1969 Assemblage with found objects and collage on Masonite Framed: 71.1 x 56.8 x 14.9cm (28 x 22 3/8 x 5 7/8 in.) Private collection of Courtney A. Moore Photo: Courtesy of the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago
The first exhibition to consider photography’s impact on a cultural and aesthetic movement that celebrated Black history, identity, and beauty.
Uniting around civil rights and freedom movements of the 1960s and 1970s, many visual artists, poets, playwrights, musicians, photographers, and filmmakers expressed hope and dignity through their art. These creative efforts became known as the Black Arts Movement.
Photography was central to the movement, attracting all kinds of artists – from street photographers and photojournalists to painters and graphic designers. This expansive exhibition presents 150 examples tracing the Black Arts Movement from its roots to its lingering impacts, from 1955 to 1985. Explore the bold vision shaped by generations of artists including Billy Abernathy, Romare Bearden, Kwame Brathwaite, Roy DeCarava, Doris Derby, Emory Douglas, Barkley Hendricks, Barbara McCullough, Betye Saar, and Ming Smith.
Text from the NGA website
Photography and the Black Arts Movement, 1955-1985 investigates the role of African American photographers and artists working with photographs in developing and fostering a distinctly Black perspective on art and culture. The Black Arts Movement was a uniquely American creative initiative, closely linked to the civil rights movement and comparable to the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s in its impact. Through new institutions and publications, Black writers, musicians, filmmakers, and visual artists explored ways their art could further the American civil rights movement and communicate messages of Black history and identity. Photography and the Black Arts Movement reveals how studio and street photographers, photojournalists, painters, conceptual artists, graphic designers, and community activists used photography to cut across traditional racial boundaries, express messages of empowerment, and advance social justice.
Bringing together some 150 works by more than 100 artists, Photography and the Black Arts Movement also includes objects from Africa, the Caribbean region, and Great Britain, representing artistic dialogues created through travel, migrations, and international engagement with the social, political, and cultural ideas that propelled the movement. Among the artists included are Billy Abernathy, Anthony Barboza, Romare Bearden, Dawoud Bey, Frank Bowling, Kwame Brathwaite, Ernest Cole, Adger Cowans, Roy DeCarava, Emory Douglas, Louis Draper, David C. Driskell, Samuel Fosso, Charles Gaines, Barkley Hendricks, Danny Lyon, Barbara McCullough, Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe, Gordon Parks, Adrian Piper, Juan Sánchez, Coreen Simpson, Betye Saar, Jamel Shabazz, Lorna Simpson, Ming Smith, Frank Stewart, and Carrie Mae Weems.
The exhibition is organised by the National Gallery of Art, Washington.
Text from the NGA website
Cecil J. Williams (American, b. 1937) During the summer of 1960, the elders of Orangeburg took to the streets as part of ongoing demonstrations and boycotts in support of civil rights. They are standing outside a segregated supermarket where they were allowed to shop but not sit down for lunch 1960, printed 2024 Inkjet print 37.3 x 55.9cm (14 11/16 x 22 in.)
Cecil J. Williams (American, b. 1937)
Cecil J. Williams (born November 26, 1937) is an American photographer, publisher, author and inventor who is best known for his photographs documenting the civil rights movement in South Carolina.
He began his career at an early age, photographing wedding and family parties. He studied art at Claflin University, while also being a photographer for the university. …
At the age of 14, Williams was one of 25 photographers around the world freelancing for JET magazine. JET caught wind of the movement growing in Orangeburg. They needed an onsite correspondent for constant updates, and someone to document the events. The only time Williams’ work appeared on the cover of JET was his picture of Coretta Scott King speaking at the protest during the 1969 Charleston hospital workers’ strike.
Williams has photographed significant desegregation efforts in South Carolina since the 1950s. Some of his most notable pictures are of the activity during the Briggs v. Elliott case in Summerton. It was the first of five desegregation cases pushing to integrate public schools in the United States. The five cases combined into Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court case that declared that having “separate but equal” public schools for whites and blacks was unconstitutional.
Cecil J. Williams (American, b. 1937) Clara White Mission, Jacksonville, Florida 1960s, printed 2024 Inkjet print 45.7 x 45.7cm (18 x 18 in.)
Bob Fletcher (American, b. 1938) Placards of Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner at a Demonstration on the boardwalk during the Democratic National Convention, Atlantic City, New Jersey 1964 Gelatin silver print 33.97 × 22.86cm (13 3/8 × 9 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington Anonymous gift
Bob Fletcher (American, b. 1938)
Robert E. “Bob” Fletcher is a photographer, filmmaker, writer, and educator. Born in 1938 in Detroit, Michigan, Fletcher majored in History and English at Fisk University and Wayne State University. In 1963, Fletcher became active in the civil rights movement, taking photographs for and administering the National Student Association’s Detroit Tutorial Program. After moving to New York City, he worked at the Harlem Education Project and set up a photographic workshop.
In the summer of 1964, Fletcher became a Freedom School teacher in Mississippi and joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) staff as a photographer; he documented the Civil Rights Movement throughout the South, between 1964 and 1968. After returning to New York in 1969, Fletcher set up a photography workshop at the Henry Street Settlement, and taught photography at Antioch College and Brooklyn College Film Studio.
Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006) Ethel Sharrieff in Chicago 1963 Gelatin silver print 14.6 × 15.9cm (5 3/4 × 6 1/4 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington Corcoran Collection (The Gordon Parks Collection)
Robert A. Sengstacke (American, 1943-2017) Dr. Martin Luther King January 1, 1965 Gelatin silver print 35.1 × 27.3cm (13 13/16 × 10 3/4 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
Robert A. Sengstacke (American, 1943-2017)
Robert A. “Bobby” Sengstacke spent more than a half century photographing Chicago’s cultural and political landscape, most notably for the weekly newspaper the Chicago Defender, for which he also worked as an editor. The Defender was founded by Robert’s great-uncle Robert Sengstacke Abbott in 1905, and Robert’s father, John Sengstacke, ran the paper for nearly 60 years. In the mid-1950s, after attending Florida’s Bethune Cookman College, Bobby Sengstacke returned to Chicago and honed his skills with fellow photographers Billy (Fundi) Abernathy, Le Mont Mac Lemore, and Bob Black. In the years that followed, he became a member of a tight-knit network of South Side photojournalists who created intimate documents of Chicago’s Black community, from Civil Rights rallies led by Martin Luther King Jr. to the city’s lively entertainment scene.
Sengstacke was also a founding member of the Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC), which brought together Black artists, writers, intellectuals, and activists on Chicago’s South Side.
Doris A. Derby (American, 1939-2022) Member of Southern Media Photographing a Young Girl, Farish Street, Jackson, Mississippi 1968 Gelatin silver print National Gallery of Art, Washington Gift of David Knaus
Doris A. Derby (American, 1939-2022)
The photography of the US civil rights activist and academic Doris Derby … began through documenting the struggles of black people in the segregated south. However, rather than recording the dramatic events and protests of the nine years from her arrival in Mississippi from New York in 1963, Doris chose to capture the everyday human effort required to live through them.
She went into rural communities to witness the work of children in the fields and women living in wooden shacks trying to care for families. “They were looking to find some help, some way to get out of their horrible poverty and despair,” she said. …
Influenced both by the German expressionist artist Käthe Kollwitz, who was concerned with the effects of poverty, hunger and war on the working class, and the photographer Roy DeCarava, who captured the creativity of the Harlem Renaissance, she also took pictures of children in urban settings, of old and young people attending election events, and those working for the movement, among them the author Alice Walker.
Hannah Collins. “Doris Derby obituary,” on The Guardian website Wed 13 Apr 2022 [Online] Cited 26/11/2025
Darryl Cowherd (American, b. 1940) Stokely Carmichael, Unknown Chicago Church c. 1968 Gelatin silver print 24.8 × 15.5cm (9 3/4 × 6 1/8 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
A key figure in Chicago’s Black Arts Movement, Darryl Cowherd has enjoyed an extensive career ranging from photojournalism to broadcast television. At the age of 20, frustrated with work and school, Cowherd followed the advice of his mentor, Chicago-based photographer Robert Earl Wilson, who encouraged him to travel and photograph abroad. Cowherd had initially studied to become a doctor and then worked for the postal service, but neither role proved a lasting fit. After nearly four years in Europe, during which Cowherd honed his photography skills, he returned to Chicago in 1964 and began taking freelance photography assignments while working at a film processing lab. His return to Chicago coincided with the emergence of the Chicago Freedom Movement (1965-67) and the Black Arts Movement (most active in the years 1965-76). An active participant in both movements, Cowherd frequently photographed the activities surrounding them as they grew and gained momentum.
Cowherd was a founding member of the Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC), a collective that brought together Black artists, writers, intellectuals, and activists on Chicago’s South Side.
Hiram Sebastian Maristany was a Nuyorican American photographer, and director of El Museo del Barrio (a museum in NYC which specialises in Latin American and Caribbean art, with an emphasis on works from Puerto Rico and the Puerto Rican community in New York City) from 1975 to 1977. He was known for his association with, and documentation of, the Young Lords chapter in Harlem, which he co-founded in 1969.
Juan González was a co-founder of the Young Lords, a radical Puerto Rican rights organisation in New York City, where he helped lead the group in protests for social justice. The Young Lords fought for better healthcare, education, and city services, and against police abuse and Puerto Rico’s colonial status. Following his work with the Young Lords, González became a celebrated journalist, co-hosting Democracy Now! and writing for the New York Daily News.
Texts from the Wikipedia website
What Is the Black Arts Movement? Seven Things to Know
Poet Larry Neal, who coined the term Black Arts Movement, described it as “a cultural revolution in art and ideas.” This movement included poets, playwrights, musicians, filmmakers, photographers, and painters. They came together to make art that advanced civil rights and celebrated Black history, identity, and beauty.
This cultural revolution shook up the art world in the 1950s and ’60s. It embodied the struggle for self-determination championed by global freedom movements. New collectives, workshops, and collaborations emerged. Creatives made art that promoted Black dignity, hope, and freedom. They asked, how could art inspire social and political change? And what would it look like?
Photography was a driving force from the beginning, playing a critical role as both a communications tool and art form. Learn more about the movement and photography’s part in it – major themes in our exhibition Photography and the Black Arts Movement, 1955-1985.
1/ Its origins are in the civil rights movement
Our exhibition begins in 1955, more than a decade before Larry Neal named the Black Arts Movement. That year, several events – and photographs of those events – helped catalyse the civil rights movement.
In September, Jet magazine was one of several publications that printed open-casket photographs of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old boy from Chicago who was lynched in Mississippi. Those disturbing images were seen across the country, including by a woman in Montgomery, Alabama: Rosa Parks. That December, Parks sat in the front, “white only” section of a segregated bus. The driver demanded that she give up her seat to a white passenger. She refused. As she later recounted, Emmett Till was on her mind in that moment.
Parks, in turn, was photographed sitting at the front of the segregated bus. Those images, and others like them, brought widespread awareness to the struggles for equal rights. Organisations like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) encouraged photography of their marches, demonstrations, and acts of nonviolent civil disobedience. SNCC even taught some members to use a camera. Lifelong activist Maria Varela became a SNCC photographer after recognising the need for more images of Black life to support the movement.
2/ Poets, writers, and playwrights led the movement
The beginning of the Black Arts Movement is often pinned to poet, playwright, and writer Amiri Baraka founding the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School in New York City’s Harlem neighbourhood in 1965. Nikki Giovanni, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Audre Lorde were among the many writers and poets active in the movement. Some collaborated with visual artists, even forming collectives such as the Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC) in Chicago.
OBAC writers, scholars, painters, and photographers collaborated to create the Wall of Respect community mural in 1967. It commemorated key figures in African American history, including W. E. B. Du Bois, Muhammad Ali, and Nina Simone. The mural was like a two-story collage that covered the facade of a building in the city’s South Side neighbourhood. It incorporated paintings by several artists alongside mounted photographs by Roy Lewis and Darryl Cowherd. At the centre was Amiri Baraka’s poem “SOS,” which opens, “Calling all black people.” The mural was demolished in 1972, but photographs by Roy Lewis and Robert Sengstacke continue to spread its message.
3/ It was inspired by jazz
Music was an equally important part of the Black Arts Movement. Musicians John Coltrane and Sun Ra both performed at a fundraiser for Amiri Baraka’s Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School. Their experimental and expressive jazz inspired Black Arts Movement writers and artists.
In Coltrane at the Gate, photographer Adger Cowans depicted the saxophonist’s energy. Ming Smith captured the magic of a Sun Ra performance. For his homage to saxophonist Charlie Parker (who was commonly known as “Bird”), painter Raymond Saunders embraced the spontaneous spirit of jazz. Saunders collaged a newsprint photograph below the word “bird” written in a chalk-like white script.
4/ It celebrated Black beauty
The Black Arts Movement celebrated the “beauty and goodness of being Black,” as Larry Neal put it. Photographer Kwame Brathwaite helped popularise the phrase “Black is beautiful.” Brathwaite was a pioneer of uplifting Black identity. He helped found groups that challenged conventional standards of beauty and celebrated African heritage. They organised fashion shows, created “Black is beautiful” products, and operated a photography studio.
In Untitled (Portrait, Reels as Necklace), Brathwaite adorned the model with a necklace made from film developing reels to “expose” her beauty. More than a decade later, Carla Williams created a self-portrait that echoed Brathwaite’s work. Showing herself in curlers, Williams challenged popular notions of beauty.
5/ It brought artists together
Small collectives of visual artists and photographers came together around the principles of the Black Arts Movement. In New York, the Kamoinge Workshop photography collective met regularly to critique each other’s work, debate photography’s purpose and aesthetics, and share tips. They created a space for their art by developing their own portfolios and exhibitions. The workshop also produced the groundbreaking Black Photographers Annual between 1973 and 1980.
