J.C. Leyendecker (American, 1874-1951) Ivory Soap It Floats Painting for Ivory soap advertisement, 1900 Gouache on board Private collection Image courtesy of the National Museum of American Illustration, Newport, RI
Featured in mainstream national magazines, ads for Ivory soap often depicted scenes of conventional domesticity. Some, however, were erotic, like this one by Leyendecker featuring a man in a floor-length robe, whose crotch is suggestively rendered.
The Eye of the Beholder
“Leyendecker’s subjects exemplify an elite white masculinity that was hardly representative of the diversity of the United States in his time, or since” observes Sonya Abrego. The artist’s subjects are white, cultured, privileged, “upholding racial, social and nationalist hierarchies”.
But how representations were and are understood depends on the eye of the beholder. At the time that Lyendecker was painting and illustrating commercial magazines his flirtatious subliminal erotic messages would have been all too decipherable to a knowing gay male readership – even as these very illustrations “passed” the scrutiny of heterosexual normativity. For gay men “passing” allowed them to hide their real identity and to fit into society without discrimination and fear of loosing their job, their home and/or going to jail.1 Leyendecker’s works both hide and transgress the taboo when they pass inspection.
For the initiated, Leyendecker’s paintings and illustrations were at the very heart of the subversion of hegemonic masculinity – “a practice that legitimises men’s dominant position in society and justifies the subordination of the common male population and women, and other marginalised ways of being a man.”2 Witness the man holding the “stiff rod” of the golf club in Men with Golf Clubs (c. 1909, below); the knowing looks of the two men in Men and Woman, Arrow Shirts with Golf Clubs and Collie (1910, below); the camp hands on hip languid pose of the man on the Cover of Saturday Evening Post (June 29, 1907, below) and the butcher, hand of hip, frontal crotch shot with Janet Jackson garment malfunction / nipple exposure that is Cover of Collier’s (June 24, 1916, below). The fact that some of the paintings such as Record Time, Cool Summer Comfort (c. 1920, below) feature Leyendecker’s lover of 48 years Charles A. Beach, only adds to the surreptitious nature of the paintings societal relationship. Much as the gay movie star Rock Hudson had to keep his private and public lives separate in order to “pass”, so Leyendecker kept his gay relationship a secret from the public.
While the exhibition would like us to address Leyendecker’s work within a broader context (according to curator Donald Albrecht talking about the artist in “gender terms, racial terms, sexual terms,” treating him in an intersectional way) – that is, through “the interconnected nature of social categorisations such as race, class, and gender as they apply to a given individual or group, regarded as creating overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination or disadvantage”3 – this is only, and can only ever be, a post-post-posterior inflection on the rump of his work, a point of view wholly constructed in the present (the word and concept becoming popular after 1989 when the term ‘intersectionality’, which has its roots in Black feminist activism, and was originally coined by American critical legal race scholar Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw). Attitudes may have changed over the years and in some parts of the world, but to believe that heterosexual Black, white or Asian men would have understood the intersectional relationships in Leyendecker’s work back in the day is contemporary fairy floss. While it would be nice to think of Leyendecker’s work in all it’s supposed intersectional glory this was not how the work was seen by the general public (and white men in particular) when it was produced and published.
Today the eye of the beholder can still be just as blinded and prejudiced… for the dominant stereotype of the body, that of the white male, constantly reinforces its value in a capitalist consumer society. Body processes are drawn into social relations through fashion, sport, body culture, etc and, “As soon as we are articulated as a male or female body, a raced, classed, or sexed body in the context of the larger culture, a subject position construed hierarchically is not far behind, due in part to that means of articulation, our language. We take up a position according to a dialectic of presence and lack in terms of our relative proximity (still generally connected to our biological bodies) to the monied white male as signifier.”4
What we can do in this case is to inform the ‘conditions of understanding’ of the beholder: in other words, by making the viewer informed of the processes of production we can undermine the “ability of dominant groupings to define their bodies and lifestyles as superior, worthy of reward, and as, metaphorically and literally, the embodiment of class.”5 While the self is a social construction it is still all to easy for the dominant hegemonic group within a culture or society to identify and impose a valuable body – for example, that of the muscular mesomorph or the body of the athlete (or super jock). What we must encourage are processes in society “which will make it extremely difficult for any one group to impose as hegemonic, as worthy of respect and deference across society, a single classificatory scheme of ‘valuable bodies’.”6
A difficult task but I believe a worthy one.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Footnotes
1/ “Passing is the ability of a person to be regarded as a member of an identity group or category, such as racial identity, ethnicity, caste, social class, sexual orientation, gender, religion, age and/or disability status, that is often different from their own. Passing may be used to increase social acceptance in order to cope with stigma by removing stigma from the presented self and could result in other social benefits as well. Thus, passing may serve as a form of self-preservation or self-protection in instances where expressing one’s true or prior identity may be dangerous.”
3/ Definition of intersectionality by Oxford Languages on the Google website
4/ Leslie Heywood. Dedication To Hunger: The Anorexic Aesthetic in Modern Culture. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996, p. 12.
5/ Chris Schilling. The Body and Social Theory. London: Sage Publications, 1993, p. 140.
6/ Ibid., p. 143.
Many thankx to the New-York Historical Society for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the art work for a larger version of the image.
“An effeminate man … expresses his abdication of power. For a man to behave effeminately is an expression of the paradox. With each flap of the wrist he slides deeper into the underclass and, in so doing, betrays the birthright of men to mythic power. Such gestures are violations of masculinity, insults to the meaning of manhood. This is why they are met with such contempt by so many, including many gay men who long for the power of patriarchy.”
Brian Pronger. The Arena of Masculinity: Sports, Homosexuality, and the Meaning of Sex. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990, p. 221.
“The Arrow collar man – handsome, well-groomed, and always dapper in crisp shirts with starched white collars – was a pop culture icon. He was so dashing that women who weren’t quite familiar with the idea of a brand personification yet, wrote to Arrow’s parent company hoping they could meet him. He shares a lot in common with the Gibson Girl of the same era: an elegant, youthful ideal of American beauty. But unlike Charles Dana Gibson’s illustrated feminine creation, which he insisted was an amalgam of modern American women of his time, The Arrow Collar Man was originally modelled after a specific person, Charles Beach, who happened to also be Leyendecker’s partner. The two lived together for close to fifty years, and he helped manage the illustrator’s career, a relationship that would have likely disappointed the Arrow man’s female fans. …
Leyendecker’s subjects exemplify an elite white masculinity that was hardly representative of the diversity of the United States in his time, or since. It was working in line with nationalist standards of rugged masculinity espoused from the top by figures like Teddy Roosevelt that permeated the culture at large…
Installation view of the exhibition Under Cover: J.C. Leyendecker and American Masculinity at the New-York Historical Society showing at left, Thanksgiving: 1628-1928 (Pilgrim and Football Player) (1928, below); and at right, Ivory Soap It Floats (1900, above) Photo: Glenn Castellano, New-York Historical Society
A new exhibition at the New-York Historical Society examines the work and influence of J.C. Leyendecker (1874-1951), a preeminent illustrator and commercial artist who helped shape American visual culture in the first three decades of the 20th century through captivating advertisement campaigns including the legendary “Arrow Collar Man” and countless covers for the Saturday Evening Post. As a gay artist whose illustrations for a mainstream audience often had unspoken homoerotic undertones, his work is especially revealing for what it says about the cultural attitudes towards homosexuality of the period. Under Cover: J. C. Leyendecker and American Masculinity is organised by New-York Historical from the collection of the National Museum of American Illustration, Newport, RI.
Born in 1874 in Montabaur, Germany, Leyendecker immigrated to Chicago in 1882 with his parents and three siblings. Showing an early artistic talent, Leyendecker and his youngest brother, F. X., studied at the Art Institute of Chicago before moving to Paris where they developed their distinctive styles. Upon returning to the United States, the brothers entered a publishing renaissance and soon found themselves at its center, New York City. In 1914, they moved into a 14-room house in New Rochelle, New York, along with Charles Beach, for 48 years.
J.C. Leyendecker (American, 1874-1951) Men with Golf Clubs Painting for Arrow Collar advertisement, c. 1909 Oil on canvas National Museum of American Illustration, Newport, RI
In Leyendecker’s illustrations, interactions between men often took place in homosocial spaces such as all-male dormitories, clubs, haberdasheries, and gymnasiums. In this example, the men’s informal dress and posture plus the heraldic marks of Harvard and Yale in the window suggest an elite college clubhouse and seem to target the ad to college men.
J.C. Leyendecker (American, 1874-1951) Men and Woman, Arrow Shirts with Golf Clubs and Collie Painting for Arrow Collar advertisement, 1910 Oil on board National Museum of American Illustration, Newport, RI
Leyendecker developed campaigns for Arrow collars depicting handsome, idealised men wearing shirts and detachable collars manufactured by Cluett Peabody & Co. These ads often depicted fashionable men in stylish settings engaged in activities such as boating, golfing, or reading in men’s clubs. Even when women are present, the men depicted seem indifferent to them, often sharing sexually charged glances with each other instead.
J.C. Leyendecker (American, 1874-1951) Couple in Boat Painting for Arrow Collar advertisement, 1912 Oil on canvas National Museum of American Illustration, Newport, RI
The exhibition locates Leyendecker’s work within the evolution of commercial illustration, when advertisers sought to sell products by emotion and feeling, not only by factual representation of a product’s utilitarian characteristics. These commercial trends can be seen in Leyendecker’s advertising illustrations for Arrow collars.
A new exhibition examines the work and influence of J.C. Leyendecker (1874-1951), a preeminent illustrator and commercial artist who helped shape American visual culture in the first three decades of the 20th century through captivating advertising campaigns including the legendary “Arrow Collar Man” and countless covers for the Saturday Evening Post. As a gay artist whose illustrations for a mainstream audience often had unspoken homoerotic undertones, his work is especially revealing for what it says about the cultural attitudes towards homosexuality of the period.
The exhibition showcases 19 of the artist’s original oil paintings and a wealth of related ephemera, and features both Leyendecker’s editorial work, such as magazine covers, as well as commercial illustrations that appeared in the pages of popular publications, on roadside billboards, in store windows, and on mass transit. Laying the groundwork of Leyendecker’s implied gay narratives, these ads starred fashionable men in stylish settings engaged in activities such as boating, golfing, or reading in men’s clubs.
Under Cover delves into the early politics of sexual identity and gender while simultaneously examining how Leyendecker helped establish a nationalistic ideal of elite and athletic white male beauty. To address this aspect of his work, the exhibition juxtaposes some of Leyendecker’s paintings with artefacts that offer counter-narratives to his works’ exclusionary nature, including depictions of fashionable African American men during the Harlem Renaissance, as well as a selection of contemporaneous advertisements with homoerotic connotations and a digital show of images depicting gay culture in New York during Leyendecker’s time.
Under Cover is organised by New-York Historical from the collection of the National Museum of American Illustration, Newport, RI. The show is guest-curated by Donald Albrecht, and coordinated at New-York Historical by Rebecca Klassen, curator of material culture.
Text from the New-York Historical Society website
J.C. Leyendecker (American, 1874-1951) In the Yale Boathouse 1905 Oil on canvas National Museum of American Illustration, Newport, RI
This painting was one of seven by Leyendecker that illustrated Ralph D. Paine’s “A Victory Unforeseen,” published in the July 1905 issue of Scribner’s Magazine. The short story centres on a Yale-Harvard boat race, and in this image, the hero cools himself off by pouring a pail of water over his sweating shoulders.
Installation view of the exhibition Under Cover: J.C. Leyendecker and American Masculinity at the New-York Historical Society showing at third right, Man and Woman Dancing (1923, below); at second right, Couple in Boat (1912, above); and at right, Thanksgiving: 1628-1928 (Pilgrim and Football Player) (1928, below) Photo: Glenn Castellano, New-York Historical Society
Installation view of the exhibition Under Cover: J.C. Leyendecker and American Masculinity at the New-York Historical Society showing at left centre, Record Time, Cool Summer Comfort (c. 1920, below); at centre, In the Yale Boathouse (1905, above); and at right, Thanksgiving: 1628-1928 (Pilgrim and Football Player) (1928, below) Photo: Glenn Castellano, New-York Historical Society
“A Superb Example of the Common Man”
As a gay artist, Leyedecker demonstrated a marked flare for portraying the male body either semi-nude or wearing body-revealing clothing. As a specialist in images of men, Leyedecker painted a whole range of male types from the mass market – from feminised men, like those in interwoven sock ads who pose languidly while they look at and caress their stockings; to elegant men of leisure like the Arrow Collar Man; to masculine icons such as the sailor, lifeguard, and athlete. Some of these types were consistent with the era’s theories linking race, gender, and bodily appearance. (Leyedecker’s attitudes toward these issues is unknown). His athletes embodied the tenets of muscular Christianity, and influential philosophy whose proponents believed in manly athleticism as a means toward a patriotic and moral good. President Theodore Roosevelt, who advocated the movement’s principles, noted that Leyendecker’s illustrations depicted “a superb example of the common man.”
Wall text from the exhibition
Installation views of the exhibition Under Cover: J.C. Leyendecker and American Masculinity at the New-York Historical Society showing at left in the bottom image, Cover of Saturday Evening Post (June 29, 1907, below) and Cover of Collier’s (June 24, 1916, below); at second right, In the Yale Boathouse (1905, above); and at right, Thanksgiving: 1628-1928 (Pilgrim and Football Player) (1928, below) Photo: Glenn Castellano, New-York Historical Society
J.C. Leyendecker (American, 1874-1951) Men reading Arrow Collar advertisement 1914 Oil on canvas National Museum of American Illustration, Newport, RI
Installation view of the exhibition Under Cover: J.C. Leyendecker and American Masculinity at the New-York Historical Society showing at left top, Men Reading (1914, above) and at left bottom, Men with Golf Clubs (c. 1909, above) Photo: Glenn Castellano, New-York Historical Society
Homo-sociability
Many of Leyendecker’s paintings portray male behaviour as well as their social and physical interactions. In his illustrations, there interactions often take place in all-male queer spaces such as dormitories, clubs, haberdasheries and gyms. Leyendecker had access to these spaces, and as a gay man he might have been attuned to their potential for same-sex desire and connection. Often, when women are present in his work, the men seem indifferent to them, sometimes sharing sexually charged glances with each other instead.
Since Leyendecker operated within the collaborative nature of the modern advertising profession, he did not have control over what happened to his images after the created them. His work was often subject to revisions at the hands of art directors and others. These changes, whether intentional or not, sometimes had the effect of fortifying or mitigating the images implications of same-sex attraction.
Wall text from the exhibition
Installation view of the exhibition Under Cover: J.C. Leyendecker and American Masculinity at the New-York Historical Society showing at left top, Men Reading (1914, above) and at left bottom, Men with Golf Clubs (c. 1909, above); at centre, The Donchester – the Cluett Dress Shirt (1911, below); and at right, In the Stands 2 (1913, below) Photo: Glenn Castellano, New-York Historical Society
J.C. Leyendecker (American, 1874-1951) The Donchester – the Cluett Dress Shirt Arrow shirt advertisement, 1911 Oil on canvas National Museum of American Illustration, Newport, RI
J.C. Leyendecker (American, 1874-1951) In the Stands 2 Arrow shirt advertisement, 1913 Oil on canvas National Museum of American Illustration, Newport, RI
Installation views of the exhibition Under Cover: J.C. Leyendecker and American Masculinity at the New-York Historical Society at left, The Donchester – the Cluett Dress Shirt (1911, above); and at right, In the Stands 2 (1913, above) Photo: Glenn Castellano, New-York Historical Society
Masculinity and Style
Leyendecker skilfully painted fashionable white men interaction with one another. His 1911 ad for Dorchester dress shirts depicts two men in evening clothes leaning slightly toward each other, possibly to share an intimate story. The whit man-about-town ideal in Leyendecker’s work was only one of many examples of masculinity that circulated in this period. Another kind was advanced by leaders of the Harlem Renaissance, a flourishing of African American art and literature. They understood the power of visual representation and self-presentation to denigrate or uplift their race, especially in the eyes of white audiences. Black Harlem Renaissance writers and artists and their allies forged an elite cultural vanguard. They produced illustrated books, drawings, and photographs that conveyed nuanced and realistic images of Black masculinity through elegant dress and deportment. Queer Black men participated in and were represented by these efforts.
Wall text from the exhibition
Installation view of the exhibition Under Cover: J.C. Leyendecker and American Masculinity at the New-York Historical Society showing at second left, In the Stands 2 (1913, above); at centre, Portrait of an American Sailor, Charles Beach (1918, below); at third right, Man and Woman with Spanish Shawl (1926); and at right, Couple in Boat (1912, above) Photo: Glenn Castellano, New-York Historical Society
J.C. Leyendecker (American, 1874-1951) Portrait of an American Sailor, Charles Beach 1918 Oil on canvas National Museum of American Illustration, Newport, RI
Installation view of the exhibition Under Cover: J.C. Leyendecker and American Masculinity at the New-York Historical Society showing at centre, Portrait of an American Sailor, Charles Beach (1918, below); at second right, The S.S. Leviathan (1918, below); and at right, Man and Woman with Spanish Shawl (1926) Photo: Glenn Castellano, New-York Historical Society
J.C. Leyendecker (American, 1874-1951) The S.S. Leviathan House of Kuppenheimer advertisement, 1918 Oil on canvas National Museum of American Illustration, Newport, RI
New-York Historical Society Exhibition Explores the Work of J.C. Leyendecker, a Pivotal Gay Artist and Illustrator Who Helped Shape American Visual Culture.
This spring, a new exhibition at the New-York Historical Society examines the work and influence of J.C. Leyendecker (1874-1951), a preeminent illustrator and commercial artist who helped shape American visual culture in the first three decades of the 20th century through captivating advertising campaigns including the legendary “Arrow Collar Man” and countless covers for the Saturday Evening Post. As a gay artist whose illustrations for a mainstream audience often had unspoken homoerotic undertones, his work is especially revealing for what it says about the cultural attitudes towards homosexuality of the period. Under Cover: J. C. Leyendecker and American Masculinity, on view May 5 – August 13, 2023, is organised by New-York Historical from the collection of the National Museum of American Illustration, Newport, RI.
“Under Cover: J.C. Leyendecker and American Masculinity deepens our understanding of the struggle for full civil rights as Americans of the LGBTQ+ community,” said Dr. Louise Mirrer, president and CEO of New-York Historical. “The exhibition is part of New-York Historical’s ongoing commitment to tell stories of Americans whose lived experience, though important and consequential to our history, is so often absent from textbooks in schools and colleges. New-York Historical’s collaboration with the American LGBTQ+ Museum, which will be housed in our institution’s new wing, will further enable meaningful conversations about LGBTQ+ history and its rightful place within the American narrative.”
“J.C. Leyendecker was an amazingly talented artist whose illustrations have come to embody the look and feel of the first half of the century while simultaneously demonstrating how fluidity in gender expression and gay representation were actually quite common at the time, contrary to current assertions that they are unique to our own moment,” said Donald Albrecht, guest curator. “Not only did his work exemplify the zeitgeist, but it depicts a deeply nuanced view of sexuality and advertising that broadens our understanding of American culture.”
Under Cover: J.C. Leyendecker and American Masculinity showcases 19 of the artist’s original oil paintings and a wealth of related ephemera, and features both Leyendecker’s editorial work, such as magazine covers, as well as commercial illustrations that appeared in the pages of popular publications, on roadside billboards, in store windows, and on mass transit. His aesthetic influence extended to Norman Rockwell, his colleague and eventual successor as the Post’s premier illustrator. The exhibition is organised into two primary sections: one exploring Leyendecker’s depictions of the male body, either semi-nude or clad in body-revealing garments, and a second focusing on his images of male intimacies, often of men sharing sexually charged looks. The model for many of his illustrations was Charles Beach, his lover and eventual business manager.
Under Cover delves into the early politics of sexual identity and gender while simultaneously examining how Leyendecker helped establish a nationalistic ideal of elite and athletic white male beauty. To address this aspect of his work, the exhibition juxtaposes some of Leyendecker’s paintings with artefacts that offer counter-narratives to his works’ exclusionary nature, including depictions of fashionable African American men during the Harlem Renaissance. Also providing crucial context: a selection of contemporaneous advertisements with homoerotic connotations and a digital show of images depicting gay culture in New York during Leyendecker’s time, including plays about lesbians and men in drag that appeared on Broadway, effeminate male nightclub performers, and gay artists who wrote poems and created drawings about same-sex desire.
The exhibition locates Leyendecker’s work within the evolution of commercial illustration, when advertisers sought to sell products by emotion and feeling and not only by factual representation of a product’s utilitarian characteristics. These commercial trends can be seen in Leyendecker’s work creating advertising illustrations for companies such as Gillette razors, Ivory soap, House of Kuppenheimer menswear, and Interwoven socks. He also developed campaigns for Arrow collars depicting handsome, idealised men wearing shirts and detachable collars manufactured by Cluett, Peabody & Co. Laying the groundwork of Leyendecker’s implied gay narratives, these ads starred fashionable men in stylish settings engaged in activities such as boating, golfing, or reading in men’s clubs. In his work, Leyendecker created drawings depicting multiple kinds of masculinity for the mass market, from feminized men like the languidly posed males in Interwoven ads who look at and caress their sheer stockings to elegant men of leisure like the Arrow Collar Man to manly men like muscular sailors, lifeguards, and athletes.
Leyendecker’s suggestive images aligned with his era’s sexual mores. Starting in the latter decades of the 19th century, small but dense subcultures that defied sexual and gender conventions became increasingly visible in cities like New York. Members of these subcultures often identified themselves with specific styles of dress, mannerisms, and language. As a gay Manhattanite immersed in the city’s sophisticated visual culture industries, Leyendecker was most likely cognisant of these gay identity markers, sometimes depicting them in his illustrations.
Under Cover is organised by New-York Historical from the collection of the National Museum of American Illustration, Newport, RI. The show is guest-curated by Donald Albrecht, and coordinated at New-York Historical by Rebecca Klassen, curator of material culture. Drawing on three decades of scholarship, the exhibition is aided by a committee of advisors: Dr. Elspeth Brown, Professor of History at the University of Toronto; Dr. Monica L. Miller, Professor of English and Africana Studies, Barnard College; and Dr. Michael Murphy, Associate Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Illinois Springfield.
Press release from the New-York Historical Society
J.C. Leyendecker (American, 1874-1951) Cover of Saturday Evening Post June 29, 1907 National Museum of American Illustration, Newport, RI
Leyendecker’s Ivy League athletes embodied the ideals of muscular Christianity, a philosophy whose proponents believed in athleticism as a means toward a patriotic and moral good. President Theodore Roosevelt, who advocated the movement’s principles, noted that Leyendecker’s illustrations depicted “a superb example of the common man.”
J.C. Leyendecker (American, 1874-1951) Cover of Collier’s June 24, 1916 National Museum of American Illustration, Newport, RI
As a gay male artist, Leyendecker demonstrated a marked flair for depicting the male body either semi-nude or wearing body-revealing clothing. In this cover, Leyendecker partially exposes the athlete’s left nipple.
J.C. Leyendecker (American, 1874-1951) Cover of Collier’s November 10, 1917 National Museum of American Illustration, Newport, RI
During World War I, Leyendecker adapted his flair for depicting men to produce images of sailors and soldiers endowed with a healthy, heroic, and muscular masculinity.
Robert Minor (American, 1884-1952) “Army Medical Examiner: ‘At last a perfect soldier!'” The Masses, July 1916 Reproduction The Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University Libraries
Home-front depictions of World War I were not always as positive as those created by Leyendecker. Chronicling the war’s dehumanising and deathly toll, this illustration from the leftist magazine The Masses rendered the male body with biting satire.
Installation view of the exhibition Under Cover: J.C. Leyendecker and American Masculinity at the New-York Historical Society showing Record Time, Cool Summer Comfort (c. 1920, below) Photo: Glenn Castellano, New-York Historical Society
By using the same model (Charles Beach) for each figure in this painting, Leyendecker implied that the muscled swimmer and eel-attired collegian were the same person. Reinforcing this idea, the catalog copy assets that the company makes American clothes perfectly fitted to the athletic American man’s body.
Men’s clothing manufacturer B. Kuppenheimer was founded in Chicago in 1876 by Bernard Kuppenheimer, a German Jewish immigrant, along with his son Jonas Kuppenheimer and Samuel Nathan. It was one of many American men’s clothiers with German Jewish founders and/or owners. Subjected to anti-Semitic satire in print media, manufacturers like Kuppenheimer were anxious to project a brand identity though advertising that embraced white, Christian ideals like the college man in the Leyendecker illustration.
Wall text from the exhibition
J.C. Leyendecker (American, 1874-1951) Record Time, Cool Summer Comfort Painting for Kuppenheimer advertisement, c. 1920 Oil on canvas National Museum of American Illustration, Newport, RI
By pairing a muscled swimmer with a well-tailored collegian, both modelled by Charles A. Beach, this advertisement illustrated Kuppenheimer’s claim in the ad for “truly American clothes” designed “for the American figure” and expressing “the American personality.” Men’s clothing manufacturer B. Kuppenheimer was founded in Chicago in 1876 by Bernard Kuppenheimer, a German Jewish immigrant, along with his son Jonas and Samuel Nathan.
J.C. Leyendecker (American, 1874-1951) Man and Woman Dancing Painting for Arrow Collar advertisement, 1923 Oil on canvas National Museum of American Illustration, Newport, RI
This illustration features models Phyllis Frederic and Brian Donlevy, who launched his acting career in the early 1920s while posing for Leyendecker. Donlevy went on to perform in Broadway plays and silent films, eventually taking on major roles in Hollywood movies.
Paralleling Leyendecker’s idealised depictions of white men and often stereotypical images of Black ones, members of the Harlem Renaissance produced illustrated books, drawings, and photographs that conveyed positive images of Black masculinity through elegant dress and deportment. Taken by Carl Van Vechten, a gay white critic, novelist, and Renaissance promoter, this photograph of author and artist Richard Bruce Nugent signalled its subject’s gayness by including a bust of Antinous, the male lover of the Roman emperor Hadrian.
J.C. Leyendecker (American, 1874-1951) Thanksgiving: 1628-1928 (Pilgrim and Football Player) Painting for cover of Saturday Evening Post, November 24, 1928 Oil on canvas Private collection Image courtesy of the National Museum of American Illustration, Newport, RI
Juxtaposing a modern muscular football player with a Pilgrim, Leyendecker’s painting for the 1928 Thanksgiving cover of the Saturday Evening Post positions the popular sport not only as a Thanksgiving pastime, but also as a cultural marker of American-ness. By the time the Post published this cover, football had been emerging for decades as an emblem of masculinity.
Installation view of the exhibition Under Cover: J.C. Leyendecker and American Masculinity at the New-York Historical Society showing at right, Leyendecker’s Easter – Man in the Mirror Painting for cover of Saturday Evening Post, April 11, 1936 (below) Photo: Glenn Castellano, New-York Historical Society
J.C. Leyendecker (American, 1874-1951) Easter – Man in the Mirror Painting for cover of Saturday Evening Post, April 11, 1936 Oil on canvas National Museum of American Illustration, Newport, RI
In his work, Leyendecker created drawings depicting multiple kinds of masculinity for the mass market, from preening, dandified men like this artwork’s subject to elegant men of leisure like the Arrow Collar Man to manly men like muscular sailors, lifeguards, and athletes. Timed to Easter, this cover illustration was also one of many instances of the artist creating Post illustrations themed to the seasons and holidays.
New-York Historical Society 170 Central Park West at Richard Gilder Way (77th Street) New York, NY 10024 Phone: (212) 873-3400
Curator: Dr. Josie R. Johnson, Capital Group Foundation Curatorial Fellow for Photography at the Cantor Arts Center
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Cypress Root and Rock, Seventeen Mile Drive 1929 Gelatin silver print The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University Cantor Arts Center Collection
On November 18, 1929, Edward Weston drove north from his home in Carmel to traverse the scenic coastal route of Seventeen Mile Drive. He made nine photographs of cypress roots and rocks that day, including this image. Less than three weeks earlier, the stock market had crashed, setting off a panic that plunged the United States into the Great Depression. Money troubles plagued Weston throughout his life, but on this November day, he was completely enthralled with the landscape. He wrote in his daybooks soon after that these photographs were “among the best seen and most brilliant technically I have yet done.”
Wall label from the exhibition
Transcending reality
While I admire the clever recontextualisation of the work of American photographers from the 1930s in this exhibition – into the sections Natural Wonders, Divine Figures, Everyday Splendors, Living Relics, The World of Tomorrow, Street Theater and Surreal Encounters – I am unsure that those photographers would ultimately see their work as a fusion of reality and dream, their documentary photographs “being both real and dream-like” that the concept of this exhibition proposes.
While all photographers use their imagination to visualise and take their photographs, to then extrapolate that these images are both reality-dream is, to my mind, a theoretical fancy that takes a kernel of the truth and views the images through a contemporary lens. Nothing wrong with that I hear you say and as the photographer Richard Misrach observes, “Photographs, when they’re made, can shift meaning with time, and often do.” And I agree that the meaning of photographs changes over time, is an ever fluid and shifting feast.
