Exhibition: ‘Street Photography. Lee Friedlander, Joseph Rodríguez, Garry Winogrand’ at Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany

Exhibition dates: 3rd May – 12th October, 2025

Curator: Barbara Engelbach

Lee Friedlander (American, b. 1934)
New York City
1966
Gelatin silver paper, print after 1966
22 x 32.9cm
Museum Ludwig, Köln
© Lee Friedlander, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco and Luhring Augustine, New York and Luhring Augustine, New York
Repro: Historisches Archiv mit Rheinischem Bildarchiv

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.

Lee Friedlander (American, b. 1934)
New York City
1962
Gelatin silver paper, print after 1962
22 x 32.9cm
Museum Ludwig, Köln
© Lee Friedlander, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco and Luhring Augustine, New York
Repro: Historisches Archiv mit Rheinischem Bildarchiv

Lee Friedlander (American, b. 1934)
New York City
1963
Gelatin silver paper, print after 1963
22 x 32.9cm
Museum Ludwig, Köln
© Lee Friedlander, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco and Luhring Augustine, New York and Luhring Augustine, New York
Repro: Historisches Archiv mit Rheinischem Bildarchiv

Lee Friedlander

(*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

Lee Friedlander (American, b. 1934)
New York City
1965
Gelatin silver paper, print after 1965
22 x 32.9cm
Museum Ludwig, Köln
© Lee Friedlander, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco and Luhring Augustine, New York and Luhring Augustine, New York
Repro: Historisches Archiv mit Rheinischem Bildarchiv

Lee Friedlander (American, b. 1934)
Philadelphia, PA
1965
Gelatin silver paper, print after 1965
20.5 x 30.6cm
Museum Ludwig, Köln
© Lee Friedlander, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco and Luhring Augustine, New York
Repro: Historisches Archiv mit Rheinischem Bildarchiv

Lee Friedlander (American, b. 1934)
Mount Rushmore
1969
Gelatin silver paper, print after 1969
22 x 32.9cm
Museum Ludwig, Köln
© Lee Friedlander, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco and Luhring Augustine, New York and Luhring Augustine, New York
Repro: Historisches Archiv mit Rheinischem Bildarchiv

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 view of the exhibition 'Street Photography. Lee Friedlander, Joseph Rodríguez, Garry Winogrand' at Museum Ludwig, Cologne, May - October, 2025

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

Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984)
Coney Island, New York
1952
Gelatin silver paper, print after 1973
21.7 x 32.6cm
© The Estate of Garry Winogrand/Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
Repro: Historisches Archiv mit Rheinischem Bildarchiv

Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984)
Utah
1964
Gelatin silver paper, print after 1978
23 x 34cm
© The Estate of Garry Winogrand/Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
Repro: Historisches Archiv mit Rheinischem Bildarchiv

Garry Winogrand

(*1928 in New York City, New York, d. 1984)

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

Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984)
New York City
1969
Gelatin silver paper, print after 1978
22.9 x 34.2cm
© The Estate of Garry Winogrand/Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
Repro: Historisches Archiv mit Rheinischem Bildarchiv

Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984)
Circle Line Statue of Liberty Ferry, New York
1971
Gelatin silver paper, print after 1973
21.7 x 32.4cm
© The Estate of Garry Winogrand/Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
Repro: Historisches Archiv mit Rheinischem Bildarchiv

Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984)
Untitled, from: Women are Beautiful
1970
Gelatin silver paper, print after 1981
21.7 x 32.4cm
© The Estate of Garry Winogrand/Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
Repro: Historisches Archiv mit Rheinischem Bildarchiv

Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984)
Untitled, from: Women are Beautiful
1973
Gelatin silver paper, print after 1973
21.7 x 32.4cm
© The Estate of Garry Winogrand/Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
Repro: Historisches Archiv mit Rheinischem Bildarchiv

Joseph Rodríguez (American, b. 1952)
East Village, New York
1984
Gelatin silver paper, print after 1988
25.3 x 37.4cm
© Joseph Rodríguez, Courtesy Galerie Bene Taschen
Repro: Historisches Archiv mit Rheinischem Bildarchiv

“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

Joseph Rodríguez (American, b. 1952)
220 West Houston Street, New York
1984
Gelatin silver paper, print after 1988
25.3 x 37.2cm
© Joseph Rodríguez, Courtesy Galerie Bene Taschen
Repro: Historisches Archiv mit Rheinischem Bildarchiv

Joseph Rodríguez (American, b. 1952)
I picked him up at a club and I took him to Brooklyn. He was a happy camper, New York
1984
Gelatin silver paper, print after 1988
24.8 x 36.8cm
© Joseph Rodríguez, Courtesy Galerie Bene Taschen
Repro: Historisches Archiv mit Rheinischem Bildarchiv

Joseph Rodríguez (American, b. 1952)
At the Garage, my cab broke down, New York
1984
Gelatin silver paper, print after 1988
25.3 x 37.5cm
© Joseph Rodríguez, Courtesy Galerie Bene Taschen
Repro: Historisches Archiv mit Rheinischem Bildarchiv

Joseph Rodríguez (American, b. 1952)
Meatpacking District, I picked him up from one of the clubs. He was a drag performer and I was taking him home to Brooklyn, New York
1984
Gelatin silver paper, print after 1988
24.8 x 36.6cm
© Joseph Rodriguez, Courtesy Galerie Bene Taschen
Repro: Historisches Archiv mit Rheinischem Bildarchiv

Joseph Rodríguez (American, b. 1952)
Greenwich Village, The Anvil, New Jersey
1984
Gelatin silver paper, print after 1988
25.0 x 36.8cm
© Joseph Rodríguez, Courtesy Galerie Bene Taschen
Repro: Historisches Archiv mit Rheinischem Bildarchiv

“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.

Joseph Rodríguez (American, b. 1952)
Pulaski Skyway, New Jersey
1984
Gelatin silver paper, print after 1988
24.8 x 36.8cm
© Joseph Rodríguez, Courtesy Galerie Bene Taschen
Repro: Historisches Archiv mit Rheinischem Bildarchiv

Museum Ludwig
Heinrich-Böll-Platz, 50667 Köln, Germany

Opening hours:
Tuesday through Sunday: 10am – 6pm

Museum Ludwig website

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Online exhibition: ‘Stephen Salmieri: Coney Island’ from Joseph Bellows Gallery, La Jolla, California

September 2025

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.

For more information on the history and photography of Coney Island please see the exhibition posting Coney Island: Visions of an American Dreamland, 1861-2008 and Forever Coney: Photographs from the Brooklyn Museum Collection at the Brooklyn Museum, New York, November 2015 – March 2016

“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

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
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 (American, 1899-1968) 'Afternoon Crowd at Coney Island, Brooklyn' 1940

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

Joseph Bellows Gallery website

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Exhibition: Anna Malagrida. ‘Opacitas: Veiling Transparency’ at Museu Tàpies, Barcelona

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 view of the exhibition Anna Malagrida. 'Opacitas: Veiling Transparency' at Museu Tàpies, Barcelona

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 showing 'La laveur du carreau' 2010 (video still)

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' 2009

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

Museu Tàpies
Carrer d’Aragó 255
08007 Barcelona, Catalonia (Spain)
Phone: +34 934 870 315

Opening hours:
Tuesday – Saturday 10.00am – 7.00pm
Sunday 10.00am – 3.00pm

Museu Tàpies website

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Exhibition: ‘Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of the Matter’ at Gallerie d’Italia, Turin

Exhibition dates: 17th April – 7th September, 2025

Curator: Sarah Meister

Carrie Mae Weems (American, b. 1953) 'Welcome Home' 1978-1984 From the series 'Family Pictures and Stories' from the exhibition 'Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of the Matter' at Gallerie d'Italia, Turin, April - Sept, 2025

Carrie Mae Weems (American, b. 1953)
Welcome Home
1978-1984
From the series Family Pictures and Stories 1978-1984
© Carrie Mae Weems and reproduced courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York, Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, and Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin

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

Caitlin Ryan. “My work endlessly explodes the limits of tradition,” 2021 on the MoMA website [Online] Cited 06/09/2025

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.

AI generated text from Google

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

Carrie Mae Weems (American, b. 1953)
Galleria Nazionale D’Arte Moderna
2006-ongoing
© Carrie Mae Weems and reproduced courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York, Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, and Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin

Installation view of the exhibition 'Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of the Matter' at Gallerie d'Italia, Turin, April - September, 2025

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, April - September, 2025 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 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

Carrie Mae Weems (American, b. 1953) 'Untitled' Nd from the series 'Preach' 2025

Carrie Mae Weems (American, b. 1953)
Untitled
Nd
From the series Preach
© Carrie Mae Weems and reproduced courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York, Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, and Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin

Carrie Mae Weems (American, b. 1953)
Road Sign
1991-1992
From the series Preach
© Carrie Mae Weems and reproduced courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York, Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, and Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin

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

Carrie Mae Weems (American, b. 1953) 'Untitled (Man and mirror)' 1990 From the series 'Kitchen Table'

Carrie Mae Weems (American, b. 1953)
Untitled (Man and mirror)
1990
From the Kitchen Table Series
© Carrie Mae Weems and reproduced courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York, Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, and Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin

Carrie Mae Weems (American, b. 1953) 'Untitled (Woman and daughter with children)' 1990 From the series 'Kitchen Table'

Carrie Mae Weems (American, b. 1953)
Untitled (Woman and daughter with children)
1990
From the Kitchen Table Series
© Carrie Mae Weems and reproduced courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York, Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, and Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin

Carrie Mae Weems (American, b. 1953) 'Untitled (Woman standing alone)' 1990 from the series 'Kitchen Table'

Carrie Mae Weems (American, b. 1953)
Untitled (Woman standing alone)
1990
From the Kitchen Table Series
© Carrie Mae Weems and reproduced courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York, Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, and Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin

Carrie Mae Weems (American, b. 1953)
Untitled
1988
From the series Four Women
© Carrie Mae Weems and reproduced courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York, Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, and Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin

Carrie Mae Weems (American, b. 1953)
Wilfredo, Laura and Me, I
2002
From the series Dreaming in Cuba
© Carrie Mae Weems and reproduced courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York, Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, and Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin

Gallerie d’Italia – Torino
Piazza San Carlo, 156
10121 Turin
Phone number: 800 167 619

Opening hours:
Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday: 9.30 – 19.30
Wednesday: 9.30 – 20.30

Gallerie d’Italia – Torino website

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Exhibition: ‘The Underground Camera’ at Foam, Amsterdam

Exhibition dates: 2nd May – 1st September, 2025

Co-curators: Hripsimé Visser, former curator at Stedelijk Museum, Foam curator Claartje van Dijk, and exhibition designer Jeroen de Vries, in collaboration with NIOD Institute

Marius Meijboom (Dutch, 1911-1998)
Hunger Winter
February 1945
Marius Meijboom / Niod

Iconic photo of Henkie Holvast from the Jordaan, 9 years old

Resist!