A group of Chicago artists formed AfriCOBRA. The collective’s founders defined their own aesthetic principles, aimed at creating “images that jar the senses and cause movement” and “images designed for mass production.”
6/ It spread across the Atlantic
The Black Arts Movement made an impact beyond the United States. In Great Britain, Raphael Albert organised and photographed Black beauty pageants in London. James Barnor focused on style, migration, and Black city life in London and in Accra, Ghana. Horace Ové photographed the British Black Power Movement. He also captured scenes of the West African and West Indian communities in London, like his Walking Proud, Notting Hill Carnival.
Samuel Fosso opened his first photography studio in Bangui, Central African Republic, at age 13. After finishing with clients, Fosso would use his studio to experiment with self-portraits. He wore an array of costumes and adopted personas, often taking inspiration from the pictures of Black Americans he saw in magazines shared by American Peace Corps volunteers.
7/ It influenced generations of artists
By the end of the 1970s, the literary arm of the Black Arts Movement had waned, but a new generation of artists and photographers carried on its spirit. Coming out of art school, photographers such as Carrie Mae Weems and Lorna Simpson explored more personal, metaphorical, and conceptual ideas.
In her Family Pictures and Stories series, Weems made her own family the subjects. The intimate photographs presented a counterargument to claims that many Black Americans faced poverty and struggle as a result of weak family structures. Weems paired the photographs with brief stories about each family member.
Herbert Eugene Randall, Jr. is an American photographer who had documented the effects of the Civil Rights Movement. Randall is of Shinnecock, African-American and West Indian ancestry.
Randall studied photography under Harold Feinstein in 1957. From 1958 to 1966, he worked as a freelance photographer for various media organizations. His photographs were used by the Associated Press, United Press International, Black Star, various television stations, and other American and foreign publications. Randall was also a founding member of the Kamoinge Workshop, a collective of African-American photographers, in New York City in 1963.
In 1964, Sanford R. Leigh, the Director of Mississippi Freedom Summer’s Hattiesburg project, persuaded Randall to photograph the effects of the Civil Rights Movement in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. Randall had a Whitney Fellowship for that year, and had been looking for a project. He spent the entire summer photographing solely in Hattiesburg, among the African-American community and among the volunteers in area projects such as the Freedom Schools, Voter Registration, and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party campaign.
Only five of Randall’s photographs were published in the summer of 1964. One seen worldwide was the bloodied, concussed Rabbi Arthur Lelyveld, head of a prominent Cleveland congregation and former conscientious objector to World War II. However, most of his photographs sat in a file at the Shinnecock Reservation, on Long Island, New York.
Billy Abernathy (Fundi) (American, 1939-2016) Mother’s Day from the series “Born Hip” 1962 gelatin silver print 17.5 x 13.3cm (6 7/8 x 5 1/4 in.) The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of the Illinois Arts Council Photo: The Art Institute of Chicago / Art Resource, NY
Billy Abernathy (Fundi) (American, 1939-2016)
Photographer Billy (Fundi) Abernathy was known for creating images that defined Black confidence, elegance, and style. This work extended to his collaborations with his wife, Sylvia (Laini) Abernathy, with whom he designed album covers for Delmark Records in the 1960s. Around that time, the poet and author Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) encountered Abernathy’s photographs of Chicago and proposed a book project that would combine his poetry with Abernathy’s images. The resulting collaboration, In Our Terribleness (Some Elements and Meaning in Black Style), was designed by Laini and published in 1970. In 1971 the New York Times hailed the book as “an example of the new direction that black art is taking.”
Charles “Teenie” Harris (American, 1908-1998) A television playing coverage of James Baldwin at the March for Freedom and Jobs in Washington, DC 1963/2025 Gelatin silver print National Gallery of Art, Washington
African American artist Charles “Teenie” Harris, captured “the essence of daily African-American life in the 20th century. For more than 40 years, Harris – as lead photographer of the influential Pittsburgh Courier newspaper – took almost 80,000 pictures of people from all walks: presidents, housewives, sports stars, babies, civil rights leaders and even cross-dressing drag queens.”
In 1953, he enrolled at the historically Black college in Petersburg, which was not far from his hometown of Richmond. He began working as a reporter for the school paper, and during that time Draper’s father, who was an amateur photographer himself, sent Louis his first camera. By 1956, Draper’s title at the paper had changed to cameraman. After his revelatory first experience with The Family of Man, a catalogue that accompanied the 1955 photography exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, he decided to leave school during his final semester and move to New York City to become a photographer. Once there, Draper enrolled in a photography workshop led by Harold Feinstein, and was mentored by W. Eugene Smith, one of the most prominent American photojournalists.
In 1963, the same year as the March on Washington, Draper became a founding member of the Kamoinge Workshop, a New York-based collective of Black photographers. Workshop members met regularly to discuss one another’s work, produced group portfolios, exhibitions, and publications, and mentored young people all over the city. Draper emerged as one of the group’s teachers, which began his long career as an educator (he worked in numerous teaching roles, including at Pratt Institute and Mercer County Community College). The collective aimed to “create the kind of images of our communities that spoke of the truth we’d witnessed and that countered the untruths we’d all seen in mainline publications.” Kamoinge members wanted to avoid the racial stereotypes prevalent in the media and the violence that was typical of journalistic coverage of the Civil Rights Movement, working instead to represent their communities in a positive light.
Jane Pierce, Carl Jacobs Foundation Research Assistant, Department of Photography, “Louis Draper,” on the MoMA website 2021 [Online] Cited 27/11/2025
Ernest C. Withers (American, 1922-2007) I Am A Man, Sanitation Workers Strike, Memphis, Tennessee March 28, 1968 Gelatin silver print 19 × 32.6cm (7 1/2 × 12 13/16 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
Ernest C. Withers (American, 1922-2007)
Photojournalist Ernest C. Withers was born on August 7, 1922, in Memphis, Tennessee. Withers got his start as a military photographer while serving in the South Pacific during World War II. Upon returning to a segregated Memphis after the war, Withers chose photography as his profession.
In the 1950s, Withers helped spur the movement for equal rights with a self-published photo pamphlet on the Emmitt Till murder. Over the next two decades, Withers formed close personal relationships with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Medgar Evers, and James Meredith. Withers’s pictures of key civil rights events from the Montgomery Bus Boycott to the strike of Memphis sanitation workers are historic. Indeed, Withers was often the only photographer to record these scenes, many of which were not yet of interest to the mainstream press.
Withers photographed more than the southern Civil Rights Movement. Whether Jackie Robinson, Willie Mays, and other Negro League baseball players, or those jazz and blues musicians who frequented Memphis’ Beale Street, Withers photographed the famous and not-so famous. Withers’s collection includes pictures of early performances of Elvis Presley, B.B. King, Ike and Tina Turner, Ray Charles, and Aretha Franklin.
First-of-Its-Kind Exhibition Opening at the National Gallery of Art Explores Photography’s Role in the Black Arts Movement
Never-before-seen photographs alongside images of cultural icons reveal the medium’s central role during a pivotal era of creative expression
The National Gallery of Art presents Photography and the Black Arts Movement, 1955-1985, an exhibition exploring the work of American and Afro-Atlantic diaspora photographers in developing and fostering a distinctly Black visual culture and identity. The first presentation to investigate photography’s role in the Black Arts Movement, a creative initiative comparable to the Harlem Renaissance in its scope and impact, which evolved concurrently to the civil rights and international freedom movements, the exhibition reveals how artists developed strategies to engage communities and encourage self-representation in media, laying a foundation for socially engaged art practices that continue today. Photography and the Black Arts Movement will be on view in the West Building from September 21, 2025, to January 11, 2026, before traveling to California and Mississippi.
Photography and the Black Arts Movement brings together approximately 150 works spanning photography, video, collage, painting, installation, and other photo-based media, some of which have rarely or never been on view. Among the over 100 artists included in the exhibition are Billy Abernathy (Fundi), Romare Bearden, Dawoud Bey, Frank Bowling, Kwame Brathwaite, Roy DeCarava, Louis Draper, David C. Driskell, Charles Gaines, James E. Hinton, Danny Lyon, Gordon Parks, Adrian Piper, Nellie Mae Rowe, Betye Saar, Raymond Saunders, Jamel Shabazz, Lorna Simpson, and Carrie Mae Weems.
This expansive selection of work showcases the broad cultural exchange between writers, musicians, photographers, filmmakers, and other visual artists of many backgrounds, who came together during the turbulent decades of the mid-20th century to grapple with social and political changes, the pursuit of civil rights, and the emergence of the Pan-African movement through art. The exhibition also includes art from Africa, the Caribbean, and Great Britain to contextualize the global engagement with the social, political, and cultural ideas that propelled the Black Arts Movement.
“Working on many fronts – literature, poetry, jazz and new music, painting, sculpture, performance, film, and photography – African American artists associated with the Black Arts Movement expressed and exchanged their ideas through publications, organisations, museums, galleries, community centres, theatres, murals, street art, and emerging academic programs. While focusing on African American photography in the United States, the exhibition also includes works by artists from many communities to consider the extensive interchange between North American artists and the African diaspora. The exhibition looks at the important connections between America’s focus on civil rights and the emerging cultural movements that enriched the dialog,” said Philip Brookman, cocurator of the exhibition and consulting curator of the department of photographs at the National Gallery of Art.
“Photography and photographic images were crucial in defining and giving expression to the Black Arts Movement and the civil rights movement. By merging the social concerns and aesthetics of the period, Black artists and photographers were defining a Black aesthetic while expanding conversations around community building and public history,” said Deborah Willis, guest cocurator, university professor and chair of the department of photography and imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts and founding director of the Center for Black Visual Culture at New York University. “The artists and their subjects helped to preserve compelling visual responses to this turbulent time and their images reflect their pride and determination.”
About the Exhibition
The exhibition draws significantly from the National Gallery’s collection – including more than 50 newly acquired works by Dawoud Bey, Kwame Brathwaite, Louis Draper, Ray Francis, Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe, Horace Ové, Jamel Shabazz, Malik Sidibé, Ming Smith, and Carrie Mae Weems, among others – and from lenders in the US, Great Britain, and Canada. Photography and the Black Arts Movement, 1955–1985 presents the cultural and political titans of the era, including civil rights leaders, artists, and musicians, as well as everyday people, scenes of daily life, and fashion and commercial photography. Structured around nine thematic sections – including explorations of the self, community, fashion and beauty, the media, and ritual – the exhibition weaves a holistic vision of the period and its cultural impact.
Among the works in the first section of the exhibition is a collage by Romare Bearden, 110th Street Harlem Blues (1972). A dynamic mixture of painted paper and photographs, the work illustrates the ongoing vitality of Harlem’s community, echoing the vibrancy and social content of the Harlem Renaissance, which Bearden was exposed to in his early life. Moving into the section titled Picturing the Self / Picturing the Movement, self-portraits by Coreen Simpson, Alex Harsley, and Barkley L. Hendricks underscore a central theme of the exhibition: artists asserting their presence within the broader narrative of the movement and the era, along with the importance of self-representation in their art. A highlight of Representing the Community – a section filled with everyday scenes of people at work and at rest – is Ralph Arnold’s Soul Box (1969), a mixed-media assemblage of found objects and collage, serving as a time capsule that captures stories of the Black Arts Movement.
Photographs were a crucial tool used to communicate the events of the civil rights movement to a national audience. Artists and news media understood the power of photographs to address inequality and advocate for civil and human rights, and some works in the exhibition are by photojournalists who captured the speeches, marches, and sit-ins that defined the era. A rarely seen 1965 photograph by Frank Dandridge captures Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. watching President Lyndon B. Johnson’s televised address following the Selma, Alabama, marches – events that would ultimately lead to the passage of the Voting Rights Act. Depicting Dr. King in a private, domestic moment, the image underscores not just the personal gravity of the moment but the television’s growing role in shaping public understanding of the era’s historic events. One of several works featured in the In the News section, it reflects how photographers responded to the shifting landscape of news media – from still photography to the rise of television.
The Black Arts Movement was instrumental in reshaping fashion, advertising, and media as tools of self-representation and cultural empowerment. A Kraft Foods advertisement (1977), photographed by Barbara DuMetz and featuring a young Black girl holding her doll, illustrates how the movement prompted advertisers to engage Black audiences more thoughtfully by hiring Black photographers and models in their campaigns. It is among the highlights of the Fashioning the Self section, along with an editorial photograph by Kwame Brathwaite, the photographer who helped coin the “Black is Beautiful” movement, and many depictions of women in beauty shops, showing the importance of these spaces to forming identity and community.
The exhibition’s concluding section, Transformations in Art and Culture, reflects a shift in the Black Arts Movement’s purpose – from its earlier focus on civil rights to a younger generation’s engagement with more historical and conceptual ideas, while still drawing on the movement’s visual language. Highlights include multimedia and time-based works by Ulysses Jenkins, Charles Gaines, and Lorna Simpson, which explore new and experimental ways to explore Black identity.
Exhibition Publication
Published in association with Yale University Press, the fully illustrated catalog accompanying the exhibition examines the vital role photography played in the evolution of the Black Arts Movement, which brought together writers, filmmakers, and artists as they explored ways of using art to advance civil rights and Black self-determination. Edited by Philip Brookman and Deborah Willis, with a preface by Angela Y. Davis and contributions by Makeda Best, Margo Natalie Crawford, Romi Crawford, Cheryl Finley, Sarah Lewis, and Audrey Sands, this book reveals how photographs operated across art, community building, journalism, and political messaging to contribute to the development of a distinctly Black art and culture. Essays by these distinguished scholars focus on topics such as women and the movement, community, activism, and Black photojournalism, and consider the complex connections between American artists and the African diaspora, and the dynamic interchange of Pan-African ideas that propelled the movement.