But can you imagine any of the Farm Security Administration (FSA) photographers out in the field saying to themselves, “Oh! let’s take a dreamscape of these poor travelling people trying to survive the deprivations of hunger, poverty and joblessness”. It just wouldn’t happen. They didn’t think like that because it was a different era. They were concerned with representing with clarity and focus, with compassion and imagination not the melding of reality and dream, but the visceral feeling of the life being lived under the most trying of circumstances.
Following on from thoughts on the stunning landscape photographs of Ansel Adams in the last posting, one has to agree with Dr Isobel Crombie, Senior Curator of Photography at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne when she says that,
“The term “landscape” can be ambiguous and is often used to describe a creative interpretation of the land by an artist and the terrain itself. But there is a clear distinction: the land is shaped by natural forces while the artist’s act of framing a piece of external reality involves exerting creative control. The terms of this ‘control’ have be theorised since the Renaissance and, while representations of nature have changed over the centuries, a landscape is essentially a mediated view of nature.”1
All photographs are a mediated view of reality, captured through the imagination of the artist and (usually) the gaze of the camera lens… but that does not necessarily mean that they are a melding of reality and dream: of course they can be – but in the context of 1930s American photography what is more likely is that the artists where attempting to create something that transcends the moment. As that fantastic American landscape photographer Robert Adams observes,
“At our best and most fortunate we make pictures because of what stands in front of the camera, to honor what is greater and more interesting than we are. We never accomplish this perfectly, though in return we are given something perfect – a sense of inclusion. Our subject thus redefines us, and is part of the biography by which we want to be known.”2
To my mind American photographers of the 1930s took photographs not only to document but also to honor what was greater and more interesting than they were. Not as a melding of reality-dream as this exhibition proposes, but as an exploration of what is possible through the interface of the image and imagination, the interface as Ansel Adams put it “between the reality of the world and the reality of yourself.”
Finally, the unknown to me photographs of Wright Morris are superb because of their very capricious fidelity.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ Isobel Crombie. Stormy Weather. Contemporary Landscape Photography (exhibition catalogue). Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 2010, p. 15 2/ Robert Adams. Why People Photograph. New York: Aperture Foundation, 1994, p. 179
Many thankx to the Cantor Arts Center for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
In the fall of 1930, Stanford biology professor Laurence Bass-Becking used a curious phrase to describe the photography of his friend Edward Weston: “Reality makes him dream.” Few people today would associate dreaminess with the Great Depression, yet Bass-Becking penned this statement one year into the economic turmoil that would last until the nation’s entry into World War II. This exhibition of over 100 photographs, periodicals, and photobooks offers an alternative understanding of 1930s photography in the US by taking Bass-Becking’s phrase as its point of departure.
The work of five photographers featured in the Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at the Cantor Arts Center – Ansel Adams, John Gutmann, Helen Levitt, Wright Morris, and Edward Weston – comprises the core of the exhibition. Woven into this display is a diverse selection of photographs by their contemporaries that present new narratives about artists and images, from the iconic to the overlooked. Against the typical history of 1930s photography that views the work of this period as primarily documentary, this exhibition contends that a key goal for artists of this period was to use photography to ignite the imagination.
“If you have a conscious determination to see certain things in the world you are a potential propagandist; if you trust your intuition as the vital communicative spark between the reality of the world and the reality of yourself, what you tell in the super-reality of your art will have greater impact and verity. … without the elements of imaginative vision and taste the most perfect technical photograph is a vacuous shell.”
Ansel Adams. “Exhibition of Photographs” (1936), reproduced in Andrea Gray. Ansel Adams: An American Place, 1936. Tucson: Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, 1982, p. 38 quoted in Josie R. Johnson. “Reality Makes Them Dream: American Photography, 1929-1941,” in Josie R. Johnson. Reality Makes Them Dream: American Photography, 1929-1941. Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, 2023, p. 17.
The present exhibition [exhibition of contemporary photography in November 1930 at Harvard University] attempts to prove that the mechanism of the photograph is worthy and capable of producing creative work entirely outside the limits of reproduction or imitation. … Photography exists in the contemporary consciousness of time, surprising the passing moment out of its context in flux, and holding it up to be regarded in the magic of its arrest. It has the curious vividness and unreality of street accidents, things seen from a passing train, and personal situations overheard or seen by chance – as one looks from the window of one skyscraper into the lighted room of another forty stories high and only across the street.
Lincoln Kirstein, introductory note, Photography 1930. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Society for Contemporary Art, 1930, n.p. quoted in Josie R. Johnson. “Reality Makes Them Dream: American Photography, 1929-1941,” in Josie R. Johnson. Reality Makes Them Dream: American Photography, 1929-1941. Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, 2023, p. 26.
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Migrant Mother, California 1936 Gelatin silver print Gift from the Alinder Collection Cantor Arts Center Collection
The Cantor Arts Center is pleased to present Reality Makes Them Dream: American Photography, 1929-1941, an exhibition featuring over 100 photographs, periodicals, and photobooks. This material collectively pushes against the typical history of 1930s photography that views the work of this period as primarily documentary, and instead illustrates that artists of this era frequently used photography to ignite the imagination. The exhibition and the expansive art historical narratives it illuminates result from Dr. Josie R. Johnson’s study over the past three years of the Cantor’s Capital Group Foundation (CGF) Photography Collection – a major gift of over 1,000 twentieth-century American photographs.
Currently serving as the museum’s CGF Curatorial Fellow for Photography, Johnson comments: “The Cantor’s holdings of American photography from the 1930s are especially rich, and the generous terms of the Capital Group Foundation Fellowship enabled me to delve deeply into this fascinating chapter of photo history. Sifting through these prints allowed me to set aside what I thought I knew about this material and take a fresh look, giving me a new appreciation for the novel approaches these artists developed in the midst of a profoundly difficult historical moment.”
The work of five photographers from the CGF Collection – Ansel Adams, John Gutmann, Helen Levitt, Wright Morris, and Edward Weston – comprises the core of the exhibition. Its conceit draws from a curious phrase by Stanford biology professor Laurence Bass-Becking about the photography of his friend Edward Weston: “Reality makes him dream.” Though few people today would associate dreaminess with the Great Depression, Bass-Becking penned this statement in the fall of 1930, one year into the economic turmoil that would last until the nation’s entry into World War II. Reality Makes Them Dream exemplifies the spirit of experimentation that Bass-Becking describes by highlighting an undercurrent of artistic practices in the United States that were sometimes more akin to those of Surrealism taking place concurrently in Europe.
To tease out these under-examined connections, and de-emphasise the association of American photography of the 1930s with the unbiased documentation of real people and events, works by the five core CGF artists are interwoven with a diverse selection of photographs by their contemporaries, both iconic and overlooked, such as Walker Evans, Hiromu Kira, and Dorothea Lange. Edward Weston’s bold experimentation with forms both natural and man-made – exemplified by highly evocative works such as Pepper No. 35 (1930) and Egg Slicer (1930) that inspired Bass-Becking’s comment – blends harmoniously with contemporary prints from the community of Japanese-American photographers in Los Angeles that often supported Weston’s work. Examples of fashion and editorial photography, including colour images by Toni Frissell and Paul Outerbridge, draw connections across the galleries with photographs of airplanes, household items, and tourist sites made by seasoned artists and amateur hobbyists alike. Helen Levitt’s surreal tableaux on the streets of New York echo Berenice Abbott‘s studies of the metropolis with multiple layers of history jumbled into the same block. Ansel Adams’s pristine images of the Sierra Nevada hang alongside little-known photographs by Seema Weatherwax, his darkroom assistant in the late 1930s who was similarly enchanted with nature but developed a vision all her own. Despite gaining the respect of not only Adams, but also Weston, Lange, and Imogen Cunningham, Weatherwax shared her own work publicly for the first time in 2000 at the age of 95. Her photographs evidence her technical abilities and, not unlike her peers on view in this exhibition, find beauty in the everyday. Altogether, these photographs effectively illustrate Johnson’s three year exploration of the collection which revealed that despite the very real financial, political, and cultural challenges of the Great Depression, certain photographers chose not to focus on the camera’s cold mechanical precision, but rather used it as a medium to spark their imaginations – fusing reality and dream into one. …
The first exhibition curated by a CGF fellow, Reality Makes Them Dream is accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue. It features an essay by Johnson and contributions from the community of photography scholars at Stanford University – Kim Beil, associate director of the ITALIC arts program for undergraduates; Yechen Zhao (PhD in art history ’22); Anna Lee, photography curator for special collections at the Stanford Libraries; Rachel Heise Bolten (PhD in English ’22); Altair Brandon-Salmon (PhD candidate in art history); Marco Antonio Flores (PhD candidate in art history); and Maggie Dethloff, PhD, assistant curator of photography and new media at the Cantor.
Press release from the Cantor Arts Center
Wright Morris (American, 1910-1998) Gano Grain Elevator, Western Kansas 1940, printed 1979-1981 Gelatin silver print The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University Cantor Arts Center Collection
In Dr. Josie R. Johnson’s exhibition … Johnson interweaves the Capital Group Foundation Collection images with additional works by other artists, building narratives that nuance our understanding of American photography in the 1930s. Her essay pushes against longstanding narratives that overemphasise the purity of straight photography and the veracity of documentary photography in this decade. Her research reveals instead that many artists used the medium of photography to fuse reality and dream into one.
Johnson divides Reality Makes Them Dream into seven sections exploring subjects commonly photographed in the 1930s as being both real and dream-like. Looking beyond well-traveled approaches to photographs captured in the decade defined by the Great Depression, “Natural Wonders” features awe inspiring organic forms from still life and nature photography. “Divine Figures” presents methods of elevating the human figure to the status of a god-like being in portraiture, nude studies, dance photography, and photographs of modern labourers. “Everyday Splendors” explores the transformation of commonplace scenes and objects into vibrant masses of shapes and textures. The portraits, architectural photographs, and still life images in “Living Relics” exemplify the tendency of these photographers to depict emblems of a purer and more noble past that they hoped to reclaim. “The World of Tomorrow” considers the opposite end of the temporal spectrum, where photographers captured glimpses of a futuristic, machine-driven utopia in urban or industrial scenes. “Street Theater” encompasses street photography and urban architectural studies that approach their subjects as if they are actors and stage sets in their own make-believe world. Finally, “Surreal Encounters” highlights Surrealist strands in the work of American photographers as they emphasised the uncanny and fantastical in the physical world around them.
Veronica Roberts, Director of the Cantor Arts Center
Ansel Adams (American, 1902-1984) Sculptor’s Tools, San Francisco, California 1930, printed c. 1974 Gelatin silver print Gift from the Alinder Collection Cantor Arts Center Collection
In 1930, a meeting with the photographer Paul Strand inspired Ansel Adams to abandon the use of soft-focus camera settings and textured printing papers in pursuit of “absolute realism.” However, Adams did not renounce the photograph’s capacity to convey an artist’s imaginative vision; instead, he launched a crusade for photography to be recognised as a “pure art form.” This image of the tools belonging to the San Francisco sculptor Ralph Stackpole stages Adams’s main argument at the time: Photography is no less a form of art than sculpture, so long as the artist’s tools (a camera or a hammer and chisel) are employed directly, without imitating another medium.
Wall label from the exhibition
Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) Sumner Healy Antique Shop 1936 Gelatin silver print Gift of Judge Leonard Edwards Cantor Arts Center Collection
Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009) New York c. 1938 Gelatin silver print The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University Cantor Arts Center Collection
Woven into this exhibition is a diverse selection of photographs by their contemporaries, adding breadth to this survey of American photography of the 1930s and presenting new narratives about artists and images, from the iconic to the overlooked. This project interprets the term “American” loosely, encompassing photographers who lived in the United States for extended periods but who did not necessarily hold citizenship, as well as locations including Alaska and Hawaii, which were then still US territories. Thirteen of the forty-two photographers featured in this catalogue were born outside the United States, reflecting diasporic patterns that brought Japanese immigrants in the early 1900s and European immigrants – especially Jews fleeing antisemitism – in the 1910s and mid-1930s.7 Many turned to photography as a way to earn a living, and their photographs often expressed their enchantment with the dramatic natural landscapes or unfamiliar cultural practices they encountered in their newly adopted nation.
Together, this material demonstrates that Bass-Becking’s idea [Bass-Becking used a curious phrase to describe the photography of his friend Edward Weston: “Reality makes him dream”] offers an interpretive lens for a much wider swath of photography than either he or Weston might have realized. Against the typical history of 1930s photography that views the work of this period as primarily documentary in style and purpose , this project contends that a key goal for artists of this period was to use photography to ignite the imagination, even while pursuing an increasingly transparent approach that mirrored the world as they saw it. From the delicate curve of a seashell to the jostle of a crowded city street, reality made the photographers and their audiences dream.
Footnote 7. Another ten were second- and/or third-generation immigrants.
Josie R. Johnson. “Reality Makes Them Dream: American Photography, 1929-1941,” in Josie R. Johnson. Reality Makes Them Dream: American Photography, 1929-1941. Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, 2023, p. 11.
Natural Wonders
Ansel Adams (American, 1902-1984) Dogwood, Yosemite National Park, California 1938 Gelatin silver print The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University Cantor Arts Center Collection
Ansel Adams is best known today for the majestic landscape photographs he made throughout his life, but in the 1930s he gravitated toward tightly framed images of a more intimate scale. This photograph of dogwood blossoms exemplifies Adams’s close looking at nature from this period. Even among the grand vistas of Yosemite, he often turned his lens to humbler sights while retaining the same density of detail across the picture plane, illuminating multitudes in a patch of moss or a pile of pine needles. Adams explained at the time: “Honest simplicity and maximum emotional statement suggests the basis of a critical definition of photography as an Art Form – that is, as a means of more than factual statement.”
Wall label from the exhibition
Cedric Wright (American, 1889-1959) Wildflowers 1930s-1940s Gelatin silver print Gift from the Alinder Collection Cantor Arts Center Collection
George Cedric Wright (April 13, 1889 – 1959) was an American violinist and a wilderness photographer of the High Sierra. He was Ansel Adams’s mentor and best friend for decades, and accompanied Adams when three of his most famous photographs were taken. He was a longtime participant in the annual wilderness High Trips sponsored by the Sierra Club. …
In an article published in 1957, which included eight full-page photographs, Wright described his thoughts about how high mountain beauty resembles great music: “Beauty haunts the high country like a majestic hymn, sings in cold sunny air, the brilliant mountain air – makes of sunlight a living thing – floats in cloud forms – filters changing floods of light ever clothing the mountains anew. Beauty arrives in deep voice of river and wind through forest, swelling the chorus, giving sonority universal proportions.”[Wright, Cedric. “Trail Song: An Artist’s Profession of Faith” Sierra Club Bulletin. San Francisco: Sierra Club. 42 (6): 50-53]. He dedicated these words to Sierra Club leader William Edward Colby, and they became part of the introduction to Wright’s posthumous book, Words of the Earth.
Bradford Washburn (American, 1910-2007) Mount La Perouse c. 1933 Gelatin silver print Courtesy of Department of Special Collections, Stanford Libraries
Bradford Washburn became a well-known mountaineer and aerial photographer while still in college. In the early 1930s, he climbed and surveyed multiple peaks in the Fairweather Range of southeastern Alaska, including Mount La Perouse. Although Washburn’s photographs functioned as topographical records and route maps, he also displayed them in artistic contexts, where they elicited deeply poetic and emotional responses from viewers. In the 1940 issue of U.S. Camera Magazine, an editor wrote of Washburn’s Alaskan photography: “Sea and mountain and plain, join island and cape and bay in a beauty that is the true setting for the fantasy of northern lights and midnight sun. … Here is an America that is no more a last frontier or hinterland, but a fruitful part of America, present – a glowing promise to America, future.”
Wall label from the exhibition
Henry Bradford Washburn Jr. (June 7, 1910 – January 10, 2007) was an American explorer, mountaineer, photographer, and cartographer. He established the Boston Museum of Science, served as its director from 1939-1980, and from 1985 until his death served as its Honorary Director (a lifetime appointment). Bradford married Barbara Polk in 1940, they honeymooned in Alaska making the first ascent of Mount Bertha together.
Washburn is especially noted for exploits in four areas.
1/ He was one of the leading American mountaineers in the 1920s through the 1950s, putting up first ascents and new routes on many major Alaskan peaks, often with his wife, Barbara Washburn, one of the pioneers among female mountaineers and the first woman to summit Denali (Mount McKinley).
2/ He pioneered the use of aerial photography in the analysis of mountains and in planning mountaineering expeditions. His thousands of striking black-and-white photos, mostly of Alaskan peaks and glaciers, are known for their wealth of informative detail and their artistry. They are the reference standard for route photos of Alaskan climbs.
3/ He was responsible for creating maps of various mountain ranges, including Denali, Mount Everest, and the Presidential Range in New Hampshire.
4/ His stewardship of the Boston Museum of Science.
Hy Hirsh (American, 1911-1961) Untitled Late 1930s Gelatin silver print Dennis and Annie Reed Collection
Hyman Hirsh (October 11, 1911, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania – November 1961, Paris, France), was an American photographer and experimental filmmaker. He is regarded as a visual music filmmaker, as well as one of the first filmmakers to use electronic imagery (filmed oscilloscope patterns) in a film. …
Photography style
Hirsh’s early photographs were influenced by California photography movement Group f/64, who had first exhibited in 1932 at the de Young Museum where Hirsh later worked. In 1932. Hirsh’s photo work from that period used sharply focused black and white renderings and little manipulation in their process. Hirsh was then influenced by the social documentary of the Farm Security Administration [FSA] photographers who recorded the impact of the Great Depression on displaced workers and their families. Hirsh followed suit, exploring social issues through visages of vacant lots, rusted machinery, and other images of urban decay. Recognition for these photographs led to seven exhibitions in Los Angeles and San Francisco from 1935 to 1955. A 1936 group show entitled “Seven Photographers” at L.A.’s Stanley Rose Gallery put him alongside the leading figures of West Coast photography, including Ansel Adams, Edward Weston and Brett Weston. Hirsh also appeared in the publication U.S. Camera in 1936, 1937 and 1939.
In 1943 San Francisco Museum of Art featured Hirsh in a solo exhibition. By now Hirsh had moved away from the straight-ahead aesthetic of Ansel Adams and Group f64, and his artistic photography took more cues from the world of experimental film. He made surrealist self-portraits by superimposing negatives of himself with broken sheets of glass. Later in Paris, as a study for one of his films, he shot colour slides of old wall posters that were peeling, exposing layers of posters underneath.
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Bananas 1930 Gelatin silver print Dennis and Annie Reed Collection
Despite his many accolades, Edward Weston struggled to support himself throughout his career as a photographer. He found an important group of patrons in Los Angeles’s Little Tokyo, where several artist groups sustained a lively community of photographers in the 1920s and ’30s. The play of light, movement, and space in Shinsaku Izumi’s The Shadow (below) exemplifies their experimental ethos. In this context, the photographer Toyo Miyatake (1895-1979) organised three exhibitions of Weston’s photography between 1925 and 1931. At the final exhibition, he purchased this print (above) from Weston, perhaps because he shared Weston’s excitement for the pictorial possibilities of the rhythms and textures in a bunch of bananas.
Wall label from the exhibition
Marion Post Wolcott (American, 1910-1990) Cornshocks and fences on farm near Marion, Virginia 1940 Gelatin silver print Gift of Michael and Sheila Wolcott Cantor Arts Center Collection
Marion Post Wolcott (June 7, 1910 – November 24, 1990) was an American photographer who worked for the Farm Security Administration during the Great Depression documenting poverty, the Jim Crow South, and deprivation. …
Post trained as a teacher, and went to work in a small town in Massachusetts. Here she saw the reality of the Depression and the problems of the poor. When the school closed she went to Europe to study with her sister Helen. Helen was studying with Trude Fleischmann, a Viennese photographer. Marion Post showed Fleischmann some of her photographs and was told to stick to photography.
Career
While in Vienna she saw some of the Nazi attacks on the Jewish population and was horrified. Soon she and her sister had to return to America for safety. She went back to teaching but also continued her photography and became involved in the anti-fascist movement. At the New York Photo League she met Ralph Steiner and Paul Strand who encouraged her. When she found that the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin kept sending her to do “ladies’ stories”, Ralph Steiner took her portfolio to show Roy Stryker, head of the photography division of the Farm Security Administration, and Paul Strand wrote a letter of recommendation. Stryker was impressed by her work and hired her immediately.
Post’s photographs for the FSA often explore the political aspects of poverty and deprivation. They also often find humour in the situations she encountered.
In 1941 she met Leon Oliver Wolcott, deputy director of war relations for the U. S. Department of Agriculture under Franklin Roosevelt. They married, and Marion Post Wolcott continued her assignments for the FSA, but resigned shortly thereafter in February 1942. Wolcott found it difficult to fit in her photography around raising a family and a great deal of traveling and living overseas.
In the 1970s, a renewed interest in Post Wolcott’s images among scholars rekindled her own interest in photography. In 1978, Wolcott mounted her first solo exhibition in California, and by the 1980s the Smithsonian and the Metropolitan Museum of Art began to collect her photographs. The first monograph on Marion Post Wolcott’s work was published in 1983. Wolcott was an advocate for women’s rights; in 1986, Wolcott said: “Women have come a long way, but not far enough. … Speak with your images from your heart and soul” (Women in Photography Conference, Syracuse, N.Y.).
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Pepper No. 35 1930, printed 1952-1955 by Brett Weston Gelatin silver print The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University Cantor Arts Center Collection
Ansel Adams (American, 1902-1984) High Country Crags and Moon, Sunrise, Kings Canyon National Park, California c. 1935, printed 1979 Gelatin silver print The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University Cantor Arts Center Collection
Divine Figures
Peter Stackpole (American, 1913-1997) Overview of the City 1935 Gelatin silver print Gift of Ayleen Ito Lee Cantor Arts Center Collection
In 1935, 25 of Stackpole’s bridge photographs were shown at the San Francisco Museum of Art.
Peter Stackpole (1913-1997) was an American photographer. Along with Alfred Eisenstaedt, Margaret Bourke-White, and Thomas McAvoy, he was one of Life Magazine‘s first staff photographers and remained with the publication until 1960. He won a George Polk Award in 1954 for a photograph taken 100 feet underwater, and taught photography at the Academy of Art University. He also wrote a column in U.S. Camera for fifteen years. He was the son of sculptor Ralph Stackpole.
Peter Stackpole (American, 1913-1997) Mother and Daughter 1934 Gelatin silver print Cantor Arts Center Collection
Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006) Langston Hughes, Chicago, Illinois, 1941 1941, printed 2002-2003 Gelatin silver print The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University Cantor Arts Center Collection
Barbara Morgan (American, 1900-1992) Martha Graham – Ekstasis (Torso) 1935 Gelatin silver print Given in memory of Belva Kibler by Barbara Morgan Cantor Arts Center Collection
Barbara Morgan first attended a performance by Martha Graham’s modern dance company in 1935. The experience so deeply impressed her that she began photographing Graham and her fellow dancers regularly, becoming a recognised expert in the genre within a few years. Morgan typically captured a dancer’s entire body, but for Graham’s solo in Ekstasis, she explained: “When by moving a light which cast a certain shadow I suddenly felt a heroic scale evoked. … The torso expressed it all, and I felt as if I were on a lonely shore between Egypt and archaic Greece discovering a forgotten Venus.”
Wall label from the exhibition
John Gutmann (American born Germany, 1905-1998) Class, Olympic High Diving Champion, Marjorie Gestring 1937 Gelatin silver print The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University Cantor Arts Center Collection
Marjorie Gestring, a future Stanford undergraduate from Los Angeles, won the 1936 Olympic gold medal in women’s springboard diving at age 13. John Gutmann photographed Gestring the following spring at a diving exhibition held as part of the weeklong festivities for the opening of the Golden Gate Bridge. For Gutmann, the “rigid geometry” of her dives struck him as an “absolutely modern machine style.” More broadly, his image of Gestring soaring through the air captures the ethos of a moment when, having just completed the longest suspension bridge in the world, humans seemed capable of any accomplishment.
Wall label from the exhibition
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Nude (Charis) Floating 1939, printed 1952-1955 by Brett Weston Gelatin silver print The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University Cantor Arts Center Collection
Herbert Matter (American born Switzerland, 1907-1984) Untitled 1940 Gelatin silver print Courtesy of Department of Special Collections, Stanford Libraries
Herbert Matter (April 25, 1907 – May 8, 1984) was a Swiss-born American photographer and graphic designer known for his pioneering use of photomontage in commercial art. Matter’s innovative and experimental work helped shape the vocabulary of 20th-century graphic design. …
As a photographer, Matter won acclaim for his purely visual approach. A master technician, he used every method available to achieve his vision of light, form and texture. Manipulation of the negative, retouching, cropping, enlarging and light drawing are some of the techniques he used to achieve the fresh form he sought in his still lifes, landscapes, nudes and portraits. As a filmmaker, he directed two films on his friend Alexander Calder: “Sculptures and Constructions” in 1944 and “Works of Calder” (with music by John Cage) for the Museum of Modern Art in 1950.
Russell Lee (American, 1903–1986) Jim Norris and wife, homesteaders, Pie Town, New Mexico 1940 Dye transfer print Committee for Art Acquisitions Fund Cantor Arts Center Collection
Chao-Chen Yang (Chinese-American, 1910-1969) Chief Owasippe 1939 Gelatin silver print The Michael Donald Brown Collection, made possible by the William Alden Campbell and Martha Campbell Art Acquisition Fund and the Asian American Art Initiative Acquisitions Fund Cantor Arts Center Collection
Chao-Chen Yang came to the United States in 1934 to work at the Chinese Consulate in Chicago. He photographed in his spare time, regularly submitting prints like this one to the national circuit of photography salons. At first glance, this photograph might appear to be a portrait of the man named in the title. In fact, “Owasippe” references a legend about a Potawatomi chief who died waiting for his sons to return from a journey. The story originated in Michigan around the turn of the 20th century; by the 1930s, it had been popularised around the Midwest by the Boy Scouts of America. Yang likely heard the tale in Chicago and photographed a model whose true identity remains unknown. Although the headdress was familiar to settler audiences as a shorthand for “Native,” the one in this photograph references different cultural traditions than those of the Potawatomi. Reality thus became fodder for a fantasy that captured the interest of many viewers in the late 1930s, when Yang’s photograph won multiple awards from camera club juries across the country.
Wall label from the exhibition
Chao-Chen Yang (1910-1969) was a Chinese American photographer based in Seattle, Washington. Born Hangchow, China, Yang received degrees in foreign relations and art education from the University of Hwin-Hwa, Shanghai, and became the director of the Department of Art at the Government Institute in Nanking. Coming to the United States in 1934 to work at the Chinese Consulate in Chicago, he took night courses in art at the Art Institute of Chicago from 1935 to 1939. He was transferred to Seattle as Deputy Consul and founded the Seattle Photographic Society in 1941. He served as director of the Northwest Institute of Photography and concentrated in colour photo printing processes.
Lit dramatically from above, the face of the “chief” emerges stoically from beneath a feathered headdress, the sartorial signifier of “Indianness” lifted by white Americans from the Oceti Sakowin Oyate of the Northern Plains (plate 27 [here above]). Concentrating on some distant point beyond the frame, he squints as if staring into the sun, but the nondescript background suggests that the photograph was likely made in a studio setting. All the better to decontextualize and generalize its subject, because the aim is not to reproduce the specificity of an Indigenous person, but to practice the visual shorthand popularized decades earlier by the photographer Edward S. Curtis and his North American Indian portfolios (fig. 2).1 The stereotyping function of this picture is reinforced by its title: “Chief Owasippe” is not Oceti Sakowin Oyate, but an invented leader of the Potawatomi, whose name continues to adorn the oldest Boy Scout camp in the United States, founded in 1911 in Michigan by a group of businessmen from Chicago.
Yet this reductive representation of the “vanishing Indian” – whose authenticity and natural purity came from his exteriority to the temporal and societal boundaries of modernity – was produced by a recent arrival to the United States with no personal connection to the politics of Indigenous assimilation, domination, and expropriation that underpinned this representational type. Chao-Chen Yang, employee at the Chinese consulate in Chicago, made this picture while enrolled in night classes at the Art Institute of Chicago. The photograph is his attempt to speak a foreign language: not English per se but the dialect of American identity, which is so filled with fantasy and contradiction that it feels right, with the theme of this exhibition in mind, to call it a language of dreams. What fluencies must the photographer possess to move freely within another person’s dream?