The photograph of Henkie Holvast (February 1945, above) is an example of the famine the Nazis inflicted on the general population of the Netherlands during the last year of the Second World War.

I’ll leave you to make the correlation between these historical events and what is happening in Gaza today … and to understand the hypocrisy and evil of contemporary acts.

Like the photojournalists that are being targeted and killed for reporting the truth of the situation in Gaza, so these photographers would have been killed by the Nazis for photographing the occupation of the Netherlands if they had been caught.

“Verzet! Verzet!” (Resist! Resist!)

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

“The exhibition The Underground Camera captures the hunger and hardship in Amsterdam during the final year of World War II, but also sheds light on the untold stories behind the images, offering fresh perspectives.”

De Volkskrant

Cas Oorthuys (Dutch, 1908-1975) 'Resistance slogans on a bomb shelter at Kwakersplein, Amsterdam' 1944-1945 from the exhibition 'The Underground Camera' at Foam, Amsterdam, May - Sept, 2025

Cas Oorthuys (Dutch, 1908-1975)
Resistance slogans on a bomb shelter at Kwakersplein, Amsterdam
1944-1945
© Cas Oorthuys / Netherlands Photo Museum

“Verzet! Verzet!” (Resist! Resist!) is spray painted boldly on a public wall, confronting the public in Cas Oorthuys’s Verzetsleuzen op een schuilbunker Kwakersplein (Resistance slogans on a bunker at Kwakersplein), taken in Amsterdam between 1944-1945. In many ways this image serves as a visual manifesto for The Underground Camera, the new exhibition at Foam Amsterdam, articulating the collective’s commitment to resistance, subversion, and the political potential of the photographic image.

The Underground Camera, a group of Amsterdam based photographers, made the life-threatening and courageous decision to photograph the Nazi occupation of Holland, specifically the famine of 1944-45 in Amsterdam as a result of the Nazis blocking food transport. The photographers, recruited by members of the Dutch resistance, were tasked with making the unseen visible. The intention was to inform the Dutch government working in exile in London to advocate for food drops on their behalf while also documenting the conditions of the occupation, creating evidence in the event the Nazis would be held accountable. A general ban on photography was implemented in 1944 by the occupation, so The Underground Camera followed through with illegal acts carried out discreetly, often hiding the cameras under their garments.

Not only was participating in illegal acts under the Nazi occupation dangerous, but being associated with the resistance otten carried dire consequences. By highlighting the potential fatality of the mission, its dangerous conditions, and the equipment that was difficult to obtain at the time and often poor quality, Foam’s exhibit allows the audience to witness a quiet rebellion. A rebellion that is often overlooked not only in the history of photography, but in history as a whole.

With this exhibit, the courageous and inspiring group finally gets their time of recognition.

The Underground Camera, initially known as the more unassuming ‘Nederland Archief’ (Netherlands Archive), significantly contributed to the retelling of history regarding Germany’s occupation during the war, viewing the camera as both a witness and a weapon. The idea of the camera as a weapon is underscored by many academic discourses surrounding documentary war photography. A camera has the potential to become a tool of war whose target is completely dependent on the intention of the one shooting, but in this case of the camera has actively deconstructed propaganda while also holding the occupiers accountable.

There are many unknowns when it comes to this group. Who were the participating photographers, were any were caught, how were they organised, how did they operate, etc. This exhibition is giving them deserved institutional and academic recognition and advocates for their story to be told. The Underground Camera is an incredible show not only because it offers rare glimpses into the realities of war, but because the photographs are a product of courageous resilience.

Georgina Laube. “Apr 24: The Underground Camera | Foam,” on the Musee magazine website, April 2th, 2025 [Online] Cited 09/05/2025

Cas Oorthuys (Dutch, 1908-1975) 'A man collects materials from a demolished building, Zwanenburgstraat' 1944 from the exhibition 'The Underground Camera' at Foam, Amsterdam, May - Sept, 2025

Cas Oorthuys (Dutch, 1908-1975)
A man collects materials from a demolished building, Zwanenburgstraat
1944
© Cas Oorthuys/Nederlands Fotomuseum

Cas Oorthuys (Dutch, 1908-1975)
Two women returning from a hunger march
Early 1945
Courtesy of Foam
© Cas Oorthuys / Nederlands Fotomuseum

Foam presents The Underground Camera, an exhibition that features work from Dutch photographers who captured the consequences of the German occupation during the 1944-45 ‘famine winter’ in Amsterdam.

The exhibition The Underground Camera is inspired by the celebrations of Amsterdam’s 750th anniversary and 80 years of liberation.

With their photographs, The Underground Camera group made a significant contribution to the image of the Second World War. The photographers were recruited by members of the resistance, with the aim of informing the Dutch government in London. They worked independently and under the dangerous conditions of an occupied city, with hard-to-obtain, often poor-quality equipment. The exhibition provides an impressive picture of the consequences of hunger and cold in the dismantled Amsterdam at the end of the war.

The group of photographers included Cas Oorthuys, Emmy Andriesse, Charles Breijer, Kryn Taconis, and Ad Windig, among others.

Text from the Foam website

Charles Breijer (Dutch, 1914-2011)
Closure of the Jewish Quarter near the Waag, Nieuwmarkt, Amsterdam
1941
© Charles Breijer / Netherlands Photo Museum

Charles Breijer (Dutch, 1914-2011)
Charles Breijer photographs a German-requisitioned building near Vondelpark from his bicycle bag. He inadvertently captures his own shadow
Spring 1945
Charles Breijer / Netherlands Photo Museum (NFM)

German guard post in front of the Kriegsmarine building at Emmaplein in Amsterdam. Visible in the foreground is the shadow of photographer Charles Breijer, operating his Rolleiflex camera from his pannier.

Charles Breijer (Dutch, 1914-2011)
Andrea Domburg distracts bystanders while Margreet Meijboom-Van Konijnenburg takes the photo from her bag
Nd
Charles Breijer / Netherlands Photo Museum

Charles Breijer (Dutch, 1914-2011)
Margreet Meijboom-van Konijnenbrug (right) demonstrates photographing from a shopping bag. Andrea Domburg, in a nurse’s uniform, accompanies her to keep an eye on the surroundings
Nd
Charles Breijer / Netherlands Photo Museum

Charles Breijer (Dutch, 1914-2011)
Joop Kuijt, a refugee, crawls into a hiding place at Oranje Nassaulaan 15, Amsterdam
1945
© Charles Breijer/Netherlands Photo Museum

Charles Breijer (Dutch, 1914-2011)
Shortly after the liberation, Cas Oorthuys demonstrates how he took illegal photographs during the occupation
1945
© Charles Breijer / Nederlands Fotomuseum

In honour of Amsterdam’s 750th jubilee and the 80th remembrance of the Netherlands’ liberation, Foam presents The Underground Camera (De Ondergedoken Camera). The exhibition showcases images captured by the group of photographers who came to be known by the same name. They photographed the harsh realities of Amsterdam during the ‘Hunger Winter’ of 1944-1945, offering a rare glimpse into the courageous missions of the resistance group and their role in documenting the Nazi occupation. The exhibition features work by renowned Dutch photographers such as Cas Oorthuys, Charles Breijer and Emmy Andriesse.

The resistance group was led by Fritz Kahlenberg and Tonny van Renterghem. In November 1944, when the German administration banned public photography, they – alongside a network of fourteen photographers – worked in secrecy to document the occupation and the resistance. Their efforts, carried out at great personal risk, preserved a crucial visual record of this era. Kahlenberg, a German Jewish filmmaker who had migrated to Amsterdam in 1933, was involved in the forgery of identity cards for the resistance. Van Renterghem had a military background and was also actively involved in resistance work. Although he was not a photographer himself, he played a crucial role in the coordination between The Underground Camera and other resistance groups. The images taken by the photographers of The Underground Camera were intended to be smuggled to London to convince the Dutch government in exile of the need for Allied food droppings in the Netherlands. Today, the photos provide a realistic perspective of daily life in Amsterdam during the last months of the German occupation.

The historical material of the group was stored in various Dutch collections in the form of negatives, original photo prints, albums and picture books. The exhibition sheds light on topics such as the Hunger Winter, the resistance, the illegal press, instances of sabotage, the transport of weapons and the liberation by the Allied Forces.

The Underground Camera is the result of a close collaboration with the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies. A publication by the same name, written by NIOD-researchers René Kok and Erik Somers, will be released in March 2025. The exhibition has been co-curated by Hripsimé Visser, former curator of photography at Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, in collaboration with exhibition designer Jeroen de Vries.

The Mayor of Amsterdam, Femke Halsema, will open the exhibition at Foam.

The exhibition The Underground Camera is part of a research trajectory within Foam’s artistic programme, launched in early 2024 under the title The Camera as a Weapon, which included a pop-up exhibition of the same name and a symposium. In a time marked by conflict, Foam poses the question: what can photography do? Through this research line – which also includes the exhibition Sakir Khader – Yawm al-Firak – the museum responds to current events by presenting artistic practices in which the camera is used as a weapon.
In light of the national observance of Remembrance Day on 4 May and the national celebration of Liberation Day on 5 May, het Amsterdams 4 en 5 mei comité, in collaboration with Foam en NIOD, will also present an exhibition. This public exhibition will be shown from 29th of April until the 6th of May on the Museumplein.

About The Underground Camera

Kahlenberg and Van Renterghem, the driving forces behind the operation, instructed a group of photographers from their main location at the Michelangelostraat 36 in Amsterdam South from where they oversaw their resistance activities. Many of the The Underground Camera photographers would later become internationally renowned. They concealed their cameras in handbags and jackets in order for them to take the pictures unnoticed. Many used Rolleiflex cameras which had a viewfinder on top, making it easier to take pictures from hip height. Given the danger of being involved in organised resistance, the photographers did not know who else was part of the collective and worked under neutral names such as ‘Netherlands Archive’ (‘Nederlands Archief’) and ‘Central Imagery Archive’ (‘Centraal Beeldarchief’). Just a few weeks after the liberation, in early June 1945, a selection of work was showcased in the exhibition The Underground Camera located in the studio of the photographer Marius Meijboom at the Keizersgracht in Amsterdam. The exhibition brought national recognition for The Underground Camera’s work, leading the group to officially adopt this name. Now, 80 years later, their legacy returns in a new exhibition along the same canal.

UNESCO included The Underground Camera in its Dutch Memory of the World Register, making it the first photographic legacy ever to receive this prestigious distinction.

The Underground Camera consisted of Tonny van Renterghem (1919-2009), Fritz Kahlenberg (1916-1996), Emmy Andriesse (1914-1953), Carel Blazer (1911-1980), Charles Breijer (1914-2011), Cornelis Holtzapffel (1916-1984), Ingeborg Kahlenberg-Wallheimer (1920-1996), Boris Kowadlo (1912-1959), Frits Lemaire (1921-2005), Marius Meijboom (1911-1998), Margreet Meijboom-van Konijnenburg (1910-onbekend), Cas Oorthuys (1908-1975), Hans Sibbelee (1915-2003), Ben Steenkamp (1917-1967), Ad Windig (1912-1996) and Krijn Taconis (1918-1979). Taconis was the first Dutch person to become a member of renowned international photography collective Magnum.