Harry Adams, also known as “One Shot Harry,” was one of the best-known members of the Los Angeles African American community. Having access to the city’s inner circle, he became known for his images of politicians, entertainers, and society figures. Adams worked as a freelancer for the California Eagle and Los Angeles Sentinel for 35 years and had a number of churches and lawyers as clients. His collection is particularly rich in its documentation of African American social life including images of social organisations, churches, schools, civil rights organisations, protests and cultural events. …
The collection of images for the period 1950-1985 is rich in its depiction of the unique lives of African Americans in and around the Los Angeles area. There are many images of important black political leaders, such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Rev. Ralph Abernathy, Malcolm X, and many others.
Between the late 1960s and the early 1990s, the cultural promoter, entrepreneur and photographer Raphael Albert organised and documented numerous black beauty pageants and other cultural events in London. His long and successful career as a promoter and chronicler of pageants included the establishment of Miss Black and Beautiful, Miss West Indies in Great Britain, and Miss Grenada.
These competitions celebrated the global ‘Black is Beautiful’ aesthetic in a local west London context: paired with the obligatory bathing costumes and high heels, Albert’s contestants often sported large Afro hairstyles, inventing and reinventing themselves on stage while articulating a particular and multifaceted black femininity as part of a widely contested and ambiguous cultural performance.
Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006) Newsman Being Frisked at Muslim Rally in Chicago 1963, printed 1997 Gelatin silver print 47.3 x 33.7cm (18 5/8 x 13 1/4 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington Corcoran Collection (The Gordon Parks Collection)
Herman Howard (American, 1942-1980) Sweet as a Peach, Harlem, New York City 1963 Gelatin silver print 16 x 23.1cm (6 5/16 x 9 1/8 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
John W. Mosley (American, 1907-1969) View of the crowd as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. addresses civil rights demonstrators at 40th Street and Lancaster Avenue, Philadelphia August 3, 1965 Gelatin silver print 24.8 x 19.7cm (9 3/4 x 7 3/4 in.) John W. Mosley Photograph Collection, Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection, Temple University Libraries
John W. Mosley (American, 1907-1969)
John W. Mosley (May 19, 1907 – October 1, 1969) was a self-taught photojournalist who extensively documented the everyday activities of the African-American community in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, for more than 30 years, a period including both World War II and the civil rights movement. His work was published widely in newspapers and magazines including The Philadelphia Tribune, The Pittsburgh Courier and Jet magazine.
Mosley has been called a “cultural warrior” for preserving a record of African-American life in Philadelphia and Pennsylvania, one which combats “negative stereotypes and false interpretations of African-American history and culture”. …
Mosley flourished in his career as a photographer from the 1930s to the 1960s. He was known to photograph as many as four events a day, seven days a week. He traveled around Philadelphia on public transit, carrying his cameras and other equipment.
Mosley shot in black and white film. He used a large-format Graflex Speed Graphic camera. and a medium-format Rollieflex.
Proud of his heritage, Mosley chose to portray the black community positively at family, social, and cultural events that were part of daily life. He photographed individuals and families at weddings, picnics, churches, segregated beaches, sporting events, concerts, galas, and civil rights protests. During a time of racism and segregation, he emphasised the achievements of black celebrities, athletes, and political leaders.
“During the Civil Rights Movement, I was a participant just like everybody else. I just happened to be there with my camera, and I felt and firmly believed that my mission was to photograph and show the side of it that was the right side.”
~ Moneta Sleet Jr.
During Sleet’s 41 years at Ebony, he worked by Martin Luther King Jr.’s side for 13 years, capturing historical moments of the civil rights movement.
Sleet began working for Ebony magazine in 1955. Over the next 41 years, he captured photos of young Muhammad Ali, Dizzy Gillespie, Stevie Wonder, Emperor Haile Selassie I, Jomo Kenyatta, former ambassador Andrew Young in a blue leather jacket and jeans in his office at the United Nations, Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, Liberia’s William Tubman and Billie Holiday. He gained the affection and esteem of many civil rights leaders, many of whom called on him by name. When Coretta Scott King found out that no African American photographers had been assigned to cover her husband’s funeral service, she demanded that Sleet be a part of the press pool. If he was not, she threatened to bar all photographers from the service. Besides his photo of Coretta Scott King, he also captured grieving widow Betty Shabazz at the funeral of her husband Malcolm X.
Kwame Brathwaite (American, 1938-2023) Untitled (Charles Peaker Street Speaker, head of ANPM, after Carlos Cooks passed away, on 125th Street) c. 1968, printed 2016 Inkjet print 37.2 x 37.2 cm (14 5/8 x 14 5/8 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund and Pepita Milmore Memorial Fund
Kwame Brathwaite (American, 1938-2023)
Black Is Beautiful.
From Marcus Garvey to the Black Panther Party, these three words powered the political dreams and material possibilities of generations of Black people living in the United States. Over the course of seven decades, the recently departed photographer Kwame Brathwaite constructed a glorious visual lexicon to articulate a Pan-Africanist argument. Whether through his rhythmic documentation of the jazz scene in Harlem and the Bronx, or his cofounding of the African Jazz-Art Society & Studios (AJASS), Brathwaite positioned photography at the nexus of Black artistic, political, and musical expression. Moving between concert halls and boxing rings, portrait studios and protest movement scenes – his Hasselblad in hand – Brathwaite chronicled self-determination and creativity that celebrated Blackness in all of its forms. Each of his photographs brims with bombastic flare and undeniable elegance. Their narrative potential is still transfixing.
“Black Is Beautiful was my directive,” Brathwaite said. “It was a time when people were protesting injustices related to race, class, and human rights around the globe. I focused on perfecting my craft so that I could use my gift to inspire thought, relay ideas, and tell stories of our struggle, our work, our liberation…. Oppression still exists today, and we must keep fighting, keep on pushing until we are free. A luta continua, a vitória é certa – the struggle continues, victory is certain.”
Oluremi C. Onabanjo, Esther Adler, Roxana Marcoci, Marilyn Nance, David Hartt, Michael Famighetti. “Remembering Kwame Brathwaite (1938-2023),” on the MoMA website, Dec 26, 2023 [Online] Cited 30/11/2025
While the Black Arts Movement is generally pegged to the 1960s and ’70s, the point of departure for Willis and Brookman was the work of photographer Roy DeCarava, who in 1955, on the cusp of the civil rights movement, released a book titled The Sweet Flypaper of Life. The book featured portraits of Black life in Harlem activated by a fictitious character named Mary Bradley, a narrative invention of Harlem Renaissance writer Langston Hughes.
In the book, Sister Mary’s musings unfold within DeCarava’s photographic landscape. The exhibition includes an image from the book featuring bassist Edna Smith, whose face is partially illuminated by a single light in the distance. Her downward gaze conveys a sense of somberness that’s echoed by the shadows that surround her, while the single glint of light coming off her wristwatch draws attention to the bass like the beacon from a lighthouse.
Published decades following the Harlem Renaissance, one year after Brown v. Board of Education and months after the murder of Emmitt Till, DeCarava’s book came at a critical moment in art history, a time when photography became more broadly recognised as fine art through groundbreaking exhibitions like “The Family of Man” at the Museum of Modern Art, also in 1955. With that recognition, Black artists seized an opportunity to compose compelling visual narratives. “The collaboration between Langston Hughes and Roy De Carava was influential for so many photographers and artists, in part because De Carava and Hughes were looking at their respective communities, and they put together a story that was looking inward,” says Brookman.
Ray Francis (American, 1937-2006) Genie 1971 Gelatin silver print 13.97 × 17.78cm (5 1/2 × 7 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
Ray Francis (American, 1937-2006)
Ray Francis was a founding member of the Kamoinge Workshop. He received his first camera in 1952, at the age of 15. In 1961 he met Louis Draper, with whom he formed Group 35. In 1963 Group 35 merged with other photographers to create Kamoinge, where Francis contributed significantly by creating a darkroom for the group and working as a photo editor for the Black Photographers Annual.
His photographic work spanned still life, portraiture, and landscape, often using dramatic light and shadow, influenced by Johannes Vermeer’s use of composition. Francis also made contributions as an educator, teaching at the Bedford-Stuyvesant Neighborhood Youth Corps (1966–1969) and later serving as director of the New York City Board of Education’s photography program for Intermediate School 201 from 1970 to 1974.
Kwame Brathwaite, [was] a photographer, musician and African American activist who was a unique politico-aesthete. With his brother Elombe Brath, he virtually invented the phrase “Black Is Beautiful” in the 1960s by photographing the Grandassa Models in Harlem: young African American women who became the sensational template for beauty, doing away with the usual cosmetic products and the usual white standard of femininity.
Black Is Beautiful became a radical rallying cry, an inspired three-word prose poem and manifesto for change. Simply to assert that black people were beautiful was a liberating force in art, politics and culture, and Brathwaite became a part of Black power’s pan-Africanist movement by photographing Muhammad Ali before his Rumble in the Jungle fight in Zaire in 1974. He was the exclusive photographer for the Jackson 5’s African tour, and became the house photographer for the Apollo theatre, building an amazing archive of black musicians, and with Elombe was the driving force behind bringing Nelson Mandela to speak in Harlem.
African-American artist, activist, and writer Romare Bearden was close friends with film producer and photographer Sam Shaw, and he often drew inspiration from Shaw’s creative projects. The portraits incorporated into this collage feature outtakes of extras from a movie Shaw may have documented as set photographer. Bearden’s work reflects his improvisational approach to his practice. He considered his process akin to that of jazz and blues composers. Starting with an open mind, he would let an idea evolve spontaneously. “You have to begin somewhere,” he once said, “so you put something down. Then you put something else with it, and then you see how that works, and maybe you try something else and so on, and the picture grows in that way.”
Text from the Fraenkel Gallery Facebook page via DC Gallery, New York
Other works of art in the show are a testament to the medium’s lasting influence on established visual artists. Among these was Romare Bearden, who in the mid-1960s began exploring photographic collage; it would become an art form he used to create his most influential works. “Romare Bearden has always been integral to understanding the Black Arts Movement,” says Brookman. “By using photographs in his collages, he makes a direct connection between photography in all of its forms and the Black Arts Movement. That was something I had not seen or thought a lot about before, how much photography is incorporated into his visual art, including painting, during that time.”
Dawoud Bey (American, b. 1953) The Blues Singer, Harlem, NY 1976 Gelatin silver print 22.1 x 32.7 cm (8 11/16 x 12 7/8 in.) National Gallery of Art, Gift of the Charina Endowment Fund in memory of Robert B. Menschel
Barbara DuMetz (American, b. 1947) Kraft Foods advertisement 1977
Barbara DuMetz (American, b. 1947)
Barbara DuMetz (born 1947) is an American photographer and pioneer in the field of commercial photography. She began working in Los Angeles as a commercial photographer in the 1970s, when very few women had established and maintained successful careers in the field, especially African-American women. Over the course of her career, “she made a major contribution to diversifying the landscape of images that defined pop culture in the United States.”
DuMetz is known for her work with African-American celebrities, corporations and images of everyday life in African-American communities. …
DuMetz has been a professional photographer for more than four decades. Over the course of her career, she has produced award-winning images for advertising agencies including Burrell Advertising, J. P. Martin Associates and InterNorth Corporation. Her photographs have appeared in African-American publications including Black Enterprise, Ebony, Essence, Jet and The Crisis. She has taken commercial photographs for corporations including The Coca-Cola Company, Delta Air Lines and McDonald’s Corporation.
DuMetz ran and maintained three different photography studios located in the Los Angeles area where she was contracted by department stores, record companies, graphic design studios, advertising agencies, public relations firms, film production companies, actors and business professionals. DuMetz’s has shot photo layouts of celebrities and artists and personalities including Maya Angelou, Ernie Barnes, Bernie Casey, Pam Grier, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Quincy Jones, Samella Lewis, Ed McMahan, Thelonious Monk, Lou Rawls, Della Reese, Richard Roundtree, Betye Saar, Charles Wilbert White, and Nancy Wilson. Her show The Creators: Photographic Images of Literary, Music and Visual Artists, at the Southwest Arts Center in Atlanta, Georgia, in 2015, included images of over two dozen African-American artists whom she has photographed.
Ming Smith (American, b. 1947) Sun Ra Space II, New York, New York 1978 Gelatin silver print 15.24 × 22.4cm (6 × 8 13/16 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington Charina Endowment Fund
“You don’t make art for money, especially as a Black artist. You do it because there is that need to create – and that has been part of my survival; that has helped me survive.”
“My work as a photographer was to record, culturally, the period of time in which I lived – and I recorded it as an artist.”
“Oh no, it’s all discovery, it’s all improvisation. It’s like when jazz musicians solo. They improvise, and photography is definitely that, for me.”
“Whether I’m photographing a person on the street, someone I know, or on an assignment, I’m doing it because I admire them. I like the sense of exchange – they’re giving and I’m taking, but I’m also giving them something back. There were certain people who would understand what I was looking for and would try to give me a photograph by posing. Whatever I’m shooting, whether it’s a portrait or a place, my intention is to capture the feeling I have about that exchange and that energy.”
Simpson’s career launched when she became editor for Unique New York magazine in 1980, and she began photographing to illustrate her articles. She then became a freelance fashion photographer for the Village Voice and the Amsterdam News in the early 1980s, and covered many African-American cultural and political events in the mid-1980s. She is also noted for her studies of Harlem nightlife. She constructed a portable studio and brought it to clubs in downtown Manhattan, barbershops in Harlem, and braiding salons in Queens. Her work’s ability to present a wide variety of subjects with “depth of character and dignity” has been compared to that of Diane Arbus and Weegee.
Simpson became a photographer after noticing that she could make better images than the ones used to illustrate her stories as a freelance lifestyle writer. She took the chance to start creating the images she wanted to see. In 1976, she contacted her friend Walter Johnson, a street photographer who worked at a photo lab in Manhattan, with whom she had been acquainted from her modeling days, and asked if he could teach her how to use a camera. He showed her how to use it, and as soon as she got a hold of it, she became unstoppable.