By the time Yang took this photograph, American artists’ fetishistic valorization of Indigenous culture had turned away from the Plains tribes from which the chief’s feather headdress originates and toward the southwestern tribes in New Mexico. In the 1920s, writers and artists including D. H. Lawrence, Mabel Dodge Luhan, John Sloan, and Marsden Hartley projected an “authenticity” onto Pueblo visual culture, which justified their appropriation of its subject matter and form to create a native modernist aesthetic.2 Many photographers did the same, including Ansel Adams and Wright Morris (plates 47 and 48). For its time, Yang’s photograph spoke a dated form of Indigenous appropriation, but the numerous exhibition stamps on the version of the print held by his estate reveal that this image was widely received by photography clubs across America – New York, Denver, all the way to Seattle, where Yang would become deputy consul in 1941.
Vexingly, the racist exoticization and flattening of Indigenous identity performed by the photograph also demonstrate its creator’s fluency with the visual language of artistic-minded amateur photographers in America…
Yechen Zhao. “Photographic Fluency (Its Pleasures and Pains): Kyo Koike and Chao-Chen Yang,” in Josie R. Johnson. Reality Makes Them Dream: American Photography, 1929-1941. Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, 2023, p. 55.
Everyday Splendors
Shinsaku Izumi (Japanese-American, 1880-1941) The Shadow c. 1931 Gelatin silver print Dennis and Annie Reed Collection
In The Shadow (c. 1931, above), Izumi plays with the late-afternoon light, picturing a man riding a bike. In the upper-right-hand corner of the image, we see part of the front wheel; the entire rear wheel; the bicycle seat; and the cyclist’s feet, perfectly balanced and planted on pedals, riding past our line of vision. The rest of the image shows the bike traveling past a rectangular manhole cover, on the left side; and, on the right, the front wheel appears prominently as it casts a long shadow, with the individual spokes disappearing with each rotation. Against the brushed surface of the street, hard and soft patterns of gray emerge diagonally across the image…
The Shadow [is] a study of motion, light, and shadow, and, on another level, a metaphysical commentary on “the fugitive, fleeting beauty of present-day life.”
Marion Post Wolcott (American, 1910-1990) One of the Wilkins family making biscuits for dinner on cornshucking day at Mrs. Fred Wilkins’ home near Tallyho, Granville County. North Carolina 1939 Gelatin silver print Gift of Judith Hochberg and Michael Mattis Cantor Arts Center Collection
Sonya Noskowiak (American, 1900-1975) Washing, San Francisco, California 1937 Gelatin silver print San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The United States General Services Administration, formerly Federal Works Agency, Works Projects Administration (WPA), allocation to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Sonya Noskowiak (25 November 1900 – 28 April 1975) was a 20th-century German-American photographer and member of the San Francisco photography collective Group f/64 that included Ansel Adams and Edward Weston. She is considered an important figure in one of the great photographic movements of the twentieth century. Throughout her career, Noskowiak photographed landscapes, still lifes, and portraits. Her most well-known, though unacknowledged, portraits are of the author John Steinbeck. In 1936, Noskowiak was awarded a prize at the annual exhibition of the San Francisco Society of Women Artists. She was also represented in the San Francisco Museum of Art’s “Scenes from San Francisco” exhibit in 1939. Ten years before her death, Noskowiak’s work was included in a WPA exhibition at the Oakland Museum in Oakland, California.
Photography
Noskowiak primarily focused on landscapes and portraits between the 1930s and 1940s. Noskowiak embraced straight photography and used it as a tool to give newer meaning to her photographs. She emphasized the forms, patterns, and textures of her subject, to enrich the documentation of it.
Her earliest works reflect the work of photographers of her period and their thoughts on Pictorialism. In her earliest works, such as City Rooftops, Mountains in Distance (the 1930s), there is a graphic quality to how she abstracted the piece. There is the dark, strong industrial structure that contrasts with the light sky. There are almost no logs seen on the buildings, as if they are they are blurred beyond readability. This is an example of the ‘New Objectivity’ movement, which focused on a harder, documentary approach to photography.
Noskowiak often composed her photographs to intersect her subjects, which gave a more dynamic feel to her photographs. Examples of these are provided by her works Kelp (1930) and Calla Lily (1932). The composition crops the boundaries of the kelp plant and flower and draws the viewer’s eye to the texture of the plants. The kelp is so abstracted that if not for the title it would be unrecognisable. In Calla Lily, her use of chiaroscuro gives a luminous, almost floating feeling to the photograph.
Her photograph Agave (1933) is an intimate viewing of the cactus plant – another example of a composition separating the object from what is made visible shown and emphasising the plant’s beautiful pattern.
Noskowiak utilised the same technique of straight photography in her pictorial portraits and commercial works. The same intimacy shown in Agave can be seen in portrait works such as John Steinbeck (1935) and Barbara (1941). In both, she creates an intimate atmosphere, in which the viewer feels as though they are there interacting with the subjects. Even in her more commercial works, Noskowiak’s style and technique still remained important. In her untitled 1930s photograph, you have a model with a broad-brimmed hat that conceals her face. The composition of the piece relieves viewers from thinking about the photograph as an advertisement. The cropping and position of the model offers closeness, and viewers get the feeling of being in the moment with the model more than simply responding to the photo as an advertisement.
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Cement Worker’s Glove 1936, printed 1952-1955 by Brett Weston Gelatin silver print The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University Cantor Arts Center Collection
Imogen Cunningham (American, 1883-1976) Junk 1934 Gelatin silver print Gift of Florence Alston Swift San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Henry Swift Collection
Seema Weatherwax (Jewish-American, 1905-2006) Yosemite 1940 Gelatin silver print Courtesy of Department of Special Collections, Stanford Libraries
Seema Aissen Weatherwax was a photographer and social activist who was part of the Film and Photo League, worked with Ansel Adams in Yosemite, and shot Woody Guthrie and migrant workers at a California FSA camp. …
Emigrating from Tsarist Russia with her parents in 1913 to escape persecution and the conscription act, Seema Aissen graduated from high school and began studying science courses in Leeds, England. A few years after her father’s death, her mother took the three daughters to Boston to join relatives, and Seema became involved in photography. She moved to Southern California in 1929, lived in Tahiti for a year, and upon returning to Los Angeles joined the Film and Photo League in 1934. Ansel Adams asked her to run his darkroom in Yosemite in 1938. The following year she assisted Adams with the first Camera Workshop in Yosemite. In 1941 Seema met the writer Jack Weatherwax, and together with folk singer Woody Guthrie visited the Shafter Farm Security Administration Camp, managed by noted civil rights advocate Fred Ross. At Shafter she photographed Dust Bowl refugees and their surroundings. The Weatherwaxes moved to Santa Cruz, California in 1984. Following the death of her husband, Seema continued her activism, including working with the NAACP and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, and at the age of 95 organized the first exhibition of her work. She passed away in 2006, two months shy of her 101st birthday.
Text from the Online Archive of California website
Prints made by Seema at Yosemite reveal a photographer whose confidence in her technical abilities allows her to pursue photography in daunting weather conditions7 and to render transcendent beauty through everyday forms, both natural and man-made. Her work from this period focuses not only on postcard-ready vistas but also on the physical structures that locate and organise human experiences within these natural surroundings: like a slush-covered road impressed by tire tracks, or a fawn viewed through a gridded windowpane. 8 In one winter scene from 1940, titled simply Yosemite, tall wooden utility poles with triple cross-arms anchor a dozen snow-coated cables (plate 38 [above]). Set amidst dark tree trunks laced with white boughs, these power lines are resplendent in the snow. They stream down the vertical axis of the scene, indelible reminders of a Yosemite modernised for tourism – reminders that Adams typically left out of his artistic work. Seema’s prints from the 1940s are variously signed “Seema,” “Seema Aissen,” and later “Seema Weatherwax,” reflecting the surname she adopts upon marrying writer and political activist Jack Weatherwax in 1942.
Anna Lee. “Seema (Sophie) Aissen Weatherwax: Photographer,” in Josie R. Johnson. Reality Makes Them Dream: American Photography, 1929-1941. Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, 2023, p. 72.
Living Relics
Wright Morris (American, 1910-1998) Meeting House, Southbury, Connecticut 1940 Gelatin silver print Gift from the Alinder Collection Cantor Arts Center Collection
Wright Morris developed a personal practice of pairing his photographs with texts, publishing the first of many of these combination projects in 1940. The page-long text paired with a variation of this photograph does not describe an observed scene but rather a scene imagined by the narrator, who sits “like a man caught in a spell” seeing “what nobody’d seen before.” By presenting this text with his photograph of an unidentified, weather-worn wooden building, Morris vaguely evokes a moment from the past, but leaves its meaning open to interpretation. As with memories and daydreams, the viewer’s impressions are subjective and imprecise, if not total figments of the imagination.
Wall label from the exhibition
Wright Morris (1910-1998) was a renowned writer and affective photographer. Pairing photographs with his own writing, Morris pioneered a new tradition of “photo-texts” in the 1940s that proved highly influential to future photographers. Devoid of figures, his photographs depict everyday objects and atmosphere. Morris’s poetic images exist in a fictional narrative, but reference documentary style.
Born in Nebraska, Morris attended Pomona College in Claremont, California. After graduation he traveled throughout Europe, purchasing his first camera in Vienna. Morris returned to California in 1934 determined to become a writer, but also continued to photograph. In 1935, he bought a Rolleiflex camera and began photographing extensively. Morris first exhibited his photo-texts in 1940, at the New School for Social Research in New York. This same year the Museum of Modern Art purchased prints for their collection and New Directions published images that would become his first book.
In 1942, Morris received the first of his three Guggenheim Fellowships, funding the completion of The Inhabitants. Published by Scribners, The Inhabitants (1946) documented domestic scenes of the South, Midwest, and Southwest and although visually influential enjoyed little financial success. His second photo-text book, The Home Place (1948) was a visual novel, with short fictional prose accompanying each photograph. Although groundbreaking, it remained unmarketable and after its publication Morris invested in his more successful career as a writer. In 1956, Morris won the National Book Award for his tenth book, the unillustrated A Field of Vision. Morris continued to write and publish while teaching English and creative writing from 1962-1974 at San Francisco State University, San Francisco, California. Morris’s acclaimed novel, Plains Song won American Book Award for Fiction 1981.
The Museum of Modern Art proved supportive of Morris throughout his career, both exhibiting and purchasing his work. MoMA curator John Szarkowski prompted a reconsideration of Wright Morris with the publication of God’s Country and My People (1968), widely considered Morris’s most successful photo-text book. Morris’s exhibition career burgeoned in his later years with many shows including Wright Morris: Origin of a Species, a 1992 retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and following his death, Distinctly American: The Photography of Wright Morris at Stanford’s Cantor Center of Art in 2002.
Anonymous. “Wright Morris,” on the Center for Creative Photography website Nd [Online] Cited 04/07/2023
Wright Morris (American, 1910-1998) House in Winter, near Lincoln, Nebraska 1941, printed 1979-1981 Gelatin silver print The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University Cantor Arts Center Collection
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Wedding Cake House, Kennebunkport, Maine 1941, printed 1952-1955 by Brett Weston Gelatin silver print The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University Cantor Arts Center Collection
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Eroded Plank from Barley Sifter 1931, printed 1952-1955 by Brett Weston Gelatin silver print The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University Cantor Arts Center Collection
Alma Lavenson (American, 1897-1989) Eucalyptus Leaves 1933 Gelatin silver print Gift from the Alinder Collection Cantor Arts Center Collection
The next year Lavenson made her own picture specimen, titled Eucalyptus Leaves, a forking branch against white ground (plate 49 [above]). The leaves are rounded, almost gingko-like, the stems slender and bending, a young plant or newer shoot, likely blue or silver dollar gum. It is hard to make sense of the light, which comes from the left, above, and the right – which is to say that there is an unnatural quality to the photograph. This looks like a studio picture, though Lavenson rarely worked indoors. But there are ways the photograph is in conversation with others made during this period, after she met Weston in 1930. It is a graceful picture, attentive to form and surface. Almost a decade later Lavenson would write, “In all my work – whether shacks or flowers or landscapes – I aim for perfection of texture and fineness of detail.”2 Up close the silver gelatin print has a lithographic quality, in its etched shadows and shining branch, the velvet opacity of the leaves.
Footnote 2. Alma R. Lavenson. “Virginia City: Photographing a ‘Ghost Town,'” in U.S. Camera Magazine 10 (June-July 1940), 66, quoted in Audrey Goodman. A Planetary Lens: The Photo-Poetics of Western Women’s Writing. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2021, p. 75.
Rachel Heise Bolten. “Eucalyptus Leaves,” in Josie R. Johnson. Reality Makes Them Dream: American Photography, 1929-1941. Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, 2023, p. 87.
The World of Tomorrow
Akira Furukawa (American born Japan, 1890-1968) Cargo 1929 Bromoil Dennis and Annie Reed Collection
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Egg Slicer 1930, printed 1952-1955 by Brett Weston Gelatin silver print The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University Cantor Arts Center Collection
Ruth Bernhard (American born Germany, 1905-2006) Kitchen Music 1930-1933 Gelatin silver print Gift from the Alinder Collection Cantor Arts Center Collection
Hiromu Kira (American, 1898-1991) The Thinker c. 1930 Gelatin silver print Dennis and Annie Reed Collection
Margaret Bourke-White (American, 1904-1971) Drilling Rig, The Texas Co. 1937 Gelatin silver print Elizabeth K. Raymond Fund Cantor Arts Center Collection
Lou Stoumen (American, 1917-1991) Times Square in the Rain 1940 Gelatin silver print Gift from the Alinder Collection Cantor Arts Center Collection
Lou Stoumen began photographing Times Square when he first moved to New York City at age 21. Decades later, he still recalled the day he made this photograph, when he rode an elevator to the top of the Times Building, then waited to snap the shutter until the rain “turned the great X of Broadway and Seventh Avenue into silvery rivers.” Stoumen continued photographing this famed stretch of the city for nearly half a century, but he remembered the years around 1940 as special: “Those days Manhattan was the center of the world, and Times Square was its heart.”
Wall label from the exhibition
It was raining in New York. Streets slick as oil, people hurrying past the trams and buses in Times Square with their umbrellas up. September 1940: the penultimate year of peace for America. An ocean away, bombs were falling on London, nightly. But here, for now, people could still think of it as a European war.
Some of the crowds in Lou Stoumen’s photograph Times Square (plate 59 [above]) might have come to catch Gone with the Wind, Wallace Beery’s new western Wyoming, or Busby Berkeley’s latest musical spectacular Strike Up the Band, starring Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney. Times Square: Here are the cinemas and the burning neon lights and the billboards for cigarettes and automobiles and cold, fizzy drinks. All the things you can buy and see during an autumn in New York.
Lou Stoumen was 23 when he made the photograph: The elevator at 1475 Broadway took him up the first 19 stories and then he took the stairs up the final six flights, to the top, and walked out onto the roof ledge.1 From there he pointed his camera out at 46th Street and Broadway capturing the TIMES sign from behind. The building had once been the home of the New York Times, but the newspaper had departed in 1913 and now the sign stood as an announcement of a location, a cry too, an exclamation of the times. …
Margaret Bourke-White photographed Drilling Rig, The Texas Co. (1937) (plate 56) within the oil well’s tower, looking up at the vertiginous pipes that pumped petroleum from beneath the ground. The cutting shadows cast by the latticework of the rig patterns the image with a rigorous geometry, all forms reduced to a series of rectangles and triangles. Humanity has disappeared from view, to be replaced by science and engineering, unchallengeable, mathematically correct.
Bourke-White had begun working for the newly established Life magazine a year earlier, already one of America’s most prominent news photographers.5 Yet she had been fascinated with shooting machinery since the late 1920s, claiming that “the beauty of industry lies in its truth and simplicity; every line is essential therefore beautiful.”6 The drilling rig is undoubtedly elegant; shorn of context, it becomes impossible to establish its scale or relationship to its environment. It stands as an autonomous creation, a pure distillation of form as function. Irresistibly, its towering pipes and metal superstructure, disappearing into the distance at the top of the photograph, recall the skyscrapers of Stoumen’s New York. Their symbiosis is more than coincidence: It is the drilling rig that enables the tower block. This is the stuff that the World of Tomorrow is built upon.
1/ William A. Ewing. Ordinary Miracles: The Photography of Lou Stoumen. Los Angeles: Hand Press, 1981, p. 22. 5/ Stephen Bennett Phillips. Margaret Bourke-White: The Photography of Design, 1927-1936. Washington, DC: Phillips Collection, in association with Rizzoli, New York, 2002, p. 83. 6/ Margaret Bourke-White in 1930, quoted in Theodore M. Brown. Margaret Bourke-White: Photojournalist. Ithaca, NY: Andrew Dickson White Museum of Art, Cornell University, 1972, p. 31.
Altair Brandon-Salmon. “Sign of the Times,” in Josie R. Johnson. Reality Makes Them Dream: American Photography, 1929-1941. Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, 2023, pp. 101-102.
John Gutmann (American born Germany, 1905-1998) “Switch to Dodge,” An American Altar, Detroit 1936 Gelatin silver print The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University Cantor Arts Center Collection
Street Theater
Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) Corrugated Tin Façade 1936 Gelatin silver print Gift of Dr. J. Patrick and Patricia A. Kennedy Cantor Arts Center Collection
Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) Warehouse, Water and Dock Streets 1936 Gelatin silver print Gift of Daniel Mattis Cantor Arts Center Collection
Wright Morris (American, 1910-1998) Powerhouse and Palm Tree, near Lordsburg, New Mexico 1940, printed 1979-1981 Gelatin silver print The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University Cantor Arts Center Collection
Marion Post Wolcott (American, 1910-1990) Center of town. Woodstock, Vermont. “Snowy night” 1940 Gelatin silver print Gift of Michael and Sheila Wolcott Cantor Arts Center Collection
Marion Post Wolcott made this photograph halfway through her three-year appointment as a photographer for the Farm Security Administration. Though most of her work (and that of the FSA overall) was understood at the time as “documentary” or factual in nature, this is one of several photographs by Post that tended to stir the imagination. For instance, Sherwood Anderson reproduced this photograph in his 1940 book on rural America, Home Town, to illustrate his metaphor for New England winters as times of peaceful slumber.
Wall label from the exhibition
Aaron Siskind (American, 1903-1991) Untitled from St. Joseph’s House c. 1938 Gelatin silver print Vincent Bressi Fund Cantor Arts Center Collection
Robert Disraeli (American born Germany, 1905-1988) Sunday – After Church 1933 Gelatin silver print Cantor Arts Center Collection Committee for Art Acquisitions Fund
Wright Morris (American, 1910-1998) Untitled 1940 Gelatin silver print Gift from the Alinder Collection Cantor Arts Center Collection
Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009) New York c. 1940 Gelatin silver print The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University Cantor Arts Center Collection
Helen Levitt avoided the descriptive or symbolic titles favoured by the previous generation of photographers, preferring instead to leave her photographs untethered to specific people or locations within New York. The viewer is thus given free rein to make associations or compose narratives from the streetscapes in each photograph, just as the shoe shiner in this image may have conjured his own daydream from the action unfolding on the street.
Wall label from the exhibition
Surreal Encounters
John Gutmann (American born Germany, 1905-1998) Monster on Broadway, New York City 1936 Gelatin silver print The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University Cantor Arts Center Collection
John Vachon (American, 1914–1975) Girl on Lobster, Washington, D.C. 1938 Gelatin silver print Gift of R. Joseph and Elaine R. Monsen Cantor Arts Center Collection
By the early 1930s, discussions about Surrealism had spread from the art world into the mainstream, even if few Americans subscribed to, or even understood, its main tenets. Not long after, Americans began to use the words “surreal” and “surrealistic” to describe anything bizarre or dreamlike. Each of these three photographs could have fit this unofficial classification; by locating the extraordinary among the ordinary – a monster in the city, a woman riding a lobster, and another woman enacting the text on the magazine in her hands – each image is thoroughly uncanny.
Wall label from the exhibition
John Gutmann (American born Germany, 1905-1998) Monument to the Chicken Center of the World, Petaluma, California 1936 Gelatin silver print The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University Cantor Arts Center Collection
After photographing the town of Petaluma, north of San Francisco, John Gutmann sent dozens of prints to his agent in New York. He explained: “This little town of 9,000 inhabitants and its surrounding ranches is today one of the greatest, if not the greatest poultry center in the world. … Thousands and thousands of little chicken houses, covering the country, the low built hatcheries, the many signs and symbols, trucks fully loaded with poultry or eggs give a very unique character to this district.” Gutmann photographed this roadside monument several times, likely noticing the traces of past vandalism visible in this image.
Wall label from the exhibition
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Hot Coffee, Mojave Desert 1937, printed 1977 by Cole Weston Gelatin silver print Gift from the Alinder Collection Cantor Arts Center Collection
Although Edward Weston regarded his photography with the utmost seriousness, his writings and accounts from friends reveal a spirited sense of humour. This photograph offers a rare example of this playful side. According to Charis Wilson, Weston’s travel companion at the time, they were struck by the absurdity of the hot coffee advertisement in the middle of the desert; the fact that the location bore the name “Siberia” added a second layer of irony.
Wall label from the exhibition
Clarence John Laughlin (American, 1905-1985) The Repulsive Bed 1941 Gelatin silver print Gift from the Alinder Collection Cantor Arts Center Collection
In the summer of 1941, Edward Weston visited Louisiana with Clarence John Laughlin as his guide. Before driving to the same building that Walker Evans had photographed six years earlier, they visited another antebellum plantation house where Laughlin photographed a friend among the ruins. Weston shared Laughlin’s fascination with the ornate architecture, laden with history as it slowly deteriorated back into swampy earth. Yet Laughlin understood these forces as an embodiment of Surrealism. For him, New Orleans was a place “unparalleled in its violence of decay” but also where “the human spirit reached a singular flowering” in the face of this destruction.
Wall label from the exhibition
Dubbed “The Father of American Surrealism,” Clarence John Laughlin (American, 1905-1985) was the most important Southern photographer of his time and a singular figure within the burgeoning American school of photography. Known primarily for his atmospheric depictions of decaying antebellum architecture that proliferated his hometown of New Orleans, Laughlin approached photography with a romantic, experimental eye that diverged heavily from his peers who championed realism and social documentary.
Referring to his own fraught relationships with women, Laughlin described this ethereal photograph of a woman lounging atop a collapsed, tattered bed in a decaying house as an “Image of those who endure marriage, without love, because of convention. [The] marriage bed becomes repulsive, and part of it turns into a monster head.” The veil across the woman’s face gives her a haunting look, as if she is fading away along with the house around her. The cracks in the wall reinforce the idea of a fractured, failing marriage, while the shadows envelop her in darkness.
Text from the High Museum of Art website
Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) Breakfast Room at Belle Grove Plantation, White Chapel, Louisiana 1935, printed 1974 Gelatin silver print Gift of Dr. J. Patrick and Patricia A. Kennedy Cantor Arts Center Collection
Walker Evans admired the photography of Eugène Atget (1857-1927), a French photographer whose images of Paris caught the interest of a new generation of photographers shortly before his death. Though neither photographer self-affiliated with Surrealism, Evans recognised that “in some of his work [Atget] places himself in a position to be pounced upon by the most orthodox of surrealists.” Evans occasionally emulated Atget’s style, as in this image of an empty Louisiana plantation house, leading some American critics to describe Evans’s photography in a manner befitting a Surrealist. One 1938 review stated, “In some miraculous way [Evans’s] objects or persons acquire a super-reality, the implications of which echo across the years to startle and haunt, to jolt and to enchant.”
Wall label from the exhibition
Nathan Lerner (American, 1913-1997) Uncommon Man 1936, printed 1983 From Nathan Lerner – Fifteen Photographs: 1935-1978 Gelatin silver print Gift of the Mattis Family Cantor Arts Center Collection
Frederick Sommer (American, 1905-1999) Jack Rabbit 1939 Gelatin silver print Gift of Lisa and John Pritzker San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Sommer’s Jack Rabbit (1939) was one of the first 100 negatives the artist made with his new 8 x 10 inch view camera recommended by his friend Edward Weston.1 Living in the arid climate of Arizona to protect his lungs against the recurrence of tuberculosis, the casualties of the desert – rabbits, horses, coyotes – became some of Sommer’s signature photographic subjects.2 Weston, too, had a penchant for photographing dead things. Weston’s preference was for the corpses of birds, often those of shore birds near his coastal California home.3 Photo historian Robin Kelsey has made an excellent comparison of the two artists’ “rival” treatments of deceased animals, grounded in their diametrically opposed aesthetic concerns. As in Jack Rabbit, Sommer used evenly dispersed light to create a visual field that privileged no one thing above the rest,4 reflecting both an aesthetic and a philosophical orientation concerned with the essential oneness of the world.5 On the other hand, Weston treated his dead birds in the same manner as his nudes or his peppers, expressing what he termed “the universality of basic form.”6 Using light to emphatically trace the contours of the birds’ forms, Weston visually separated them from their backgrounds and transformed them into abstract objects. Aligned with their concerns, the two artists typically chose different moments of death and decay to capture: For Sommer it was desiccated or decaying bodies and for Weston it was stripped bones or newly deceased bodies.
Although Weston’s Dead Man, Colorado Desert (1937) similarly focuses on the clearly defined form of a newly deceased body,7 there are crucial distinctions in its composition. Whereas Weston’s birds are photographed from above, aiding in their abstraction, the dead man is photographed from an angle to the side, which emphasizes both his human features and the bramble-filled space that he occupies (plate 83 [below]). His waist, legs, and one arm continue outside the frame to the top right. This makes Dead Man fundamentally different from Weston’s birds, because the man exists not as an abstract form, but as a body in space, a space that we can imagine Weston and his wife and collaborator Charis Wilson sharing and a space that we can imagine inhabiting ourselves.
Maggie Dethloff. “Violable Edges: Frederick Sommer’s and Edward Weston’s Photographs of Death in the Desert,” in Josie R. Johnson. Reality Makes Them Dream: American Photography, 1929-1941. Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, 2023, p. 131.
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Dead Vulture, Mojave Desert 1937
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Dead Man, Colorado Desert 1937 Gelatin silver print The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University Cantor Arts Center Collection
While traveling through the Colorado Desert on a photography excursion for his Guggenheim Fellowship, Edward Weston came across the corpse of a recently deceased man. He had apparently become ill and stranded while traversing the harsh landscape. Despite the unexpected, and certainly disturbing, nature of this encounter, Weston seamlessly fit the subject into his photography practice. He made two photographs, one of which Life magazine published alongside a short narrative by Weston titled “Desert Tragedy.” In the text Weston explained: “He must have died that day. But whatever aid he got came too late, hunger and privation had wasted his body and the merciless sun had dried him up. But he was quite beautiful in death.”
Wall label from the exhibition
Cantor Arts Center 328 Lomita Drive at Museum Way Stanford, CA Phone: 650-723-4177
Curator: Karen Haas, Lane Senior Curator of Photographs at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Participating artists: Ansel Adams, 1902-1984; Matthew Brandt, b. 1982; Lois Conner, b. 1951; Binh Danh, b. 1977; Mitch Epstein, b. 1952; Lucas Foglia, b. 1983; Sharon Harper, b. 1966; Frank Jay Haynes, 1853-1921; CJ Heyliger, b. 1984; John K. Hillers, 1843-1925; Mark Klett, b. 1952; Chris McCaw, b. 1971; Laura McPhee, b. 1958; Arno Rafael Minkkinen, b. 1945; Richard Misrach, b. 1949; Abelardo Morell, b. 1948; Eadweard Muybridge, 1830-1904; Catherine Opie, b. 1961; Trevor Paglen, b. 1974; Meghann Riepenhoff, b. 1979; Mark Ruwedel, b. 1954; Victoria Sambunaris, b. 1964; Bryan Schutmaat, b. 1983; David Benjamin Sherry, b. 1981; John Payson Soule, 1827-1904; Stephen Tourlentes, b. 1959; Adam Clark Vroman, 1856-1916; Carleton E. Watkins, 1829-1916; Will Wilson, b. 1969; Byron Wolfe, b. 1967.
Please note: This posting may contain the names or images of people who are now deceased. Some Indigenous communities may be distressed by seeing the name or image of a community member who has passed away.
Ansel Adams made this remarkably abstract image of ancient salt beds during the first year of his national parks project. Barely visible in the distance is a delicate string of telephone poles and wires, a slightly jarring intervention into an otherwise empty space. Adams’ inclusion of the poles might be explained in part by the fact that Wendover was the meeting point for the first telephone line between New York and San Francisco. This achievement was celebrated at the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition – a fair that the young Adams attended nearly every day, after his father gave him a season pass with instructions to visit daily, in place of formal schooling.
Exhibition label text
Man and imagination
Most could not fail to know the superb landscape work of Ansel Adams, that master of the large format camera used to produce stunning black and white silver gelatin photographs of great formal beauty and technical prowess, the rich detail and tonal range of his landscape photographs used “in service of what he called the “spiritual-emotional” aspects of parks and wilderness, conveying their restorative power to as wide an audience as possible.” His photographs are so well known that they became icons and he a legend in his own lifetime. But all is not as effortless in his beautiful modernist photographs as they seem.