Press release from Foam

Margaretha van Konijnenburg (1910 – d.)
Bicycle raid on the Weteringplantsoen in Amsterdam
Autumn 1944

Photographed from a shopping bag

Marius Meijboom (Dutch, 1911-1998)
Hungry
Nd
© Marius Meijboom, NIOD

Hans Sibbelee (Dutch, 1915-2003)
Children on Sarphatistraat remove the impregnated wooden blocks from between the tram rails, for the stove
March 1945

The photographer took the photo from under his jacket

Krijn Taconis (Dutch, 1918-1979)
Police officers guarding food supplies in the Amsterdam harbour to prevent looting will receive an extra meal
Nd
Krijn Taconis / Niod

Emmy Andriesse (Dutch, 1914-1953)
On the way to the soup kitchen
Nd
BBWO2 / Leiden University Library

Emmy Andriesse (Dutch, 1914-1953)
A man and a woman find some coal remains at the Weesperpoort station in Amsterdam
Spring 1945

Emmy Andriesse (Dutch, 1914-1953)
A boy eats a meal from a soup kitchen
Nd

H.R. Kettner (Dutch, 1916 – d.)
The distribution of groceries became increasingly difficult, resulting in long lines in front of, among other places, the Wijnbergh & Co. store on Middenweg
Nd

Other photographs by The Underground Camera photographers

Emmy Andriesse (Dutch, 1914-1953)
Amsterdam tijdens de hongerwinter (Amsterdam during the hunger winter) [1944-1945]
Published 1947
Bound volume
Closed: 29.21 x 22.86cm (11 1/2 x 9 in.)
Open: 29.21 x 44.45cm (11 1/2 x 17 1/2 in.)
National Gallery of Art Library, David K.E. Bruce Fund

Emmy Andriesse (Dutch, 1914-1953)

Emmy Eugenie Andriesse (Dutch, 1914-1953) was a Dutch photographer best known for her work with the Underground Camera group (De Ondergedoken Camera [nl]) during World War II. …

War years and the ‘Underground Camera’

In June 1941 Andriesse married graphic designer and visual artist Dick Elffers (a gentile with whom she had two sons, one who died young), but as a Jew during the Nazi occupation Andriesse was no longer able to publish and she was forced into hiding. At the end of 1944, with the assistance of the anthropologist Arie de Froe [nl] she forged an identity card and re-engaged in everyday life, joining a group of photographers, including Cas Oorthuys and Charles Breijer, working clandestinely as De Ondergedoken Camera. The photos that Andriesse made under very difficult conditions of famine in Amsterdam, include Boy with pan, The Gravedigger and Kattenburg Children are documents of hunger, poverty and misery during the occupation in the “winter of hunger” of 1944-1945.

Post-war

After the war, she became a fashion photographer and was an associate and mentor of Ed van der Elsken. She participated in the group show Photo ’48 and in 1952, together with Carel Blazer [nl], Eva Besnyö and Cas Oorthuys, the exhibition Photographie, both in Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum. Edward Steichen chose her 1947 portrait of a staid and elderly Dutch couple for the section ‘we two form a multitude’ in the Museum of Modern Art world-touring The Family of Man that was seen by an audience of 9 million. More recently (October 2006 – January 2007) she was included in a display of Twentieth Century European photography at the Barbican Art Gallery, London.

Andriesse’s last commission, the book The World of Van Gogh – published posthumously in 1953 – was not yet complete when she became ill and after a long battle with cancer, died at the age of 39.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Emmy Andriesse (Dutch, 1914-1953) 'Amsterdam tijdens de hongerwinter' (Amsterdam during the hunger winter) [1944-1945] book published 1947 (detail)

Emmy Andriesse (Dutch, 1914-1953)
Amsterdam tijdens de hongerwinter (Amsterdam during the hunger winter) (detail)
1947
Bound volume
Closed: 29.21 x 22.86cm (11 1/2 x 9 in.)
Open: 29.21 x 44.45cm (11 1/2 x 17 1/2 in.)
National Gallery of Art Library, David K.E. Bruce Fund

Steeds grauwer werd het beeld de steden. Schoeisel en kleding raakten totaal versleten.

The image of the cities became increasingly grey. Footwear and clothing became totally worn out.

De etalages waren leeg of toonden alleen vervangingsmiddelen.

The shop windows were empty or only showed substitutes.

Foam
Keizersgracht 609
1017 DS Amsterdam
The Netherlands
Phone: 31 (0)20 5516500

Opening hours:
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Exhibition: ‘Edward Weston. La matèria de les formes’ at Centro de Fotografía KBr Fundación MAPFRE, Barcelona

Exhibition dates: 12th June – 31st August, 2025

Curator: Sérgio Mah

Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
Surf, Bodega
1937
19 x 24cm
Gelatin silver print
Center for Creative Photography, The University of Arizona. Edward Weston Archive

Three week’s to the day since my hip replacement operation and I’m still in pain. I know, slowly slowly but it’s very frustrating…

Thus, I just have two words for you about this exhibition –

GREAT WESTERN!

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

“Not I, nor anyone else can travel that road for you,
You must travel it for yourself.

It is not far, It is within reach,
Perhaps you have been on it since you were born, and did not know,
Perhaps it is every where on water and land.”

Walt Whitman. Part of Song of Myself from Leaves of Grass. 1855

I never try to limit myself by theories, I do not question right or wrong approach when I am interested or amazed – impelled to work. I do not fear logic, I dare to be irrational, or really never consider whether I am or not. This keeps me fluid, open to fresh impulse, free from formulae; and precisely because I have no formulae – the public who know my work is often surprised, the critics, who all, or most of them, have their pet formulae are disturbed. And my friends distressed.

I would say to any artist – don’t be repressed in your work – dare to experiment – Consider any urge – if in a new direction all the better – as a gift from the Gods not to be lightly denied by convention or a priori concept. Our time is becoming more and more bound by logic, absolute rationalism; this is a straitjacket I – it is the boredom and narrowness which rises directly from mediocre mass thinking.

The great scientist dares to differ from accepted ‘facts’ -think irrationally – let the artist do likewise.

Edward Weston 28 January, 1932 from The Daybooks of Edward Weston. Vol. ll Horizon Press, New York 1966

Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
Guadalupe Marín de Rivera
1924
20.8 x 17.9cm
Gelatin silver print
Center for Creative Photography, The University of Arizona. Gift of Ansel and Virginia Adams

Strongly linked to the landscape and to North American cultural history, Edward Weston’s work, in its extreme simplicity and originality, allows us to appreciate a unique perspective on the process of consolidation of photography as an artistic medium and its relevant role in the context of modernity in the visual arts. The exhibition Edward Weston. La matèria de les formes (Edward Weston. The Matter of Forms) is conceived as an anthology that covers the different phases of the artist’s photographic production.

A pioneer in the use of a modern photographic style, his use of the large-format camera gives rise to richly detailed black and white images of extraordinary clarity. His technical expertise and his affection for nature and form led to the development of a body of work in which iconic images of still lifes, nudes, landscapes and portraits stand out. His images are essential for understanding the new aesthetic and new American lifestyle that emerged in the United States between the wars.

The exhibition, curated by Sergio Mah, consists of around two hundred photographs grouped into seven sections. The exhibition tour is completed with numerous documentary material and is conceived from a European perspective on the legacy of modern American photography. An aesthetic and conceptual counterpoint to the photographic modernism in Europe that emerged with the first avant-garde of the 20th century.

The emancipation of photography

Edward Weston was one of the pioneers, along with Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand, in defending the emancipation of photography from other artistic disciplines. In this sense, his work contributed decisively to demonstrating, in this early period of photography, the aesthetic and perceptual dimension of the medium, the capacity to express aesthetic qualities in the same way as painting or sculpture.

Figuration and abstraction

The technical mastery of the photographic medium leads Weston to a formalism in which framing becomes one of the most relevant elements of his work. Weston eliminates any anecdotal aspect and focuses on the motif that interests him, and does so with such realism and exaltation of the two-dimensional nature of photography, which often results in an abstract image. In this way, the artist shows that figuration and abstraction do not exempt one from the other, but are perfectly compatible.

Exhibition organised with the support of the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, Tucson.

Text from the Fundación MAPFRE website translated from the Spanish by Google Translate

Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
Two Shells
1927, print about 1933
24.1 x 18.4cm
Gelatin silver print
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
Pepper No. 30
1930
22.8 x 17.7cm
Gelatin silver print
Courtesy by Trockmorton Fine Art

Highlights

Fundación MAPFRE presents the exhibition Edward Weston. The Matter of Forms, dedicated to the five decades of the career of this North American artist, one of the most important figures in modern photography. In addition, through the work of the artist himself, the exhibition aims to offer a pedagogical reflection on the history of the medium and its relevance as an aesthetic and perceptive discipline, apart from the more traditional plastic arts; specifically, painting.

Key points

The emancipation of photography

Edward Weston was one of the pioneers, along with Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand, in defending the emancipation of photography from other artistic disciplines. In this sense, his work is essential to understanding the aesthetic and perceptive capacity of the medium in its beginnings. This capacity allows photography to express aesthetic qualities such as beauty, pain or ugliness at the same level as painting or sculpture.

Figuration and abstraction

The technical mastery of the photographic medium leads Weston to a formalism where framing becomes one of the most relevant elements of his work. In this sense, he eliminates any anecdotal aspect and focuses on the motif that interests him, and he does so with such realism and with such exaltation of the two-dimensional character of photography that he ends up obtaining an abstract image as a result. In this way, the artist shows that figuration and abstraction do not exclude each other, but are perfectly compatible.

Pepper No. 30

Edward Weston took this photograph, one of the most representative of his entire career, at the beginning of August 1930. It was not the first time he had photographed a vegetable, nor a pepper. The artist himself spoke about this image: “It is a fully satisfactory classic: a pepper, but more than a pepper. It is abstract, in the sense that it exists completely outside the subject. It has no psychological attributes, it does not awaken human emotions: this new pepper takes us beyond the world we know in the conscious mind.” In the light of this photograph and the artist’s words, the innovative character of his work can be distinguished, which transcended not only modern American photography, but also European photography.

The exhibition

Weston’s work, strongly linked to the landscape and to North American cultural history, in its extreme simplicity and originality, reveals a unique perspective on the process of consolidation of photography as an artistic medium and its relevant role in the context of modernity in the visual arts. The exhibition Edward Weston. The Matter of Forms is conceived as an anthology that covers the different phases of the artist’s photographic production. From his initial interest in Pictorialist approaches to his consolidation as one of the central figures in the affirmation of the poetic and speculative value of direct photography. A pioneer in the use of a modern photographic style, his work is characterised by the use of a large-format camera, which allows him to offer richly detailed black and white images of extraordinary clarity. His mastery of technique, together with his love of nature and form, led him to develop a photographic production in which iconic images of still lifes, nudes, landscapes and portraits stand out. As a co-founder of the photography collective Group f/64, his images are key to understanding the new North American aesthetic and lifestyle that emerged in the United States between the wars.