She argues that great images are the key to having a successful published story. “You have to feel good about yourself, and good about the article that you’re presenting to the public,” she says. “So what makes it good? It’s the visuals. The visuals make it good.”
Anthony Barboza (American, b. 1944) Grace Jones, New York City 1970s Gelatin silver print 27 × 23.7cm (10 5/8 × 9 5/16 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
Anthony Barboza (American, b. 1944)
Anthony Barboza (born 1944 in New Bedford, Massachusetts) is a photographer, historian, artist and writer. With roots originating from Cape Verde, and work that began in commercial art more than forty years ago, Barboza’s artistic talents and successful career helped him to cross over and pursue his passions in the fine arts where he continues to contribute to the American art scene.
Barboza has a prolific and wide range of both traditional and innovative works inspired by African-American thought, which have been exhibited in public and private galleries, and prestigious museums and educational institutions worldwide. He is well known for his photographic work of jazz musicians from the 1970s – ’80s. Many of these works are in his book Black Borders, published in 1980 with a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. In an article printed in 1984 in The City Sun, he said, “When I do a portrait, I’m doing a photograph of how that person feels to me; how I feel about the person, not how they look. I find that in order for the portraits to work, they have to make a mental connection as well as an emotional one. When they do that, I know I have it.” Many of his photographs achieve his signature effect through the careful use of lighting and shadows, manipulation of the backdrop, measured adjustments to shutter speeds, composition, and many other techniques and mediums at his command.
Nellie Mae Rowe was born in Georgia, in the last year of the nineteenth century – to a once-enslaved father and mother born the year of Emancipation. Rowe laboured as a child, married young, was widowed twice, and worked much of her adult life as a uniformed “domestic” in white households. Although her early life was shaped by segregation and oppression, Rowe’s desire to define herself sparked a joyful and colourful body of art that suffused her home and yard. This undeniable and contagious positivity made Rowe one of the first Black self-taught women to be celebrated for her art.
Rowe saw art-making as a God-given way to convey gratitude and recover a girlhood lost to labor and poverty. She transformed her property into an enriched realm she called her “Playhouse,” embellished with artworks and found objects that brought a heightened animation to her surroundings. Amid a society that rarely featured Black women in works of art and cast them as demeaning stereotypes in popular culture, Rowe took control of the narrative. She depicted friends, neighbours, and herself in drawings and hand-coloured photographs, confident images of Black beauty and free-spirited joy. In a radical act of reclamation, she crafted a world where cultural pride, personal style, and a bit of the unexpected embody the richness of life.
(We Are Made of Stories: Self-Taught Artists in the Robson Family Collection, 2022)
Carrie Mae Weems (American, b. 1953) Mom at Work 1978-1984 Gelatin silver print 60.96 × 92.71cm (24 × 36 1/2 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe (American, b. 1951) Jake with His Boat Arriving on Daufuskie’s Shore, Daufuskie Island, South Carolina 1978, printed 2007 Gelatin silver print 31.1 x 46.6cm (12 1/4 x 18 3/8 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington Gift of Funds from Diana and Mallory Walker
Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe (American, b. 1951)
Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe (b. 1951, USA) is an American photographer, photojournalist and AIDS activist. Beginning photography at the age of 18, she trained with American street photographer Garry Winogrand before graduating from the Cooper Union School of Art with a BFA in 1975, completing a year of independent photographic study in West Africa. Her 1977 photograph ‘Black Man, White Woman, Johannesburg, South Africa’ emblematised the visual narrative of apartheid at that time, recalling the institutionalised racism Jeanne had herself experienced as an African-American photographer.
Jeanne’s experience in South Africa informed her later work, encouraging her to focus on the contemporary experience of Blackness through humanist street photography. More recently, her photobook Daddy and Me: A Photo Story of Arthur Ashe and His Daughter, Camera (1993), which captures the last year of her husband Arthur Ashe’s life, has been praised as a sensitive record of family and mortality which demystifies AIDS. Following the tragedy of Ashe’s death, Jeanne has become a spokesperson for further AIDS research.
Barkley L. Hendricks (American, 1940-2017) Self-Portrait with Red Sweater 1980, printed 2023 Chromogenic print 24.8 × 15.5cm (9 3/4 × 6 1/8 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
Barkley L. Hendricks (American, 1940-2017)
Barkley L. Hendricks (American, 1940-2017) was an American painter and photographer who revolutionised portraiture through his realist and post-modern oil paintings of Black Americans living in urban areas, beginning in the 1960s and 1970s.
Hendricks’ depictions of the Black figure exude attitude and style. The artist culled subjects for his hagiographic portraits from sartorially minded friends and acquaintances he encountered around the world, including travels to Jamaica, his hometown of Philadelphia, and Connecticut where he last lived and worked. He applied intense focus to his subjects while painting, allowing him to capture their unique personalities. Steeped in pop culture and balanced with exquisite detail, the cast of characters in Hendricks’ work inhabits an unconventional realism united by painterly mastery.
While the directness of his subjects’ gaze could be piercing, Hendricks invoked humour through the titling of his pieces, mitigating the gravity of the message and allowing for an opening into the work. His paintings are distinctly of their time, grounded in the style of their contemporary present, and simultaneously emphatically timeless. They are a direct engagement with art history, the tradition of portraiture, and a confrontation of institutional portrayal of the black subject.
Hendricks was first a photographer before taking up painting. Beyond his portraiture, he also made distinct works on paper and painted landscapes and still lifes, including an early series of Basketball paintings that explored abstraction and colour theory. Throughout his career, Hendricks refused to be boxed into a medium, and his practice is commanding, bold, and without limitations to media or form.
Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006) Miles Davis 1981 Gelatin silver print 22.9 x 34.1cm (9 x 13 7/16 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington Corcoran Collection (The Gordon Parks Collection)
Carla Williams (American, b. 1965) Untitled (curlers) #1.2 1984-1985 Gelatin silver print 27.31 × 34.93cm (10 3/4 × 13 3/4 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington Pepita Milmore Memorial Fund
Carla Williams (American, b. 1965)
Los Angeles native Carla Williams is a photographer and curator known for her exploration of identity, race, gender, and representation.
She first encountered photography in 1983 during her sophomore year at Princeton University, studying under Emmet Gowin. Her early work in self-portraiture began at Princeton, where she used the large-format camera to explore her own image. The focus of renewed scholarship, these works reflected on the lack of visibility of African American women in photographic history. Williams earned an MFA in photography from the University of New Mexico in 1991, where her thesis project focused on the themes of self-representation and identity. After graduating, she worked as a curator of photography at institutions in Los Angeles and New York.
Juan Sánchez, the influential Nuyorican visual artist, teacher, writer, and curator once declared “Political art is a medium used as a weapon to hopefully recapture or regain the positive energy of celebration – to regain the goodness of humanity.” Sánchez, the child of Puerto Rican immigrants, was born and raised in Brooklyn. Encompassing a variety of mediums and techniques, including collage, painting, printmaking, photography, and video, his work is informed by his activism and engagement with issues of colonialism and its legacy, race, class, cultural identity, equality, social justice, and self-determination. At the same time, he has maintained a consistent focus on communities, families, and both personal and political histories in his work.
This is a magnificent exhibition of the 103 photographs that form American photographer Richard Avedon’s series and subsequent book of the same name, In The American West 1984.
“Avedon spent the next six years, from 1979 to 1984, traveling to 189 towns in 17 states – Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, and Wyoming – and even up into Canada. He conducted 752 sittings, exposing 17,000 sheets of film through his large-format view camera.”1
“For five years, Avedon photographed miners, drovers, showmen, vendors, and vagabonds, alone or in small groups, in front of his view camera against a white background that enhanced their features, postures, and expressions. He thus created a striking portrait of this region and its residents, a departure from traditional representations and glorifications of the myth of the American West.”2
Using relatively small reference prints (40 x 50cm) not originally intended for exhibition made by the photographer at the time to produce the prints for his book, the hanging of this exhibition “on the line”, “follows the book, from the first to the last image… The blank pages are represented on the wall by a gap equivalent to the width of a frame, like a half-space. We have thus reproduced the rhythm of someone leafing through the book. We can see through this that Richard Avedon and Marvin Israel (1924-1984), artistic director, have constructed the rhythm of these images in a very precise manner”3, one which follows “the dynamics of the photograph on the page, and the inter-relationships, scaling and sequencing of groups of photographs.”
Breaking with the code of social documentary photography, Avedon brings to this project all his undoubted skill as a New York fashion photographer, reassigned to the artistic sphere: clarity of purpose, simplicity of representation, aesthetic beauty, clinical detail and contextless backgrounds.
While there is a long history of the use of plain backgrounds in portrait photography dating back to the infancy of the medium, Avedon was one of the first to employ such a technique in contemporary (I’d like to say postmodern) photo-portraits, where the subject is disassociated from their location, job, culture and is posed by the director of the theatrical show.
Over the five years of the project, Avedon worked closely with his subjects, often advertising for people to be photographed, street-casting his sitters, paying them for their time and providing prints of the resultant photographs. He or one of his assistants “took a Polaroid photograph of each of the models intended to pose. Clément Chéroux (curator of the exhibition) notes that, “Comparing these polaroids with Avedon’s portraits shows his ability to transcend the appearance of his models.”4
During the photographic sessions Avedon shot not from behind his camera but to the side, like the director of a play in rehearsal, front of stage. “He had a strong connection with his subjects, mimicking their position, and asking them to respond to a very small gesture by showing himself moving in one direction or another, and I think a lot of the work is in this relationship that he was establishing with the subject. Photographic literature usually focuses on the framing, the composition, but for me, this kind of interaction he was able to develop with the subject is where the work is, where he’s transforming the people that he met into a Richard Avedon photograph.”5
“A conductor of his own composition, Richard Avedon was able to weave an unparalleled fusional relationship with his models, while implacably directing them through his gaze, gestures or voice.”6
Thus, through his imagination, his direction and his creative experience Avedon conjured a subjective view of the American West every bit as much as myth as those cowboys in John Wayne movies, a kind of counter-mythology undercutting the eulogising of the American West, but a staged, fabricated, youthful, desolate, mysterious mythology none the less – a series which captures the ethos of the era (global recession, disease, dis/ease) counter to the one hoped for, “representing a sad, unsmiling America, which does not correspond to the one dreamed of.”7
Think that damned foreigner Robert Frank and his book The Americans, pointing the bone at the belly of the United States of America, holding a mirror up to their reflection8 and they certainly not liking what they saw. Indeed Avedon, while American and respectful of his subjects, could be seen as an interloper from New York exposing through his photographs the underbelly of this vast country colonised through divine providence and Manifest Destiny.
Avedon, while undercutting the myth of the American West through his storytelling, doesn’t seek to document, exploit or misrepresent his subjects, but to subjectively present them as on a theatrical set devoid of scenery – where their very appearance becomes scene / seen. As he himself said, “My concern is… the human predicament; only what I consider the human predicament may simply be my own.”
“Richard Avedon showed his own America, those we do not see, those we pass by without pausing, those who do the work, those who make America work.”9
Neither the series nor the exhibition are without fault, however.
While I believe that Avedon’s exceptional magnum opus In The American West has become one of the truly iconic photographic portrait series of the 20th century it can also be seen as problematic, not in the photographic sense, but in the sense that the photographs did not reflect the diverse reality of the West’s population. While the series may be Avedon’s subjective mythologising of the American West some people, myself included, find the lack of representation of Black Americans, Asian Americans and other ethnicities that have been integral to the development of the American West a point of contention. Are they not those that also do the work, those who also make America work, as much as those Avedon chose to photograph? Indeed there is a “significant demographic blind spot” in the whole series…
The other blind spot is the inability of commentators such as myself to publish some of the preparatory Polaroids that Avedon and his assistants took before posing his subjects. I asked the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson for some of the Polaroids to illustrate this posting and they said that none were available. Since the exhibition promotes the presence of these unpublished documents and the curator Clément Chéroux notes their importance for their ability to compare them with Avedon’s finished portraits, showing “his ability to transcend the appearance of his models,” they become vital to understanding Avedon’s creative process … and it would have been great to see the visualisation of his subjects from beginning to end.
Finally, in the juxtaposition of Polaroid and finished portrait we can begin to perceive the magical transformation and artistry and humanism of the man, Avedon, as he visualises his ode to the American West, composing his subjects so that they engage with the viewer directly from the photographic frame – the dynamics of the photographs creating iconic images of memorable characters, collectively constructing the rhythm of these images (from dark to light, from sublime to industrial) into an unforgettable sequence of photographs.
8/ Holding a mirror up to their reflection, i.e. to hold something up to scrutiny, to reveal an unpleasant truth, or to show something for what it truly is, often with the intent of providing insight or understanding.
9/ Nathalie Dassa, op.cit.,
Many thankx to the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“I don’t think the West in these portraits is any more accurate than John Wayne’s West.”
Richard Avedon at the exhibition opening in 1985
“Avedon’s most compelling photographs are about performance – his performance as well as his subjects’ – and depend on the engagement of their personalities. For this reason it is difficult to separate the photographer from the man. Indeed it is partly owing to the ineluctable presence of Avedon’s own psychology that his portraits transcend the mainstream of cultural history.”
Anonymous. “Body of Evidence,” on the Frieze website, 06 March 1994 [Online] Cited 23/09/2025
“Listen carefully to the stories of others and they may tell us something of ourselves. The story of any person exists first in the mind of its teller, perpetually renewing itself as, like smoke in wind, it is constantly shaped and reshaped in the flux of daily life. Narratives constructed from various facts, memories and rumours are added to, subtracted from, come together and fall apart in a continuous reassembling of experience and imagination. The human mind is a place where fact meets fiction, where reality and fantasy mingle easily and endlessly with fabrication, half-truths and invention. As they say, looking at something is no guarantee you will actually see it.”