Early landscape photographs from his 1927 portfolio Parmelian Prints of the High Sierras (below) show Adams’ indebtedness to pictorialist and modernist photography. Indeed these elemental and muscular photographs show a dramatic use of dark and light hues in the near / far construction of the picture frame, the warm toned prints adding to their chthonic, almost underground and dystopian nature. Dark and brooding, dystopian and abstract. Those dark tones have a warmth that is contradictory – a lack of light: yet warmth! So there is a fiction at their heart… and that is why their dark brooding never seems a threat for they were based on a dream-world that couldn’t exist. What a difference to the later straight-ahead aesthetic of the artist and Group f64 (“a group founded by Adams of seven 20th-century San Francisco Bay Area photographers who shared a common photographic style characterised by sharply focused and carefully framed images seen through a particularly Western viewpoint.” ~ Wikipedia).
Other mutations and obfuscations are hidden from view “in order” that the artist achieve his desired transcendence of the American landscape. Adams cropped out attendant carparks and people viewing the scene even as other artists such as Seema Weatherwax incorporated them into their work (in the 1940s) as “indelible reminders of a Yosemite modernised for tourism – reminders that Adams typically left out of his artistic work.” Adams even manipulated the negative where necessary, for example removing a road that inconveniently ran through the centre of a canyon that destroyed his imaginative (and Western) vision of the pristine Sierra Nevada. So much for his “absolute realism” and honest simplicity in service of a maximum emotional statement.
Adam’s photographs of Indigenous Americans are also pictures seen from a particularly Western viewpoint, that of the fetishistic valorisation of Indigenous culture. “In the 1920s, writers and artists including D. H. Lawrence, Mabel Dodge Luhan, John Sloan, and Marsden Hartley projected an “authenticity” onto Pueblo visual culture, which justified their appropriation of its subject matter and form to create a native modernist aesthetic. Many photographers did the same, including Ansel Adams and Wright Morris…”1
When Adams first visited the American Southwest in 1927 to publish a book about Taos Pueblo “that aimed to communicate the threat tourism in the region posed to the artistic and religious traditions of Indigenous people [he] made images for the book only after receiving permission from the Taos Pueblo council, to whom he paid a fee and gifted a copy of the finished publication. He also photographed some Indian cultural observances that had become popular attractions among tourists. Adams’s own images of Native dancers have a complex legacy: although he was one of the non-Native onlookers, he carefully framed his views to leave out evidence of the gathered crowds.” (Exhibition wall text) As Joseph Aguilar (San Ildefonso Pueblo) notes in a further exhibition label text, “At the time, Pueblo people and other Native Americans in the Southwest were trying to navigate the outsiders who were interested in their culture. Some of them did not quite understand the circumstances surrounding the curiosity, while others did understand the extractive nature, and they had to weigh that in terms of their other needs. I get questions from members of my community about why they did not chase the archaeologists and photographers out, and I often respond it is because of the uneven power relations between Indigenous and non-Native people at the time.” This influx of artists and photographers did lead to the racist exoticisation and flattening of Indigenous identity performed by the photograph. What is heartening to see in this exhibition is that the curators have placed Adams’ Indigenous American portraits and landscapes in both a historical and contemporary setting, proffering alternative points of view from within the communities being photographed.
An extractive, imaginative and emotional Western “nature” then, is at the heart of Adam’s work and his “marketing the view” – whether that be national parks, empty bays before the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge, or Native Americans. While he was a tireless champion of photography as a legitimate form of fine art and an unremitting activist for conservation and wilderness preservation, Adams’ photographs are a creation of a myth of his own of a pristine wilderness which had never co-existed with man. To our benefit, Adams had his ideals and he let them manifest themselves in his imagination.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ Yechen Zhao. “Photographic Fluency (Its Pleasures and Pains): Kyo Koike and Chao-Chen Yang,” in Josie R. Johnson. Reality Makes Them Dream: American Photography, 1929-1941. Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, 2023, p. 55.
Many thankx to the de Young museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“Only pictures that look as if they had been made easily can convincingly suggest that beauty is commonplace.”
Robert Adams. Beauty in Photography. New York: Aperture, 1996, p. 28.
A self-described “California photographer,” Ansel Adams had his first museum exhibition at the de Young in 1932. In a San Francisco homecoming, more than 100 of his most iconic works are on view in Ansel Adams in Our Time alongside those of 23 contemporary artists who share his deep concern for the environment, Catherine Opie, Richard Misrach, Trevor Paglen, and Binh Danh among them. An unremitting activist for conservation and wilderness preservation in the spirit of his 19th-century predecessors, Adams is today beloved for his lush gelatin silver prints of the national parks. Organised by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in partnership with the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Ansel Adams in Our Time is enhanced at the de Young by the addition of works from the Museums’ permanent collection and new interpretive framing that explores Adams’ close connection to the Bay Area and the state of California more broadly.
Installation views of the exhibition Ansel Adams in Our Time at the de Young museum, San Francisco Images courtesy of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco Photos: Gary Sexton
Ansel Adams in Our Time brings iconic artist home to San Francisco
Beloved for his lush gelatin silver photographs of the national parks, Ansel Adams is a giant of 20th-century photography whose images have become icons of the American wilderness. Opening April 8 at the de Young, Ansel Adams in Our Time brings more than 100 works from this self-described “California photographer” to the site of his very first museum exhibition in 1932, placing him in dialogue with 23 contemporary artists who are engaging anew with the landscapes and environmental issues that inspired Adams. The exhibition is organised by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in partnership with the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, and enhanced at the de Young by the addition of works from the permanent collection and new interpretive framing exploring Adams’ close connection to his hometown of San Francisco.
“Ansel Adams’ photography is renowned for its formal beauty and technical prowess, but his work is equally one of advocacy,” remarked Thomas P. Campbell, Director and CEO of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. “Adams was a tireless conservationist and wilderness preservationist who fully understood the power of images to sway public opinion. Ansel Adams in Our Time is exceptional in underscoring his brilliant legacy and the critical role that his works and others’ before him have played in safeguarding our national parks and other public lands.”
Instrumental to Adams’ development as a photographer was Yosemite, one of the oldest national parks in the country, which he visited regularly from the age of 14 with his Eastman Kodak Brownie camera in tow. Ansel Adams in Our Time examines the critical role that photography has played in the history of the national parks, with Adams following in the footsteps of predecessors such as Carleton Watkins, whose efforts first secured Yosemite as protected land. A longtime member of the Sierra Club, Adams would go on to perfect the rich detail and tonal range of his landscapes in service of what he called the “spiritual-emotional” aspects of parks and wilderness, conveying their restorative power to as wide an audience as possible. Presenting President Gerald Ford with a print of Yosemite: Clearing Winter Storm (c. 1937) in 1975, Adams urged, “Now, Mr. President, every time you look at this picture, I want you to remember your obligation to the national parks.”
At the de Young, the exhibition delves further into the artist’s Bay Area connections with new interpretive framing and works from the Fine Arts Museums’ permanent collection. Adams became a truly modernist photographer in San Francisco in the 1920s and 1930s, experimenting with the large-format camera that would yield the maximum depth of field and razor-sharp detail that are today considered his signature. He was a tireless champion of photography as a legitimate form of fine art. From his pristine Parmelian Prints of the High Sierras (1927), a landmark work in 20th-century photography, to images of oil derricks, ghost towns, drought conditions, and the sand dunes of Death Valley, Ansel Adams in Our Time spans the scope of the artist’s nearly seven-decade career and efforts to establish both environmental stewardship as a pillar of civic life and the photographic medium as a widely accepted art form.
The works of 23 contemporary artists, including Catherine Opie, Abelardo Morell, Binh Danh, Trevor Paglen, Mitch Epstein, and Victoria Sambunaris, among others, provide a new lens for Adams, drawing on his legacy of art as environmental activism to confront issues such as drought and fire, mining and energy, economic booms and busts, protected places and urban sprawl. The exhibition’s five thematic sections – Capturing the View, Marketing the View, San Francisco: Becoming a Modernist, Adams in the American Southwest, and Picturing the National Parks – open up new conversations around Adams’s work, looking both forward and backward in time to present a richer picture of the relationship between photography, art, environmentalism, and conceptions of landscape.
“Ansel Adams had close ties to San Francisco, and the California landscape, and the de Young museum was among the first institutions to celebrate his work when he was a rising artist,” noted Lauren Palmor, Associate Curator of American Art, who organised Ansel Adams in Our Time at the Fine Arts Museums. “His reverence for our region’s natural beauty drew him to photograph the natural diversity that can be found throughout the Bay Area over the course of his lifetime. Adams was also a tireless advocate for the environment, and the Bay Area shares that spirit as a global center of innovation in conservation and wilderness preservation today.”
Exhibition organisation
Ansel Adams in Our Time was organised by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in partnership with the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. The exhibition was curated by Karen Haas, Lane Senior Curator of Photographs at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The Presenting Sponsor is the Clare C. and Jay D. McEvoy Endowment Fund. Lead Sponsors are The Lisa and Douglas Goldman Fund and the San Francisco Auxiliary of the Fine Arts Museums. Major Support is provided by the Byers Family and The Herbst Foundation, Inc. Significant Support is provided by The Ansel Adams Gallery. Generous Support is provided by David A. Wollenberg and Merrill Private Wealth Management.
About Ansel Adams
Ansel Easton Adams (1902-1984) made indelible images of the American landscape and successfully advocated for the environment and the preservation of natural resources. Adams was born in San Francisco in 1902, and he made his first trip to Yosemite when he was just 14 years old. Transfixed by the valley’s beauty, he took his first photographs of Yosemite’s waterfalls and rock formations. Adams went on to develop his photographic practice in parallel with his environmentalist outlook.
The de Young museum hosted several important early Adams exhibitions in the 1930s, celebrating the achievements of this local photographer whose star was rapidly rising nationally: Photographs by Ansel Easton Adams (1932); the landmark Group f.64 exhibition (1932-1933), which also featured the work of Imogen Cunningham, John Paul Edwards, Preston Holder, Consuelo Kanaga, Alma Lavenson, Sonya Noskowiak, Henry Swift, Willard Ames Van Dyke, Brett Weston, and Edward Weston; and Yosemite in Four Seasons: Photographs by Ansel Adams (1935).
Adams shaped the field for other practicing photographers on both coasts, and his impact is immeasurable. In addition to teaching, he authored a celebrated series of books on photographic techniques that distilled his expertise for generations of budding photographers. Parallel to his achievements in photography, Adams dedicated himself to environmental advocacy for over seven decades. In 1980, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, for his artistic and environmental efforts.
These photographs were issued together as a portfolio by San Francisco’s Grabhorn Press in 1927. Although photographic print portfolios would become common later in the century, Parmelian Prints of the High Sierras represents one of the first attempts to market photographs in this way. Looking back on this moment in his career, a time when he was struggling to make a living and gain recognition as an artist, Ansel Adams was embarrassed by the made-up term “Parmelian” in the title. His publisher thought it was necessary because photographs were not yet considered worthy of investment by fine art collectors. Later, Adams would use the same negative of Half Dome from this series to produce the larger version of Monolith – The Face of Half Dome [below] that appears at the start of this exhibition.
This majestic view of Half Dome is one of Ansel Adams’ most important and groundbreaking early photographs. Shot on a hike in the spring of 1927, it represents his first conscious “visualisation” – an image fully anticipated before he tripped the shutter, and one that for Adams captured the emotional impact of the scene. He made this enlarged print years later, but the dramatic sky and the sharp contrast between the brilliant white snow and dark ridges in the granite were recorded in 1927 when Adams took the photograph, using a deep red filter and a long exposure (made possible by the windless conditions that day).
Spending time in the wilderness was a spiritual experience that Ansel Adams marvelled at his entire life. Describing one such transcendent moment, he wrote: “It was one of those mornings when the sunlight is burnished with a keen wind and long feathers of clouds move in a lofty sky. … I was suddenly arrested … by an exceedingly pointed awareness of the light. The moment I paused, the full impact of the mood was upon me; I saw more clearly than I have ever seen before or since the minute detail of the grasses, the clusters of sand shifting in the wind, the small flotsam of the forest, the motion of the high clouds streaming above the peaks.”
Ansel Adams made this photograph near Fish Camp, south of Yosemite National Park, in an area where forest fires raged some years earlier. In his close-up view, he juxtaposes the tender shoots of new grass and the charred surface of a burned stump. This is an example of what Adams liked to call the “microscopic revelation of the lens,” which he saw as the ideal of his “straight,” sharp-focus approach to photography.
On a visit to Manzanar, a Japanese internment camp, in 1944, Ansel Adams drove to the field of boulders that extends to the base of Mount Williamson. “There was a glorious storm going on in the mountains,” he wrote. “I set up my camera on the rooftop platform of my car, [which] enabled me to get a good view over the boulders to the base of the range.” The resulting photograph captures a storm passing over the distant mountain range – an awe-inspiring image that confounds all sense of scale and perspective.
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Ansel Adams (American, 1902-1984) Birds on Wire, Evening 1943, printed 1984 Gelatin silver print This print from the Library of Congress
A few months after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941, people of Japanese ancestry living on the West Coast (two-thirds of whom were American citizens) were quickly rounded up, separated from homes, possessions, and businesses, and quietly relocated to remote incarceration camps.
A total of 11,070 Japanese Americans were processed through Manzanar War Relocation Center in Inyo County, California. Ansel Adams was invited to photograph Manzanar by Ralph Merritt, a Sierra Club friend who had recently been appointed director of the isolated detention center. Although he was not allowed to photograph the center’s barbed wire or guns, Adams did see himself as a kind of conscientious objector for his work documenting the site and the people forced to live there.
Adams was personally moved by the treatment of Japanese Americans in World War II when an older Japanese man who worked for his family for many years was transferred to a detention center. When Adams first went to Manzanar in 1943, he was “profoundly affected” by photographing the camp and meeting its incarcerated inhabitants. He later presented his Manzanar images in an exhibition and book entitled Born Free and Equal. Manzanar means “apple orchard” in Spanish, but agriculture in the area had suffered since the diversion of water to Los Angeles began in 1913. Nonetheless, the internees were responsible for raising much of their own food in the fields near the camp.
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Ansel Adams (American, 1902-1984) Potato Field, North Farm, Manzanar 1943, printed 1984 Gelatin silver print This print from the Library of Congress
Ansel Adams shot this image of Mount McKinley in Denali National Park at 1:30 in the morning, just two hours after the setting of the midsummer sun. He described, “As the sun rose, the clouds lifted, and the mountain glowed an incredible shade of pink. Laid out in front of Mount McKinley, Wonder Lake was pearlescent against the dark embracing arms of the shoreline. I made what I visualised as an inevitable image. The scale of this great mountain is hard to believe – the camera and I were thirty miles from McKinley’s base.”
In 1919, at the age of seventeen, Ansel Adams joined the Sierra Club. The organisation’s original focus on environmental preservation, and its initial failure to acknowledge Indigenous people and their homelands, helped lay the groundwork for the twentieth-century environmentalism he would come to represent. Adams participated in the club’s annual High Trips, serving as photographer and assistant manager from 1930 through 1936. He produced albums of photographs from these treks, inviting members to order contact prints or, for a higher fee, enlargements in “plain or soft-focus.” His ingenuity ultimately lad to his 1927 portfolio, Parmesan Prints of the High Sierras, on view in this gallery – one of the earliest experiments in custom printing, sequencing, and distributing fine photographs.
Adams was not the first to market view of the American West. In the nineteenth century, images of western landscapes were mass-produced and widely distributed, catering to a burgeoning tourist market. Today, contemporary artists are using photography to highlight the dynamic nature of landscapes and to document humans’ impact on the environment. Sometimes these works take the form of extended series or grids, as though invoking earlier methods of mass-distributing western views.
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Carleton E. Watkins (American, 1829-1916) The Golden Gate from Telegraph Hill, San Francisco 1868 Albumen silver print from wet-collodion-on-glass negative Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco Museum purchase Prints and Drawings Art Trust Fund
Installation views of the exhibition Ansel Adams in Our Time at the de Young museum, San Francisco showing at centre Adams’ The Golden Gate Before the Bridge(1932, below) Images courtesy of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco Photos: Gary Sexton
San Francisco: Becoming a Modernist
San Francisco is where Ansel Adams became a modernist photographer. He grew up in present-day Sea Cliff, where his family home overlooked the Presidio to the Marin Headlands beyond. These views made a lasting impact on his photographs – he later described constantly returning to the elements of nature that surrounded him in his childhood. Adams’ first exhibition, featuring photographs he took on Sierra Club hikes, was held at the club’s headquarters on Montgomery Street in 1928. Convinced that he could make a living as a photographer, he acquired a large-format camera and became an advocate of “straight” (unmanipulated) photography, leaving behind the soft-focus aesthetic of his earlier work. He experimented with abstraction and extreme close-ups, capturing texture and clarity of detail. He recorded cloud-filled skies and depicted landscapes as seemingly infinite spaces devoid of people. During the Great Depression, Adams began photographing a wider range of subjects, including the challenging reality of urban life in San Francisco and the region’s changing landscape. The latter included the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge (1937), which radically transformed the views of San Francisco Bay that had captivated Adams in his youth.
Golden Gate Bridge
Ansel Adams made this photograph [below] near his family home the year before construction began on the Golden Gate Bridge. He later recalled, “One beautiful storm-clearing morning, I looked out the window of our San Francisco home and saw magnificent clouds rolling from the north over the Golden Gate. I grabbed the 8-by-10 equipment and drove to the end of 32nd Avenue, at the edge of Sea Cliff. I dashed along the old Cliff house railroad bed for a short distance, then down to the crest of a promontory. From there grand view of the Golden Gate commanded me to set up the heavy tripod, attach the camera and lens, and focus on the wonderful evolving landscape of clouds.”
Richard Misrach (American, b. 1949) Golden Gate Bridge, 10.31.98, 5:18 pm 1998, printed 2016 Pigment prints Courtesy of Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
In 1997, Richard Misrach began what would become a three-year project photographing the Golden Gate Bridge from his porch in the Berkeley Hills. Placing his large-format 8-by-10-inch camera in the same position on each occasion, Misrach recorded hundreds of views of the distant span, at various times of day and in every season, set off against the constantly changing sky. The series was reissued in 2012 to mark the occasion of the seventy-fifth anniversary of the bridge’s landmark opening.
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Richard Misrach (American, b. 1949) Golden Gate Bridge, 12.19.99, 7:31 am 1999, printed 2020 Pigment prints Courtesy of Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
Picturing National Parks
Photography played a critical role in the establishment of the national parks. The dramatic views made by Carleton Watkins and other nineteenth-century photographers ultimately helped convince government officials to protect Yosemite and Yellowstone from private development. However, the formation of the national parks further dispossessed Indigenous people of their ancestral lands, overlooking their ongoing stewardship of the land and restricting their access to it.
Although Ansel Adams claimed he never intentionally made a creative photograph that related directly to an environmental issue, he was aware of an image’s power to sway opinions on conservation. Adams’ photographs of King’s River Canyon [below] helped the Sierra Club successfully campaign to establish the site as a national park. Over the following years, Adams photographed national parks from Alaska to Texas, Hawaii to Maine, creating images that conveyed the transformative power of the parks to a wide audience.
Many contemporary artists working in the national parks acknowledge, as Adams did, the efforts of the photographers who came before them. But the complicated legacies – and uncertain futures – of these protected lands have led some photographers to take more personal and political approaches to the work they are making in these places.
Ansel Adams made this photograph while on a Sierra Club outing in Kings River Canyon. Three years later, he represented the club at a congressional hearing in Washington, DC. Armed with photographs like this one, he argued successfully for the transfer of Kings River Canyon from the Forest Service to the National Park Service. When it became a national park in 1940, the director of the Park Service wrote to Adams, saying, “I realise that a silent but most effective voice in the campaign was your book Sierra Nevada – John Muir Trail. As long as that book is in existence, it will go on justifying the park.”
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Installation view of the exhibition Ansel Adams in Our Time at the de Young museum, San Francisco showing at left, Clearing Winter Storm, Yosemite National Park (about 1937, below); at centre, Rain, Yosemite Valley, California (c. 1940, below); and at right, Moon and Half Dome, Yosemite National Park (1960, below) Images courtesy of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco Photos: Gary Sexton
Ansel Adams described photographs like Monolith and Clearing Winter Storm as his “Mona Lisas”: images so popular with the public that they were printed countless times over the course of his long career. He took this remarkable photograph from Yosemite’s Inspiration Point soon after a sudden rainstorm turned to snow and then, just as swiftly, began to clear. It records an expansive valley view that Adams had attempted on several previous occasions but never been successful in rendering in such shimmering detail. Trained as a pianist, Ansel Adams often compared the photographic negative to a musical score and described each print from a particular negative as an individual performance of that score.
Like Clearing Winter Storm [above], this photograph features what the nineteenth-century photographer Carleton E. Watkins described as “the best general view” of Yosemite Valley, with the massive granite outcropping of El Capitan on the left and the silvery stream of Bridalveil Fall visible on the right. Yet here Yosemite’s famous features are shrouded in mist, and the pine tree in the foreground, its needles glistening with rain, stands in place of the distant peaks.
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Installation view of the exhibition Ansel Adams in Our Time at the de Young museum, San Francisco showing at left, Abelardo Morell’s Tent-Camera Image on Ground: View of Mount Moran and the Snake River from Oxbow Bend, Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming (2011, below); and at centre Adams’ The Tetons and Snake River, Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming(1942, below) Images courtesy of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco Photos: Gary Sexton
Ansel Adams began writing how-to books on photography in the mid-1930s, but he is best known for his series of technical books, including Camera and Lens, The Negative, The Print, and Natural Light Photography. In one of his later books, he uses an image of a Yellowstone geyser as an example of a particularly challenging subject that defies light-meter readings and tests a photographer’s ability to “visualise” in advance something so inherently fleeting and unpredictable. “It is difficult to conceive of a substance more impressively brilliant than the spurting plumes of white waters in sunlight against a deep blue sky,” he wrote.
Lyell Fork was one of Ansel Adams’ favourite locations from his earliest years as a photographer in Yosemite. It was a place he also loved introducing to others—he took Georgia O’Keeffe and photography collector David McAlpin there when they hiked into the backcountry in 1938. Reflected in the placid water are several distant peaks, the most prominent of which was named Mount Ansel Adams after the photographer’s death in 1984.
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The Other Side of the Mountain
Ansel Adams made his reputation mainly through images of beautiful, seemingly unspoiled nature. Less well known are the images he produced in California’s Death Valley and Owens Valley [below], southeast of Yosemite. Yet he was drawn to these more forbidding landscapes multiple times – occasionally lured by a book or magazine project but often of his own volition.
Here, on the dry side of the Sierra Nevada, Adams and his work took a dramatic detour. The photographer Edward Weston introduced Adams to Death Valley, where he photographed sand dunes, salt flats, and sandstone canyons. Owens Valley was once farmland, but its residents struggled after their water supply was diverted to the growing city of Los Angeles. In 1943, Adams first traveled to nearby Manzanar, where he photographed Japanese Americans forcibly relocated to internment camps shortly after the US entered World War II. The resulting series explores the tension between the area’s open spaces and the physical restrictions imposed upon internees.
Contemporary photographers continue to find compelling subjects in these remote places. Their images explore the raw beauty of the terrain and the sometimes unsettling ways it is used today – including as the site of maximum-security prisons and clandestine military projects carried out under wide skies.
Installation view of the exhibition Ansel Adams in Our Time at the de Young museum, San Francisco showing at left, Salt Flats Near Wendover, Utah (1953, above); at second left, Self‑Portrait, Monument Valley, Utah (1958, below); at second left Trees Near Washburn Point, Illiloutte Ridge, Yosemite Valley (c. 1945, below); and at bottom right, Burned Trees, Owens Valley, California(1936, above) Image courtesy of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco Photo: Gary Sexton
This unusual self-portrait depicts Ansel Adams, light meter in hand, standing next to his large-format camera and tripod. He made this image of his shadow falling across a fissured rock face while in Monument Valley to shoot a Colorama for display in New York’s Grand Central Station. Sponsored by Eastman Kodak, Coloramas were panoramic, backlit transparencies, almost eighteen feet high and sixty feet long, whose sweeping scale and luminous colour were the antithesis of this intimate image that Adams shot while waiting for the weather to cooperate.
This stunning double portrait records a pair of massive tree trunks following a fire. The Illilouette Ridge is an area of Yosemite National Park that lies between Glacier Point and the valley floor. In recent decades, the Illilouette Creek basin has been the focus of an environmental study to measure the potential benefit of managing fires with minimal suppression and fewer controlled burns on the overall health and diversity of forests.
Ansel Adams made this spectacular image of two of his favourite subjects – Half Dome and the moon – on an autumn afternoon in 1960. He witnessed a brilliant gibbous moon rising to the left fo the vertical rock face and, using a long lens and orange filter, carefully framed what would become one of his most popular late works. “As soon as I saw the moon coming up by Half Dome, I had visualised the image,” Adams wrote.
In the 1950s and 1960s, Ansel Adams often recorded urban subjects like this view looking toward San Bruno Mountain, just south of San Francisco. Here Adams documents one of the many tract housing developments built during this period, as it snakes across the steep hillsides surrounding the rapidly growing city.
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Carleton E. Watkins (American, 1829-1916) Mount Starr King and Glacier Point, Yosemite, No. 69 1865-1866 Mammoth albumen print from wet collodion negative Ernest Wadsworth Longfellow Fund Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Carleton E. Watkins took this photograph from the floor of Yosemite Valley while working for the California State Geological Survey in the mid-1860s. It is a more intimate and less sweeping view than the photograph Watkins self-described as the “best general view of Yosemite” (below), which presents the most recognisable features of the landscape.
Mount Starr King, the distant peak at centre, was named for Thomas Starr King, the Unitarian minister from Boston whose life and ministry were powerfully influenced by his experiences in the Yosemite wilderness. Ansel Adams later shared his “disregard for the naming of things and [his skepticism] of those non-professionals who go through the wilderness classifying and labelling everything in sight.”
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Carleton E. Watkins (American, 1829-1916) Yosemite from the Best General View No. 2 1866
Installation view of the exhibition Ansel Adams in Our Time at the de Young museum, San Francisco showing at left, Adams’ The Golden Gate Before the Bridge (1932, above); and at second right, Eadweard J. Muybridge’s Valley of the Yosemite from Union Point, No. 33 (1872, below) Image courtesy of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco Photo: Gary Sexton
Eadweard J. Muybridge (American, 1830-1904) Valley of the Yosemite from Union Point, No. 33 1872 Albumen print Gift of Charles T. and Alma A. Isaacs Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Eadweard Muybridge first came to Yosemite in the 1860s. Capitalising on the growing popularity of wilderness landscape subjects, he stayed for six months, making large-format albumen prints and stereo views. Hoping to compete with Carleton E. Watkins’s earlier grand vistas, he returned in 1872 with a mammoth-plate camera. Often, Muybridge shot his atmospheric images from unusual perspectives, with sharp contrasts between foreground and background, light and shadow. This is evident in this photograph taken from Union Point, which provided a closer view of the valley and a greater sense of three-dimensional space than the better-known Glacier Point above.
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Frank Jay Haynes (American, 1853–1921) Grand Canyon of Yellowstone and Falls About 1887 Albumen print Sophie M. Friedman Fund Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Frank Jay Haynes was one of the second generation of photographers to be employed by the railroads and government surveys in the American West in the late nineteenth century. In 1884, he was named official photographer and concessionaire of Yellowstone to serve the growing numbers of tourists coming to visit the first national park. Yellowstone is situated on top of a massive subterranean volcano, which produces its active hot springs and towering geysers, such as Old Faithful. For his photograph of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone River, Haynes used a mammoth-plate camera to produce a large glass negative, from which he made this highly detailed contact print.
These Nevada landscapes are from Grays the Mountain Sends, a series that depicts the landscapes, structures, and residents of former mining towns. Bryan Schutmaat seeks out these far-flung mountain communities, now mostly abandoned due to the loss of their mineral wealth.
Not unlike Ansel Adams’ fleeting view of Hernandez, New Mexico, first seen in his rearview mirror, Schutmaat’s vision is that of an extended road trip. And like Adams, he is drawn to the methodical way that his large-format camera forces him to work. He waits patiently for the changing light to activate a scene. For Schutmaat, each town’s deserted structures and lonely inhabitants stand as last “relics of hope” and proof of the tragic demise of the American dream. The fragile, hardscrabble beauty of these modern-day ghost towns is also a powerful reminder of the region’s uncertain future and its long history of economic booms and busts.
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Installation view of the exhibition Ansel Adams in Our Time at the de Young museum, San Francisco showing at foreground left and right, works by Mark C. Klett (below) Image courtesy of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco Photo: Gary Sexton
“[Ansel Adams’] depopulated scenes suggest that the landscape does best without our presence, and that wilderness is an entity defined by our absence. However, anyone who has visited the site of one of Adams’ photographs knows that the romance of his landscapes is often best experienced in the photographs themselves. The reality of place is quite different. … The natural beauty of the land is still there to be seen, but you will not see it alone.” ~ Mark Klett
Mark Klett has photographed and rephotographed the western American landscape for more than thirty years. With his longtime collaborator, Byron Wolfe, Klett carefully studies prints by Carleton E. Watkins and other nineteenth-century wilderness photographers, as well as twentieth-century modernists like Ansel Adams. By studying the shadows, they determine the time of year and time of day that an image was made. Once on-site, Klett photographs the view with Polaroid film, and Wolfe measures that image against the original photograph, repeating the process until they locate exactly where the earlier photographer stood. By visually collapsing time and space in this composite panorama of Yosemite Valley, Klett and Wolfe document changes to the landscape over more than a century.