The exhibition, grouped into seven sections and curated by Sérgio Mah, consists of around 200 photographs and a large amount of documentary material. The exhibition is conceived as a European look at the legacy of modern North American photography. An aesthetic and conceptual counterpoint to the modern photography that emerged in Europe with the first avant-garde of the 20th century.

Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
Prologue to a Sad Spring
1920
23.8 x 18.7cm
Platinum print
Center for Creative Photography, The University of Arizona. Johan Hagemeyer Collection/Purchase

1 /

Edward Weston began photography very early, thanks to a Kodak Bulls-Eye No. 2 camera that his father gave him when he was just sixteen. Although he was practically self-taught, in 1911 he opened his first photographic establishment in a suburb of Los Angeles. His early works reveal the influence of the Pictorialist atmosphere of the time: impressionistic views and pastoral subjects with soft or slightly blurred focus, scenography and expressive poses.

Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
Janitzio, Mexico
1926
20.4 x 25.2cm
Gelatin silver print
Center for Creative Photography, The University of Arizona. Edward Weston Archive/Gift of the Heirs of Edward Weston

2 /

Weston’s dissatisfaction with this artistic approach to photography, which sought to assimilate itself to painting, coincided with the appearance of other photographers with similar ideas, such as Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand, whom he met in New York in 1922. In 1923 he set sail for Mexico accompanied by one of his sons and the photographer Tina Modotti. There he found a true renaissance of the arts and culture, and he came into contact with artists such as Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo and Rafael Sala. He expanded his visual horizon and tackled new themes, photographing objects, figures and motifs far from their original context, turning them into suggestive and extraordinary elements. It was then that he realised that true photographic art is intuitive and immediate, that the elimination of everything that is accessory constitutes the essence of his creative talent.

Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
Excusado, Mexico
October 1925
24.1 x 19.1cm
Gelatin silver print
Center for Creative Photography, The University of Arizona. Edward Weston Archive

3 /

From 1927, influenced by the humanism of Walt Whitman and his work Leaves of Grass, he felt attracted, in the words of Sérgio Mah, by “the extraordinariness of banality”. Fruits, shells and vegetables became the protagonists of his works, and he made one of his most famous photographs: a toilet, an unusual object as an artistic subject, with the title Excused. In these images, Weston accentuated the two-dimensionality of the motifs, since it was one of the characteristics of photography that interested him. He looked for details as a way of fragmenting, isolating and approximating the photographed object, eliminating the sense of depth, a technique particularly notable in still lifes with dark backgrounds, as is the case with his photographs of peppers.

Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
Floating Nude
1939
19.3 x 24.2cm
Gelatin silver print
Center for Creative Photography, The University of Arizona. Edward Weston Archive

4 /

From 1926, after leaving Mexico, Weston photographed several sets of nudes. In these nudes, the photographer’s gaze varies depending on the model. In some cases, the frame is wide and even shows the face, while in others the gaze is more segmented and focuses on parts of the body as a way of cutting out and accentuating the shapes within the frame. It must be recognized that eroticism is a quality present in some of these photographs. However, it is incorrect to conclude that this type of gaze prevails in most of the nudes he photographed. Above all, Weston observes the body as a formal reality. The beauty and sensuality that these bodies suggest is reflected in the play of lines, shadows and contours they offer.

Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
Clouds, Death Valley
1939
20.4 x 25.2cm
Gelatin silver print
Center for Creative Photography, The University of Arizona. Edward Weston Archive

5 /

From the late 1920s and into the following decades, landscape became a central element in Weston’s work. The artist photographed in the desert near Palm Springs, California, as well as in New Mexico, Arizona, and other Californian areas near his home in Carmel. In these works, the horizon and the depth of the background become a structural part of his works: the panoramic shots highlight the sublime character of the landscape. It was also during this period that Weston began to be interested in meteorological phenomena such as rain, the configuration of clouds, and the aridity of the territory.

Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
Crescent Beach, North Coast
1939
24.3 x 19.2cm
Silver print mounted on board
The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens

6 /

Over the years, Weston’s work increasingly acquired a “dense and melancholic” patina, an aspect that is accentuated by the tones that the images acquire. This characteristic is particularly evident in the photographs he took in 1941 to illustrate Leaves of Grass, a project for which he traveled throughout much of the United States for nearly two years. The images he captured in cemeteries in Louisiana and Georgia stand out, as well as those of abandoned, destroyed and burned buildings where the interest in formal aspects predominates and in which a critical and disillusioned commentary on reality and American society can already be seen.

Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
Drift Stump, Crescent Beach
1937
20.3 x 25.2cm
Gelatin silver print
Center for Creative Photography, The University of Arizona. Edward Weston Archive

7 /

In the vicinity of Point Lobos, California, was the log cabin built by his son Neil on Wildcat Hill, where Weston moved in 1938. In this area of California, the artist found the wild nature that he had sought in distant places. His images from this period denote less compositional and formal rigidity and show the cycles of nature in the territory, the wild beauty, the trees, stones and rocky landscapes that seem to arise and remain in a time that is stopped. These images express a certain melancholy and solitude, while allowing the viewer to rediscover nature in all its splendour.

Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
Dunes, Death Valley
1938
20.4 x 25.1cm
Gelatin silver print
Center for Creative Photography, The University of Arizona. Edward Weston Archive

Catalogue

The catalogue accompanying this exhibition reproduces all the photographs on display. In addition, it includes essays by Sérgio Mah, its curator, by Rebecca Senf, who discusses the artist’s relationship with Mexico, and by Jason Weems, who focuses on Weston’s landscapes and vegetable photographs. It also includes a series of reflections by the artist himself on photography taken from his diaries.

The publication of the catalogue, published in Spanish and Catalan by Fundación MAPFRE, also has a co-edition in Italian published by Dario Cimorelli Editore.

Text from Fundación MAPFRE translated from the Spanish by Google Translate

Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
Nude
1936
23.4 x 19.1cm
Gelatin silver print
Center for Creative Photography, The University of Arizona. Gift of the Estate of A.Richard Diebold, Jr.

Author of a vast and diverse body of work spanning five and a half decades, Edward Weston (1886-1958) is one of the great figures in the history of modern photography, partly because his work allows us to reflect on the distinctive qualities of photography as a technical, aesthetic and perceptual category.

His first creative experiments reveal a momentary adherence to the pictorialist tendencies of the time, but he would later stand out as one of the protagonists of a new generation of American photographers who sought to refocus the artistic axis of photography based on its exceptional capacity to represent the most diverse subjects in the world with rigor, clarity and sobriety.

With their extreme simplicity and originality, the exceptional quality of Weston’s images also lies in the way in which he was able to rethink and articulate the extraordinary realistic and objective capacity of photography with its aesthetic, poetic and phenomenological potential, contributing to expanding the horizon of the subjective experience of the image. In this way, Weston enunciated the unique role of photography in the panorama of the visual arts of his time.

Weston was an immensely prolific photographer and his work brings together a whole series of photographic themes, types and genres: portraits, nudes, still lifes, natural and urban landscapes, object photography, architecture… This anthological exhibition aims to cover the entirety of Weston’s photographic career, which began at the beginning of the 20th century and was uninterrupted until the end of the 1940s. The selection of works aims to go well beyond the period in which Weston took most of the images that gave him wide critical and institutional recognition. The truth is that a more complete and heterogeneous approach to his work allows us to summon other layers of aesthetic appreciation, broadening the understanding of the depth and articulations that Weston developed in the various fields he explored. Furthermore, it offers the opportunity to point out the aspects and affinities (in the gaze, in the construction of the image or in its peculiar relationship with certain themes) present throughout his career, emphasizing the coherence of his imagery, as well as the nuances and moments of transition that occurred in it.

Sérgio Mah
Curator

Text from Fundación MAPFRE translated from the Spanish by Google Translate

Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
Dunes, Oceano
1936
24.1 x 18.9cm
Silver print mounted on board
The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens

From an early age, Edward Weston showed an interest in developing a creative side of photography apart from his commercial work. His early experiments show the influence of painting and reveal his attention and attachment to the pictorialist atmosphere of the time. These photographs include impressionistic views, pastoral subjects with soft or slightly blurred focus, numerous staged portraits that explore expressive poses and combinations with shadows and graphic elements of the environment.

The two periods he spent in Mexico, between 1923 and 1924 and then between 1925 and 1926, were decisive in Edward Weston’s creative career. There he began to explore new themes and genres and his visual horizon expanded significantly. He covered a wide variety of subjects, types of places, figures and things, parts of things, appropriate objects, motifs taken from their original context and repositioned in another interpretative framework. At the same time, his visual style completely sheds any reminiscence of the Pictorialist phase. A photography of great technical, formal and compositional rigour was consolidated. Weston realised that he had the capacity to transform trivial things into suggestive and extraordinary. He was clear that the art of photography lies fundamentally in the moment of making the image, in the way in which the photographer contemplates the subject and makes decisions according to the variables inherent in the photographic device. For him, the process is instinctive. This way of seeing – intuitive, intense and immediate – which seeks to isolate the subject, eliminating the accessory, the unnecessary, anything that could divert or attenuate the intensity of the photographic vision, constitutes the essence of Weston’s creative talent.

From 1927, Weston began a series of still life photographs. In these images he fully reveals the principles and characteristics of his work: the desire to represent the timeless essence of a natural object and, correlatively, to emphasise the duplicative and perceptive capacities of the photographic medium.

The compositions are carefully conceived. In the space of the image, there is a calculated conformity between the dimension of the forms and the format of the image. Here it is important to reiterate the focus on detail as a defining aspect of Weston’s imagery, evident in these still lifes and also in other aspects of his work. Weston understands the vision of detail as a way of fragmenting, isolating and bringing our gaze closer to certain things, accentuating the two-dimensional character of the image, its closed and opaque nature, without depth or horizon, evident above all in still lifes with dark backgrounds, such as photographs of peppers, but also in the various images of plants, trees, rocks and stones that he has been making since the early 1930s.

Weston left Mexico in 1926. In the following years, he made several series of nudes. This is not a new subject. He had already made some important ones before, including one of Anita Brenner’s back and another of her son Neil, whose torso is cut out in an image that evokes ancient Greek statues. In the nudes, the photographer’s gaze varies depending on the model. In some cases, the framing is wide and even shows the face, while in others the gaze is more segmented and focuses on parts of the body as a way of cutting out and accentuating the shapes within the frame. We can recognise that eroticism is a quality present in some of these photographs. It is incorrect, however, to conclude that this gaze prevails in most of his nudes. Weston observes the body mainly as a formal reality. The beauty and sensuality that these bodies suggest are based above all on the play of lines, shadows and contours that they provide.