To mark the 40th anniversary of Richard Avedon’s iconic work, In The American West, the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson presents, from April 30 to October 12, 2025, in collaboration with the Richard Avedon Foundation, an exceptional exhibition entirely dedicated to this iconic series.
Between 1979 and 1984, at the request of the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas, Richard Avedon traveled the American West and photographed more than 1,000 of its inhabitants. For five years, Avedon photographed miners, drovers, showmen, vendors, and vagabonds, alone or in small groups, in front of his view camera against a white background that enhanced their features, postures, and expressions.
He thus created a striking portrait of this region and its residents, a departure from traditional representations and glorifications of the myth of the American West. The sheer power of the 103 works that make up the final series and the book of the same name make In The American West a pivotal moment in Avedon’s work and a major milestone in the history of photographic portraiture.
The exhibition presented at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson from April 30 to October 12, 2025, displays for the very first time in Europe all the images that appear in the original work, accompanied by previously unpublished documents.
Text from the YouTube website translated from the French by Google Translate [Online] Cited 23/09/2025
Richard Avedon photographing for In The American West
“We have some testimonies about the way that Avedon was working, and we know that he was not behind his camera, he was standing next to it. He had a strong connection with his subjects, mimicking their position, and asking them to respond to a very small gesture by showing himself moving in one direction or another, and I think a lot of the work is in this relationship that he was establishing with the subject. Photographic literature usually focuses on the framing, the composition, but for me, this kind of interaction he was able to develop with the subject is where the work is, where he’s transforming the people that he met into a Richard Avedon photograph.”
Installation view of the exhibition Richard Avedon ‘In the American West‘ at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris, April – October 2025
“The hanging follows the book, from the first to the last image,” explains Clément Chéroux. “The blank pages are represented on the wall by a gap equivalent to the width of a frame, like a half-space. We have thus reproduced the rhythm of someone leafing through the book. We can see through this that Richard Avedon and Marvin Israel (1924-1984), artistic director, have constructed the rhythm of these images in a very precise manner.”
Nathalie Dassa. “Richard Avedon: The Living Forces of the American West,” on the Blind Magazine website, May 12, 2025 [Online] Cited 22/09/2025
“Here, the works are displayed throughout the building in classic fashion – in a single line – and in unusually small formats (40 × 50 centimetres). “These are the reference prints, made by the photographer at the time, to produce the prints for his book and the enlargements shown in his exhibitions,” explained Clément Chéroux, the foundation’s director. These prints were not intended for exhibition, but nonetheless their remarkable quality allows the public − for the first time in Europe − to discover this exceptional work in its entirety.”
Installation views of the exhibition Richard Avedon ‘In the American West‘ at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris, April – October 2025
To mark the 40th anniversary of Richard Avedon’s iconic work In the American West, the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, in collaboration with the Richard Avedon Foundation, presents an exclusive exhibition focused on this emblematic series.
Between 1979 and 1984, commissioned by the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas, Richard Avedon traveled across the American West to photograph over 1,000 of its inhabitants. For five years, Avedon photographed miners, herdsmen, showmen, salesmen and transient people, amongst others with rich histories, alone or in small groups, before his camera, against a white background that enhanced their features, postures and expressions, for a striking portrait of the territory and its residents, in stark contrast to traditional depictions and glorifications of the legend of the American West. The force of the 103 works that compose the book makes In the American West a pivotal event in Avedon’s career, and a milestone in the history of photographic portraits.
For the first time in Europe, the exhibition at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson presents the whole series of images included in the original publication, while also showcasing the stages of its production and reception. The exhibition includes a full selection of engravers prints, which served as reference materials for both the exhibition and the 1985 book, as well as previously unpublished documents, such as preparatory Polaroids, test prints annotated by the photographer, and correspondence between the artist and his models.
To mark this anniversary, Abrams, the book’s original publisher, is reissuing the long out-of-print book.
Richard Avedon short biography
Richard Avedon was born to parents of Russian Jewish heritage in New York City. As a boy, he learned photography, joining the YMHA Camera Club at the age of twelve. Avedon joined the armed forces in 1942 during World War II, serving as Photographer’s Mate Second Class in the Merchant Marine. Making identification portraits of the crewmen with his Rolleiflex twin lens camera – a gift from his father – Avedon advanced his technical knowledge of the medium and began to develop a dynamic style. After two years of service he left the Merchant Marine to work as a photographer, making fashion images and studying with art director Alexey Brodovitch at the Design Laboratory of the New School for Social Research.
In 1945, Avedon set up his own studio and worked as a freelance photographer for various magazines. He quickly became the preeminent photographer used by Harper’s Bazaar.
From the beginning, Avedon made portraits for editorial publication as well: in the pages of Harper’s Bazaar, in Theater Arts, and in Life and Look magazines. From the outset, he was fascinated by photography’s capacity for suggesting the personality and evoking the life of his subjects. Only rarely did he idealize people; instead, he presented the face as a kind of landscape, with total clarity.
Avedon continued to make portraiture and fashion photography for magazine publications throughout his career. After parting ways with Harper’s Bazaar in 1965, he began a long-term relationship with Vogue that continued through 1988. In later years, he established formidable creative partnerships with the French publication Egoiste, and with The New Yorker. In the pages of these periodicals, Avedon reinvigorated his formalist style, investing his imagery with dynamism and theatricality. In addition, he supported his studio by making innovative advertising work for print and broadcast – defining the look of brands like Calvin Klein, Versace, and Revlon.
As his reputation grew and his signature aesthetic evolved, Avedon remained dedicated to extended portraiture projects as a means for exploring cultural, political, and personal concerns. In 1963-1964, he examined the civil rights movement in the American South. During the Vietnam War, he photographed students, countercultural artists and activists, and victims of the war, both in the United States and in Vietnam. In 1976, on a commission for Rolling Stone magazine, he produced The Family, a composite portrait of the American power elite at the time of the country’s Bicentennial election.
In 1985, Avedon created his magnum opus – In the American West. He portrayed members of the working class: butchers, coal miners, convicts, and waitresses, all photographed with precisionist detail, using the large format camera and plain white backdrop characteristic of his mature style. Despite their apparent minimalism and objectivism, however, Avedon emphasised that these portraits were not to be regarded as simple records of people; rather, he said, “the moment an emotion or a fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion.”
Publication
Richard Avedon’s acclaimed work In the American West was first published in 1985 by American publishing house Abrams. For its 40th anniversary, Abrams is republishing the work in its original format.
“This was the beginning of his emblematic project “In the American West” that took him across 17 US states, where he photographed nearly 1,000 people from 1979 to 1984 and revealed a poor, hardworking America, far removed from the clichés and the myth of the glorious American West. He carried out this series with neither sociological intent nor a concern for objectivity. “This is a fictional West,” he said. “I don’t think the West of these portraits is any more conclusive than the West of John Wayne.””
“He needed to create disjunctions,” says Clément Chéroux. “The beekeeper remains a great image of the 20th century. After placing an ad, he chose this man suffering from alopecia, who no longer had any hair, no eyebrows. He took him to an entomologist who covered him with queen pheromones to attract bees. Through this staging, he wanted to make the audience understand that nothing is more complex than simplicity.”
Nathalie Dassa. “Richard Avedon: The Living Forces of the American West,” on the Blind Magazine website, May 12, 2025 [Online] Cited 22/09/2025
“The subjective part of the project is clear. And most of the photographs were from encounters where he photographed people he met as they were. He also stated very clearly that a few photographs were set up, and the photograph of the Bee Man is a good example of that. He first published an advertisement in the American Bee Journal to find the type of person he was interested in – we have the advertisement in the exhibition, we found the original magazine where it was published. So, he looked for that person and made some drawings in preparation for the shoot. He clearly had a dream of a specific image that he wanted to realize. And he made clear that he wanted to have this photograph to show the subjective part of the project, that it was not exclusively a documentary project. I think the Bee Man shows us that there isn’t truth on one side and fiction on the other. It’s much more complex.” …
“Just before the Bee Man, we have the coal miners, these very strong dark images and then suddenly you have the white body of Ronald Fisher with all these little bees. We wanted to respect this in the exhibition, the sense that it was not just a collection of twentieth-century photographs of Americans, but it was a group of images, a full sentence.”
“The year after [Glenn Busch’s] Working Menwas published came fashion photographer Richard Avedon‘s In the American West (New York: Abrams, 1985), the consistent theme of which, as Richard Bolton in Afterimage argues, sees “human experience as manifested in [no]thing but style,” a quality, less sombre, but equally arch, exoticising and stereotyping that is found also in the Small Trades studio series of 1950-51 by Irving Penn.”
James McArdle. “October 8: Prosopography,” on the On This Date In Photography website 08/10/2025 [Online] Cited 08/10/2025
“Avedon was aware of the subjectivity of what he presents. He was also very familiar with art history and pictorial references, such as those of Rembrandt. He made carcasses of sheep and cattle appear like hallucinations among the workers. His photography is therefore no more objective than that of John Wayne’s westerns. And that is what he had been criticised for: representing a sad, unsmiling America, which does not correspond to the one dreamed of. These are the people that Walker Evans and the traveling photographers sought out during the conquest of the West. He demonstrated this paradox. And this is the term Roland Barthes uses for him: the paradox of all great art. Richard Avedon showed his own America, those we do not see, those we pass by without pausing, those who do the work, those who make America work.”
Nathalie Dassa. “Richard Avedon: The Living Forces of the American West,” on the Blind Magazine website, May 12, 2025 [Online] Cited 22/09/2025
Avedon took this portrait in 1979 in Texas during the annual snake hunt in the small town of Sweetwater.
The portraits from In the American West may not be romantic images – no pomp and circumstance – but they are dignified. Coal miners, cotton farmers, and cowboys stand tall and proud. Avedon worked quickly, street-casting his subjects alongside his assistant Laura Wilson, setting up white paper backdrops and shooting instinctively. Post-production was another matter entirely: Chéroux’s exhibition showcases the meticulous care that went into each print, with Avedon’s instructions for dodging and burning scrawled across pictures.
I know and greatly admire the presence and directness of legendary American photographer Lee Friedlander’s photographs containing fractured planes within the image construction.
I know and appreciate (if not admire) the immediacy and in your face obstinacy (shoot at all costs!) of American photographer Garry Winogrand’s photographs.
What I didn’t know was the excellent 1980s social documentary and humanist work of the American photographer Joseph Rodríguez – for me, the unexpected hero of this exhibition.
Rodríguez’s moody, high contrast photographs of humanity and street scenes pictured from behind the wheel of his taxi in New York proffer an intuitive, empathetic and subjective view of the city and its people at a time of great economic and social upheaval.
“The photographs in the Taxi series are a significant document of the 1980s in New York, a period marked by economic and social upheaval and the AIDS crisis. On his journeys crisscrossing the city, Rodríguez does not depict despair, but rather shows people maintaining their dignity in the face of difficult and uncertain times.” (Text from Museum Ludwig)
Uncertain times, uncertain angles and perspectives, uncertain light give rise to a powerful body of work made certain by the talent of an impressive photographer. Glorious work.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Museum Ludwig for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
(*1934 in Aberdeen, Washington, lives and works in New York City, New York)
Lee Friedlander began photographing at the age of fourteen and studied under Edward Kaminski at the Art Center School in Los Angeles until 1955. In 1956, he moved to New York, where he met Diane Arbus, Robert Frank, and Garry Winogrand. As early as the end of the 1950s, he made his first photographic forays into the streets of New York. His often humorous photographs reveal the complexity of American society, which he documented in thoughtful compositions.
In 1962, Friedlander photographed a parade in which American President John F. Kennedy also participated. His interest, however, was not in the event itself, but in the fleeting moments on the sidelines. One of the photographs taken that day shows a waiter and a boy attentively gazing out the window of a café. Upon closer inspection, it becomes clear that the crowd behind them is actually a reflection of the audience gathered outside for the parade. Due to the reflection, the café’s advertising signs also appear to be on the same plane as the signs on the opposite side of the street. Such interweaving of perspectives through reflections, as well as picture-in-picture constructions and unusual cropping, characterize Friedlander’s work of the 1960s. By focusing his camera on the often unnoticed details of daily life, capturing them with precise focus and exposure, he found a new way to depict contemporary America. His own presence, as a reflection or a shadow, in many of these images draws attention to the process of photography itself.
Friedlander does not create complete series. Each shot stands on its own as a “sharp and crudely amusing, bitterly comic observation” (Walker Evans). He initially used a Leica 35mm, whose wide angle he valued. In the early 1990s, he discovered the depth of field of the Hasselblad camera, which he also used to photograph the suburban towns of San Angelo, Texas. His subjects remained the same, only he continually reinvented them. In the 1990s, Friedlander created his photographs of flower stems trapped in glass containers and surrounded by a veil of condensation, transforming a sober detail of everyday life into a contemporary memento mori – a reminder of transience. The self-portraits, which unvarnishedly depict his ageing body, date from the same period.
Text from Museum Ludwig translated by Google Translate
The street life of cities has always been a fascinating subject for photographers, who have approached it in a variety of ways, from candid images documenting urban unrest to portraits that shine a spotlight on individuals. Since the nineteenth century, cities and photography have been directly linked through the idea of modernity. With the introduction of compact cameras such as the Leica, street photography developed into its own genre in the mid-twentieth century. Small-format cameras gave photographers greater flexibility and enabled them to respond quickly while remaining discrete. They explored public space without obtruding and, in contrast to staged photography, captured candid and spontaneous moments that had previously been considered unworthy photographic subjects. Influenced by Henri Cartier-Bresson’s concept of the “decisive moment,” these photographers sought to capture the fleeting instant when light, composition, and subject aligned to convey the significance of an event.