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The Changing Landscape
In his own time, Ansel Adams was aware of the environmental concerns facing California and the nation. Although Adams continued to make symphonic and pristine wilderness landscapes, as his career progressed, he began to create images that showed a more nuanced vision – images that decidedly break with widely held ideas about his work. He photographed urban sprawl, freeways, graffiti, oil drilling, ghost towns, rural cemeteries, mining towns, and the sometimes-dispossessed inhabitants of those places, as well as less romantic views of nature, such as the aftermath of forest fires.
Appreciated for their imagery and formal qualities, Adams’ photo-graphs also carry a message of advocacy. Photographers working in the American West today confront a changed, and changing, landscape. Human activity – urbanisation, logging, mining, ranching, irrigated farming – and global warming continue to alter the terrain. Works by contemporary artists bear witness to these changes and their impacts, countering notions that our natural resources are limitless. Placed in conversation with Adams’ photographs, these images aid our understanding of his singular contribution to the ways we envision the landscape and the urgency with which we must protect it.
Several of the contemporary photographers in this exhibition call into question the archetypal images of empty wilderness spaces that have long held a central place in the popular imagination. Arno Rafael Minkkinen activates pristine, unpopulated landscapes by introducing his own naked body into them, without relying on digital manipulation. Here, the artist’s seemingly headless torso and the gentle curve of his outstretched arms perfectly echo the bowl-shaped Yosemite Valley as seen from Inspiration Point.
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Installation view of the exhibition Ansel Adams in Our Time at the de Young museum, San Francisco showing at left in the light panel, Laura McPhee’s Early Spring (Peeling Bark in Rain) (2008, below); and at second right, Mitch Epstein’s Altamont Pass Wind Farm, California (2007, below) Image courtesy of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco Photo: Gary Sexton
Mitch Epstein (American, b. 1952) Altamont Pass Wind Farm, California 2007 Chromogenic print Courtesy of the artist and Yancey Richardson Gallery Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Reproduced with permission
Mitch Epstein’s American Power series investigates energy in its many forms by exploring how we create and consume it, as well as its impact on our daily lives. Often employing a bird’s-eye view and printed on a very large scale, Epstein’s photographs – like these showing oil drilling, wind turbines, desert irrigation, and suburban sprawl – call into question the very definition of power and point to our shared accountability for the abuse of our natural resources. In a world in which we are constantly inundated with photographs, these densely detailed views are also meant to slow down our “reading” of the images and remind us that each may be interpreted in a variety of ways.
“[The] American Power [series] is an active response to the American dream gone haywire. My project focuses on the United States not only because I am American, but because the US has exported its model of unrestricted growth around the world in the form of mass consumerism, corporatism, and sprawl.
“We need to now export a revised model of growth, a revised American dream. I included pictures in American Power of renewable energy – wind, biotech, solar – to show that a healthier, more economical, and compassionate way of life is possible. American Power bears witness to the cost of growth; it asks viewers to consider the landscape they have created – and take responsibility for it.” ~ Mitch Epstein
Working with a large-format camera, Laura McPhee records the impact of human activity on the land, especially in Idaho, a state she loves and visits regularly. These photographs from her Guardians of Solitude series were made in the aftermath of a massive forest fire. Caused by human error, it devastated thousands of acres of woodland before it was finally extinguished. McPhee returned to the area three years later to find that it had burst into bloom. In the renewal of the charred landscape, she found a powerful metaphor for human resilience in the face of terrible personal loss.
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Installation view of the exhibition Ansel Adams in Our Time at the de Young museum, San Francisco showing the work of Abelardo Morell including at left centre, Tent-Camera Image on Ground: View of the Yosemite Valley from Tunnel View (2012, below); at centre, Tent-Camera Image on Ground: View of Old Faithful Geyser, Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming (2011, below); and at right his Tent-Camera Image on Ground: View of Mount Moran and the Snake River from Oxbow Bend, Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming (2011, below) Image courtesy of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco Photo: Gary Sexton
Early in his career, Abelardo Morell began experimenting with the camera obscura (from the Latin for “dark room”), a setup that allowed him to photograph the view outside, projected through a small hole (or lens) and inverted on the opposite wall of an interior. More recently, Morell has adapted this technology, using a tent fitted with a periscope and angled mirror, with a digital camera pointed downward to capture the sweeping landscapes reflected on the ground. This process of combining the distant view with the grass, pebbles, pine needles, sand – even pavement – underfoot, allows Morell to turn the terrain into his “canvas” and transform familiar scenes into otherworldly, impressionistic images.
Like several of the contemporary artists in this gallery, Abelardo Morell is a foreign-born photographer for whom US national parks hold special meaning. While growing up in Cuba, he fell in love with the popular Hollywood Westerns playing at the local cinema. Once he immigrated to the United States, he was eager to discover the region for himself. Here he takes in the sweeping grandeur of snowcapped Mount Moran and the Snake River from a vantage point similar to the one employed by Ansel Adams seventy years earlier for his photograph of Grand Tetons National Park (on view nearby).
Abelardo Morell made this photograph along the Rio Grande River, which runs for more than one hundred miles through Big Bend National Park in southwest Texas, forming the border between the United States and Mexico. The tranquility of the scene belies the fact that this is contested space, sometimes violently so. Morell’s tent camera optically inverts the river’s northern and southern banks, and the mysteriously floating compass further compounds the sense of dislocation or disorientation.
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John K. Hillers (American born Germany, 1843-1925) Zuni Pueblo, Looking Southeast c. 1879 Albumen print The Lane Collection Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Images such as this one, created in the 1870s and 1880s as ethnographic data for the US government, often ended up in popular magazines, perpetuating problematic stereotypes of Indigenous people. Beginning in 1871, John K. “Jack” Hillers worked on John Wesley Powell’s survey expeditions for such data. He continued to work under Powell’s leadership at the US Bureau of Ethnology for nearly thirty years. Hired by Powell to photograph Indigenous people living in agrarian communities in New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah, Hillers made his most extensive photographic record at Zuni Pueblo in the high plateau region of New Mexico. The photograph is taken at the middle place, or Halona I:diwanna in Zuni/A:shiwi.
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Adam Clark Vroman (American, 1856-1916) An Isleta Water Carrier (Nine of Spades) c. 1894 Chara, Cacique at Pueblo (Jack of Clubs) c. 1894 Playing cards with halftone prints Lazarus and Melzer (Los Angeles), publishers Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Gift of Lewis A. Shepard, 2006
An amateur archaeologist and committed preservationist, Adam Clark Vroman owned a bookstore in Pasadena, California, that also sold photography supplies. In the mid-1890s, he made the first of many photographic trips to Navajo, Pueblo, and Hopi communities in Arizona and New Mexico. Like Edward S. Curtis and other Anglo-American photographers, he approached Indigenous subjects with concern for what he saw as their threatened lifeways. Nevertheless, when he produced this set of playing cards in 1900, his sitters, each representing a different Southwestern tribe, were reduced to elaborately costumed “types” and often were not identified by name, relegating Indigenous people to a novelty. For instance, in one example shown here, a group of young Walpi women is simply captioned “Bashful,” illustrating the limits of Vroman’s ability to respectfully record the identities of his sitters.
“This photo of Cloud Dance (Po-Who-Geh-Owingeh) was taken at a time when there was an influx of tourists, archaeologists, anthropologists, artists, and photographers who were intrigued by Pueblo people. At the time, Pueblo people and other Native Americans in the Southwest were trying to navigate the outsiders who were interested in their culture. Some of them did not quite understand the circumstances surrounding the curiosity, while others did understand the extractive nature, and they had to weigh that in terms of their other needs. I get questions from members of my community about why they did not chase the archaeologists and photographers out, and I often respond it is because of the uneven power relations between Indigenous and non-Native people at the time.” ~ Joseph Aguilar (San Ildefonso Pueblo)
In 1937 Ansel Adams spent several weeks traveling in the Southwestern states with painter Georgia O’Keeffe and friends. Adams and O’Keeffe shared an interest in the region’s expansive skies and distinctive mesas, as well as the mix of Indigenous and Spanish cultures. The group first spent two weeks at Ghost Ranch, O’Keeffe’s home in the Chama River Valley of New Mexico. Adams made this picture in a nearby town, perhaps drawn by the way the foreground cross echoes a smaller one on the church steeple. Their road trip took them through Pueblo and Navajo lands in New Mexico and Hopi lands in Arizona; Monument Valley, Canyon de Chelly, and the Grand Canyon in Arizona; and Mesa Verde in Colorado.
When a Sierra Club friend gave him a copy of the Wheeler geographical survey album (1871-1874), Ansel Adams had the opportunity to study Timothy H. O’Sullivan’s photographic technique, as well as his subject matter. In 1941, as Adams set out to work in Canyon de Chelly as part of his national parks project, he decided to try to rephotograph O’Sullivan’s view of an Ancestral Pueblo site. Adams used a green filter to replicate the dramatic striations in the canyon walls that are so pronounced in the early print, as otherwise they would not appear in a “straight” print from his modern negative. Of the power of works like this one, Adams said, “O’Sullivan had that extra dimension of feeling. You sense it, you see it.”
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Timothy H. O’Sullivan (American born Ireland, 1840-1882) Ancient Ruins in the Cañon de Chelle 1873 Albumen silver print
John K. Hillers (American b. Germany, 1843-1925) Hedipa, Diné (Navajo) Woman c. 1879 Albumen print Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Gift of Jessie H. Wilkinson – Jessie H. Wilkinson Fund
Between 1879 and 1881, Hillers extensively documented the pueblo at Zuni, photographing not only its people and distinctive multi-storied adobe architecture, but also its relationship to the surrounding land. He made panoramic views of the pueblo and recorded cultural observances including ceremonial dance and individual artisans at work.
The Paiutes of Utah gave John K. Hillers a name that meant “Myself in the Water,” a reference to his ability to record their likenesses using the wet-plate collodion process to produce glass negatives. Here, Hillers has photographed a Diné (Navajo) man and woman in front of boldly patterned blankets, which he used to create a backdrop for his outdoor portrait “studio.”
The Ahwahnechee (Miwok) of Yosemite prepared food and sharpened tools using semi-spherical holes ground into bedrock as mortars and smooth stones as grinding tools (or pestles). Acorns of the black oak trees were a diet staple once abundant in the region. Settler colonialism, logging in the nineteenth century, and modern-day fire suppression have led to the growth of mainly conifers in their place.
Ansel Adams made this aerial view of the famously tangled freeways of Los Angeles while photographing for Fiat Lux (1967), a publication commissioned by the University of California to celebrate its centennial. Intended to serve as a visual document of the entire University of California system, the project saw Adams travel to the nine UC campuses, along with the system’s various research stations, observatories, natural reserves, and agricultural extensions. The most extensive of all his commercial projects, Fiat Lux took Adams three years to complete and resulted in several thousand negatives.
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Lois Conner (American, b. 1951) Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, Arizona 1988 Platinum print Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Otis Norcross Fund
Inspired by the stories told to her by her Cree maternal grandmother, Lois Conner regularly traveled throughout the Navajo Nation and Four Corners region with an old-fashioned banquet camera to document Indigenous people and their land. The elongated format and subtle tonal range of the platinum prints that resulted from these trips seem ideally suited to capturing subjects like the expansive desert landscape of Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument and the vertiginous rock face of Canyon de Chelly.
“The extended sweep of the panorama allows me to draw on multiple levels, much as cinema does, and to take something of the immediate present, and layer that with something from a few centuries before. The large-format camera can draw the particular in minute detail. Like adjectives in a sentence, they allow the viewer to look closer, engaging them in the little world contained by the frame.” ~ Lois Conner
This portrait of six-time world-champion hoop dancer Nakotah LaRance (1989-2020) is from an ongoing series that Will Wilson calls the Critical Indigenous Photographic Exchange (CIPX). Using a large-format camera and the wet-plate collodion process – the first photographic process used to image Native Americans – Wilson produces a portrait; he then gives his sitter the original tintype, while he retains a digital copy. Wilson is aware of the long history of inaccurate and romanticised representations of Indigenous people in the United States. His goal is to negotiate a more collaborative relationship between photographer and sitter in order to return personal agency to his subjects, like this young Hopi man with his traditional dance hoop and contemporary headphones, game console, and Japanese manga.
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Nakotah Lomasohu Raymond LaRance (August 23, 1989 – July 12, 2020) was a Native American hoop dancer and actor. He was a citizen of the Hopi Tribe of Arizona. …
At four years old, LaRance began dancing as a fancy dancer and competed in the youth division of the World Championship Hoop Dance Contest in Phoenix, Arizona. He performed on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno in 2004. LaRance won three championships in the youth division and three in the teenage division of the World Championship Hoop Dance competition.
In 2009, LaRance joined the Cirque du Soleil troupe as a principal dancer. He worked as a traveling performer with the troupe for over three years. In 2015, he danced at the opening of the Pan American Games in Toronto with Cirque du Soleil. He won the title of World Champion at the Hoop Dance Contest three times, as part of the adult division in 2015, 2016 and 2018. LaRance taught hoop dancing to students at the Lightning Boy Foundation in New Mexico.
LaRance died at age 30 on July 12, 2020, after a fall from climbing a bridge in Rio Arriba County, New Mexico.
Installation view of the exhibition Ansel Adams in Our Time at the de Young museum, San Francisco showing at left in the light panel, Will Wilson’s Nakotah LaRance (2012, above); and at centre Will Wilson’s How the West is One (2014, below)
Adams in the American Southwest
Ansel Adams first visited the American Southwest in 1927. While there he collaborated with author Mary Austin on an illustrated book about Taos Pueblo that aimed to communicate the threat tourism in the region posed to the artistic and religious traditions of Indigenous people. Adams made images for the book only after receiving permission from the Taos Pueblo council, to whom he paid a fee and gifted a copy of the finished publication. He also photographed some Indian cultural observances that had become popular attractions among tourists. Adams’s own images of Native dancers have a complex legacy: although he was one of the non-Native onlookers, he carefully framed his views to leave out evidence of the gathered crowds.
In Diné photographer Will Wilson’s ongoing series Critical Indigenous Photographic Exchange, the artist responds to and confronts historical depictions of Native Americans by white artists. He focuses in particular on those who traveled west in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to document the Indigenous people they viewed as a “vanishing race” due to US government-sanctioned genocide and settler colonialism.
Born in San Francisco, Diné photographer Will Wilson spent his childhood in the Navajo Nation. Today he lives and works in Santa Fe. Made from his original tintypes, Wilson’s double self-portrait shows him in profile, facing off against himself: on one side wearing an elaborate silver and turquoise necklace, and on the other dressed in a cowboy hat and work gloves. The title riffs on the 1962 John Ford movie How the West Was Won, an epic Western of the type that helped turn stereotypical cowboys and Indians into potent symbols for the American public. Wilson’s dual portrait illustrates the disparate ways that he – as a Native American artist – might be portrayed and perceived by others, whereas in his case, the reality lies somewhere between the two.
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CJ Heyliger (American, b. 1984) Broken Glass 2015 Inkjet print William E. Nickerson Fund Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Reproduced with permission
CJ Heyliger makes his desert landscapes in many different places, resulting in images that reveal the sites’ alien beauty and hallucinatory detail. His approach to mapping the terrain on film reduces it to the medium’s most basic elements – simply light and time. Here, he magically transforms a trail of broken glass into a constellation of stars in a night sky, and in North, East, South, West, his multiple exposures of a spiky yucca create a wildly spinning whirligig.
“My current work brings me to places that, for one reason or another, have become geographical outcasts,” says Heyliger. “These scraps of land are often hidden in plain view and are rife with artefacts and submerged histories of their own. Photography allows me to gather these shards of cultural debris and weave them into a new narrative constructed of diverse environments with varying relationships to reality.”
Based in Southern California, Catherine Opie is best known for her unflinching portraits – of herself and of members of the lesbian leather community to which she belongs. In 2015, she was commissioned to create a large-scale piece spanning the multi-story atrium of a new federal courthouse in Los Angeles, which inspired her to tackle a very different California subject: Yosemite National Park.
The opportunity to produce such a major work motivated Opie to take on the iconic views of the park’s natural wonders, examine her relationship with these Western landscapes, and try to “de-cliché” them. Her luminous colour images of Yosemite are often soft-focused yet still recognisable, thanks to the popularisation of such views by earlier photographers like Carleton E. Watkins and Ansel Adams. Depicting Yosemite through a feminist lens, Opie seeks to assert her equal rights to such wilderness subjects, previously considered the domain of photographers who are white men.
Hurricane Sandy was a turning point for Lucas Foglia, who witnessed its disastrous impact on his family’s Long Island farm in 2012. Convinced that human behaviour and the changing weather patterns that produce such destructive storms are connected, he decided to document the many ways in which human beings use science and technology to respond to climate change. Now living in California, Foglia photographed workers and machines performing the extremely demanding and futile task of shoring up the Pacific coastline in the face of El Niño wind and waves. His sharply angled viewpoint from the highway above consciously echoes the abstract composition of Ansel Adams’ Surf Sequence of 1940.
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Binh Danh (Vietnamese-American, b. 1977) Lower Yosemite Fall, August 16, 2016 2016 Daguerreotype Mary S. and Edward J. Holmes Fund Copyright by Binh Danh Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Binh Danh and his family immigrated to California after the Vietnam War. For much of his early life, he felt little personal connection to this country’s national parks, several of which were located near his home. That sentiment changed once Danh reached adulthood, took up photography, and discovered a new found pride while documenting these wilderness areas using a mobile darkroom and the daguerreotype process developed in France by Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre in 1839.
Made with a highly polished metal plate, the daguerreotype has a mirror-like surface that allows Danh to capture in stunning detail the same views that he admires in the photographs of Carleton E. Watkins and Ansel Adams. But it also makes it possible for him to create landscapes that reflect his own likeness back to him, literally situating him within those very American spaces.
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de Young Golden Gate Park 50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive San Francisco, CA 94118
Dialogue: Old English dialogas (plural), from Latin from Greek dialogos, from dia ‘through’ + logos ‘word’
“As we define it, dialogue is “a communicative process in which people with different perspectives seek understanding.” To be in dialogue means that participants are not only engaging each other in light of their different views, but they are also striving to achieve a degree of mutual understanding.”
Jason Combs. “What is Dialogue?” on the University of Dayton website Monday October 28, 2019 [Online] Cited 01/07/2023
Short and sweet because I’m not feeling well.
What an inspired pairing for an exhibition. “Each [artist] addresses race, class, representation, and systems of power in their work, creating photographic series grounded in Black history and realities that speak to the human condition.”
From street-based photographs of everyday life to conceptual excavations of Black Histories, they produce incisive thought provoking works “that intermingle past and present, referenc[ing] African Americans whose lives and stories have been co-opted or lost.”
I love them both for their commitment to and passion for life in all its different forms. Bringing people together. Expressing a degree of mutual understanding.
#BlackLivesMatter #AllLivesMatter
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the J. Paul Getty Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Dawoud Bey and Carrie Mae Weems have been friends and colleagues for more than 40 years. Each addresses race, class, representation, and systems of power in their work, creating photographic series grounded in Black history and realities that speak to the human condition. This exhibition sheds light on their unique trajectories and modes of presentation, and their shared consciousness and principles. Organised by the Grand Rapids Art Museum.
In 1976 I had been making photographs for a couple of years. I had certainly been looking at a lot more photographs than I had actually made. From looking at photographs in books and magazines and going to exhibitions of pictures by Mike Disfarmer at MoMA, Richard Avedon at Marlborough, and haunting whatever other places there were to see photographs in New York in the early 1970s, I had begun to educate myself, with the intent of adding something to the conversation through my own pictures.
The artist Janet Henry, who was from the same Jamaica, Queens neighborhood that I lived in, had gotten a job in the Education Department at the Studio Museum in Harlem, then located above a Kentucky Fried Chicken on 125th Street and Fifth Avenue in a large second floor loft space. When Frank Stewart, the museum’s staff photographer and photo teacher, left to do a commissioned project in Cuba, Janet called me and asked if I would take over the class. On the first day of class a few students straggled in. One of them, a seemingly shy woman with big expressive eyes, introduced herself, “Hi, my name is Carrie. Do you think I could be a photographer?” she asked, holding her Leica camera in her hand. That began what has now been 33 years of friendship and camaraderie with one of the most brilliant people I know.
From the very beginning, Carrie Mae Weems has had a sharp intelligence that was looking for a way into the world. From her early documentary photographs to the more expansive and materially varied recent works, she has consistently set out to visually define the world on her own terms and to redefine for all of us the nature of the world that we are in. After all these years I still anticipate her work with a fresh sense of wonderment, knowing that her restless search for the deeper meaning of things will yield a continuing rich trove of objects and images. On a Sunday morning in May I called from my home in Chicago to reconnect with my dear friend while she was traveling in Seville, Spain.
Since meeting at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1977, Dawoud Bey and Carrie Mae Weems have been intellectual colleagues and companions.
From the outset of their careers, both have operated from a deep social commitment to participate in, describe, and define culture. In seeking to express themselves fully, each has expanded possibilities within photography and video to address their chosen subjects.
Dawoud Bey & Carrie Mae Weems: In Dialogue, on view April 4 through July 9, 2023, brings together for the first time a focused selection of work from a period of over 40 years by two of today’s most important and influential photo-based artists. Each grapples with issues of race, class, and representation in their work, making art grounded in the experiences and realities of Black Americans while also speaking to the broader human condition.
“The Museum’s Department of Photographs has made great strides in recent years in building an exhibitions program that highlights more expansive narratives of photographic history,” says Timothy Potts, Maria Hummer-Tuttle and Robert Tuttle Director of the J. Paul Getty Museum. “Dawoud Bey and Carrie Mae Weems are two artists who reframe American traumas that have been ignored or simplified in the national historical record. We are proud to showcase their work in dialogue with one another.”
Jim Ganz, senior curator of photographs, adds, “These artists are two of the most dynamic and insightful of our time. As presented in this extraordinary exhibition, their eloquent dialogue gives unique perspective on their shared concerns as image makers.”
Dawoud Bey (American, born 1953) creates photographs that focus on individuals, communities, and important but often overlooked American histories. His carefully composed images convey the dignity and rich inner lives of his subjects. Carrie Mae Weems (American, born 1953) first gained recognition in the 1980s for exploring identity, race, power, and history, themes that still fuel her art. Over her career, Weems has turned increasingly to staged photography and the use of text to heighten the emotional intensity of her work.
This exhibition is divided into five sections, starting with early pictures that both artists made in the photodocumentary tradition and followed by ambitious, groundbreaking explorations of the medium as it developed technologically and artistically. The exhibition then focuses on how both artists moved beyond candid pictures of everyday life and began making larger scale work that is more planned than spontaneous. Bey’s portraiture evolved from street-based glimpses of the world made with a handheld camera to portraits that are formal but intimate, in which his subjects appear at ease and engage directly with the lens. With her Kitchen Table Series, Weems transitioned from representing real people in their natural environments to creating staged photo essays. For each artist, the techniques developed in this period became the foundation for future projects.
In Resurrecting Black Histories, each artist addresses the 19th century and its legacies in distinctive ways. Bey’s carefully composed landscapes evoke the experience of fleeing along the Underground Railroad, the clandestine network that helped enslaved people escape the South. Weems, by incorporating texts that intermingle past and present, references African Americans whose lives and stories have been co-opted or lost.
In Memorial & Requiem, Bey and Weems reference traumatic 20th-century events. They worked with community partners to stage scenes meant to reinvigorate discussion of the American legacy of racial violence. Each photographer also created a related video, bringing their own sensibility – Bey’s searching, intimate gaze; Weems’ choreographed social commentary – to the moving image, using sequencing and sound to deepen engagement with American history.
The exhibition ends with Revelation in the Landscape, where both Bey and Weems contemplate the built environments in which we live and how those spaces affect our perceptions of the world and ourselves. Bey returns to the Harlem neighbourhoods he photographed in the late 1970s, tracking the changes wrought by gentrification. Weems photographs imposing sites in Rome, inserting herself into historical places imbued with power and legacy. Both series reveal the economic and institutional forces that shape daily life.
In conjunction with the exhibition Getty has created a community program inspired by the exhibition, L.A.: In Dialogue. This program brings Dawoud Bey & Carrie Mae Weems: In Dialogue to a wider Los Angeles community, furthering the influence of the two artists and introducing their work to a new generation of artists and viewers. The artist-led program will host educational workshops for local teens and young adult photographers, and will teach participants techniques in black-and-white photography and the artistic practice of capturing portraiture and place. They will explore themes from the exhibition, collaborate with peers, and explore their local communities: Culver City (Black Image Center), South L.A. (LA Commons), Downtown L.A. (Inner-City Arts), and Venice Beach (Venice Arts). This program will result in a satellite exhibition that will open in June 2023.
Related programming includes Dawoud Bey and Carrie Mae Weems in Conversation on Tuesday, April 4 at 4pm. That evening at 7pm, the Museum presents master saxophonist David Murray in concert with his newly formed quartet as part of the exhibition programming.
The pose of the figures, other than the obvious reference to the Pieta, reminds me of that famous and most moving Eugene W. Smith photograph Tomoko and Mother in the Bath (1971)
The J. Paul Getty Museum 1200 Getty Center Drive Los Angeles, California 90049
I love artists who push the boundaries of seeing / being, body / Self, self / spirit.
Artists who see and feel the world in unique and tantalising – excites the senses or desires of (someone) – ways.
Hannah Villiger is one such artist.
Her fragmentary, space-related assemblages (Works or Blocks) investigate the representation of the female body, “its classification in the media, questions of surface, space and body, and the objectification of the body. In Villiger’s work, the skin – where humans enter a dialogue with their environment – is a setting for highly topical questions of gender and ethnicity, as well as vulnerability and healing. The body was the artist’s primary working material. We encounter it abstracted or deconstructed; it can be human, but also of plant or artificial origin.” (Exhibition text)
But more than that, it is the conceived ‘idea in the mind’ strangeness of Villiger’s out of body gridded experiences… that promote in the viewer an acknowledgement of the physicality, touch, and emotion of actually living and feeling in the human body and beyond. Touch your skin, run your hands over the shape of your mouth, feel your ears, raise your foot, look at your reflection. Marvel at the bodies distortion, energy, spirit. For there is only one you. “I listen to my naked, bare body, the outside of it, the inside of it, traversing it.”
You are unique. An individual, unique, sentient animal. A human – being.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Museum Susch for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“With my Polaroid camera I listen to my naked, bare body, the outside of it, the inside of it, traversing it. Thus I create images that I can correct immediately.”
Hannah Villiger
“The longest distance between the camera and any body part is between raised arm and my toes. I always trigger the camera myself, sometimes without looking through the viewfinder. I tilt the camera to an angle of 90, 180, 270 degrees. I turn myself – literally – upside down.”
Hannah Villiger. On My Book Envy
Hannah Villiger (1951-1997) was an extraordinary voice in the late 20th-century contemporary art, but her work came to an abrupt end with her untimely death. She became known above all for her photographic works based on the body.
Muzeum Susch is hosting the largest presentation of Hannah Villiger’s oeuvre in fifteen years. Hannah Villiger: Amaze Me offers new perspectives on the work of this important Swiss artist. Villiger’s large-format works based on Polaroid photographs make a lasting contribution to the genre of the self-image within art history. At the same time, her explorations of the body can be discussed against the background of numerous contemporary themes. Her oeuvre spans from the drawings she made in the 1970s to the black-and-white photographs and works with the Polaroid camera that she created from the 1980s onwards. These fragmentary close-ups of her own body, greatly enlarged via an internegative and mounted on aluminium, are presented individually or assembled into space-related ensembles. The results are unlimited possibilities of at times spectacular views of the body. The exhibition expands the view of Villiger to include contemporary themes and issues. The focus is on the representation of the female body, one’s own perspective, as well as that of others, on the human physique, its classification in the media, questions of surface, space and body, and the objectification of the body. In Villiger’s work, the skin – where humans enter a dialogue with their environment – is a setting for highly topical questions of gender and ethnicity, as well as vulnerability and healing. The body was the artist’s primary working material. We encounter it abstracted or deconstructed; it can be human, but also of plant or artificial origin. Although Villiger’s early death brought her oeuvre to an abrupt end, her works point unwaveringly to the present.
Running from 4 January to 2 July 2023, Muzeum Susch presents Hannah Villiger: Amaze Me, a comprehensive survey dedicated to the Swiss artist Hannah Villiger (1951-1997) with contributions from contemporary artists Alexandra Bachzetsis, Lou Masduraud (b. 1990) and Manon Wertenbroek (b. 1991).