From the late 1920s, and with greater intensity in the following decades, the landscape genre occupies a central place in Weston’s photographic production. In 1927, the artist takes photos in the Californian desert near Palm Springs. In the following years, he travels through New Mexico, Arizona and other areas of California, such as Oceano, Death Valley, Yosemite, the Mojave Desert and Point Lobos, near his home in Carmel. In these various places, he captures wide views of inhospitable territories in which there are no signs of human presence or intervention. The horizon line and the breadth of the territory become structuring motifs in his work. The impetus for these images is a feeling of admiration for the epic and immeasurable nature of these natural landscapes. Beyond his choice of panoramic shots, the images reveal other aspects and elements of nature, such as meteorological phenomena, rain, cloud formations and variations in sunlight, often in conjunction with their visual effect on the arid land or the vegetation and unique morphology of these territories. It is a vision sensitive to the transformative nature of the landscape, subject to environmental and geological changes.

Gradually, and with greater intensity from the 1940s onwards, Edward Weston’s imagery became denser and more melancholic, not only in terms of the selection of subjects, but also in the tonalities of the images. This tendency is particularly evident in the photographs he takes for an edition of Leaves of Grass, the masterpiece of the poet Walt Whitman. He travels throughout the United States for two years. He revisits many of the recurring themes in his work, but the large number of images he takes of cemeteries in Louisiana and Georgia stand out. These are photographs in which his interest in formal aspects, texture and light predominates. All the subjects are seen as an integral part of a geography that is at once physical, social and mental. On the other hand, there are a lot of images of abandoned, destroyed and burnt buildings, of rubbish and things destined to disappear. We can identify that the themes of finitude and death contribute to an imagery increasingly characterised by loneliness, melancholy, and decadence. For the first time in his work, the images suggest a disillusioned and critical commentary on American reality, on the relationship between nature and culture, continuity and change, alienation and social tension.

In 1938, Weston moved with Charis Wilson to the wooden house built by his son Neil on Wildcat Hill, near Point Lobos, California. The artist spent long periods taking photos in this coastal region. He wandered through areas that he knew well. The images show a nature permeated with cycles, rhythms and forces, a macrocosm where Weston found the material to continue his work. At Point Lobos, Weston encountered a wild, dazzling and ineffable beauty that he had always sought in distant places. In the trees, forests, stones and rocky landscapes, the photographer found a vital energy that led perception towards a diffuse time, contrary to the linearity of history, alien to modernity. Nature then emerged as a theme and setting that allowed him to think and experience a renewed gaze (spontaneous, intuitive, aesthetic), a gaze that was both concrete and metaphysical that allowed him to rediscover nature.

Text from Fundación MAPFRE translated from the Spanish by Google Translate

Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
Charis, Lake Ediza
1937
19.1 x 24.1cm
Silver print mounted on board
The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens

KBr Fundación MAPFRE
Av. del Litoral, 30 08005 Barcelona
Phone: +34 932 723 180

Opening hours:
Tuesdays – Sundays (and public holidays) 11am – 8pm

Fundación MAPFRE website

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Exhibition: ‘Auto-Photo: A Life in Portraits’ at RMIT Gallery, Melbourne

Exhibition dates: 5th June – 16th August, 2025

Curated by Catlin Langford with Christopher Sutherland and Jessie Norman (Metro Auto Photo)

Installation view of the exhibition Auto-Photo: A Life in Portraits at RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, June – August, 2025
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Dream Maker

This is one of the most joyous photography exhibitions that I have seen in a very long time.

The exhibition “introduces us to Alan Adler (2932-2024), who while little known, was the oldest and longest serving photobooth technician in the world… For over 50 years, Adler maintained a fleet of photobooths across Melbourne / Narrm, most notably the site at Flinders Street Station.”

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.

We see Adler growing older and ageing; we see historic events such as the COVID pandemic with him wearing a mask; we see him travelling the world to picture other photobooths in situ; we see him goofing and performing for the camera; and we see the people he met along the way. I particularly like the photograph of Adler having his photo taken on the “Photo Ride: Take “5” with Chuckie” where he imitates the smile of his fellow traveller (see below)

The exhibition is also historical – there is a short section on the history of the photobooth – contemporary – there are contemporary works by Australian artists who use the photobooth as the basis for their art – and lost and found – where “lost” photobooth strips that Adler diligently collected in the hope of one day reuniting them with their owner are displayed.

There is an absolutely wonderful video by Christopher Sutherland titled Alan (extract below) which gives you good insight into the man. He seems part magician, keeping those old photobooths going, and part artist – Adler’s workshop reminding me so much of the basement of the American artist Joseph Cornell (1903-1972, see photo below) where he used to keep all the treasures he scavenged from around New York that he used to make his magical boxes. Adler’s photobooths were his magical boxes kept going by his bits and pieces, booths of happiness and memories, tales of a life in portraits.

In this exhibition the spirit of this man shines through in gloriously irreverent black and white and colour self-portraits, and fun, adventurous photographs from overseas. One of the best pure photography exhibitions I have seen this year.

What a life, well honoured.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image. All installation photographs © Marcus Bunyan

Entrance

Wall text from the exhibition '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
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Gallery 1

Christopher Sutherland (Australian)
Alan (extract)
2025-ongoing
Digital film

This is part of an ongoing film project by Christopher Sutherland on Alan Adler, which began in 2018 when they first met.

Cornell’s basement studio, 3708 Utopia Parkway, Flushing, New York, 1964
Collection Duff Murphy and Janice Miyahira
© Terry Schutté

Installation views of the exhibition Auto-Photo: A Life in Portraits at RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, June – August, 2025
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Gallery 2

Wall text from of the exhibition 'Auto-Photo: A Life in Portraits' at RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, June - August, 2025

Installation views of the exhibition Auto-Photo: A Life in Portraits at RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, June – August, 2025
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Auto-Photo: A Life in Portraits introduces us to Alan Adler (1932-2024), who while little known, was the oldest and longest serving photobooth technician in the world.

For over 50 years, Adler maintained a fleet of photobooths across Melbourne / Narrm, most notably the site at Flinders Street Station. As part of his weekly service, he would take a strip of test shots, now forming an extraordinary visual archive of over a thousand self-portraits.

Adler’s story shows a fascinating dedication to repetitious image making and is supported by the artworks of Melbourne creatives who have passionately used his photobooths.

Marking 100 years of the photobooth, Auto-Photo is one of many worldwide events that celebrate the centenary and reflect on the significance of this analogue machine.

Auto-Photo: A Life in Portraits features Adler’s extensive archive, alongside additional exhibits and works of art from the collections of Katherine Griffiths, Mark Holsworth, Kyle Archie Knight, Ruth O’Leary, Nicky Makin, Jesse Marlow, Brian Meacham, Metro Auto Photo, Patrick Pound and Joshua Smith.

Auto-Photo: A Life in Portraits is a Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP) exhibition, presented in partnership with RMIT Culture.

Text from the RMIT Gallery website

Gallery 3

A Selected Visual History (in vitrine)

Photobooth portraits with the same background (c. 1930-1950) (in vitrine)

Julie Mac Photobooth Portraits 1970s (in vitrine)

Vitrine text from the exhibition 'Auto-Photo: A Life in Portraits' at RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, June - August, 2025

Installation view of Julie Mac's 'Photobooth Portraits' 1970s from the exhibition 'Auto-Photo: A Life in Portraits' at RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, June - August, 2025

Mark S. Holsworthy Photo Booth – readymade in 3 minutes 1984-continuing (in vitrine)

Installation view of Mark S. Holsworth's 'Photo Booth - readymade in 3 minutes' (1984 - continuing) from the exhibition 'Auto-Photo: A Life in Portraits' at RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, June - August, 2025

Installation views of the exhibition Auto-Photo: A Life in Portraits at RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, June – August, 2025
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Gallery 4

Joshua Smith Flinders Street Photobooth 2019

Installation view of Joshua Smith's 'Flinder Street Photobooth' (2019) from the exhibition 'Auto-Photo: A Life in Portraits' at RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, June - August, 2025

Installation views of the exhibition Auto-Photo: A Life in Portraits at RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, June – August, 2025
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

RMIT Gallery
344 Swanston St,
Melbourne VIC 3000

Opening hours:
11am – 5pm Tuesday to Friday
12pm – 4pm Saturday
Closed on public and University holidays

RMIT Gallery website

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Exhibition: ‘Peter Mitchell: Nothing Lasts Forever’ at The Photographers’ Gallery, London

Exhibition dates: 7th March – 15th June, 2025

Peter Mitchell (British, b. 1943) 'Opticians, London, 1975' 1975 from the exhibition 'Peter Mitchell: Nothing Lasts Forever' at the Photographers' Gallery, London, March - June, 2025

I absolutely adore these Peter Mitchell 1970s colour photographs made from Hasselblad two and a quarter square negatives.

There is something so …. well, British about them.

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.

The people, growing up during the Second World War the privations of which lasted well into the 1950s, now during a period of change in the 1970s standing behind the fish ‘n chip counter wondering where their lives had gone and how they had got there, but still with that British sense of spirit and grit.

Peter Mitchell, “a chaser of a disappearing world” pictures these “goners” – buildings, people (and a way of life) near the end of existence soon to be demolished – in an almost painterly manner.

His use of colour, perspective and form is very fine. Witness, the flow of the photograph ‘Edna, George & Pat, H.E. Greenwood Butcher, Waterloo Road, Leeds, 1977’ (below) as, in the shot, the camera allows the eye to pan from one vanishing point at left to the other at right, with the patchwork of colours and panels of the building creating an almost Mondrian-like texture – blue to black to beige to white sign to pale blue to yellow to green to pale green, surmounted by the dark blue of the threatening sky highlighting the jagged form of the building. Superb.

My favourite photograph in the posting is The Chair, Priestly House Interior, Quarry Hill Flats, Leeds, 1978 (below). This photograph is from what I believe to be Mitchell’s strongest body of work on the demolition of the Quarry Hill Flats in Leeds. ‘One of those doomed deserts was Quarry Hill flats, irresistible both as a symbol of the fate of all architecture and of the great clock in the heavens signalling everybody’s life span’ (Peter Mitchell quoted on The Guardian website)

A drab, beige, wallpapered room with double aspect window, an art deco chair with mirror reflecting nothing, an electrical socket, a ceiling light sprouting malignant plant and trapped in the window panes, little birds fluttering against their capture, trapped forever inside an abandoned flat, this abandoned life.

Yes, there’s a sense of nostalgia and melancholy in these photographs but their restrained, formal, representation of life does much to ennoble the people and buildings contained within them which, through osmosis, ennobles the mind of the viewer.