This exhibition in the Photography Rooms at the Museum Ludwig is dedicated to three protagonists from two generations of street photography: Garry Winogrand (b. 1928 in New York, d. 1984), Lee Friedlander (b. 1934 in Aberdeen, Washington, based in New York), and Joseph Rodríguez (b. 1951 in Brooklyn, based in New York). Despite all three photographers sharing the same subject matter, each one pursues a singular approach that produces distinct results. Iconic photographs from the 1960s to the 1980s are displayed alongside lesser-known examples from each photographer’s oeuvre. All of the works on display were included in donations made by the Bartenbach Family in 2015 and Volker Heinen in 2018, or have been acquired by the Museum Ludwig since 2001.
The landmark exhibition New Documents at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1967 helped launch the careers of Winogrand and Friedlander. Their striking photographs broke with visual conventions, such as a level horizon line or a centred main subject. Winogrand frequently tilted his viewfinder, producing skewed horizon lines that offer a new view of reality and make his images appear spontaneous, as does his purposeful use of blurriness, overexposure, underexposure, and backlighting. Friedlander, in turn, created compositions in which the viewer’s gaze is hindered by obstructions, such as shadows, signs, architectural elements, and streetlights, or is disoriented by reflections.
Winogrand and Friedlander, who are represented in the exhibition with twenty images each, both use photography in a self-reflective way that brings the formal aspects of photography to the fore. This encourages an analytical gaze, producing an emotional distance between the viewer and the subject, which often results in ambivalent images where the intention of the photographer remains unclear. Winogrand and Friedlander each developed their own distinct style, embracing originality and authorship by merging documentary photography and personal expression. While they attempted to distance themselves from photojournalism and social documentary photography, eschewing event-based, narrative-focused, and emotionally charged imagery, Rodriguez’s work deliberately engages with these genres. He aspires to give visibility to marginalised people by communicating with his subjects and attempting to tell their stories. Many of his photographs are accompanied by short commentaries that provide information about the context in which each image was created. Rodríguez’s pictures employ unusual perspectives and surprising compositions, and his use of reflections emphasises the subjectivity of the photographer’s empathic gaze beyond the momentariness of the shot. The exhibition features around twenty photographs from his Taxi series.
This is the first exhibition in the new Photography Rooms at the Museum Ludwig, centrally located on the second floor.
Text / press release from the Museum Ludwig website
Installation views of the exhibition Street Photography. Lee Friedlander, Joseph Rodríguez, Garry Winogrand at Museum Ludwig, Cologne, May – October, 2025 Photo: Historisches Archiv mit Rheinischem Bildarchiv/Vincent Quack
For many years, Garry Winogrand found his subjects right on his doorstep, on the streets of his birthplace and longtime home, New York. Whether they depict individuals or groups of people, his photographs are characterised by a special dynamism, which is also the result of the unusual perspectives of his shots. Often chaotic, sometimes surreal, the images tell stories from everyday life in the big city, but also from mass events such as sporting events or political demonstrations.
Winogrand distanced himself from both the social documentary photography popular in the 1930s and 1940s and from photojournalism, with which he himself earned his living for a long time. He was concerned with shifting the perspective from the object of the photograph to the camera: “I photograph to find out what things look like when photographed.” In his photographs, Winogrand found a formal equivalent for the diverging social forces of the 1960s. He captured passersby on the streets and public squares with a wide-angle lens in such a way that the horizons tilted and a clear center of gravity was missing. His photographs of women in public often deviated from this principle. He dedicated the book Women are Beautiful to this motif, which he returned to repeatedly throughout his career, in 1975. In another project, beginning in 1969, he focused on the media world in order to – as he put it – “study the events produced in the news.” With a distanced perspective, Winogrand captured press conferences, demonstrations, open-air festivals, and the hustle and bustle of the art world – the spectacles and pseudo-events of a society in transition.
Text from Museum Ludwig translated by Google Translate
“When I drove a cab, my taxi cab was a rolling psychology office. Everybody had something to say. Sometimes it’s just light conversation like the weather or kids. Baseball. But then you get all kinds of incredible stories. I was learning the foundations of humanism in my cab.”
Joseph Rodríguez
“To drive a cab back then, you either had to have a death wish or come to the job with a biography that inured you to the danger or graced you with such intuitive empathy/curiosity that to see and hear and sometimes engage with the cavalcade of humanity sliding in and out of your backseat trumped the nightly game of Russian roulette.”
Richard Price penned these poignant words that open photographer Joseph Rodríguez’s book, Taxi: Journey Through My Windows 1977-1987
Joseph Rodríguez
(*1951 in Brooklyn, New York City, New York, lives and works there)
Joseph Rodríguez was a teenager when street photography was celebrated in New York with exhibitions such as New Documents at the Museum of Modern Art, which also brought Friedlander and Winogrand to the fore. Rodríguez studied graphic design and photography at the School of Visual Arts in New York and the New York City Technical College. In 1985, he graduated with a degree in photojournalism and documentary photography from the International Center for Photography in New York. During his studies, he worked as a taxi driver, photographing his passengers and street scenes from behind the wheel. The exhibited works are from the Taxi series. They document, on the one hand, Rodríguez’s work as a taxi driver, who has to try to secure well-paid long-distance rides to earn a living and cover the costs of his hired taxi. During his twelve-hour shifts, Rodríguez captures city life in the various neighborhoods at different times of day, from nightlife to the busy hours of the day. His shots of passersby in the rearview mirror, of a sunrise, or of someone urinating in public who believes they are unobserved, testify to the fleeting nature of the moment. Rodríguez also engages directly with his passengers. His portraits convey the openness and respect with which he treats them. Rodríguez sees himself in the tradition of social documentary photography. He advocates the goal of giving visibility to those who are overlooked. He often adds short comments to his images that shed light on what is being photographed. He also uses unusual perspectives, surprising crops, and reflections. However, these emphasize the subjectivity of his empathetic gaze beyond the momentary nature of the moment.
The photographs in the Taxi series are a significant document of the 1980s in New York, a period marked by economic and social upheaval and the AIDS crisis. On his journeys crisscrossing the city, Rodríguez does not depict despair, but rather shows people maintaining their dignity in the face of difficult and uncertain times.
Text from Museum Ludwig translated by Google Translate
“14th Street & West Side Highway. That’s the back of the Anvil. These guys would come outside to take a leak. And of course they’re having a conversation, so who knows what happened after that.” ~ Joseph Rodríguez
The Anvil was a gay BDSM after-hours sex club located at 500 West 14th Street, Manhattan, New York City, that operated from 1974 to 1985.
Stephen Salmieri (American, b. 1945) Coney Island 1968 Vintage gelatin silver print
I love these photographs!
What’s not to like… generously sympathetic photographs that exhibit no pretension, containing interesting backgrounds and wonderful characters. The incongruity of a muscle man in leopard skin bathers in a snowy landscape at Coney Island … no worries!
“In the images, storefront booths, midway games, carnival architecture, and the shoreline provide the backdrop to Salmieri’s descriptive and engaging portraits.”
I particularly like the wonderful photograph of the large gentleman with tattoos in a white singlet sitting at a table surrounded by a halo of light bulbs. I also like how Salmieri gives some of his portraits context by including background information in his photographs.
The artist joins a rite of passage for many American photographers in taking photographs at Coney Island – that is, to capture the magic and mystique of this theatrical, carnivalesque place – one full of history, ceremony, community, tradition, fun, drama, people, sun and sand.1
Luminaries to have photographed there include Diane Arbus, Robert Frank, Weegee, Garry Winogrand, Bruce Davidson, Lisette Model, Walker Evans, Leon Levinstein, Arlene Gottfried, Harold Feinstein and Edward J. Kelty to name just a few.
Stephen Salmieri’s charismatic photographs are strong enough to join this pantheon of stars and the “vaunted tradition” of picturing Coney Island.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ Bakhtin’s idea of the carnivalesque and the carnival paradigm accords to certain patterns of play where “the social hierarchies of everyday life… are profaned and overturned by normally suppressed voices and energies.”
“The carnival offers the chance to have a new outlook on the world, to realise the relative nature of all that exists, and to enter a completely new order of things.”
Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and his World (trans. Hélène Iswolsky). Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984, p. 34.
Many thankx to the Joseph Bellows Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“These spare and emotional first images of a forgotten community, now lost in time, allowed me to forge a vision at a pivotal moment in my young life.”
Stephen Salmieri
Stephen Salmieri (American, b. 1945) Coney Island 1968 Vintage gelatin silver print
Stephen Salmieri (American, b. 1945) Coney Island 1971 Vintage gelatin silver print
Stephen Salmieri (American, b. 1945) Coney Island 1968 Vintage gelatin silver print
Stephen Salmieri (American, b. 1945) Coney Island 1969 Vintage gelatin silver print
Stephen Salmieri (American, b. 1945) Coney Island 1969 Vintage gelatin silver print
Stephen Salmieri (American, b. 1945) Coney Island 1969 Vintage gelatin silver print
Stephen Salmieri (American, b. 1945) Coney Island 1969 Vintage gelatin silver print
Stephen Salmieri (American, b. 1945) Coney Island 1969 Vintage gelatin silver print
Stephen Salmieri (American, b. 1945) Coney Island 1969 Vintage gelatin silver print
Stephen Salmieri (American, b. 1945) Coney Island 1969 Vintage gelatin silver print
Joseph Bellows Gallery is pleased to present an online exhibition of Stephen Salmieri’s photographs of Coney Island. Made between 1967 and 1972 with an array of cameras and black and white film, these images portray a cast of beachgoers and amusement park locals within the surrounding environment of one of America’s earliest and most illustrious seashore amusement parks.
The exhibition showcases Salmieri’s finely crafted vintage black and white prints. In the images, storefront booths, midway games, carnival architecture, and the shoreline provide the backdrop to Salmieri’s descriptive and engaging portraits. In a published statement on the photographs, the artist explains his process and motivation:
“The world of Coney Island has changed dramatically since I made these photographs. It was my first self-assigned project at twenty years of age, having just graduated from the School of Visual Arts. In choosing my subject I gravitated naturally to the familiar destination of my adolescent bike adventures.
I made the hour ride to Coney Island with all my cameras in tow all year round. I carried a 4 x 5 field camera, a 6 x 6 cm and a 35 mm format, and lots of Tri-X film.
In 1969, CAMERA magazine approached me at my first exhibition at the Underground Gallery. In my naivety, I did not realise that Coney Island was also the choice territory for such luminaries as Robert Frank, Lisette Model, Leon Levinstein, and Weegee. It wasn’t until the magazine published these photographs as part of their seminal Coney Island issue in 1971 that I realised I had become part of a vaunted tradition.
These spare and emotional first images of a forgotten community, now lost in time, allowed me to forge a vision at a pivotal moment in my young life.”
Salmieri’s photographs from this body of work were also featured in the exhibition Forever Coney: Photographs from the Brooklyn Museum Collection.
Salmieri’s work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Brooklyn Museum, New York, Smithsonian Institute, Washington D.C., Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, New York, Flint Institute, Michigan, the Museum of the City of New York, the Nelson-Atkins Museum, and the J. Paul Getty Museum. Publications include “American Grilles” (1978, Hartcourt-Brace) and “Cadillac: An American Icon” (1985, Rizzoli).
Text from the Joseph Bellows Gallery website
Stephen Salmieri (American, b. 1945) Coney Island 1970 Vintage gelatin silver print
Stephen Salmieri (American, b. 1945) Coney Island 1971 Vintage gelatin silver print
Stephen Salmieri (American, b. 1945) Coney Island 1971 Vintage gelatin silver print
Stephen Salmieri (American, b. 1945) Coney Island 1972 Vintage gelatin silver print
Stephen Salmieri (American, b. 1945) Coney Island 1967-1972 Vintage gelatin silver print
Robert Frank (American, 1924-2019) Coney Island 4th of July, 1958 Gelatin silver print
Edward J. Kelty (American, 1888-1967) Harlem Black Birds, Coney Island 1930
Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) Couple at Coney Island, New York 1928 Gelatin silver print
Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American born Ukraine, 1899-1968) Afternoon Crowd at Coney Island July 21st 1940
Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984) Coney Island, New York City, N.Y. 1952 Gelatin silver print
Leon Levinstein (American, 1910-1988) Coney Island 1955 Gelatin silver print
Diane Arbus (American, 1923-1971) Man in hat, trunks, socks and shoes, Coney Island, N.Y. 1960 1960 Gelatin silver print
Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933) Two Youths, Coney Island 1958 From the series Brooklyn Gang
Joseph Bellows Gallery 7661 Girrard Avenue La Jolla, California Phone: 858 456 5620
Opening hours: Tuesday – Saturday 11am – 5pm and by appointment
Exhibition dates: 13th March – 28th September, 2025
Curator: Patricia Sorroche, Head of Exhibitions at the Museu Tàpies
Anna Malagrida (Spanish, b. 1970) Rue de Charenton 2008-2009 Photographic print on Dibond
Contradicting the hobgoblin of little minds
I love the conceptualisation of these photographs: interstitial spaces of the city, liminal spaces that ‘stand between’ one place and another.1
I love the abstract nature of these photographs, abstract paintings of the city which occlude symbols and signs, capture traces and gestures, where nothing is fixed and everything is fluid, up for interpretation through the imagination.
Unfortunately, the digital online reproductions make the spaces seem very flat and one-dimensional, in a liminal and spiritual sense.
I would have loved to have stood in the gallery to breathe in the presences of the photographs, their energy and spirit. Would they have held me? Is there enough for me to hang my hat on? Would they have reverberated in my soul. I don’t know. I can’t feel them through the digital reproductions.
I think of sitting in front of Monet’s massive curved paintings of Water Lillies at the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris and being surrounded by these beautiful, shifting, elemental / alchemical abstract works of art. And being spell bound.