The exhibition Hannah Villiger: Amaze Me offers new perspectives on the work of this important Swiss artist. Hannah Villiger’s (1951-1997) large-format works based on Polaroid photographs make a lasting contribution to the genre of the self-image within art history. At the same time, her explorations of the body can be discussed against the background of numerous contemporary themes.
Muzeum Susch is hosting the largest presentation of Hannah Villiger’s work in fifteen years. The exhibition spans her oeuvre, from the drawings she made in the 1970s to the black-and-white photographs and works with the Polaroid camera that she created from the 1980s onwards. These fragmentary close-ups of her own body, greatly enlarged via an internegative and mounted on aluminium, are presented individually or assembled into space-related ensembles. The results are unlimited possibilities of at times spectacular views of the body. On display are vintage prints, existing though often still unknown individual works, as well as so-called blocks, large-format assemblages of up to fifteen square picture panels. Some of these will be shown for the first time in the exhibition in Susch.
The exhibition expands the view of Villiger to include contemporary themes and issues. The focus is on the representation of the female body, one’s own perspective, as well as that of others, on the human physique, its classification in the media, questions of surface, space and body, and the objectification of the body. In Villiger’s work, the skin – where humans enter a dialogue with their environment – is a setting for highly topical questions of gender and ethnicity, as well as vulnerability and healing. The body was the artist’s primary working material. We encounter it abstracted or deconstructed; it can be human, but also of plant or artificial origin. Although Villiger’s early death brought her oeuvre to an abrupt end, her works point unwaveringly to the present.
The undiminished relevance of Villiger’s work is underscored by the inclusion of works by the contemporary artists Alexandra Bachzetsis, Lou Masduraud and Manon Wertenbroek. These younger women artists present thematically related works – distributed throughout the entire exhibition – in dialogue with Villiger and at the same time represent strong contemporary positions. The artists have been selected based on their exploration of similar themes to those of Villiger. Bachzetsis in collaboration with Julia Born presents This Side Up, a video installation of the artist moving in all directions in a confined space, much like the way Villiger writhes, turns and shapes her own body under the eye of her Polaroid camera. Masduraud presents Petrifying basin (kisses with the nymphs), a sculptural installation and small wall objects that playfully and sensually rethink organic life and anchors mythological traditions in the present day. And finally, Wertenbroek presents a selection of objects addressing the boundaries between the skin and surrounding world and reflects on themes such as unveiling and veiling.
On the exhibition and Hannah Villiger, Muzeum Susch’s found Grazyna Kulczyk says, “Female artists are no longer afraid to document their bodies being destructed due to illness or ageing – often the artworks become projects showing chronicles of pain. Observing and recording their own bodies has become a form of manifesto for female artists, reclaiming the subjectivity of the body. Female artists have painted, photographed and sculpted themselves. In this way, the shame of nakedness or imperfection has often become a point of pride. Hannah Villiger, through photographs of her body, become the body’s conscious sculptor.”
The exhibition is accompanied by a monograph on the latest research on Hannah Villiger’s practice and influence. Villiger is often likened to an artist’s artist, which has inspired the editors to invite artists who knew her to contribute texts, including Katja Schenker, Beat Streuli, and Claudia and Julia Müller. The book, part of a series of monographs by Muzeum Susch and Skira, will be published in March 2023.
Hannah Villiger (1951-1997) grew up as the fourth of five children in Cham (CH). After completing her studies at the School of Applied Arts in Lucerne, Villiger spent a period travelling and living between Toronto, Rome, Montefalco and Switzerland until she finally settled in Basel in 1977. In Basel, she produced her first black-and-white photographs as well as wood and Plexiglas objects. In 1980 Villiger fell ill with open tuberculosis and spent a month isolated in the Basel Cantonal Hospital, followed by a stay in a sanatorium in Davos. Despite her poor health, Villiger continued to create and exhibit her work. From 1981 to 1982 she undertook a world road-trip with Susan Wyss, with whom she had been in a relationship since 1975. In the early 1980s, Villiger began to use Polaroid cameras primarily to explore her body, serving as a working material, and increasingly moved away from the classic black-and-white and colour photographs. In 1988 in Paris, she met Mouhamadou Mansour (“Joe”) Kébé, with whom she had a son with in 1991. Between 1992 and 1997, Villiger taught at the Basel School of Art and Design. She died of heart failure in 1997.
Curators: Christine Barthe: Head of the Photography Heritage Department at the Musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac; Annabelle Lacour: Head of the Photography Collection at the Musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac
Warning: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers should be aware that this posting contains images and names of people who may have since passed away.
Unknown photographer Portrait of a Persian Dignitary Tehran, 1848 Daguerreotype Photo: RMN – Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay) Hervé Lewandowski
I wish we had tele-transportation so that I could go and see this incredible exhibition about the beginnings of photography practiced outside Europe.
It took me many hours to construct this posting. Placing the information into a logical order was an important consideration, matching the installation photographs with the exhibition texts and individual images so that the story makes sense. Finding country of origin and dates for the photographers was another issue. Further bibliographic information has been added from sources around the internet to fill out life stories and sometimes this information was difficult to find.
Congratulations to the curators for assembling a photographic tour de force in which “the production of these images is diverse and responds to different wishes, desires, and fits into various different contexts.” In other words what was the force majeure, the greater force, that directed the what, where, when, how, who and for whom of their production. Here, force is the operative word… for many of the foremost contexts are both anthropological and geographic (to record what people and places looked like) under the guise of European colonial conquest: to “capture” the spirit of the people and conquered lands under force of occupation.
More interesting are the photographs taken by photographers of their own people, for example different Indian “casts” taken by a Indian born photographer. How did they picture themselves using a European machine? In this context we must remember that the images were usually taken to fulfil a commercial brief, either taken for a rich patron or to be sold through the photographers studio to local and foreign clients.
Predominantly using a Western pictorial language, sometimes these local photographers step outside the mould of making a portrait or casting a ‘type’ or recording a monument within the landscape by embodying within their art the aesthetics of their own cultural history. For example, “Lai Afong’s photographic compositions show the technical and aesthetic influence of traditional Chinese painting, known as guóhuà.” (Wikipedia) “In many regions, from Colombia to West Africa to Madagascar, and from Iran to Japan to India, photography was adopted and sometimes adapted to social uses and local cultures and in many places seems to satisfy the desire for self-representation and the construction of modern identities.” (Exhibition text)
Undoubtedly this was the exception rather than the rule – for the rule of the lawful image was usually Western in power and aesthetic. As the exhibition text notes, “The 19th century in Europe was characterised by a need to accumulate objects, knowledge and also territory. Through photography, landscapes became lands to be mapped and conquered, and their inhabitants subjects to be studied. In the scientific field, the natural history model influenced the use of photography. It contributed to the myth of virgin territories and was a tool in the growing geographical discipline, making claims of exhaustivity: see everything, photograph everything.” And one might add, own everything, both physically and visually (through the photographers and viewers gaze).
Thus the European photographer of the 19th century taxonomically ordered the world around him through a classification of the visual culture of the exotic. Anthropologically, “within the framework of a science then racial, and in a project typology inherited from natural history classification methods, photography is a tool that establishes visual categories that shape racial stereotypes.” This racial science was to have a lasting impact well into the 20th century through the now debunked theory of eugenics (which has no association with anthropology) – “the study of all agencies under human control which can improve or impair the racial quality of future generations” (Galton) – influencing cultures around the world with devastating impact especially through the genocide of untermensch, or what were seen as racial subhumans, by the Nazi party in Germany in the 1930s-1940s.
What is undeniable is the inalienable presence of the sitter in these powerful portraits. This is William Lane in the here and now, with his strong face and sorrowful eyes. This is Botcudo “brought to France by a certain Mr. Porte and are going to stay in Paris for a few months.” This is his representation but also his spirit from the past, this impression all that is left of his life force today. But it is enough. We pay reverence to his life. This is a half-length portrait of a 77-year-old Japanese man… what did he do in his life, what journey led him to be present in front of the camera in February 1890, the learnt lines on his open face evidence of a hard life well lived. And these are Majeerteen Woman trapped in silver like ghosts in a machine, a movement of mutable energy through time and space that still has me engaging with their life even today. Bless them all.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“Among the 101 photographers on show, 52 are Westerners and 49 are indigenous. This near-parity was made possible by the rise, over the last decade, of acquisitions of works by artists from the four continents.”
Quotation by curator Christine Barthe, head of the heritage unit at the Quai Branly’s photographic collection and co-curator of the exhibition with Anabelle Lacour, head of the photographic collection
Installation views of the exhibition Photographs. An Early Album of the World (1842-1911) at the musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, Paris showing in the two bottom images the section ‘Daguerreotypes for anthropology’ and in the bottom image the daguerreotypes of Henri Jacquart (French, 1809 – died after 1873) from September 1851 (below)
Many places in the world became accessible through photography as soon as it was invented in 1839. From the 1840s, darkrooms were taken on official expedition ships and crossed the borders of Europe. From Mexico to Gabon, the camera served the taste of the time for archaeological and geographical description and curiosity about the models encountered. In the second half of the 19th century, photography was used to examine all areas of the globe. This thirst for images was notably fuelled by the European colonial conquest.
Starting from the Musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac’s photograph collection, completed by exceptional loans from public and private collections, the exhibition considers the routes and the dissemination of photography outside Europe in the 19th century. Through a selection of photographs produced between 1842 and 1911 in Asia, Africa, Oceania and the Americas, it aims to understand better the development and the different appropriations of the medium locally by bringing to light less well-known photographs, patrons, phenomena and forms of photography in different parts of the world. An attempt to rebalance the history of photography, too often centred on Europe and the United States.
This exhibition is an adaptation of the exhibition Photographs. 1842-1896: An Early Album of the World designed by the Musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac and presented at the Louvre Abu Dhabi from 25 April to 13 July 2019.
Text from the musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac website
There was a time without photography, and there were places without cameras. Even if it is hard to imagine nowadays, it was not so long ago. Since its invention in 1839, photography has extended its reach at varying paces into all the visible spaces and every corner of the globe: starting in familiar places, spreading to nearby regions and neighbouring countries, and finally making it way into more far-flung lands as well. From the most extraordinary scenes to the most trivial, from breathtaking scenery to the food on our plates, nothing is too intimate or too grandiose to escape our desire to take a picture of it.
But how did it all start? How did photography spread, contributing to our view of the world? Who are the players who make this “photo album of the world”?
Since the 1840s, photography has accompanied countless scientific and military expeditions and trips. It was part of the usual conquest of the world, in the context of colonial expansion by the European powers, which intensified in the second half of the 19th century. As a tool to describe landscape and map territories, it contributed to the knowledge and control of Indigenous populations. Europe did not have a monopoly over this modern technology, however. Photography travelled and was transformed. In many regions, from Mexico and Colombia to Sierra Leone and Madagascar, Iran, Japan and India, it was adopted and sometimes adapted to social practices and local cultures, to create, control and conserve an image of the self and one’s environment.
The exhibition revisits some of this early histories of photography outside of Europe.
There was a time without photography and places without a camera. Even if it is difficult to imagine it today, this period is not so far away.
Since the announcement of its invention in 1839, photography has more or less quickly invaded all visible spaces, penetrated all places on the scale of the globe: familiar places, nearby regions, then neighbouring countries, also the most distant. From the most extraordinary to the most trivial, from the sublime landscape to the content of our plates, nothing was too intimate or too grandiose to escape the desire to create its image.
How did it all start? How did photography come about? propagated, participating in the global geographical imagination? Who are the actors who make up this “world album”?
Since the 1840s, photography has accompanied the countless voyages and scientific and military expeditions. It participates in the visual conquest planetary, in the context of the colonial expansion of the European powers which accelerated in the second half of the 19th century. Description tool landscapes, territorial mapping, it supported the knowledge and population control. But Europe did not have a monopoly on this modern technology. Photography travels, transforms, takes root. In many regions, Mexico, Colombia, West Africa in Madagascar, from Iran to Japan via India, it has been adopted and sometimes adapted to social uses and local cultures to build, control and maintain an image of oneself and one’s environment.
This exhibition proposes to return to some of these stories from the beginnings of photography practiced outside Europe.
First appearances
The first technique that was widely used in the early days photography, between the 1840s and 1850s, takes its name “daguerreotype” of its inventor Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre. It’s about of a copper plate coated with silver and made sensitive to light. Relatively expensive to manufacture and requiring learning, this technique was widely used to produce portraits. The long exposure time made it difficult to apply it to the landscape. These images are unique because formed directly on the silver plate, they cannot therefore give rise to several tests. The difficulty of their realisation as well as their cost explain their rarity today. European and American practice in its very beginnings, the daguerreotype quickly exported around the world. new technique modifying the relationship to its own image, the daguerreotype is also used as a tool of scientific description. Practiced by travellers and traveling photographers, it was also adopted very early in many photographic studios of major world cities, such as Mexico City, Bogotá and Lima. In Tehran, the daguerreotype is practiced at the court of the Shah of Persia from 1845.
Daguerreotypes for anthropology
If photography is quickly adopted by travellers and offers a new vision of the real world, it also serves a new discipline: anthropology. In France, the first scientific applications of photography to this burgeoning field are experienced in the years 1840-1850. Within the framework of a science then racial, and in a project typology inherited from natural history classification methods, photography is a tool that establishes visual categories, that shape racial stereotypes. Daguerreotypes made on demand from the anthropology laboratory of the National Museum of Natural History show the importance attached by scientists to skulls, casts and human skeletons, central in a discipline marked by the medicine and comparatism. Produced by professionals like Louis-Auguste Bisson, or by employees of the Museum like Henri Jacquart, these examples testify of an objectification of bodies that photography reinforces. These daguerreotypes are produced or collected by the institution in the same way as the portraits of living people.
Twenty years after the conquest of Algeria, the Arab horsemen have stopped fighting, and are but the shadows of those who for years thwarted the French army. They came to Paris for a show set up by the Museum, Children of the Desert, a fantasia on the Champ de Mars in June, 1851. They too are photographed, and casts of their bodies taken for science – but as popular artists, these horsemen leave their names under their portraits and are paid to pose.
Catherine Darley. “Ghosts (1) – Shadows,” on the Poemas del río Wang blog 10/08/2012 [Online] Cited 07/05/2023
Installation views of the exhibition Photographs. An Early Album of the World (1842-1911) at the musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, Paris showing in the bottom image the section ‘Recreated worlds: photo studios’ (below)
Recreated worlds: photo studios
In the second half of the 19th century, travel by land and sea developed considerably. European colonial expansion was one of the drivers behind the rise in global photographic coverage, not only did cameras and photographers travel, but so did their models. Members of the Indigenous elites made regular diplomatic trips or came to Europe to study. At the major colonial world’s fairs between 1870 and the early 20th century, groups were brought to European cities to be exhibited.
From the 1860s onwards, a great number of photo studios were set up in major cities. Those involved in this new commercial practice adapted to demand from a tourist clientele in search of exoticism, and sets and accessories were used to recreate artificial worlds. These widely distributed images with simplistic, sometimes demeaning captions, transmitted and perpetuated stereotypes. Photos with the frame centred on the face were often taken to respond to the need for description expressed in the field of physical anthropology. But studio decors also attracted a local clientele keen to create souvenirs with their loved ones.
Looking at these portraits, many questions remain today: Who are these individuals? What can we find out about their interactions with the photographer and their participation when being photographed?
Portraits of Aboriginal Australians
The aboriginal populations were privileged subjects of the first commercial photographers in Australia. Produced in the studio, these portraits obey 19th century racialist scientific interests; they are designed to document what was then considered to be an endangered population. German photographer John William Lindt, based in Grafton, New Wales of the South, produces a series of portraits of the aboriginal populations of Clarence Valley, marketed in the form of portfolios from the 1870s.
Combining exoticism and pictorial tradition, his pictures met with great success. Despite this problematic production context and the sometimes artificial nature stagings, this visual heritage is now a resource important for the descendants of the communities. In Australia, research have been undertaken since the 1990s to obtain information on the models, their identity and their territory of origin. The photography model known as “Mary Ann of Ulmarra” was identified in 2013 as Mary Ann Williams, née Cowan, through research conducted by one of his descendants.
Text from the exhibition
John William Lindt (Australian born Germany, 1845-1926) Mary Ann of Ulmarra (Mary Ann Williams, née Cowan) 1873 Albumen print
Lindt took at least sixty photographs in this series of studio portraits of Clarence River Aborigines, although extant albums usually contain fewer than a dozen each. When first published, these studio tableaux were regarded as accurate. Reference: An Eye for Photography: the camera in Australia / Alan Davies. Carlton, Vic: Melbourne University Press, 2004, p. 60.
Antoine Julien Nicolas Fauchery (French, 1823-1861) and Richard Daintree (Australian born United Kingdom, 1832-1878) Untitled (Two Aborginal Australian men and three women posing in front of a studio backdrop) Victoria possibly Mt Franklin, 1858 9.20 x 21.20cm
John Beattie (1859-1930) came to Tasmania from Scotland at the age of nineteen, in 1878. Within a year, he was using the brand-new dry-plate photographic technique to take a series of views of Lake St Clair. He joined the Anson Brothers studio, and worked with the three siblings until he bought them out in 1891. In the 1890s he established a museum of curiosities he had collected. The first of the island’s wilderness photographers – with a keen interest in preservation of the environment – Beattie became the ‘official’ photographer for the Tasmanian Government. In addition to his well-known series of photographs of convicts, he made a number of portraits of Aboriginal people, of whom he said ‘for about thirty years this ancient people held their ground bravely against the invaders of their beautiful domain.’
Of Scottish origin, John Watt Beattie landed in Australia in 1878. The following year, he moved to Tasmania to a farm in New Norfolk, northwest of Hobart. Feeling more interest in going out in the bush than for the work of the farm, he then devotes himself to the photography of countryside. He was appointed official government photographer of Tasmania in 1896. Able to promote his work, he also enthusiastically supported the development of the tourism industry. In 1906, he traveled to Melanesia, Polynesia and the Norfolk Islands and derives hundreds of widely distributed photographs.
Text from the exhibition
Charles Woolley (Australian, 1834-1922) William Lanne 1866 Albumen silver photograph
William Lanne (1834-1869), also known as King Billy or William Laney, is said to have been Truganini’s third partner. Lanne was captured along with his family in 1842 and taken to the Aboriginal camp at Wybelenna on Flinders Island. He moved for a time to Oyster Cove in 1847, before spending the years until 1851 in a Hobart orphanage. Four years later he joined a whaling ship. Regarded as the last surviving male of the Oyster Cove clan, Lanne died in March 1869 from a combination of cholera and dysentery. Following his death an argument broke out between England’s Royal College of Surgeons and Tasmania’s Royal Society over who should have his remains for scientific purposes. A member of the College of Surgeons, William Crowther, managed to break into the morgue where Lanne’s body was kept, decapitating the corpse, removing the skin and inserting a skull from a white body into the remnants. The Royal Society, discovering Crowther’s work, moved to thwart any further violations by amputating the hands and feet and discarding them separately. In this state, Lanne’s body was buried.
Charles Alfred Woolley (17 December 1834-1922) was born in Hobart Town, Tasmania, Australia. He was an Australian photographer but also created drawings, portraits and visual art. He is best known for his photographic portraits of the five surviving Oyster Cove Aboriginal people taken in August 1866 and exhibited at the Intercolonial Exhibition of Australasia colonial exhibition in Melbourne the same year. …
In August 1866, Woolley took photographic portraits in his studio of the five surviving Oyster Cove Aboriginal people which became his best known work. These were exhibited at the Intercolonial Exhibition of Australasia colonial exhibition in Melbourne later that year. Two of the portraits were of Truganini, a female, and William Lanne, also known as King Billy.
These works are now exhibited in the National Library, and the State Libraries of New South Wales, Tasmania and Victoria. James Bonwick’s publication The Last of the Tasmanians (1870) included several of the photographs and shortly after engravings started to appear. Woolley exhibited the prints again in 1875 at the Victorian Intercolonial Exhibition. A few of the original sets survive, mainly in English collections, as well as copies that J. W. Beattie made.
After Lanne’s death in 1869, his grave was desecrated and his body mutilated and a full sized bust was produced by an artist named Francisco Santé. The Evening Mail advertised that it could be seen for a “small fee”. Though Woolley was not known as a sculptor, the Hobart Town Examiner reported that “numerous” busts he had produced were at Walch and Sons and Birchall’s bookshops.
Installation view of the exhibition Photographs. An Early Album of the World (1842-1911) at the musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, Paris showing the section ‘Conquering souls and spreading the word’ with, at left, three photographs by Augustine Dyer (Australian, 1858-1931) of Papua New Guinea (1884, see below)
Conquering souls and spreading the word
The movement of colonial conquest also proceeded through missionary work where competition between congregations and between nations played out, much like at the political level. The Pacific was a place of rivalry between the United Kingdom and France. Protestant societies established from 1875 onwards in south-eastern New Guinea found themselves in competition with the Catholic missionaries. National alliances were formed between explorers and missionaries, promoting each other’s work. At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, the development of illustrated travel press allowed these heroic stories to be shared with a wide audience. Conferences with photo projections organised by the Geographical and Anthropological Societies were part of this process, combining different sources of images and narratives and establishing a lasting visual culture of the exotic.
Dyer was the Australian Government Printing Office photographer who went to British New Guinea with John Paine (a studio photographer), for the purpose of recording the British annexation of the territory. He travelled more extensively with Paine in 1884 through PNG visiting Port Moresby, Motu-Motu, Kerepunu, etc.
Taking as its starting point the photography collection of the musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, a reference collection for the representation of the extra-European world in the early years of photography, the exhibition focuses on the trajectories and geographies of the medium outside Europe in the 19th century, from its invention. Through a selection of nearly 300 photographs taken between 1842 and 1911 in Asia, Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, it seeks to better understand the phenomenon of the global dissemination of photography and the regional histories of non-European photography.
A visual collection of the world
Many places in the world became accessible through photography after the official announcement of its invention. The technical details of the daguerreotype were revealed in Paris in August 1839 and, in September, the darkrooms were loaded onto ships and crossed the borders of Europe. A tool associated with Western technological modernity, taken on countless voyages and scientific and military expeditions around the world, the medium of photography was used in the second half of the 19th century to investigate everywhere on the globe. From Mexico to Gabon, photography was in turn an instrument of description and the visual appropriation of landscapes and monuments, a tool for knowledge and the control of populations, and an object of diplomacy with the local elite. European colonial expansion was one of the driving forces that greatly accelerated global photography.
Dissemination and local appropriation
The new medium spread throughout the world from the 19th century, with very varied adoption rates in different regions. Europeans were no longer the only ones experimenting with, commissioning and marketing photography. Its local roots can be linked to the relations of countries with the West and to the relationship of societies to images. The exhibition, which presents the work of European and local photographers on four continents, seeks to better understand the development and appropriation of the medium around the world on a local scale by bringing to light lesser-known photographers, sponsors, phenomena and photographic forms, in an attempt to rebalance a history of photography that too often focuses on Europe and the United States. In many regions, from Colombia to West Africa to Madagascar, and from Iran to Japan to India, photography was adopted and sometimes adapted to social uses and local cultures and in many places seems to satisfy the desire for self-representation and the construction of modern identities. If cameras and photographers travelled, their models also travelled. The indigenous elites made regular diplomatic visits or came to Europe for training. From the 1860s, many photography studios were set up in large cities to meet the demands of tourists looking for exoticism. But the studios’ decor also attracted a local clientele wanting to preserve the memory of their loved ones.
How far should photography be taken?
The 19th century in Europe was characterised by a need to accumulate objects, knowledge and also territory. Through photography, landscapes became lands to be mapped and conquered, and their inhabitants subjects to be studied. In the scientific field, the natural history model influenced the use of photography. It contributed to the myth of virgin territories and was a tool in the growing geographical discipline, making claims of exhaustivity: see everything, photograph everything. But this thirst for images, which began in 1840 in Europe and then spread rapidly throughout the world, met with contrasting situations. From the beginning, the question of limits arose: how far to go, under what conditions and for what purposes should a photograph be taken? This was sometimes a technical challenge, but above all an ethical question when it involved showing the horrors of wars or producing the image of scenes or objects that were supposed to remain hidden. Some photographers may have tricked, coerced or negotiated to get an image.
The selection of works, mostly taken from the quai Branly photography collection, highlights the diversity of photographic practices outside Europe at their origins and reveals early testimonies of indigenous photographers. By revealing the scientific, military and commercial uses, as well as the memorial and social functions of photography, and by presenting a wide range of objects and techniques, the exhibition invites us to re-examine today the meaning of the photographic gesture in these different non-European contexts.
Publication
Mondes photographiques, histoires des débuts
The book that accompanies the exhibition broadens its scope of study to offer the first decentralised history of early world photography. Taking as its base the photography collection of the musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, a reference collection for the representation of the extra-European world in the early years of photography, it deepens this study to focus on the trajectories and geographies of the medium outside Europe from the 19th century. Co-publication musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac / Actes Sud 400 pages. €69
Text from the musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac
In 1844, two Brazilian Indians were brought to France by a certain Mr. Porte and are going to stay in Paris for a few months. This man baptised Manuel (and the young woman baptised Marie) in the press, will arouse interest certain among the anthropologists of the Natural History Museum. Werner, painter from the Museum, paints their portrait in watercolour, while Thiesson photographs them using the daguerreotype. They also lend themselves at a moulding session in the anthropology laboratory. The five daguerreotypes that remain today from the photography session show us two people with the top of the body undressed, and the bottom dressed of what appears to be European clothing.
Text from the exhibition
This man from the Canaries counts among the very first non-Europeans to have been photographed, probably in Paris. His portrait illustrates the first scientific publication offering daguerreotypes to visually appreciate the anatomic characteristics of human skulls. The Botocudo Indian from Brazil was photographed in Lisbonne, in 1844, but he visited Paris; his name was Manuel, and his wife was Maris. They lodged with some man called Porte, who brought them to the Museum. There, people wanted to make casts of their faces, their torsos, their arms and legs. Manuel and Marie walked across Marville’s Paris – across that city that was to disappear; they walked on the Boulevard du Temple and might have even visited the theaters. Actors, spectators? Dressed, costumed, naked? Under applause, mockery, examination, or measurement?
Catherine Darley. “Ghosts (1) – Shadows,” on the Poemas del río Wang blog 10/08/2012 [Online] Cited 07/05/2023
Luis Garcia Hevia is the first Colombian photographer and daguerreotypist. He exhibited his first “two essays of daguerreotypes” at the exhibition of industry in Bogota in November 1841. He was also a painter and miniaturist.
Recreated Worlds: The Studios
In the second half of the 19th century, land and sea travel grow considerably. European colonial expansion is one of the driving forces behind the acceleration of global photographic coverage. If cameras and photographers travel, their models also travel. The indigenous elites make regular diplomatic visits or come to train in Europe. During major universal and colonial exhibitions, population groups are moved and exhibited in European metropolises, between the 1870s and the beginning of the 20th century.
From the 1860s, many photographic studios set up in the big cities. The actors of this new commercial practice adapt to the demand of a tourist clientele in search of exoticism. Staging and props recreate artificial worlds. When the framing refocuses on the face, it is often to respond to the descriptive need of physical anthropology. But the decor of the studio attracts also a local clientele anxious to preserve the memory of their loved ones.
Faced with these portraits, many questions persist today: who were these individuals? What can we know of their interaction with the photographer and their participation at the time of the shot?
In photography, the portrait genre has from the outset brought together goals and very different situations. Like today, it may have been used at recreational or law enforcement purposes, as a personal memento or as a means of recording. The very ambiguity of the medium lies in this possible permeability of domains: a family album image can leave the private sphere, a photograph made for an anthropological description can sometimes also be a true portrait, shedding light on the personality of its subject.
The images of Jacques-Philippe Potteau, produced for scientific purposes between 1860 and 1869 at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, confer a undeniable dignity to their models, sometimes photographed as part of diplomatic functions (embassies of India, Siam, Japan). Jean Lagrêne, Philippe Colarossi are closely associated with the artistic world, as models. If Jacques-Philippe Potteau, a technician employed by the Museum, took care to note the names of the people he photographs, the reason for their presence in the photographic workshop, or in the Parisian capital is not always known to us. This is currently under research.
Jacques-Philippe Potteau was a member of the anthropology department of the Muséum d’histoire naturelle, Paris. Between 1860 and 1869 he made a series of ethnographic portraits for the museum under the collective title Collection anthropologique du Muséum de Paris. In 1862 Potteau succeeded Louis Rousseau as the departmental photographer. Potteau showed his work at the London Photography Exhibit in 1862 and 1863, and the 1863 Paris International Photography Exhibit.
As early as the 1840s, cameras were on board on expedition ships departing from Europe. sailors, explorers, archaeologists, missionaries, artists are among the first experimenters of this new technology in remote regions, which are gradually passing under the yoke of the colonial powers. From Mexico to Gabon, photography is in turn an instrument of description and visual appropriation landscapes and monuments, a knowledge and control tool populations, or even an object of diplomacy vis-à-vis the local elite.