As I myself sense the great clock in the heavens signalling my life span, the pleasure and comfort I get from feeling the spirit of Peter Mitchell’s photographs is immeasurable.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

Peter Mitchell (British, b. 1943) 'Mrs Clayton and Mrs Collins, summer 1974' 1974 from the exhibition 'Peter Mitchell: Nothing Lasts Forever' at the Photographers' Gallery, London, March - June, 2025

Peter Mitchell (British, b. 1943) 'Mr and Mrs Hudson, Newsagents, Seacroft, Leeds, 1974' 1974 from the exhibition 'Peter Mitchell: Nothing Lasts Forever' at the Photographers' Gallery, London, March - June, 2025

Peter Mitchell (British, b. 1943)
Mr and Mrs Hudson, Newsagents, Seacroft, Leeds, 1974
1974
C-print
© Peter Mitchell

‘Mr and Mrs Hudson in Seacroft Green, Leeds. I took this photograph on the 14 August 1974 at about 11am. I like the way the ladder is propping up the shop. They had just moved into a new shop on the same spot, with the church getting a facelift to match’

Peter Mitchell quoted on The Guardian website

Peter Mitchell (British, b. 1943)
Mrs. McArthy & her daughter, Sangley Road, Catford, London, 1975
1975
C-print
© Peter Mitchell

Peter Mitchell (British, b. 1943) 'Kingston Racing Motors, Olinda Terrace, Leeds 1975' 1975

Is the man with the wrench a mechanic? Why is the woman with the clapped-out Porsche looking so naughty? Will James C Gallagher, whose business it is, always have his back to the camera? And after painting the wall, why did Barry have to leave Leeds? The council demolished the lot shortly after this snap.

Text from The Guardian website

Peter Mitchell (British, b. 1943)
Two anonymous ladies, Tivoli Cinema, Acre Road from Sisson’s Lane, Leeds, 1976
1976
C-print
© Peter Mitchell

Peter Mitchell (British, b. 1943)
Sir Yank’s Records (& Heavy Disco), Gathorne Street, Leeds 1976
1976
C-print
© Peter Mitchell

Peter Mitchell (British, b. 1943) 'Concorde Wallpaper, Devon Road, 1970s' 1970s

Peter Mitchell (British, b. 1943) 'Alea Stony Rock, Westlock Grove, 1970s' 1970s

Peter Mitchell (British, b. 1943) 'Beetham's, Church Street, Leeds, 1970s' 1970s

A retrospective of work by one of the leading early colour photographers of the 20th century opens this March at The Photographers’ Gallery.

Peter Mitchell (b. 1943, UK) is widely regarded as one of the most important early colour photographers of the 1970s and 1980s. A powerful storyteller and social historian, Mitchell’s photography unfolds a longstanding and poetic connection with Leeds. He has chronicled the people and fortunes of the city with warmth and familiarity for over 40 years.

Described as ‘a narrator of who we were, a chaser of a disappearing world’ (Val Williams), his work reveals his love, and at times quirky, off-beat vision, of the people and changing face of Leeds.

The retrospective explores the breadth of Mitchell’s photographic practice. It brings together his famous series ‘A New Refutation of the Viking 4 Space Mission’, which imagines England as seen through the eyes of an alien from Mars, demolished flats, shopkeepers and their shops, and boarded-up and disused buildings, as well as his portraits of scarecrows. The exhibition marks a return to The Photographers’ Gallery for Mitchell – he first exhibited at the Gallery in 1984.

A chronicler of a changing city, he said of his work photographing the demise of the iconic Quarry Hills Estate in Leeds, ‘I know there was no point in keeping Quarry Hill flats. But what it stood for might have been worth keeping.’

Calling himself ‘a man of the pavement’, Mitchell continues to regularly walk the streets of Leeds to photograph his beloved hometown today.

Peter Mitchell: Nothing Lasts Forever will include rarely seen works from Mitchell’s own collection, personal ephemera and found objects.

Peter Mitchell: Nothing Lasts Forever is in collaboration with Leeds Art Gallery. Nothing Lasts Forever, published by RRB Photobooks, is available now.

Peter Mitchell

Peter Mitchell was born in Manchester in 1943. He studied at Hornsey College of Art in London, then moved north to look for work and never left. Living and working in Leeds for much of his life, Mitchell treats his surrounding with a unique sense of care. An essential part of the colour documentary scene in the 1970s and 80s, Mitchell’s landmark show A New Refutation of the Space Viking 4 Mission at Impressions Gallery in York in 1979 was the first colour photography show in the UK.

Press release from The Photographers’ Gallery

Peter Mitchell (British, b. 1943)
Ready mixed Concrete Ltd., Elland Road, Leeds, 1977
1977
C-print
© Peter Mitchell

Peter Mitchell (British, b. 1943)
Edna, George & Pat, H.E. Greenwood Butcher, Waterloo Road, Leeds, 1977
1977
C-print
© Peter Mitchell

Peter Mitchell (British, b. 1943) ''How many Aunties?', Back Hares Mount, Leeds, 1978' 1978

Peter Mitchell (British, b. 1943)
The Sir Yank’s Heavy Disco, Harehills Avenue, Leeds, 1978
1978
C-print
© Peter Mitchell

Peter Mitchell (British, b. 1943) 'Priestly House, Quarry Hill Flats, 1978' 1978

Peter Mitchell (British, b. 1943)
The Kitson House telephone, Quarry Hill Flats, 1978
1978
C-print
© Peter Mitchell

‘It was obvious to me that they were something special. York House was one side of the football pitch, Thoresby House opposite’

Peter Mitchell quoted on The Guardian website

Peter Mitchell (British, b. 1943) 'The Garden of Rest, Quarry Hill Flats, Leeds, 1978' 1978

Peter Mitchell (British, b. 1943) 'Thoresby House, Quarry Hill Flats, Leeds, 1978' 1978

‘I photograph dying buildings and Quarry Hill was terminal by the time I got to it. Times change and I know there was no point in keeping Quarry Hill flats. But what it stood for might have been worth keeping’

Peter Mitchell quoted on The Guardian website

Peter Mitchell (British, b. 1943)
Nielson House interior, Quarry Hill Flats, Leeds, 1978
1978
C-print
© Peter Mitchell

Peter Mitchell (British, b. 1943)
The Chair, Priestly House Interior, Quarry Hill Flats, Leeds, 1978
1978
C-print
© Peter Mitchell

‘One of those doomed deserts was Quarry Hill flats, irresistible both as a symbol of the fate of all architecture and of the great clock in the heavens signalling everybody’s life span’

Peter Mitchell quoted on The Guardian website

Peter Mitchell (British, b. 1943)
Abandoned car, Wright House, Quarry Hill Flats, Leeds, 1978
1978
C-print
© Peter Mitchell

Peter Mitchell (British, b. 1943)
Frances Gaven. Leeds, 1979
1979
From A New Refutation of the Viking 4 Space Mission
C-print
© Peter Mitchell

Francis Craven on Woodhouse Moor, Leeds in April 1979. He’d built this apparition himself but was having trouble with its arms – the pulleys had given out

Text from the Guardian website

Peter Mitchell’s A New Refutation of the Viking 4 Space Mission features photos and portraits, taken in Leeds in the 1970s. The pictures show the traditional urban landscape presented on a background of space charts, the concept being that an alien has landed from Mars and is wandering around Leeds with a degree of surprise and puzzlement.

In the Earthly vernacular these photographs are of Nowheresville. Yet, for some people, they are the centre of the universe. Usually they call it Home.

Text from the Martin Parr Foundation website [Online] Cited 25/05/2025

Mitchell’s series documents backstreets, corner shops, factories, churches and cemeteries in Leeds and Sheffield, as well as other locations in Cumbria and London, building a compelling picture of these cities during the late 1970s. Many of the portraits show the city inhabitants standing outside their homes or places of work. Equal attention is paid to the entirety of the setting, the figures often appearing dwarfed in the composition by their surroundings. The majority of the subjects gaze directly at the camera adopting stiff, frontal poses giving the images a formal impression and sense of stillness. Describing the distinctive style and subject matter of the photographs, historian David Mellor has commented, ‘it is as if Alan Bennett had met Diane Arbus in an urban picaresque’ (Mellor 2005, accessed 12 June 2017).

Ruins, crumbling facades, abandoned shops and cemeteries punctuate the series, pointing to themes of life, death, memory and loss. For example, Mitchell’s pictures includes shots of Mrs Lee’s dress shop – which burnt down the day after closure – a decayed synagogue and a defunct station in Sheffield, where the trains pass through but never stop. The 1970s were a time of great change in Britain as it struggled with widespread social unrest as well as the collapse of heavy industries. Commenting on this aspect of the series, Mellor noted, ‘NASA’s 1976 Viking Landers were a triumph of robotics, of remote sensing and imaging – that very culture of digitised information which was to supplant the manual world of industrial era Leeds.’ (Ibid.)

Text is a crucial element in Mitchell’s work, and each image in this series is accompanied by a caption to be displayed alongside. These idiosyncratic snippets of text are excerpted from Mitchell’s diary, and range from deadpan descriptions of place, to short anecdotes and humorous musings. Historian Val Williams has likened the artist’s distinctive combination of photography and text across his different bodies of work to the Situationist writing of the French theorist Guy Debord. …

Mitchell’s work occupies an important position within the history of colour photography specifically. He was photographing in colour at a time when black and white was the predominate medium for documentary photography in Britain, and before colour photography was fully embraced by museum collections. His work thus evidences an alternate history of colour photography distinct from the predominant narrative of the emergence of colour photography in the United States in the work of photographers such as William Eggleston (born 1939) and Stephen Shore (born 1947).

Sarah Allen
June 2016

Collection text on the Tate website [Online] Cited 24/05/2025

Peter Mitchell (British, b. 1943) 'Max Babbin, Vulcan Street, Leeds, 1979' 1979

Peter Mitchell (British, b. 1943)
ABC (Aerated Bread Company offices), Camden Road, London, 1979
1979
C-print
© Peter Mitchell

Peter Mitchell (British, b. 1943) 'Old Kent Road, London, 1979' 1979

His early photographs were made in the 1970s and 80s, when he was working as a truck driver. His vantage point removed him from the immediacy of the street, and he developed his distinctive graphic framing of the buildings and landscapes, which reveal the layers of urban and social history

Text from The Guardian website

Peter Mitchell (British, b. 1943) 'Mr Costas, Stroud Green Road, London, 1979' 1979

Mr Costas on Stroud Green Road, London in May 1979. He was thinking to himself: ‘If only this was Athens instead of Finsbury Park’

Text from The Guardian website

Peter Mitchell (British, b. 1943) 'Nosey 'Twat, Sackville Street, Leeds, 1980s' 1980s

Peter Mitchell (British, b. 1943) 'Kirkstall Road, Leeds, 1980s' 1980s

Peter Mitchell (British, b. 1943)
Francis Gavan, Ghost Train Ride, Woodhouse Moor, Leeds, Spring 1986
1986
C-print
© Peter Mitchell

Peter Mitchell (British, b. 1943)
Racing Pigeon Shop (ii), Blake Grove, Leeds, Summer 2009
2009
C-print
© Peter Mitchell

John Murray owned the Racing Pigeon Shop and remembers “great times” on Blake Grove.