How would I feel surrounded by these representations, surfaces, depths of the city, these whitewashed absences (with all the connotations of race, power, money, and coverups that the name implies) that proffer different ways of seeing the world, places of the visible and the invisible.
“Her work forces us to confront our social and political condition of being, but from a poetic, liminal space, where contradiction is a symbol of the dualities of the human condition in the postmodern world.”2
Contradiction is NEVER a symbol for that would mean contradiction becomes a conventional representation of an object, function, or process. And the human condition in the postmodern world is far more than a duality … it is an intertextual multiplicity of points of view and nexus (the nexus between industry and political power, the nexus between business and government, the nexus between public space and private space, etc…)
“Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)”
~ Walt Whitman from Leaves of Grass
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ A liminal space is a transitional place or state, like a hallway or adolescence, that is “in-between” two distinct stages or locations, creating a sense of unease or disorientation. The word comes from the Latin for “threshold,” and these spaces, often devoid of people and eerily familiar yet subtly wrong, can evoke feelings of nostalgia, anxiety, and the potential for creativity or personal growth during periods of uncertainty.
AI summary from Google
2/ Patricia Sorroche. Anna Malagrida. (Trans)gazes of the sensible. Curatorial statement, 2025
Many thankx to Colin Vickery for alerting me to this exhibition. Many thankx to Museu Tàpies for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“I’m interested in the intuited spaces on the other side, what isn’t in the image, but is imagined. What lies beyond, outside the frame, is the place that activates the imagination, inventing a story or imagining a space. The things we intuit, which are on the other side, belong to the story or to the space itself. Through the metaphor of the window, I’m trying to create a space of in-betweenness and uncertainty.”
Anna Malagrida in Álvaro de la Rica, “Las fronteras transparentes. A propósito de las fotos de Anna Malagrida,” published in Revisiones, No. 7, 2011, p. 129.
Opacitas: Veiling Transparency takes us on a journey through the work of Anna Malagrida (Barcelona, 1970) and presents a project that explores photography, video and installation. Her gaze focuses on the liminal spaces that unite and separate, bringing opposites into conversation.
Malagrida mainly situates us in the city and in a few constructed natural spaces. Through a play of perspectives, from the interior to the exterior and vice versa, her photographs and video installations become windows that reveal and conceal the tensions that run through society. Her polysemic gaze escapes a univocal interpretation of images in order to inhabit certain entropic spaces that she invites us to discover through her work.
Malagrida’s images capture the remnants and the infralight traces, indexes, signs that refer to previous moments, social tensions or simple anonymous gestures. The visual ambiguity in her work is revealed through the texture of her images, which evoke pictorial references and dissolve the limits between appearance and reality. Images of closed shop windows painted with characteristic whitewash, an opaque veil that prevents us from looking inside and transforms these spaces into abstract surfaces, resembling large pictorial canvases. Poetic actions operate in her works with a multiplicity of meanings: the painter’s gesture is also that of the working body, and the city and the landscape are revealed from within. Said gestures are erased, cleansed or simply fixed by the passage of time, cyclical and mutable.
Her work, which transcends photography and painting, immerses the viewer in a visual experience with multiple meanings and invites them to look at the city and natural surroundings from a new perspective, one that reveals the vestiges of a landscape affected by social and economic change. Her practice is a space for reflecting on vulnerability, resistance and the possibility of reconstruction, both of the individual and the environment they inhabit.
Text from the Museu Tàpies website
Installation views of the exhibition Anna Malagrida. Opacitas: Veiling Transparency at Museu Tàpies, Barcelona, March – September, 2025
Installation view of the exhibition Anna Malagrida. Opacitas: Veiling Transparency at Museu Tàpies, Barcelona, March – September, 2025 showing La laveur du carreau 2010 (video still)
The Museu Tàpies presents Anna Malagrida’s exhibition Opacitas. Veiling Transparency. Curated by Patricia Sorroche, Head of Exhibitions at the Museu Tàpies, the exhibition offers a survey of the artist’s work through photography, video and installation.
This exhibition provides an opportunity to see, for the first time in Barcelona, the work of this artist, who was born in the city, but has spent most of her career in France.
Anna Malagrida’s project responds to the Museu Tàpies’ current aim of enabling discourses that institutions have left out and that have not found a space for representation in our most immediate reality.
Anna Malagrida (Barcelona, 1970) works with photography to navigate between that which is public and private, based on a play of perspectives and visions that shuns the realistic image to draw us into a game of collective imaginaries. The idea of the city and its significance as a social agent are present in her photographs, which function as archaeological vestiges of the social crises of contemporary city life.
The exhibition Opacitas. Veiling Transparency, curated by Patricia Sorroche, Head of Exhibitions at the Museu Tàpies, offers a survey of Anna Malagrida’s work through projects that explore photography, video and installation. Focusing on the liminal spaces that unite and separate, her gaze brings opposites into conversation.
Malagrida mainly situates us in the city and in a few constructed natural spaces. Through a play of perspectives, from the interior to the exterior and vice versa, her photographs and video installations become windows that reveal and conceal the tensions that run through society. Her gaze escapes a univocal interpretation of images, in order to inhabit certain spaces that she invites us to discover through her work.
Her images capture remnants and traces, signs that refer to previous moments, social tensions or simple anonymous gestures. The visual ambiguity in her work is revealed through the texture of her photographs and videos, which evoke pictorial references and dissolve the limits between appearance and reality. This can be seen, for example, in the images of closed shop windows painted with characteristic whitewash, an opaque veil that prevents us from looking inside and transforms these spaces into abstract surfaces, resembling large pictorial canvases. Poetic actions operate in her works with a multiplicity of meanings: the painter’s gesture is also that of the working body, and the city and the landscape are revealed from within. These gestures are erased, cleaned or simply fixed by the passage of time, cyclical and mutable.
Malagrida’s work, which transcends photography and painting, immerses the spectator in a visual experience with multiple meanings and invites us to look at the city and natural surroundings from a new perspective, one that reveals the vestiges of a landscape affected by social and economic change. Her practice is a space for reflecting on vulnerability, resistance and the possibility of reconstruction, both of the individual and the environment they inhabit.
The exhibition Opacitas. Veiling Transparency allows visitors to explore and delve into Anna Malagrida’s career through a selection of her works. The itinerary of the exhibition begins with the piece Vitrines (Shop Windows, 2008-2009), in which the artist photographs the windows of shops on the streets of Paris that had to close down due to the economic crisis and concealed their interiors by coating their windows with whitewash. The exercise of gazing through shop windows is also present in Le laveur du carreau (The Window Cleaner, 2010), an audiovisual piece that allows us to observe how a worker lathers and cleans the windows, in a visual play between opacity and transparency that also situates us in the intermediate zones.
In Danza de mujer (Woman Dance, 2017), filmed in the Jordanian desert, ‘Malagrida puts into question, through the movement of the veil, certain social policies in relation to specific groups, and how narrow perspectives promote ways of seeing the world that exclude a large part of it,’ in the words of the exhibition’s curator, Patricia Sorroche. Finally, Point de vue (2006), produced in the architectural complex that housed the Club Med tourist resort inaugurated in 1962 in the protected natural area of Cap de Creus, presents the traces of the economic systems that defied sustainability.
Sorroche concludes that ‘operating through opposites, through the decategorisation of traditional forms of representation and the overlapping of different languages, makes Anna Malagrida’s work move between textures, between the places of the visible and the invisible, to immerse us in a dialogue of opposites’. And she continues: ‘Her work multiplies our gazes, our ways of seeing the world, making it more porous, while at the same time enabling other ways of understanding, transmuting and transcending it. Her work forces us to confront our social and political condition of being, but from a poetic, liminal place, where contradiction is a symbol of the dualities of the human condition in a post-modern world. A space where we can come together to understand each other in possible societies of the common, based on a collective and communal view.’
The project Anna Malagrida. Opacitas. Veiling Transparency is completed with an exhibition booklet featuring texts by the curator and by art critic Marta Gili, as well as an interview with the artist. Malagrida and Gili will take part in the inaugural conversation of the exhibition, on 13 March at 6 pm, in an event that forms part of the project’s public programme, along with the talk by Morena Hanbury. Over the next few months, the Museu Tàpies’ Education Department will be offering a programme of tours and activities for all audiences.
Press release from Museu Tàpies
Anna Malagrida (Spanish, b. 1970) Rue Laffitte I 2008-2009 Photographic print on Dibond
Anna Malagrida (Spanish, b. 1970) Rue Laffitte II 2008-2009 Photographic print on Dibond
Anna Malagrida (Spanish, b. 1970) Vitrines. Boulevard Sébastopol. Aparadors. Boulevard Sébastopol 2008-2009 Photographic print on Dibond
Curatorial statement
Anna Malagrida. (Trans)gazes of the sensible
Patricia Sorroche
“Photography is, above all, a way of looking, it is not the same look. It is a way of seeing that has become conscious of itself, that has become reflexive.”
~ Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977
What happens when we place ourselves in that intermediate space where the visible and the invisible intertwine? Anna Malagrida invites us to explore this question by delving into the dichotomy of opposites in her work, and by directing our gaze toward the space in-between, where our way of looking is amplified, expanded and transformed, blurring the boundaries between the perceptible and the imperceptible. Revisiting some of Malagrida’s works opens a path, a transmutation of our bodies and our drives as we move around her pieces. Like palimpsests, her works hold layers of memory for us to rewrite. Time, memory and narrative intertwine to confront us with a new perspective from which to observe the world.
Opacitas. Veiling Transparency takes as its starting point an apriorism where the poetic gesture reveals the political gesture. When Jacques Rancière speaks of the ‘distribution of the sensible’, what he offers us is the possibility of the gesture to modify and transform what is seen, felt or said within a society from a poetic space. Along the same lines, Martha Rosler maintains that poetry and art are spaces of resistance, as well as political and social reconfiguration. Based on this axiom, we can understand Malagrida’s photographs and works as a space where the poetic and the political intersect in a subtlety of visual nuances, allowing us to recodify ways of inhabiting space and time.
The journey begins with a hypallage, where the city is transformed into a text that is written and rewritten as we move forward. An accumulation of memories and desires, where each street, each wall, seems to tell a story waiting to be read. In the series Vitrines (Shop Windows, 2008-09), the city is highlighted as a place of tension, wherein Malagrida works on ‘the epidermal space of the city’.1 The financial crisis that devastated the economies of a global north during the early twenty-first century led to the bankruptcy of many businesses. The artist photographed and immortalised the shop windows of Parisian businesses forced to close as a consequence of the economic collapse. To conceal the view, the windows were painted or whitewashed, veiling the interior, creating absences. The photographs of these places, now hidden from view, place the postmodern subject in a liminal space, where the gaze is para-actional: we cannot see, but we can reinterpret the void. Here, the painted and erased surfaces invite us to draw upon the unconscious in order to activate these new visual paraphrases. Walking through those streets highlights the fragilities of being, the contemporary narratives marked by the strong tensions of a system alien to our daily lives.
An enormous pile of rubble in the middle of the gallery prevents the body from moving freely through the space. A ruin activated to challenge us directly, to make us reflect and think about our condition. It questions what remains as a memory of a past that projects us into the future; and it questions a present, as Andreas Huyssen recounted.2 In this way, the ruin takes on a double dimension: both of a past with its scars and wounds, and of a future that is being built, which rises and walks, opening up as a space that enables a society continually emerging and re-emerging.
Continuing with the idea of opposites and dualities, our path takes us to the next space, more intimate, more enclosed, darker. As if we were entering a camera obscura or a lens shutter, the viewer is immersed in darkness; but this is a darkness that reveals a transparency, opening windows and walls to the outside, and placing us in the active condition of looking out.
Danza de mujer (Woman Dance, 2007) invites us to enter into an experience where the body is exposed in its fragile condition, ‘reincorporating a sensitive look at that dialectical movement that, in part, the photographic device itself already deploys without imposing a reification of the world’.3 From a subtle artefact transporting us to a refuge in the Jordanian desert, a veil is swayed by the breeze entering through a small window. This simple poetic action condenses part of the characteristic axioms of Malagrida’s works. The darkness of the refuge, with the light filtering from the desert outside, the black veil fluttering synchronously and asynchronously. These opposites operate with determination, reminding us that what prevents us from looking transparently limits our ways of interpreting and thinking about the world.
The piece was made at a time of tension, when in France the veil was banned in all public places, and thus, Arab women were rendered invisible and blurred in a system that did not recognise the singularities of certain communities. Through the dance of the veil, Malagrida questions and puts into crisis the politics of the social in relation to certain specific groups, and how these narrow visions propose ways of seeing the world while excluding an important part of it.
From the symbolic and the poetic, Malagrida’s work opens up to the post-human condition of being, understood as a relational and concentric existence with its environment and communities. To understand this relational condition, Édouard Glissant referred to the poetics of relation, where the idea of time is cyclical, and societies can only be conceived in a structure of continuous relationships.
Another work encountered by the viewer is Le laveur de carreau (The Window Cleaner, 2010), where Malagrida draws a ‘parallel between the gesture of a sublimated painter and that of a worker carrying out an entrusted task’.4 Here, the idea permeating the artist’s work is established: the gesture becomes the subject of the action, the idea of genius as addressed by Walter Benjamin is made evident. The cleaner is a metaphor for the painter, who becomes blurred in his condition as a worker, in his social condition of being. In this video work, we find ourselves looking from inside a shop, while a worker lathers the window and then proceeds to remove the remains of water and soap with a squeegee. From the passive condition of the onlooker, we attend to the action happening before our eyes. In this way, we witness the moment of creation and also of destruction. The soapy water our cleaner spreads over the glass surface is a metonymy of the act of painting; a fleeting work, which disappearing shortly after, returns to the transparency of glass. As in previous works, Malagrida again operates from opposites, from the concepts of opacity and transparency. Just for an instant, she places us in an intermediate place, just as Marcel Broodthaers did in some of his most renowned films (for instance, in Abb. 1. Projection d’un film du Musée d’Art Moderne, 1971), where the camera was placed at the midpoint between the inside and the outside, in his case the gallery, but aiming at the same idea, at the place where art is conceived as a process in constant movement, a flow transcending the static to become transmutable.