If the camera records with the same acuity the architectural detail, the landscape grandiose and the faces crossed, the authors gathered here turn out to be excellent technicians with a personal eye. Their travelogues relate the difficulties overcome: technical challenges, climatic constraints or even reluctance of local populations to pose. But these spectacular images, carried out in more or less accessible places, are also the result of a collaboration with many less visible local intermediaries: guides, interpreters, informants or porters – necessary to transport photographic equipment – played a decisive role.
The Briton Philip Henry Egerton worked for most of his life as senior civil servant for the colonial regime in northern India. He realises these photographs during a semi-official mission in the Himalayas, trying identify alternative routes for the wool trade across the border
India and Chinese Tibet. The Kangra and Kullu valleys, as well as the sites of Spiti and the Bara Shigri glacier are thus photographed for the first time. The images are published, accompanied by the story of their author, in 1864, with the support of the government of Punja.
Text from the exhibition
Philip Henry Egerton (Welsh, 1824-1893) Shigri Glacier – From the River (Main View) Negative June – August 1863; print 1863-1864 From Journal of a Tour Through Spiti, To The Frontier of Chinese Thibet, With Photographic Illustrations Albumen silver print 21.6 × 26.5cm (8 1/2 × 10 7/16 in.) Credit Line: The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles Public domain
Philip Henry Egerton (Welsh, 1824-1893) Shigri Glacier – Lower View Negative June – August 1863; print 1863-1864 From Journal of a Tour Through Spiti, To The Frontier of Chinese Thibet, With Photographic Illustrations Albumen silver print 21.6 × 26.5cm (8 1/2 × 10 7/16 in.) Credit Line: The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles Public domain
Improvised archaeologist and photographer with a taste for travel, Désiré Charnay is known to be the first to have brought back from several archaeological sites Mexicans a harvest of spectacular images. He uses the process of the negative on wet collodion glass, which requires him to carry heavy equipment. His fame was ensured by the publication, in 1861-1862, of the album photographic American cities and ruins.
Local stories and self-images
Europeans are not the only ones to experiment, order and market photography from the 19th century. The new medium is spreading to scale across the globe and has very variable rates of adoption depending on the region. Its local roots can be linked to the countries’ relations with the West or the relationship of societies to images. In Qajar Iran, in Siam (Thailand present day), in the princely courts of India and Java, royalty has been a patron enthusiast of photography and accelerated its growth by designating official photographers and importing equipment. The leaders take awareness of the potential of photography for the representation of power and the assertion of their authority. In India, Japan, China, West Africa and in Madagascar, indigenous photographers are getting professional training to practice, open their commercial studio in the major port cities, and very often work for a wider clientele, among the local and colonial elite. Photography is appropriate and adapted to social uses, it sometimes mixes to local visual traditions – such as painting or calligraphy – and seems in many places respond to the desire for self-representation and construction modern identities.
Royal appropriations of photography in Iran and Thailand
The monarchs Naser al-Din Shah (r. 1848-1896), in Iran, and Mongkut in Siam (Rama IV, r. 1851-1868), seduced by the technology and the possibilities of dissemination of the royal image, were important patrons. Naser al-Din Shah, defender of the arts and open to Europe, initiated himself into the practice, becoming an amateur keen. It promotes the development of photography through the diversity of actions which he led: in 1858, he established the Royal Photography Workshop within the of the Golestan Palace in Tehran, promotes the teaching of technique at school polytechnic of Dar ol-Fonoun, imports equipment, translates manuals, and appoints official court photographers who are given the title of Akkasbashi. Siam’s science-savvy King Mongkut also ramps up production photography at court. The Thai Francis Chit, who receives the title of “photographer of His Majesty the King of Siam”, produced several portraits of the royal family and views of official court events.
In Japan, a considerable boom during the Meiji era (1868-1912)
In Japan, photography developed as soon as the country opened up to trade international in 1859, and experienced considerable growth during the Meiji era (1868-1912), period of great modernisation. Uchida Kuichi and Ueno Hikoma, trained in Nagasaki, are among the most famous Japanese photographers of their time. They have developed a unique style with a pronounced taste for theatricality and sometimes humour. The production of ambrotypes, known as garasu shashin – “photography on glass” – is experiencing a particular boom in the field portraiture from the 1860s. Unique objects, they are mounted in boxes in raw paulownia wood, with traditional geometric shapes simple, used to preserve calligraphy or personal property.
The ambrotypes were intended for the private sphere of Japanese families, wishing to pass on the portraits of their loved ones as an inheritance. The tekagami-style accordion albums, richly decorated with gilding and sophisticated paintings, originally planned to accommodate calligraphy, have been diverted from their traditional use to receive prints large format photographs of Ichida Sota and Suzuki Shin’ichi II.
Tamoto Kenzō (田本 研造, 1832-1912) was a Japanese photographer. He was born in Kumano, in the Mie Prefecture of Honshu. When he was twenty-three, he moved to Nagasaki to study western culture. In 1859, he relocated to Hakodate, where he lost a foot due to frostbite. The surgeon who amputated his foot had an interest in photography, specifically ambrotypes, and Tamoto became his apprentice. It was not until 1866 that he began working as a photographer. In 1867, he photographed the construction of the last castle to be built in Japan, Fukuyama Castle. Tamoto took photographs of military leaders Enomoto Takeaki and Hijikata Toshizō during the Battle of Hakodate between 1868-1869. Tamoto opened his own portrait studio in Hakodate in 1869. Starting in 1871, he documented the improvements to infrastructure in the Hokkaido region, eventually presenting 158 photographs of the process to the Settlement Office.
Introduced in India in 1840, photography was used by the authorities British and quickly adopted by the Indian elite. Studios set up in major port cities like Bombay, Madras and Calcutta. Active members of the Photographic Society of Bombay, Narayan Dajee and Hurrychund Chintamon are among the first native photographers to practice from the 1850s with the local elite, Brahmans, members of the government, and at the same time participate in colonial projects ethnographic documentation. The technology aroused enthusiasm very early on many maharajas. Famous Indian photographer Lala Deen Dayal received the title of official photographer of the ruler of Hyderabad in 1884. In some princely states like Indore, Udaipur and Mewar, photography of painted court is a great success and is part of the tradition of royal portraiture of pageantry. Enlarged prints are coated with a vivid layer of paint and opaque, which emphasises the abundance of jewels and the sumptuous character clothes.
One of India’s earliest commercial photographers who specialised in portraiture, Hurrychund Chintamon was based in Bombay (now Mumbai). He received his training at Elphinstone College in 1855 under WHS Crawford, a secretary of the Photographic Society of Bombay, where Chintamon also exhibited his work the following year. He subsequently set up his photography studio in the city, initially photographing members of local mercantile families and later expanding his clientele to aristocracy and important political, administrative and literary figures, including Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy and Manickjee Antarya.
When Elphinstone introduced a course in photography in 1855, under instruction from the British East India Company, Chintamon was among the first batch of forty students to enroll. He graduated in 1856 with distinction, having twice earned the best photographs prize. The same year, he exhibited his photographs at the Bombay Photographic Society, along with others such as Narayan Daji, gaining the visibility he needed to operate as an independent professional. He also went on to produce a number of ethnographic images, some of which were displayed at the Exposition Universelle, or the Paris International Exposition, of 1867 for industrial, art and craft manufactures. His studio, Hurrychund & Co., which he set up at Rampart Row in 1858 flourished until 1881, when it ceased operations. …
Accompanying the proliferation of independent photography studios in the mid-nineteenth century, was the development of a hybrid aesthetic, seen also in Chintamon’s work. He evolved a visual style that combined the Victorian iconographies of class and refinement with the Indian symbols of ethnicity, caste and status. In staging his sitters, he used the popular European conventions of painted backdrops as well as props such as printed carpets and flower vases. The sitters were often posed or arranged to suggest an air of casualness or informality, in conspicuous contrast to their own self-conscious formality – likely a result of having to hold still during extended individual exposure times. This unintended tension between setting and sitter is another notable characteristic of Chintamon’s portraits.
Anonymous. “Hurrychund Chintamon,” on the Mapacademy website April 21, 2022 [Online] Cited 27/05/2023
Of British origin, P. A. Johnston and Theodore Julius Hoffmann founded the Johnston & Hoffmann studio, at its time the second largest European studio important in India. Established in Calcutta in 1882, they opened eight years later a annex to Darjeeling. Their studio is best known for its portraits of locals and royalty from Nepal, Sikkim and Tibet.
Raja Lala Deen Dayal (Hindi: लाला दीन दयाल; 1844-1905; also written as ‘Din Dyal’ and ‘Diyal’ in his early years), famously known as Raja Deen Dayal) was an Indian photographer. His career began in the mid-1870s as a commissioned photographer; eventually he set up studios in Indore, Mumbai and Hyderabad. He became the court photographer to the sixth Nizam of Hyderabad, Mahbub Ali Khan, Asif Jah VI, who awarded him the title Raja Bahadur Musavvir Jung Bahadur, and he was appointed as the photographer to the Viceroy of India in 1885. He received the Royal Warrant from Queen Victoria in 1897.
Installation view of the exhibition Photographs. An Early Album of the World (1842-1911) at the musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, Paris showing the section ‘Composite photographs in Mexico’
Composite photographs in Mexico
In the history of painted photography practices, colourisation often aims to embellish the print considered monochromatic and dull. A set of photographs painted by landscape artist Conrad Wise Chapman show a association of these two techniques around picturesque and popular subjects. Other forms of formal hybridisation are attested in Mexico. Three shots set with a medallion were partially covered with feathers in the colours shimmering, to highlight clothes and certain elements of the decor. These composite objects are rare testimonies that combine the art of featherwork, widespread in Mexico during the pre-Hispanic and colonial periods, with the new technique of photography. The figure of the peddler is attributed to the photographer Augustin Péraire [below] and the image of the three women is a reproduction of a print of the popular figure showing the “China poblana”.
Installation view of the exhibition Photographs. An Early Album of the World (1842-1911) at the musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, Paris showing at second left, W.J. Sawyer’s Mr Sawyer, photo man (Nigeria, 1880-1890, below)
Photo of W. J. Sawyer and his sons taken in Calabar (possibly at his studio). W. J. Sawyer was a photographer based in Calabar, mostly active during the late 19th century and early 20th century, having photographed the Oba of Benin during the period of his craft.
W.J. Sawyer
The biography of W. J. Sawyer is still quite incomplete. He takes, on demand of the Spanish Commander Francisco Romero, several photographs in Bioko (current Equatorial Guinea), in 1883. The images are shown the same year at the International Colonial and Export Exhibition in Amsterdam. The picture showing a man accompanied by two boys could be a self-portrait of the photographer, as the title on the back suggests.
Rapid growth in West Africa
Photography was quickly adopted in many regions in the world from the 1840s to the 1860s. West Africa combines several factors which have fostered its rapid growth. Many ports connect the cities with each other and with the European continent, facilitating transatlantic and regional trade. In Freetown (current Sierra Leone), Lagos (current Nigeria), Libreville (current Gabon) established communities made up of elders freed and returning slaves from North and South America and the Caribbean. A cosmopolitan culture reigns in these cities where trade can develop.
As early as 1853, the African-American Augustus Washington left the United States and set up a daguerreotype studio in Monrovia. In the 1860s, Francis W. Joaque or J.P. Decker practice photography on an itinerant basis on the coast. These photographers respond to a local demand for photography loved ones or events to remember. They also include a clientele European, Joaque realising for example many portraits of the explorer Italian Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza. The Lutterodt dynasty establishes several studios photographers who operate in Accra (current Ghana) and Freetown between the years 1870 and 1940.
J. A. Green is one of West Africa’s most prolific photographers. Born in Nigeria, he is the son of a palm oil merchant. He practices photography from 1891 and provides images to a clientele African and European. He also trains other photographers. In this image, Green photographs a stage at the leader’s funeral slaver Amonibienye Ofori Long John. The tanda burial custom involves, for the elites, the public presentation of the body of the deceased dressed in his clothes of pageantry. Son Henry Obulu supports his father’s jaw to affirm his position as legitimate heir.
Text from the exhibition
Jonathan Adagogo Green
Jonathan Adagogo Green (J. A. Green), born in the village of Ayama (Peterside), Bonny (Rivers State, Nigeria) in 1873. The son of Chief Sunju Okoronkwoye Dublin Green and Madame Idameinye Green, he was looked after by his uncle Uruasi Dublin Green after his father’s death in 1875. He attended school in Lagos and possibly Sierra Leone. It is unknown where he trained as a photographer but by 1891 he had set up his photographic practice in Bonny. His work covered a range of themes including portraiture of British colonial officers, European merchants, prominent chiefs and their families, scenes of daily and ritual life, commerce and building – a body of work that appealed to both local elites and expatriate clients. Green died in 1905 at the age of 32, after practicing in the Niger Delta for 14 years. His work is in held in a number of collections in the UK, USA and Nigeria.
Text from the exhibition
Jonathan Adagogo Green (1873-1905) was according to some sources the first professional photographer in what is now Nigeria to have ethnic origins in that area. He is significant in being a pioneering photographer in what is now Nigeria, noted for his documentation of the colonial power and local culture, particularly his Ibani Ijo community.
Green was born in Bonny, present day Rivers State. “He studied photography in Sierra Leone and then established a studio in Bonny.” The area where he lived became part of the British Oil Rivers protectorate in 1884, which was renamed to the Niger Coast Protectorate in 1893. It was part of the Southern Nigeria Protectorate for the last few years of Green’s life, starting in 1900.
Green was active as a photographer for only a short lifetime, dying at the age of 32. “But during this period he was both energetically productive and remarkably adroit in serving both indigenous and colonial clienteles.” “When he set up shop his work was appreciated and rewarded by two very different communities.” His “strategic use of initials on his business cards and stamps… disguised his African origins”, part of his working with the colonial era officials.
William Ellis (29 August 1794 – 9 June 1872) was a British missionary and author. He travelled through the Society Islands, Hawaiian Islands, and Madagascar, and wrote several books describing his experiences.
In Madagascar, photography as a tool of social distinction
Photography is introduced to Madagascar by the British missionary William Ellis [above]. First rejected by Queen Ranavalona I (r. 1828-1861), the technology was enthusiastically adopted during the reign of Radama II (r. 1861-1863) by the king himself, the court and the Malagasy elite, responding to the desire for individualisation and social distinction from high society. Several European photographers mentioned the ease and familiarity of the models with the device. From the 1890s, the first Malagasy studios won great success with a population wishing to design and maintain a self-image. The photos presented here are the work of this first generation Malagasy photographers, including Joseph Razaka based in Antananarivo and Joseph Razafy in Toamasina.
Ulke Brothers Studio (Julius Ulke and Henry Ulke) Apsáalooke (Crow) delegation 1872 Albumen silver print from glass negative 8 x 10 in. National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution
Back row (standing) from left to right: Long Horse; Thin Belly; Bernard Prero (interpreter); unknown name, wife of Awé Kúalawaachish (Sits In The Middle Of The Land); Major F.D. Pease (agent); unknown name, wife of Uuwatchiilapish (Iron Bull); Frank Shane (interpreter); and Bear In The Water. Front row (seated in chairs) from left to right: Bear Wolf; White Calf; Awé Kúalawaachish (Sits In The Middle Of The Land); Uuwatchiilapish (Iron Bull); One Who Leads The Old Dog; and Peelatchixaaliash (Old Crow [Raven]). Front row (seated on the floor) from left to right: Stays With The Horses, wife of Bear Wolf; and Pretty Medicine Pipe, wife of Peelatchixaaliash (Old Crow [Raven])
This series by Timothy H. O’Sullivan comes from the album Photographs from Geographical explorations and surveys west of the 100th meridian Wheeler 1871-2-3, consisting of fifty photographs of explorations in the Western United States (New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, etc.). The set shows mainly landscapes and natural sites, some portraits of Zunis, Apaches and Navajos, and views of architecture and monuments.
The limits of visibility
The thirst for images which manifested itself as early as 1840 in Europe and then rapidly in the whole world has encountered contrasting situations. From the beginning arose the question of limits: how far to go? Under what conditions do a photography ? For what purposes? Technical challenge sometimes but above all question ethics when it comes to bearing witness to the horrors of war, or when it comes to to produce the image of scenes or objects that are supposed to remain hidden. Some photographers could trick, coerce or negotiate. The images produced are remained secret or, conversely, circulated widely. The life of photographs after the shot is a fundamental element of this medium, they are led to undergo multiple changes of meaning depending on the way we perceives them, from which they are presented. In this section are photographs that evoke certain situations limits: images of conflicts shown or hidden, sacred places of which a part remains invisible, images obtained by trickery. These photographs are not shown as trophies but as traces of practices that we can re-examine today.
Uncover the Sacred
For many photographers, the attraction of the forbidden or the opportunity to attend a singular event played into the desire to create an image. We consider today with a certain reserve these images of masks or places Holy. While they may still constitute factual documents, our attention now turns to the conditions of their realisation. In what contexts could they have been made, and what do they show us, apart from the very fact that they were produced in an exceptional way?
James album
The history of photography in Pueblo territory, in the United States, offers a rare example of strong reaction to the invasion of photography. The first reactions of mistrust from the Indian communities, from the 1890s, are linked to the dissemination of images and the tourist promotion of rituals supposed remain secret. The Hopi Snake Dance ceremony had become a major attraction. Often disrupted by ever-increasing numbers of visitors, it will be definitively prohibited to photographers in 1913, following the mobilisations of Hopi communities. The exhibition does not present here the photographs of this ritual that George Wharton James manages to capture, in order respect the Hopi restrictions. The exposed double page combines two times of shooting, the first image showing the perplexed waiting of the Indians in front the church of Acoma, and the second their reaction of just surprise and mistrust after shooting.
Félix Adrien Bonfils was a French photographer and writer who was active in the Middle East. He was one of the first commercial photographers to produce images of the Middle East on a large scale and amongst the first to employ a new method of colour photography, developed in 1880. …
Maison Bonfils produced thousands of photographs of the Middle East. Bonfils worked with both his wife and his son. Their studio became “F. Bonfils et Cie” in 1878. They photographed landscapes, portraits, posed scenes with subjects dressed up in Middle Eastern regalia, and also stories from the Bible. Bonfils took photographs in Lebanon, Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Greece and Constantinople (now Istanbul). While Bonfils produced the vast majority of his work, his wife, Lydie, and son Adrien were also involved in photography produced by the studio. As few are signed, it is difficult to identify who is responsible for individual photographs. Lydie is thought to have taken some of the studio portraits, especially those of Middle Eastern women, who were more inclined to pose for a female photographer. Adrien became more involved in the landscape photography at age 17, when Félix returned to Alès to have compiled collections of their photographs published and then to open a collotype printing factory. Félix died in Alès on the 9th of April 1855.
As Christine Barthe observes, “In the first ten years of photography, from 1841 to 1851, many travelers would try their hands at daguerreotypes outside Europe. Guillain’s photographs, taken in very difficult conditions, are not always perfect from a technical point of view, but they nevertheless represent the pioneering works in the history of photography.” They offer extraordinary insight into the people, the policies, and the places along the east coast of Africa during the mid nineteenth-century.
Ernest Philipp Benecke may have been part of a well-known German banking family of the same name from the Hamburg and Hanover area. Benecke made his only known photographs in Egypt and Nubia in 1852, which consisted of portraits and studies of the daily life of the cultures he visited. His works are among the earliest surviving photographs of non-Western civilizations.
Muhammad Sadiq Bey (1832-1902) was an Ottoman Egyptian army engineer and surveyor who served as treasurer of the Hajj pilgrim caravan. As a photographer and author, he documented the holy sites of Islam at Mecca and Medina, taking the first ever photographs in what is now Saudi Arabia. …
Born in Cairo, Sadiq was educated in Cairo’s military college and at the Paris École Polytechnique. He qualified as an colonel in the Egyptian army and returned to the military college to teach cartographic drawing.
In 1861, he was assigned to visit the region of Arabia from Medina to the port of Al Wajh and conduct a detailed survey. He took a small team and some surveying equipment as well as his own camera; photography was not part of the official mission. His records of the expedition are the earliest known detailed accounts of the region’s climate and settlements. His photographs of Medina were the first ever taken there. In 1880 he was assigned to accompany the Hajj pilgrim caravan from Egypt to Mecca as its treasurer. He was responsible for the safe passage of the mahmal, a ceremonial passenger-less litter, to Mecca. Again he brought a camera, becoming the first person to photograph Mecca, the Great Mosque, the Kaaba, and pilgrim camps at Mina and Arafat. …
Sadiq used a wet-plate collodion camera, which had been invented in the 1850s. This produced negatives on wet glass plates, requiring a portable darkroom. From these negatives he made albumen prints which he signed or, later, stamped.
The sanctuaries of Mecca and Medina are the holiest sites of Islam. As part of the Hajj which is one of the five pillars of Islam, pilgrims perform rituals at Mecca and other nearby sites. On his expeditions from 1861 to 1881, Sadiq photographed the interiors and exteriors of sites on the Hajj pilgrimage route as well as at Medina. Photographing the Al-Masjid an-Nabawi (Prophet’s Mosque) and its surroundings in Medina on 11 February 1861, he noted in his diary that no-one had taken such photographs before.
He used walls and mosque roofs as vantage points to capture panoramas of the cities. He also photographed people connected to the holy sites. As well as the Hajj pilgrims walking around the Kaaba, he photographed Shaykh ‘Umar al-Shaibi, the keeper of the key of the Kaaba, and Sharif Shawkat Pasha, guardian of the Prophet’s Mosque.
Jules Borelli (b. 1853, d. 1941) was a French traveller and explorer who travelled to Ethiopia from Egypt on 16 September 1885 to explore the Omo river. In this effort he was supported by his brother, a financier in Cairo and the owner of a fine collection of Egyptian antiquities. He was delayed from moving into western and southwestern Ethiopia by ase Ménilék II, who, out of political concerns, detained him at the capital of Éntotto for part of the period from July 1886 to November 1887. Finally, in November 1887. Borelli started out for the headwaters of the Omo river, and reached a point some 300 miles north of Lake Rudolf (Turkana) on 17 June 1888, three months after Count Samuel Teleki von Szek and Lieutenant Ludwig Ritter von Hohnel had arrived on the lake’s southern shore. Had Ménilék not detained him and had he not fallen ill with malaria, Borelli could have reached the lake well before Teleki and von Hohnel. During his travels, Borelli was given a good description of the lake by people in Ethiopia, who called it Lake Šambara.
Borelli arrived in Cairo on 15 November 1888, where he later met Teleki and von Hohnel who were returning to Europe from their trip. The latter assisted B. in drawing his maps of the country surrounding the Omo river. Borelli doubted von Hohnel’s unsubstantiated claim that two rivers flowed into Lake Rudolf, and, as was later proven, correctly deduced that only the Omo flowed into the lake. In 1889, Borelli invited von Hohnel to Paris to attend an international geographical congress, where both men lectured. Borelli described his Ethiopian travels in his beautifully illustrated and well documented book published in 1890.
Isidore van Kinsbergen (Bruges 1821-Batavia 1905) was a Dutch-Belgian engraver, who after an educational period in Bruges and Gent discovered the artistic wealth of the theatre. In Batavia (Jakarta) he proved to be a real all-rounder, combining decoration painting with singing, acting and management. In 1855, Van Kinsbergen also took up photography. He was invited to photograph ‘all peculiarities’ on the Dutch mission to Bangkok in 1862 and took part in two inspection tours covering Java, Madura and Bali (1862 and 1865). Between 1863 and 1867 and again in 1873 he was contracted by the Government of the Netherlands-Indies to photograph Java’s antiquities. Two series, together holding over 375 photos, constitute his art and archaeology legacy.
There is a less or even ‘unknown’ Van Kinsbergen as well, who commercially operated from a professional studio in Batavia. Thanks to research, more than 200 anonymous or wrongly attributed photos can now be assigned to him. How to recognize Van Kinsbergen in portraits, landscapes, views and ‘types’? After all, making a portrait or casting a ‘type’ is quite different from photographing monuments. Are characteristics found within his art and archaeology series evident in his so-called commercial work? Yes, but not in one stereotypical way. Besides a general artistic rendering of items and the careful use of light, his style is direct, full of contrast, academic and theatrical at the same time.
Isidore van Kingsbergen (1821-1905) is sometimes described as the “sleeping beauty” of nineteenth-century photography, because his remarkable body of work has never been presented in its entirety. Yet he was a flamboyant artist who appeals to the imagination. For the first time, this publication gives a broad overview of the exceptional qualities of this photo pioneer. Van Kinsbergen became famous for the almost four hundred photographs he took of Java’s antiquities at the behest of the Dutch colonial government and the Batavian Society. Detailed research has also brought to light a hitherto unknown part of his oeuvre, including the portraits he made at the courts of Yogyakarta, Surakarta, Bandung, Madura and Buleleng (Bali). In his studio, he used his experience as a theatre director to photograph people from various social backgrounds in an expressive manner. Due to his tireless efforts for new cultural projects, he has also been called as the “soul of colonial artistic life in Batavia.”
Unknown photographer Album of photographs of the Philippines Nd Photo: musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, Dist. RMN – Grand Palais image musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac
The text on the photo stating that this man is from Papua New Guinea is incorrect. He is from the Marquesas archipelago. Please see another photograph of Hitoro, King of the island Ua Pou by Eugene Maunoury on the Ua Pou Wikipedia entry.
Eugene Maunoury
Eugène Maunoury settled in Chile between 1858 and 1865, in Santiago and Valparaiso. Then, from 1861, he was at the head of a luxurious studio in Lima (Peru) which saw parade the elite of society. From 1862 he was a correspondent for the Nadar studio. However, these portraits of Marquesans taken in Peru are neither intended images exotic, or photographs intended for scientific use. They were made by Maunoury to protest against the kidnapping of these people intended for be employed in forced labor in the exploitation of guano, in Peru. Maunoury publishes in L’Illustration of August 29, 1863 an article denouncing the situation of the raid, using some of his portraits. We recognise the king of the island Ua Pou, in the Marquesas Archipelago.
Many places in the world have become accessible through photography since it was invented. In August 1839, the technical details of the daguerreotype were revealed in Paris, and from September onwards, cameras were taken on board the ships of countless scientific and military expeditions and voyages all around the world. Associated with technological modernity, photography was used in the second half of the 19th century to record the whole planet. From Mexico to Gabon, photography was in turn an instrument of description and the visual appropriation of landscapes and monuments, a tool for knowledge and the control of populations, and an object of diplomacy with the local elite.
European colonial expansion was one of the driving forces that greatly accelerated global photography. Taking as its starting point the collection of photographs at the musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, enriched by several exceptional loans from public and private collections, the exhibition focuses on the trajectories and geographies of photography outside Europe in the 19th century.
4 key questions for Christine Barthe and Annabelle Lacour, the curators of the exhibition
1- What is the origin of this exhibition project?
Christine Barthe: The origins of this exhibition can be found in a project set up for the Louvre Abu Dhabi, where a first version of the exhibition was shown in 2019. Originally, it was based on the museum’s own collection, focusing on early photographs taken in regions far removed from Europe. The museum’s collection mainly reflects the European and American point of view, and we wanted, right from the beginning, and even more so for this adaptation for the musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, to show a little more interest in local productions, which are not so well known and visible as those of Westerners. So this project quickly expanded in terms of research to try and decentralise the history of photography.
2- More precisely, what discoveries did you make during this new research?
C.B.: The project was built up over a period of several years, and so we benefited from the layering of experiences, in-depth research, new acquisitions, contacts… It’s a long-term project. Right from the beginning, we have been researching images from the museum’s collection. This work has allowed us to re-identify major artists in the history of photography, whose images were previously anonymous in the museum’s collections. Lesser-known photographers have been found in French collections such as the National Library and the Asian arts museum Guimet. We were thus able to include a lot of local photographers in the exhibition, especially from West Africa, in present-day Ghana, Sierra Leone, Iran, India, Japan…
3- How did photography spread outside Europe?
Annabelle Lacour: What is striking about the beginning is how fast things happened. As soon as the French government announced the invention of the process in 1839, there were articles in newspapers all over the world. In the weeks that followed, boats left for foreign countries carrying cameras to make daguerreotypes. Lots of people all over the world were curious to see how it worked. As early as 1842, the Shah of Iran asked Russia and the United Kingdom to send him some cameras. Photographers trained people at the Persian court. There were different examples in India, in Thailand, where we see this infatuation of sovereigns for photography. However, the speed it was taken up with also varied greatly depending on the region. In Japan, for example, photography developed a little later, in the late 1850s, when the country opened up to trade. In Europe, photography was related to the idea of a visual conquest that accompanied the colonial conquest. And of course, we should never forget the significant use of photography to design and build up one’s own image.
4- Today, the way we perceive these photographs has evolved. How does this translate into the way they are displayed?