The Photographers’ Gallery
16-18 Ramillies Street
London
W1F 7LW

Opening hours:
Mon – Wed: 10.00 – 18.00
Thursday – Friday: 10.00 – 20.00
Saturday: 10.00 – 18.00
Sunday: 11.00 – 18.00

The Photographers’ Gallery website

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Exhibition: ‘Felipe Romero Beltrán. Bravo’ at Fundación MAPFRE, Barcelona

Exhibition dates: 15th February – 18th May, 2025

Curator: Victoria del Val

Felipe Romero Beltrán (Colombian, b. 1992)
Breach #1
2021-2024
40 x 50cm
Lambda print

At their best there are some wonderfully spare and tensioned photographs of “crossing points” in this posting which examine the space between one state and another, one land and another, one country and another.

Other photographs go the usual performative “dead pan” route, some more successfully than others, and documentary observations of seemingly unremarkable spaces, derivative of the work of the Canadian photographer Jeff Wall who did the same thing more effectively way back in 1993 (see Diagonal Composition below).

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

Felipe Romero Beltrán (Colombian, b. 1992)
Breach #18
2021-2024
40 x 50cm
Lambda print

After earning a degree in Visual Arts in Buenos Aires, Felipe Romero Beltrán (Bogotá, Colombia, 1992) traveled to Jerusalem on a scholarship, where he developed photographic projects in the Middle East. In 2016, he moved to Madrid to further his studies in photography.

Throughout his work, Felipe Romero has been drawn to territories that have been or continue to be sites of tension, conflict and visual reflection.

In the Bravo project, he focuses on the more than 1,000 kilometers of the Río Bravo (known as the Rio Grande in the United States) that form the border between the United States and Mexico. His images place the viewer in a specific section of the Mexican side. People from Colombia, Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala arrive, reaching the final stage of a long and arduous journey. In this setting, the river dictates everything, ultimately shaping the identity and way of life of those who encounter it.

Bravo is conceived as a photographic essay composed of fifty-two images that explore this reality through a series of photographs of architecture, people and landscapes: closures, bodies and breaches. Almost bare interiors, walls and surfaces where textures, colors and portraits of individuals the artist has encountered during his travels to the region stand out. Ultimately: a poignant visual essay, both stark and poetic, on the themes of waiting and border identity.

Text from the Fundación MAPFRE website

Felipe Romero Beltrán (Colombian, b. 1992)
Breach #33
2021-2024
40 x 50cm
Lambda print

Felipe Romero Beltrán (Colombian, b. 1992)
Breach #57
2021-2024
40 x 50cm
Lambda print

Felipe Romero Beltrán (Colombian, b. 1992)
El Friki’s friend and pink wall
2021-2024
120 x 150cm
Lambda print

Felipe Romero Beltrán (Colombian, b. 1992)
Sound system
2021-2024
120 x 150cm
Lambda print

Felipe Romero Beltrán (Colombian, b. 1992)
San Juan Bautista. Nina’s visit
2021-2024
120 x 150cm
Lambda print

Felipe Romero Beltrán (Colombian, b. 1992)
Sofa and table. Rebeca’s house
2021-2024
120 x 150cm
Lambda print

Introduction

In 2021, Fundación MAPFRE launched its first KBr Photo Award, a prize created with the aim of reaffirming the institution’s commitment to emerging artistic creation, offering the winner of the contest significant visibility in both the national and international art scenes. In keeping with the biennial nature of this award, the second edition took place in 2023, with Colombian artist Felipe Romero Beltrán as the winner.

The artist

Felipe Romero Beltrán was born in 1992 in Bogota , Colombia. After studying visual arts in Buenos Aires, he traveled to Jerusalem on a scholarship to work on photographic projects in the Middle East. In 2016, he moved to Madrid to continue his training in photography and in 2024, he received his PhD from the Faculty of Information Sciences of the Complutense University with a thesis on the documentary image. Romero Beltrán’s photographic practice lies at the edge of documentary photography, using typical elements of this genre – direct recordings of everyday life, documentation of specific historical realities, etc. – and placing them in dialogue with other artistic, pictorial, and performative elements. The result consists of images that transcend the purely photographic realm to encompass the entire field of visual representation.

Throughout his career, Romero Beltrán has always been interested in territories that are or have been marked by tension, conflict and visual reflection.

The first project that brought him recognition was Magdalena, one of Colombia’s most important rivers and a witness to the armed struggle that began in 1960 between the guerrilla organisation Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the country’s government, one of the bloodiest events in history, which ended with a peace agreement in late 2016. For more than fifty years, the river became a graveyard where the bodies of those killed were hidden. Many of these bodies, either intact or dismembered, were later swept away by the Magdalena’s powerful currents.

Later, in Dialecto/Dialect, the author explored the situation of the Strait of Gibraltar – a crossing point for immigrants entering Europe through Spain – through a group of migrant minors who, once at their destination – a center in Seville – find themselves in legal limbo under the guardianship of the Spanish State. This second work, which was accompanied by a series of performative audiovisual pieces, Recital (2020), Instrucción/Instruction (2022) and Esta es tu ley/This is Your Law, a reference to immigration law, marked a turning póint in his career, as he began to gain international recognition as an artist and photographer and his work was exhibited at the Fotografiemuseum in Amsterdam (FOAM) in January 2024.

Bravo

Bravo, the winning project of this second edition of the KBr Photo Award, is once again structured around a border as its leitmotif. The Bravo River has a dual identity: it is both a river and a border between the United States and Mexico. Its geography carries a heavy political burden that has accumulated conflicts and tensions since the nineteenth century, reaching an unsustainable situation in recent years. In this case, Romero Beltrán places the viewer in a specific stretch of this river, more than three thousand kilometers long. It is an area near the Mexican city of Monterrey, where both the river and the flow of people attempting to cross it shape the identity and way of life of the local population. This movement of people affects not only Mexican citizens, but extends to all of Central and South America. Migrants also come from Colombia, Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala; for them, crossing the river is the last stage of a long and arduous journey. The border acts as a magnet, drawing people in despite the risks involved in crossing it and the fact that it has almost become a militarized zone. The author considers the river as a political actor, as a border, although throughout the photographs it only appears as a supporting character. As Romero Beltrán himself points out: “The Bravo River, rather than being the central axis that structures the project, functions as its limit, that is to say, it is an exercise in exhaustion until one reaches the river, without the possibility of crossing it. In this sense, the river exists as its visual negation, focusing interest on what comes after it: the entrance to the United States.”

Bravo was conceived as a photographic essay of fifty-two photographs that explore this reality through a series of images of architecture, people and landscapes: endings, bodies and breaches. Almost bare interiors, walls and surfaces where textures and colors stand out; fragments and remains of roads and buildings that show the traces of the passage of migrants; and portraits of people that the artist encountered during his visits to the area where he carried out the project.

The audiovisual work El cruce (The Crossing), which accompanies the exhibition, was created by the artist before the photographs. Romero Beltran thus expands the visual reflection on the river, showing us scenes that challenge its condition as a border, revealing other uses and situations linked to its dual geographical and political character: a Protestant baptism in the river itself; a fishing competition between the United States and Mexico at La Amistad dam, built in the 20th century to control the waters of the Bravo River; a series of interviews between the author and some migrants focused on linguistic changes; the testimonies of Guadalupe, a man who grew up on the Mexican side of the river and regularly swims in it with no intention of crossing it, and Luis, who frequently crosses the river to collect the wet clothes that migrants leave behind in the illegal breaches after crossing, so that he can sell them once he brings them back to Mexico.

Catalogue

The catalog accompanying the exhibition contains reproductions of all the works on display, as well as an essay by the curator, Victoria del Val, and an interview with Felipe Romero Beltrán himself. The publication also includes texts by Albert Corbí , who writes an essay on the very nature of the photographic medium in the context of migration; by artist Alejandra Aragon, on what it means to be a border person; and by Dominick Bermudez, a migrant of Salvadoran origin who describes how, after a long journey, he arrived in Monterrey, where he currently lives. Finally, the catalog features illustrations from the diary of Thom Díaz, Romero Beltrán’s “traveling companion”.

The catalog is published in Spanish by Fundación MAPFRE. The English version is co-published with Loose Joint Publishing.

Text from Fundación MAPFRE

Felipe Romero Beltrán (Colombian, b. 1992)
Grecia Evangelina. Thom’s house
2021-2024
120 x 150cm
Lambda print

Jeff Wall (Canadian, b. 1946)
Diagonal Composition
1993
Transparency in light box, AP
40 x 46cm
Collection of the artist
© Jeff Wall

Felipe Romero Beltrán (Colombian, b. 1992)
Piping. Dominick’s house
2021-2024
40 x 50cm
Lambda print

Felipe Romero Beltrán (Colombian, b. 1992)
Marco. Rafa’s room
2021-2024
40 x 50cm
Lambda print

Felipe Romero Beltrán (Colombian, b. 1992)
Martel
2021-2024
40 x 50cm
Lambda print

Felipe Romero Beltrán (Colombian, b. 1992)
Mirror. El Sower’s house
2021-2024
40 x 50cm
Lambda print

Felipe Romero Beltrán (Colombian, b. 1992)
Wall and two doors. Rebeca’s house
2021-2024
120 x 150cm
Lambda print

KBr Fundación MAPFRE
Av. del Litoral, 30 08005 Barcelona
Phone: +34 932 723 180

Opening hours:
Tuesdays – Sundays (and public holidays) 11am – 8pm

Fundación MAPFRE website

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Exhibition: ‘Dawoud Bey: Street Portraits’ at the Denver Art Museum

Exhibition dates: 17th November, 2024 – 11th May, 2025

Curator: Eric Paddock, Curator of Photography at Denver Art Museum

Dawoud Bey (American, b. 1953)
Two Girls from a Marching Band, Harlem, NY
1990
Pigment print
Courtesy the artist and Stephen Daiter Gallery, Chicago
© Dawoud Bey

Street cred

I have posted twice before on Art Blart on Dawoud Bey’s An American Project exhibition – once when it was at the High Museum of Art (November 2020 – March 2021) and then the Whitney Museum of American Art (April – October, 2021)

I waxed lyrical about his photographs which I greatly admire.

“From formal to informal portraiture, through conceptual “bodies”, Bey’s work visualises Black American history in the present moment, not by using the trope of reusing colonial photographs or memorabilia, but by presenting afresh the history of injustice enacted on a people and a culture, picturing their ongoing pain and disenfranchisement – in the here and now – through powerful and deeply political photographs…

From his early street photographs through the later large format Polaroid work and on to the conceptual series, Bey’s photographs have an engaging directness and candour to them. There are no photographic or subjective histrionics here, just immensely rich social documentary photographs that speak truth to subject. The subjects stare directly at the camera and reveal themselves with a poignant honesty.”