Both the Vitrines series and Le laveur de carreau can be read as trompe l’oeil references to large Informalist canvases. As both John Berger and Antoni Tàpies remarked, art should allow us to discover the unknown, to enter into places where the tangible, the visible, cannot go. Art is the place of transformation, a place where the unknown emerges in its multiple and polysemic condition.
Although there is no set itinerary for the viewer to follow, the last of the pieces in this exhibition is Point de vue (2006), where new agents appear in dialogue with those we have encountered before. This installation was made in Cap de Creus, in the north of Catalonia, in a protected natural area, close to the border with France. Thanks to the Law of Natural Heritage and Biodiversity, after a few decades the tourist complex built here by Club Med was forced to close. Malagrida installed her camera inside this architectural complex, which remained standing as a vestige and trace of economic systems that try to evade certain norms and sustainability policies. In so doing, Malagrida returns us to the intermediate and intersectional space, since we encounter the traces people have left on the windows, full of dust and sand; scratched phrases proclaiming their condition as the poetics of social archaeology. The dust becomes a ‘residue’5 containing the possibility of the new, of what is to come, and of the passage of time.
The piece is also an allusion, a synecdoche where perspective plays a leading role. Composed of three large photographs, the piece reveals a landscape behind the dust, a perspective revealing our form of representation, whose signs are linked to society’s power and knowledge structures. A theory influenced by Erwin Panofsky,6 who studied Renaissance perspective as a structure for representing time, place and society at a certain moment in history: something which structures the worldview. In this way, perspective becomes a space for representing socio-political systems, while in the Renaissance it adopted a homogeneous, infinite and ordered character, in contrast to the medieval or Romanesque vision where space was hierarchical. The classical and orthodox perspective proposed by this work invites us to think about how the forms of representation are ways of making the world visible and reproducing it. This idea points to the manner in which the telling of history is based on a structure, on a certain perspective that determines what is to be highlighted and ignores other events or facts running counter to historical hegemonies. It is also interesting to notice how the different layers are discovered to the viewer: first the dust, then the inscriptions and finally the landscape. And how, returning to the notion of distance and horizon, by way of passing through the glass we are led to reimagine the possibilities of the outside.
In conclusion, operating from opposites, from the decategorisation of traditional forms of representation and the overlapping of different languages, makes Malagrida’s work move between textures, between places of the visible and the invisible, to immerse us in a dialogue of opposites. This dialogical premise with which we enter her works does not seek to block our view or interpretation, but rather opens up the multiplicity of discourse, of the image. Her work leads us to multiply our views, our ways of seeing the world, to make it more porous, while enabling other ways of understanding it, of transmuting it and traversing it. Her work forces us to confront our social and political condition of being, but from a poetic, liminal space, where contradiction is a symbol of the dualities of the human condition in the postmodern world. A place where we can meet and understand each other in possible societies of the common, from a collective and community-based place.
Footnotes
1/ Muriel Barthou, “Entretien à Anna Malagrida,” in L’invisible photographique ; pour une histoire de la photographie, Paris: La lettre volée, 2019.
2/ Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of the Memory. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003.
3/ Marta Dahó, “Espacio de la continuidad. Lugares de la intersección. Algunas notas en torno a los trabajos de Anna Malagrida,” in (In)visibilidad (ex. cat.). La Coruña: Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Gas Natural Fenosa, 2016.
4/ Étienne Hat, “Entretien. Anna Malagrida,” in Anna Malagrida, Vitrines, Paris: Éditions Filigranes, 2025; Paris barricadé, Paris: Éditions Filigranes, 2025; and Los muros hablan, Paris: Éditions Filigranes, 2025. (Author’s translation.)
5/ Nicolas Bourriaud, Estética relacional. Buenos Aires: Adriana Hidalgo, 2006.
6/ Erwin Panofsky, La perspectiva como forma simbólica. Barcelona: Tusquets, 1999 (1927).
Anna Malagrida (Spanish, b. 1970) Rue Bleue 2008-2009 Photographic print on Dibond
Anna Malagrida (Spanish, b. 1970) Rue Lecourbe I 2008-2009 Photographic print on Dibond
Anna Malagrida (Spanish, b. 1970) Rue Riboutté 2008-2009 Photographic print on Dibond
Anna Malagrida (Spanish, b. 1970) Rue de Châteaudun 2008-2009 Photographic print on Dibond
I love artist’s that challenge your point of view, knowledge of the world, prejudices and biases – which we all have.
I love artist’s who make you think about the stories they tell, and how you relate to their intimate, constructed and memorable worlds.
Carrie Mae Weems is one such generational artist.
Weems blends the poetic and conceptual in photographs and bodies of work which investigate history, identity, racism, executive and patriarchal power from the perspectives of female / Black American.
What a fabulous artist, a guide into circumstances seldom seen, now revealed.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Gallerie d’Italia, Turin for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“I discovered that I was the reference point, and the point of view, pointing the viewer toward the likes of me in history. Later, I understood this photographic self to be a muse and a guide into the unknown.”
Carrie Mae Weems
“My work endlessly explodes the limits of tradition.”
“Weems was trained as both a dancer and a photographer before enrolling in the folklore studies program at the University of California, Berkeley, in the mid-1980s, where she became interested in the observation methods used in the social sciences. In the early 1990s, she began placing herself in her photographic compositions in an “attempt to create in the work the simultaneous feeling of being in it and of it.”2 She has since called this recurring figure an “alter-ego,” “muse,” and “witness to history” who can stand in for both the artist and audience. “I think it’s very important that as a Black woman she’s engaged with the world around her,” Weems has said, “she’s engaged with history, she’s engaged with looking, with being. She’s a guide into circumstances seldom seen.”3
Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of the Matter at Gallerie d’Italia, Turin
Installation walk through of the exhibition 17th April – 7th September, 2025
Installation views of the exhibition Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of the Matter at Gallerie d’Italia, Turin showing work from the series Roaming, 2006
Transcending medium, chronology, and geography, Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of the Matter puts the artist – as well as her spiritual and philosophical journeys – at the center of the discourse. Weems is a touchstone artist, renowned for her work investigating history, identity, and power. A comprehensive survey, The Heart of the Matter features generous presentations of landmark bodies of work, from Family Pictures and Stories (1978-1984) to her most recent series on the Black church. Throughout the exhibition and accompanying book, the artist’s spiritual musings provide critical insight into the iconic artist’s mind and eye. Newly commissioned essays and additional contributions from esteemed thinkers and scholars across generations underscore the singular value of Weems’s vision in grappling with the complexities and injustices of the world around us.
Text from the Aperture website
Carrie Mae Weems (American, b. 1953) The Edge of Time – Ancient Rome 2006 From the series Roaming
Carrie Mae Weems’s “Rome Series,” titled ” Roaming” (2006), features photographs taken during her residency at the American Academy in Rome where she performed “photographic actions” contrasting her presence with grand architecture and monumental surroundings. In these works, Weems, often in her signature long black dress with her back to the camera, challenges viewers to confront power structures and historical contexts associated with the sites of Rome. The series explores themes of history, power, and the individual’s relationship to imposing edifices of authority.
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Installation views of the exhibition Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of the Matter at Gallerie d’Italia, Turin showing work from the series Museums, 2006-ongoing
Installation views of the exhibition Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of the Matter at Gallerie d’Italia, Turin
Gallerie d’Italia – Torino presents the exhibition by American artist Carrie Mae Weems, open to the public from April 17 to September 7, 2025. The exhibition is organised in collaboration with Aperture and curated by Sarah Meister, former curator of the photography department at MoMA in New York. It is part of the main program of the second edition of EXPOSED Torino Foto Festival, titled Beneath The Surface, curated by Menno Liauw and Salvatore Vitale.
A major new exhibition dedicated to the internationally renowned artist Carrie Mae Weems, known for her photographic explorations of cultural identity, sexism, and class belonging.
The exhibition will feature a world premiere of a project commissioned by Intesa Sanpaolo specifically for this occasion, integrated into a powerful retrospective showcasing works from Weems’ most famous photographic series. Visitors will be guided through the artist’s entire career, following a deeply personal and spiritual journey.
The selected works highlight Carrie Mae Weems’ unique ability to address the complexities and injustices of the world around us. Her photography is rooted in spaces often excluded from mainstream narratives: artists’ studios, Southern U.S. plantations, domestic interiors, and the “invisible institutions” that emerged as places of worship for Black communities during times of oppression, juxtaposed with images of monuments and museums that have historically been sites of exclusion.
At the heart of the exhibition is Preach, a new project created specifically for this event as an original commission. This ambitious and intense installation explores religion and spirituality among African American communities across generations. The series celebrates the profound, passionate, and joyful forms of worship that define Weems’ Black Church experience while simultaneously confronting the violence and oppression that are inseparable from this history. In the new poetic text accompanying the installation, Weems writes: “Through flames and bombs, pray wherever and whenever you can, in ports and cabins, in palaces and basements, in theaters and clubs. From your secret hiding place, you have discovered new forms of worship…”. Using herself as both muse and guide, Weems invites us to join in this spiritual awakening and to condemn the persecution that has turned these sacred spaces into sites of refuge and activism. Preach intertwines early images from Harlem, San Diego, and Sea Island, Georgia, with a vast collection of new works that evoke the transcendental and secular realities of Black religious expression today.
The retrospective also includes many of Weems’ early works, such as the historic Kitchen Table Series (1990) and Museums (2006-ongoing); a selection of more recent projects, such as Scenes and Takes (2016) and Painting the Town (2021); as well as significant video installations, including The Shape of Things (2021) and Leave Now! (2022). Together, these works take visitors on a journey spanning Weems’ entire career, showcasing the depth and diversity of her artistic language.
The exhibition also benefits from the collaboration of Fondazione Compagnia di San Paolo, which has developed activities inspired by the values of inclusion and the appreciation of diversity as a source of enrichment, themes that resonate with the exhibition’s content and align with the foundation’s strategic challenges. Photography serves as a tool for storytelling, documentation, and identity-building, contributing to inclusion and community formation. Through widespread urban communication campaigns and collaboration with the public program #Inside, the foundation’s initiatives aim to promote participation and extend the exhibition’s themes to increasingly diverse audiences, particularly in light of the simultaneous presence of the EXPOSED Torino Foto Festival 2025 in the city.
The exhibition Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of the Matter will be accompanied by a catalogue co-published by Società Editrice Allemandi / Aperture. In addition to numerous images of the American artist’s works, the catalog will feature contributions from scholars of different generations, underscoring the unique value of Weems’ vision in addressing these themes.
Aperture
Aperture is a nonprofit publisher that leads conversations around photography worldwide. From its base in New York, Aperture connects global audiences and supports artists through the acclaimed quarterly magazine, books, exhibitions, digital platforms, public programs, limited-edition prints, and awards. Established in 1952 to advance “creative thinking, significantly expressed in words and photographs,” Aperture champions photography’s vital role in nurturing curiosity and encouraging a more just, tolerant society.
Carrie Mae Weems. Biography
Carrie Mae Weems, a conceptual artist, examines and challenges perceptions of race and femininity in search of new models of life. Rooted in the specificity of her experience as a Black woman yet universal in its exploration of family relationships, cultural identity, power structures, and social hierarchy, her artistic practice is primarily photographic but also incorporates text, textiles, audio, installations, and video.
Informed by storytelling, folklore traditions, and the observational methodologies of social sciences, her approach to image-making ranges from staged and serialised narratives to the appropriation and adaptation of archival and ethnographic imagery. Weems critically addresses photography’s complicity in perpetuating dehumanising representations and the historical omission of Black women from institutions and art canons.
Weems lives in Syracuse, New York, with her husband, Jeffrey Hoone. She is currently an Artist in Residence at Syracuse University.
Text from the Gallerie d’Italia website
Installation view of the exhibition Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of the Matter at Gallerie d’Italia, Turin showing the work North Star, 2022
In 1936 Carrie Mae Weems’s grandfather Frank Weems traveled 550 miles to Chicago on foot from Earle, Arkansas, partly with the aid of the North Star, which appears in these seven oval photographs as a cold and abstract promise. Frank Weems had been beaten after organising a labour strike to protest abysmal wages and working conditions in the cotton fields. For the artist, the abstracted world holds a tremendous yet distant possibility that her grandfather seized step by step.
Text from the Art Institute of Chicago website
Installation view of the exhibition Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of the Matter at Gallerie d’Italia, Turin showing at left, work from the series Family Pictures and Stories 1978-1984
Installation view of the exhibition Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of the Matter at Gallerie d’Italia, Turin showing the installation Preach, 2025
At the heart of the exhibition is Preach… this ambitious and intense installation explores religion and spirituality among African American communities across generations. The series celebrates the profound, passionate, and joyful forms of worship that define Weems’ Black Church experience while simultaneously confronting the violence and oppression that are inseparable from this history.
In the new poetic text accompanying the installation, Weems writes: “Through flames and bombs, pray wherever and whenever you can, in ports and cabins, in palaces and basements, in theaters and clubs. From your secret hiding place, you have discovered new forms of worship…”. Using herself as both muse and guide, Weems invites us to join in this spiritual awakening and to condemn the persecution that has turned these sacred spaces into sites of refuge and activism.
Preach intertwines early images from Harlem, San Diego, and Sea Island, Georgia, with a vast collection of new works that evoke the transcendental and secular realities of Black religious expression today.
Text from the Gallerie d’Italia Instagram web page
Installation view of the exhibition Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of the Matter at Gallerie d’Italia, Turin showing work from the Kitchen Table Series, 1990
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