If you look at the installation photographs of both postings you will notice the small-scale prints of his notable black and white large-format (4 × 5-inch) camera and Polaroid Type 55 film photographs. But in this exhibition, Dawoud Bey: Street Portraits at the Denver Art Museum, Bey has used the large format negatives “to make large-scale, highly detailed prints that could be enlarged to create monumental portraits.”

To my eye and mind, these monumental portraits simply don’t work … on many levels.

Firstly, the size seems totally inappropriate as a form of theatre (for that is what Bey is making them at this size) and as a photographic document to the honest representation of these people – to me, completely at odds with the spirit of the subject being captured.

Secondly – and remembering that I have not seen the exhibition or walked through it but I am using the numerous installation photographs as my guide – there seems to be little flow to the images, installed as they are cheek by jowl, on the line, with no groupings or spacing, facing off against each other, face after face – with seemingly no understanding by curator or artist of Minor White’s idea of ice/fire, or the space between, the frisson that is generated between two or more images, in conversation, in sequence. Even the lines of sight between exhibition spaces leave little to be discovered afresh.

I have never understood this need for “monumentalism” in contemporary photography especially when the work does not need it and the energy of the work does not support it.

The advent of digital printing and large scale printers have enabled the production of gigantic contemporary photographs. “Large-scale photography challenges traditional notions of what constitutes a photograph and can be seen as a way to engage with the history of painting and cinema… Large-scale photography allows artists to explore the relationship between the overall composition and the individual details within the image. This can create a sense of both macro and micro, where the viewer can zoom in and out to appreciate different aspects of the image… Large-scale photography is used by many artists to explore themes related to identity, technology, consumerism, and environmental issues. The size of the prints can be a way to amplify these themes and create a more impactful visual statement. Large-scale photographs are well-suited for exhibition spaces where they can be displayed in a way that maximizes their impact. The large size of the prints can also create a sense of awe and wonder for the viewer.” (Generative AI on Google)

“In the 1990s, the group most commonly associated with large-scale photography, and in many ways responsible for the worldwide popularity of the technique, were the students of Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, including Thomas Struth, Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer, and Thomas Ruff.” (Artsy website) With the work of artist’s such as Jeff Wall or Gregory Crewdson we become immersed in their cinematically constructed, staged fantasy worlds through the sheer scale of the photographs. With the gigantic portraits of Thomas Ruff it is not so much about the individual persona in the photograph as their every pore, a scientific examination of the surface micro death contained within every image.

Of course, I understand the desire for large photographs in creating a sense of immersion and exploring themes related to scale, power, identity and the human experience … but I don’t necessarily agree with the conditions of their becoming, nor do I think scale necessarily works for every photographic image. A photograph can be printed so that it has many sizes where it “speaks” to you and the viewer, but not every size works. I vividly remember seeing the exhibition Richard Avedon People at The Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne in 2015 and observing that Avedon’s reaction to the ever expanding size of postmodern “gigantic” photography were floor to ceiling photographs, vertiginous overblown edifices which fell as flat as a tack.

I get the same feeling here.

Impact not intimacy, (visually) overwhelming not (visually) engaging.

Fundamentally, these “monumental” photographs by Dawoud Bey are no longer “street portraits” for they lack the intimacy and intensity of that style, becoming something rather less … beguiling, in the process.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

Installation view of the exhibition 'Dawoud Bey: Street Portraits' at the Denver Art Museum

Installation views of the exhibition Dawoud Bey: Street Portraits at the Denver Art Museum

From 1988 to 1991, Dawoud Bey (American, born 1953) photographed African Americans in the streets of various American cities. He asked a cross section of these communities to pose for him, creating a space of self-presentation and performance in their urban environments. Bey used a large format tripod-mounted camera and a unique positive/negative Polaroid film that created both an instant print and a reusable negative. As part of every encounter, Bey gave each person the small black-and-white print as a way of reciprocating and returning something to the people who allowed him to make their portraits. The resulting photographs reveal the Black subjects in their psychological complexity, presenting themselves openly and intimately to the camera, the viewer, and the world.

Installation views of the exhibition Dawoud Bey: Street Portraits at the Denver Art Museum

Dawoud Bey: Street Portraits is the first standalone museum show to explore a transformational phase of the celebrated photographer and 2017 MacArthur Fellow Dawoud Bey’s work. The show features 37 portraits he made between 1988 and 1991, when he collaborated with Black Americans of all ages whom he met on the streets of various American cities. He asked a cross section of people in these communities to pose for him, creating a space of self-presentation and performance in their urban environments.

Bey used a large format tripod-mounted camera and a unique positive/negative Polaroid film that created both an instant print and a reusable negative. Bey considers photography an ethical practice that requires collaboration with his subjects. As part of every encounter, he gave each person a small black-and-white Polaroid print as a way of reciprocating and returning something to the people who allowed him to make their portrait.

Street Portraits is organised by the community the photographs were made in: Brooklyn; Washington, D.C.; Rochester; Amityville; and Harlem. Bey defies racial stereotypes by encouraging Black people to present themselves openly and intimately to the camera, the viewer, and the world.

Text from the Denver Art Museum website

Dawoud Bey (American, b. 1953)
A Young Man Resting on an Exercise Bike, Amityville, NY
1988
Pigment print
Courtesy the artist and Stephen Daiter Gallery, Chicago
© Dawoud Bey

Dawoud Bey (American, b. 1953)
Sunshine Bracey and Friend, Brooklyn, NY
1990
Pigment print
Courtesy the artist and Stephen Daiter Gallery, Chicago
© Dawoud Bey

Dawoud Bey (American, b. 1953)
A Girl with School Medals, Brooklyn, NY
1988
Pigment print
Courtesy the artist and Stephen Daiter Gallery, Chicago
© Dawoud Bey

Dawoud Bey (American, b. 1953)
A Couple at a Main Street Bus Stop, Rochester, NY
1989
Pigment print
Courtesy the artist and Stephen Daiter Gallery, Chicago
© Dawoud Bey

Dawoud Bey (American, b. 1953)
A Young Woman and a Girl, Amityville, NY
1988
Pigment print
Courtesy the artist and Stephen Daiter Gallery, Chicago
© Dawoud Bey

Dawoud Bey (American, b. 1953)
Peg’s Grandson, Brooklyn, NY
1988
Pigment print
Courtesy the artist and Stephen Daiter Gallery, Chicago
© Dawoud Bey

Dawoud Bey (American, b. 1953)
Peg, Brooklyn, NY
1988
Pigment print
Courtesy the artist and Stephen Daiter Gallery, Chicago
© Dawoud Bey

The Denver Art Museum (DAM) is proud to present Dawoud Bey: Street Portraits, featuring 37 portraits by celebrated photographer and 2017 MacArthur Fellow Dawoud Bey (American, born 1953).

From 1988 to 1991, Bey collaborated with Black Americans of all ages whom he met on the streets of various American cities. He asked a cross section of people in these communities to pose for him, creating a space of self-presentation and performance in their urban environments.

“We’re pleased to present the first standalone museum show of this important work,” said Eric Paddock, Curator of Photography for DAM. “Dawoud Bey’s Street Portraits mark a turning point where the deliberate, closely observed portraits he had been making with a handheld camera began to contain what he has called ‘the kind of lush physical description’ he wanted his pictures to convey – and that is a consistent part of all the work he has made since. The slower process of working with a camera on a tripod invited collaboration between the artist and his subjects, making each picture both an experiment and a discovery.”

Bey used a large format tripod-mounted camera and a unique positive/negative Polaroid film that created both an instant print and a reusable negative. Bey considers photography an ethical practice that requires collaboration between the artist and his subjects. As part of every encounter, he gave each person a small black-and-white Polaroid print as a way of reciprocating and returning something to the people who allowed him to make their portrait.

The exhibition is organised by the community the photographs were taken in: Brooklyn; Washington, D.C.; Rochester; Amityville; and Harlem. Defying racial stereotypes, the resulting photographs reveal the Black subjects in all of their psychologically rich complexity, presenting themselves openly and intimately to the camera, the viewer, and the world.

Press release from the Denver Art Museum

Dawoud Bey (American, b. 1953)
Mrs. Bracey, Brooklyn, NY
1988
Pigment print
Courtesy the artist and Stephen Daiter Gallery, Chicago
© Dawoud Bey

Dawoud Bey (American, b. 1953)
A Young Man Leaning on a Striped Wall
1989
Pigment print
Courtesy the artist and Stephen Daiter Gallery, Chicago
© Dawoud Bey

Dawoud Bey (American, b. 1953)
A Young Man in a Bandana and Swimming Trunks, Rochester, NY
1989
Pigment print
Courtesy the artist and Stephen Daiter Gallery, Chicago
© Dawoud Bey

Dawoud Bey (American, b. 1953)
A Young Man with His Hotdog Cart, Rochester, NY
1989
Pigment print
Courtesy the artist and Stephen Daiter Gallery, Chicago
© Dawoud Bey

Dawoud Bey (American, b. 1953)
Two Boys on Carrollsburg Place, Washington, DC
1989
Pigment print
Courtesy the artist and Stephen Daiter Gallery, Chicago
© Dawoud Bey

Dawoud Bey (American, b. 1953) 'Young Man at a Tent Revival, Brooklyn, NY' 1989, printed 2019

Dawoud Bey (American, b. 1953)
A Young Man at a Tent Revival Meeting, Brooklyn, NY
1989
Pigment print
Courtesy the artist and Stephen Daiter Gallery, Chicago
© Dawoud Bey

Dawoud Bey (American, b. 1953) 'A Boy Eating a Foxy Pop, Brooklyn, NY' 1988, printed 2019

Dawoud Bey (American, b. 1953)
A Boy Eating a Foxy Pop, Brooklyn, NY
1988
Pigment print
Courtesy the artist and Stephen Daiter Gallery, Chicago
© Dawoud Bey

Dawoud Bey (American, b. 1953)
A Cute Couple in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, NY
1990
Pigment print
Courtesy the artist and Stephen Daiter Gallery, Chicago
© Dawoud Bey

Dawoud Bey (American, b. 1953)
A Young Man with His Hair Brush, Rochester, NY
1989
Pigment print
Courtesy the artist and Stephen Daiter Gallery, Chicago
© Dawoud Bey

Dawoud Bey (American, b. 1953)
A Woman Wearing Denim, Rochester, NY
1989
Pigment print
Courtesy the artist and Stephen Daiter Gallery, Chicago
© Dawoud Bey

Dawoud Bey (American, b. 1953)
A Woman at Fulton Street and Washington Avenue, Brooklyn, NY, 1988
1988
Pigment print
Courtesy the artist and Stephen Daiter Gallery, Chicago
© Dawoud Bey

Denver Art Museum
100 W 14th Ave Pkwy,
Denver, CO 80204, United States
Phone: (720) 865-5000

Opening hours:
Open daily from 10am – 5pm, 10am – 8pm on Tuesdays

Denver Art Museum website

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