A.L.: The idea of this exhibition, through these fascinating images, is to give visitors the opportunity to see how, right from the beginning, the production of these images is diverse and responds to different wishes, desires, and fits into various different contexts. Obviously, the intention with which they were made for was not fixed in time. Some images may have seen their meaning change completely in the course of history. So we have this whole issue of a new reading of the images, which is important. The questions they posed when they were taken, and pose again today, are very much contemporary. The end of the exhibition raises certain ethical questions: what does it mean to want to photograph everything? What do we do with the images of scenes or people that we were not allowed to see or photograph? I don’t think the choice lies in the alternative of showing or concealing everything. The interest in showing these images today is the possibility to reflect, to ask the question of meaning, to show certain contexts and historical narratives, to realise just how contemporary these issues are.
Text from the musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac
Lai Afong (Chinese: 黎芳; c. 1838 or 1839 – 1890) was a Chinese photographer who established Afong Studio, considered to be the most successful photographic studio in the late Qing Dynasty. He is widely acknowledged as the most significant Chinese photographer of the nineteenth century. …
Lai Afong was the most successful of his generation of Chinese photographers in appealing to both a Chinese and foreign cosmopolitan clientele. Lai Afong advertised in English-language newspapers – offering a “Larger, and more complete collection of Views than any other Establishment in the Empire of China” – and the artist captioned much of his work in both Chinese and English. Afong Studio photographs were sold to both Chinese patrons – both those local to Hong Kong and those visiting from other parts of China – and foreign visitors to China.
The Afong Studio became a destination and training ground for foreign photographers in the region, and photographers such as Emil Rusfeldt and D.K. Griffith began their careers under the tutelage of Lai Afong. In 1875, Griffith claimed that his mentor had “entered the arena of European art, associating his name with photography in its best form, and justly stands first of his countrymen in Hong Kong.” John Thomson, a Scottish photographer working in China at the time, praised Lai Afong’s images as “extremely well-executed, [and] remarkable for their artistic choice of position,” in his book The Straits of Malacca, Indo-China, and China.
Lai Afong seems to have been the only Chinese photographer of his generation to be embraced by his foreign contemporaries. However, his work is distinct among them, as many of Lai Afong’s photographic compositions show the technical and aesthetic influence of traditional Chinese painting, known as guóhuà. Additionally, Lai Afong favoured the panorama more than any other photographer working in China in the 19th century, earning his work a place among the giants of 19th century landscape photography such as Carleton Watkins in America and Gustave Le Gray in France. No other nineteenth-century Chinese photographer offered as extensive and diverse a view of late Qing Dynasty China.
Upon his tomb is inscribed this epitaph: “Cole – Photographer”
‘Photographer’ could have had the prefix: ethical, conscientious, brave, magnificent. But there is no need… Ernest Cole was a photographer.
Cole fled South Africa in 1966 in order to publish his seminal book about living under apartheid, House of Bondage (1967), and then lived a nomadic existence around the world until his death, never returning to the country of his birth.
I feel so sad that this legend of photography died penniless and living rough on the streets of New York in 1990.
But then I rejoice in the photographs that he left us. For (unlike so many photographs) they are memorable. They make us remember that we must respect each other – through an ability to see a person as he is, to be aware of his unique individuality.
“Respect is not fear and awe, it denotes, in accordance with the root of the word (respicere = to look at), the ability to see a person as he is, to be aware of his unique individuality. Respect means the concern that the other person should grow and unfold as he is. Respect, thus, implies the absence of exploitation … It is clear respect is possible only if I have achieved independence; if I can stand and walk without needing crutches, without having to dominate and exploit anyone else. Respect exists only on the basis of freedom … To respect a person is not possible without knowing him; care and responsibility would be blind if they were not guided by knowledge. Knowledge would be empty if it were not motivated by concern. There are many layers of knowledge; the knowledge which is an aspect of love is one which does not stay at the periphery, but penetrates to the core. It is possible only when I can transcend the concern for myself and see the other person in his own terms.”1
Respect exists only on the basis of freedom … and love.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ Erich Fromm. The Art of Loving. London: Allen and Unwin, 1957, pp. 28-29.
Many thankx to FOAM for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Many thankx to my friend and fellow artist Drager Meurtant for visiting the exhbition for me and allowing me to publish his photographs of the exhibition in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“I knew what I must do. I would show the world what the white South African had done to the black.”
Ernest Cole
“Cole was born Ernest Levi Tsoloane Kole in 1940, to a working-class Black family in a Black township outside the city of Pretoria. Growing into that society he came to know, with a depth of understanding that only belonging could bring, both its richness and the hardship and humiliation imposed by apartheid. As a boy he photographed people in the township for a shilling a time. By the age of eighteen he had begun to work as a photojournalist, and within a few years he was deeply committed to his essay on what it meant to be Black under apartheid. At age twenty-six, to escape the Security Police and to publish his seminal book, House of Bondage, he went into bitter and destructive exile. Cancer killed him in 1990. Apartheid destroyed him.”
David Goldblatt
Foam x Aperture: Celebrating the Legacy of Ernest Cole
For the current exhibition House of Bondage by Ernest Cole, Foam has joined forces with Aperture to host a special online event celebrating the enduring legacy of Ernest Cole (1940-1990). During the evening, a distinguished panel of experts will share their insights and reflections on Cole’s powerful photographic work, which captured the brutal realities of apartheid-era South Africa, exposing the dehumanising effects of racial oppression in the daily life of black South Africans.
The Mines
Installation view of the exhibition Ernest Cole: House of Bondage at Foam, Amsterdam showing at left, Cole’s Pensive tribesmen, newly recruited to mine labour, awaiting processing and assignment (1960-1966, above)
Installation view of the exhibition Ernest Cole: House of Bondage at Foam, Amsterdam showing at right an Untitled image from Cole’s House of Bondage (1960-1966, below)
Installation view of the exhibition Ernest Cole: House of Bondage at Foam, Amsterdam
Foam proudly presents the first overview of the work of South African photographer Ernest Cole. The exhibition includes parts of his archive, which had long been considered lost. The overview was assembled in collaboration with the Ernest Cole Family Trust, which in 2017 secured control of Cole’s archive. Restless and tenacious, yet dedicated and empathetic. It is difficult to define the enigmatic South African photographer Ernest Cole (1940-1990). He is celebrated for his tireless documentation of Black lives in South Africa under apartheid: a regime of institutionalised racial segregation that was in effect from 1948 to the early 1990s.
As one of the first Black freelance photographers, Cole offered with his work an unprecedented view from the inside. Born in a township, Cole experienced the strains of apartheid first-hand. By having himself reclassified from ‘black’ to ‘coloured’, he managed to access places where most South Africans were banned. He risked his life exposing the grim reality of racial segregation, by documenting miners inside the mines, police controls and the demolition of townships, among others.
Cole lived a nomadic life, exiled from his native South Africa for his photographic publication House of Bondage (1967). The chapters from this book form the narrative for this exhibition. The book openly denounced the apartheid regime and was promptly banned in South Africa. In risk of arrest, Cole had gone into exile in 1966. He would never return to South Africa again.
Living between Sweden and the United States, Cole continued to document Black lives in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement. However, being Black and stateless proved debilitating there too, and a publication of his American work would never materialise. Towards the end of his life, Cole became increasingly disillusioned and reportedly started living on the streets of New York. He died at age 49 from pancreatic cancer. Much of Cole’s work had been considered lost, until the rediscovery of 60,000 negatives and contact sheets in the safety deposit boxes of a Swedish bank in 2017.
Besides (colour) images from his time in America, the archive contains unpublished photographs and contact sheets from House of Bondage. The exhibition in Foam is the first large scale overview of Cole’s work to include parts of his retrieved archive.
About the exhibition
As one of the first Black freelance photographers, Cole offered with his work an unprecedented view from the inside. Born in a township, Cole experienced the strains of apartheid first-hand. By having himself reclassified from ‘black’ to ‘coloured’, he managed to access places where most South Africans were banned. He risked his life exposing the grim reality of racial segregation, by documenting miners inside the mines, police controls and the demolition of townships, among others.
This exhibition shows the rediscovery of 60,000 negatives and contact sheets in the safety deposit boxes of a Swedish bank in 2017. Besides (colour) images from his time in America, the archive contains unpublished photographs and contact sheets from House of Bondage. The exhibition in Foam is the first large scale overview of Cole’s work to include parts of his retrieved archive.
The photographs in this exhibition were taken between 1958-1966, unless stated otherwise. All contact sheets are modern prints from scans. Original titles and text from House of Bondage are in quotation marks or italics. The exhibition pens in tandem with the launch of two volumes published by Aperture: the first a republication of House of Bondage, the second presenting US work for the first time in history.
This exhibition was made in collaboration with the Ernest Cole Family Trust and Magnum Photos.
Press release from Foam
Installation view of the exhibition Ernest Cole: House of Bondage at Foam, Amsterdam showing in the background at left the section of the exhibition entitled ‘Banishment’
Banishment
Cole secretly visited Frenchdale, a remote government detention camp. Its inhabitants were banished without trial, on account of their political views. Cole recorded the basis conditions under which they lived in exile, sometimes for decades. Cole’s presence in the camp was unauthorised, and he recalls having to hide from the police during his stay. When he left, he was relieved. “For them and infinity of unremarkable days stretched ahead. For me the frightful nothingness of Frenchdale was about to end (…) ironically, as I re-entered the restricted black life of Johannesburg, I felt free.”
Cole’s anger about apartheid education is inescapable in his chapter ‘Education for Servitude’, for which he visited various Bantu schools. His images and handwritten notes from a visit to a school in Vlakfontein in 1965 testify to overly crowded and understaffed classrooms in which children are studying to be “educated for servitude”.
Wall text from the exhibition
Installation views of the exhibition Ernest Cole: House of Bondage at Foam, Amsterdam showing photographs from the section ‘Education for Servitude’: in the bottom image at left, Cole’s Earnest boy (1960-1966, below); and at right, Teacher toward end of her day in school, South Africa (1960-1966, below)
Installation views of the exhibition Ernest Cole: House of Bondage at Foam, Amsterdam showing photographs and contact sheets from Cole’s series Black Spots from Cole’s House of Bondage (see photographs below)
Installation view of the exhibition Ernest Cole: House of Bondage at Foam, Amsterdam showing photographs and contact sheets from Cole’s series Black Spots from Cole’s House of Bondage Photo: Drager Meurtant
“African township is bulldozed out of existence to make way for white expansion. Government trucks will move residents and their few possessions to matchbox houses in new locations, usually in remote areas, perhaps not even named on the map. Even to live there, families must qualify. People at right did not, and thus have not only had their homes razed, but have nowhere to go.”
Installation view of the exhibition Ernest Cole: House of Bondage at Foam, Amsterdam showing Nightmare Rides (1960-1966, all below) from the House of Bondage Period Photo: Drager Meurtant
Encouraged by his boss Jürgen Schadeberg, and inspired by other photographers at Drum – such as Peter Magubane, Bob Gosani and Alf Kumalo – Cole became one of South Africa’s first Black freelance photojournalists. Working in Johannesburg but not being allowed to live there, he commuted to the office by train. The platforms and carriages were segregated and overcrowded leading to bizarre situations that inspired the series ‘Nightmare Rides’. The item was commissioned by the Rand Daily Mail and first published in the Netherlands in 1962 as Mensen als vee [People as Cattle] in Katholieke Illustratie.
“Twice each day, at the morning and evening rush hours, the segregated station platforms are a bizarre sight. At one end, a few white trailers stand about, surrounded by space. At the other, a dense mass of Africans is congregated, crowded and compressed.”
Installation views of the exhibition Ernest Cole: House of Bondage at Foam, Amsterdam showing in the bottom image at right, Untitled (Police and Passes) (1960-1966, below) from the House of Bondage Period Photos: Drager Meurtant
“The standard by which the police operate is cruelly simple. To them every black man is a criminal suspect. In a technical sense, the police are not far off the mark to be so suspicious. The laws of apartheid are a far-reaching tangle of restrictions, reaching so deeply into everyday life that it is a rare African who does not violate some law.”
Curated by Alistair O’Neill, professor of Fashion History and Theory at Central Saint Martins (University of the Arts London)
Please note: This exhibition includes photographs showing nudity and sexually suggestive scenes. There is no age restriction for visitors to the exhibition. We are leaving the decision to visit to the discretion of parents, guardians and carers.
Keith Vaughan (British, 1912-1977) Highgate Men’s Pond Album 1933 Courtesy Aberystwyth University School of Art Museum and Galleries
Nothing hard to see here…
This looks to be a fascinating exhibition albeit with not a single erect penis on show and about half the exhibition showing flaccid examples. The photographs seem particularly asexual. Hardly any of them are what you would call “erotic”, except perhaps the photographs from the earliest album in this posting, Keith Vaughan’s Highgate Men’s Pond Album (1933, above and below). For me, the most sexual photographs are the “rough trade” such as the skins and carnies… an archetype which has existed for centuries.
My Phd research titled Presing the Flesh: Sex, Body Image and the Gay Male (1997-2001) examined in part the history of the male body in photography, including photos of ephebes (young men), the muscular mesomorphic body as featured in the physique magazines and gay male pornography. My history of the male body in photography can be found in the Historical Pressings chapter while the Bench Press chapter investigates the ‘Cult of Muscularity’, the development of gym culture, its ‘masculinity’, ‘lifestyle’, and the images used to represent it.
Much as gay men had to speak ‘Polari’ (gay slang language) when going to pubs such as the Salisbury on St Martin’s Lane in London in the 1970s so that those around us could not understand what we were saying, so physique or ‘beefcake’ magazines of the 1950s and 1960s relied heavily on the iconography of classical Rome and Greece to legitimise and hide from unknowing eyes (in plain sight) their homo-erotic overtones. Use was made of columns, drapery, and sets that presented the male body as the contemporary equivalent of idealised male beauty of ancient times.
While Simon in his excellent post on the exhibition notes that there was a delicate balancing act in the photographs in their subtle aesthetics of constraint and tact and a “self-imposed restraint which made ‘physique photographs’ walk such an exciting fine line between factual depiction of male anatomy and objects of lust from the 1930s to the 80s,” behind the scenes the models were getting boners and having sex all over the place. Purely for private consumption in their day, none of these photographs are ever shown (as in this exhibition) or published today and hardly anyone knows about them. The limp, flaccid penis is all that we get to see for fear of offence and/or moral outrage… for what was covert activity at the time (with a wide underground circulation) is kept impotent today.
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.
“I think the interest is not so much in the images, per se, as in their variety, and also in the extraordinary density and complexity of the clandestine networks of gay photographers, subjects, printers, publishers and distributors which the wall labels describe and explain. That’s interesting social history.
And then, when you lay the complex mesh of legal and cultural and visual parameters over the images you get, as it were, another layer of complexity beyond the images themselves; you get to see them as varying visual strategies and approaches and sublimations of very powerful male urges of desire and sexuality.”
“The bodies in the ‘beefcake’ magazines of the 1950’s tend to be bigger than that of the ephebe, even when the models were quite young in some cases. As the name ‘beefcake’ implies, the muscular mesomorphic shape was the attraction of these bodies – perfectly proportioned Adonis’s with bulging pectorals, large biceps, hard as rock abdomens and small waists. The 1950’s saw the beginning of the fixation of gay men with the muscular mesomorph as the ultimate ideal image of a male body. The lithe bodies of young dancers and swimmers now gives way to muscle – a built body, large in its construction, solid and dependable, sculpted like a piece of rock. These bodies are usually smooth and it is difficult to find a hirsute body11 in any of the photographs from the physique magazines of this time. According to Alan Berube in his book, Coming Out Under Fire,
“The post-war growth and commercialization of gay male erotica in the form of mail-order 8 mm films, photographic stills, and physique magazines were developed in part by veterans and drew heavily on World War II uniforms and iconography for erotic imagery.”12
Looking through images from the 1940s in the collection at The Kinsey Institute, I did find that uniforms were used as a fetish in some of the explicitly erotic photographs as a form of sexual iconography. These photographs of male2male sex were for private consumption only. I found little evidence of the use of uniforms as sexual iconography in the published photographs of the physique magazines. Here image composition mainly featured classical themes, beach scenes, outdoor and studio settings. …
As the 1950s turned into the 1960s other stereotypes became available to the photographers – for example the imagery of the marine, the sailor, the biker, the boy on a tropical island, the wrestler, the boxer, the mechanic. The photographs become more raunchy in their depiction of male nudity.
In the 1950s, however, classical aspirations were never far from the photographers minds when composing the images as can be seen in the undated photograph Jim Stevens by Lon of New York in London taken from a book called ‘Art in Physique Photography’.14 This book, illustrated with drawings of classical warrior figures by David Angelo, is subtitled: ‘An Album of the world’s finest photographs of the male physique’.
Here we observe a link between art and the body. This connection was used to confirm the social acceptability of physique photographs of the male body while still leaving them open to other alternative readings. One alternative reading was made by gay men who could buy these socially acceptable physique magazines to gaze with desire upon the naked form of the male body. It is interesting to note that with the advent of the first openly gay pornography magazines after the ruling on obscenity by the Supreme Court in America in the late 1960s,15 classical figures were still used to justify the desiring gaze of the camera and viewer upon the bodies of men. Another reason used by early gay pornography magazines to justify photographs of men having sex together was that the images were only for educational purposes! …
As social morals relaxed in the age of ‘free love’, physique photographers such as Bob Mizer from Athletic Model Guild produced more openly homo-erotic images. In his work from the 1970s full erections are not prevalent but semi-erect penises do feature, as do revealing “moon” shots from the rear focusing on the arsehole as a site for male libidinal desires. A less closeted, more open expression of homosexual desire can be seen in the photographs of the male body in the 1970s.17 What can also be seen in the images of gay pornography magazines from the mid 1970s onwards is the continued development of the dominant stereotypical ‘ideal’ body image that is present in contemporary gay male society – that of the smooth, white, tanned, muscular mesomorphic body image.
Marcus Bunyan. “Historical Pressings,” from Presing the Flesh: Sex, Body Image and the Gay Male. PhD thesis, RMIT University, 2001
A Hard Man is Good to Find! celebrates a clandestine visual culture of men’s bodies that emerged in the post-war period, during a time when making and distributing such images was a criminal offence.
This exhibition highlights key areas of London which were a focus for men seeking out men to photograph. It maps out a territory of risk and possibility across Highgate, between Chelsea and Wellington Barracks, in Soho, Brixton, Portobello and Euston. Catalogues, print ordering sheets, personal albums, magazines and publications explore how these photographs were circulated, exchanged and shared.
While the 1955 Wolfenden Report and the 1967 Sexual Offences Act marked the partial decriminalisation of gay sexual activity, prompting gay liberation and the fight for social equality; any depiction of male nudity which suggested homosexuality remained subject to the 1857 Obscene Publications Act.
Including work by John S. Barrington, Cecil Beaton, Guy Burch, Basil Clavering, Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Bill Green, David Gwinnutt, Angus McBean, Patrick Procktor, Ajamu X and many more.
Whilst this is an exhibition of queer pictures, it is important to note that not all the photographers or models can be claimed as queer subjects. It also acknowledges that language evolves and while queer is employed today for its inclusivity, the reclaiming of the derogatory term can sit uneasily for the generation subjected to it; the term homosexual can be similarly problematic for a younger generation.
As a number of the works are historical documents, it has not been possible to identify all individuals represented in the exhibition. We welcome any amendments or additions.
Text from The Photographers’ Gallery website
A Hard Man is Good to Find! Interview with exhibition curator Alistair O’Neill
Alistair O’Neill, professor of Fashion History and Theory at Central Saint Martins (University of the Arts London) talks about curating the exhibition A Hard Man is Good to Find! – a bold new exhibition charting over 60 years of queer photography of the male physique.
Keith Vaughan (British, 1912-1977) Highgate Men’s Pond Album (detail) 1933 Courtesy Aberystwyth University School of Art Museum and Galleries
Keith Vaughan (British, 1912-1977) Highgate Men’s Pond Album (detail) 1933 Courtesy Aberystwyth University School of Art Museum and Galleries
Keith Vaughan (British, 1912-1977) Highgate Men’s Pond Album 1933 Courtesy Aberystwyth University School of Art Museum and Galleries
Keith Vaughan (British, 1912-1977) Highgate Men’s Pond Album, front cover 1933 Courtesy Aberystwyth University School of Art Museum and Galleries
Highgate men’s pond has a history of accommodating physical culturists and queer men as swimmers and sunbathers. At the age of 21, artist Keith Vaughan purchased a Leica camera and set up a darkroom in his bedroom. One of his first projects was a photobook he designed and made charting the climbing temperature of a summer’s day at the pond. This is the first time the album has been exhibited.
Keith Vaughan (British, 1912-1977) Highgate Men’s Pond Album 1933 Courtesy Aberystwyth University School of Art Museum and Galleries
Keith Vaughan (British, 1912-1977) Highgate Men’s Pond Album (detail) 1933 Courtesy Aberystwyth University School of Art Museum and Galleries
Angus McBean (Welsh, 1904-1990) David Dulak 1946 Courtesy Rupert Smith Collection
In a study of Dulak taken in Angus McBean’s Covent Garden studio, an idealised diptych of the naked dancer is created from controlled lighting and double exposure. It was taken after McBean was released from prison, having served two years’ hard labour for gross indecency. During the Blitz, McBean relocated his studio to Bath and it was raided by police in 1941.
Between Chelsea and Wellington Barracks
I.e. Pimlico, an area of boarding houses and rented rooms, an enclave of queer life. Angus McBean opened his photographic studio on Belgrave Road in 1935.
Montague Glover had served in the First World War where he was awarded a medal. He went on to practice as an architect with photography on the side. His military career gave him easy access to the barracks where he recruited like-minded Guards to return to his studio or rented rooms and pose in less than full uniform. Squaddies available for gay sex were known as ‘a bit of scarlet’.
Angus McBean (Welsh, 1904-1990) David Dulak (detail) 1946 Courtesy Rupert Smith Collection
“… by the time of the 1939 National Register he was 35 and living in a Hertfordshire cottage with three other men; his 19 year old photographer’s assistant, a 21 year old theatre clerk, and a 26 year old builder’s carpenter. Because of the London Blitz McBean moved to Bath where he set up a studio in his ground floor flat in Kingston House, Pierrepont Street, which soon became a meeting place for gay men, including servicemen who were stationed nearby.
On 13 November 1941 Bath police raided the flat and arrested McBean and a 16 year old youth. This began a chain of arrests using evidence from letters, diaries and statements to the police. It also resulted in one, and possibly two, suicides.
McBean and five other men were tried “on grave charges” at Winchester Assizes in March 1942 in front of Bristol born and former Clifton College pupil Lord Chief Justice Thomas Inskip, 1st Viscount Caldecote. All six men were found guilty and sent to prison with McBean receiving a 4 year sentence of hard labour for three charges of gross indecency. On hearing the sentence McBean collapsed in the dock. Others convicted were: 25 year old Lt. Tom Gill, in civilian life an actor, who received 15 months in prison; 18 year old Theodore Parker who was found in possession of 36 love letters from Gill and was sent to borstal for three years; 28 year old Arthur Sigmund Politzer, a well known artist and glass designer serving with the Field Security Police who received a 20 month prison sentence; 21 year old Eric Hughes, a civil servant sentenced to three years Borstal; and 22 year old Brian Ball, a soldier stationed in Surrey and sentenced to 15 months imprisonment.
Two other lives were ended by the case, though neither was charged. Alan Farr, a 30 year old Admiralty electrical fitter and draughtsman had been interviewed twice by police in the week after the raid about connections with McBean. On 16 December 1941 a Detective Inspector called at Farr’s office to escort him to the police station, probably to be charged. On the pretext of visiting the cloakroom before leaving, Farr shot himself and died instantly. Also mentioned during the trial was 18 year old Allan Patrick Nottingham, already on probation for indecency charges in Portsmouth, who may have been the catalyst for the initial discovery of Bean’s circle. A week after the trial, the Bath Chronicle of 21 March 1942 reported that Nottingham had been found in a crashed car on the Wiltshire Downs and had died shortly after in Swindon Hospital.
Jonathan Rowe. “Angus McBean,” on the Out Stories Bristol website 2021 [Online] Cited 29/05/2023
Angus McBean (Welsh, 1904-1990) David Dulak Ballet, January 1946 Courtesy Rupert Smith Collection
Dulak was a dancer, found by physique photographer John S Barrington in 1938 on Charing Cross Road. Barrington introduced him to theatre photographer Angus McBean; this study featured on the cover of Richard Buckle’s progressive dance journal, Ballet.
The Photographers’ Gallery presents A Hard Man is Good to Find! – a bold new exhibition charting over 60 years of queer photography of the male physique, on display from 2 March to 11 June 2023.
Bringing together more than 100 works, the exhibition centres on queer photographs of men’s bodies, produced in London in the twentieth century. While the 1955 Wolfenden Report and the 1967 Sexual Offences Act marked the partial decriminalisation of gay sexual activity, prompting gay liberation and the fight for social equality; any depiction of male nudity which suggested homosexuality remained subject to the 1857 Obscene Publications Act, which made making or distributing such images a criminal offence.
A clandestine visual culture emerged, regulated by laws which enforced homosexuality as invisible. In turn, it directly fed the defiant, overt visuality of gay men’s bodies that emerged in the post-war period. The tension between invisibility and visibility was negotiated through ideas about the male body drawn from art, physical culturists, and pornography – both home-grown and imported.
Taking a novel approach, the exhibition highlights key areas of London which were a focus for men seeking out men to photograph. It maps out a territory of risk and possibility across Highgate, between Chelsea and Wellington Barracks, in Soho, Brixton, Portobello and Euston. Within each site it is possible to locate artists of all persuasions, creating work about queer sensibilities and men’s bodies in radical ways. Catalogues, print ordering sheets, personal albums, magazines and publications are also included in the exhibition to explore how these photographs were circulated, exchanged and shared. Drawing together photographs produced for commercial, as well as creative and personal purposes, A Hard Man is Good to Find! dissolves hierarchies, creates non-linear historical narratives and brokers unlikely adjacencies.
Covering the 1930s to early 1990s, many works are exhibited here for the firsttime including Keith Vaughan’s Highgate Men’s Pond album, a modernist photo collage made in 1933; ‘The Portobello Boys’, an anonymous and striking portfolio of young men taken in the late 1950s and early 1960s in North Kensington. A set of archetypes, ‘The Londoners’, documented in the late 1960s by Anthony C Burls (trading as Cain of London) and Martin Spenceley’s street portraits of subcultural men photographed in Euston in the 1980s.
The hinge of this history is the posing pouch, a modest fabric covering for the male genitals developed by gay physique photographers to show as much of the male body as possible. Its origins lie in the US, in the Athletic Model Guild established by Bob Mizer in 1945, although there is evidence of it being worn for sunbathing in London in the early 1930s. An original 1950s posing pouch will on display in the exhibition. Employed to circumvent the ban on full nudity (which included the postal system), the pouch was also painted on mail order reproductions so that customers could rub them off once received in the post. The sighting and dematerialising of the posing pouch is key to thinking through how such images were consumed, and how queer erotics were discursively constructed from imaginative forms of resistance to power and oppression.
The exhibition includes works by: John S Barrington, Cecil Beaton, Guy Burch, Basil Clavering (trading as Royale), Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Bill Green (trading as Vince), David Gwinnutt, Paul Hawker, Angus McBean and Ajamu X.
Press release from the Photographers’ Gallery
Installation view of the exhibition A Hard Man is Good to Find! at The Photographers’ Gallery, London
Mrs Mizer Tangerine Posing Strap 1955 Miles Chapman Collection
In 1945 Bob Mizer started the Athletic Model Guild, a model agency for bodybuilders for the film industry. In 1951 he launched a quarterly magazine, Physique Pictorial. For his photoshoots Mizer developed the skimpiest possible garment which dwindled down to the posing pouch. The exhibition explains that the earliest versions were sewn for him by his mother who, nonetheless, strongly disapproved of his sexuality. …
Slightly spoiling the effect, there is a small mention of the photographic evidence that this kind of super-minimalist covering was, in fact, being worn by sunbathing men in London in the early 1930s. Still. American has to be shoehorned in somehow. [see photographs by Keith Vaughan at the top of the posting]
Bill Green (Vince) catalogue sheet 31949 June 1949
Bill Green set up Vince Studio at 46 Manchester Street, Marylebone in 1946, specialising in photographs of bodybuilders. Prints could be ordered from catalogue sheets advertised in the classifieds of Health and Strength magazine. His catalogue sheets always had a gutter in the middle so they could be folded for discreet posting without creasing any image.
“Vince” had originally been the pseudonym of Bill Green, a photographer for men’s magazines, who shot wrestlers and bodybuilders naked but for nifty briefs he had cut down from chainstore trunks. These were so unlike available mens’ underwear that models and readers wanted to buy them. Green obliged by mail order, later adding to his catalogue the black sweater get-up of intellectual Paris and unshrunk Levis; in 1954 he set up in the Soho premises – described by Richard Benson of the Face magazine as “a CS Lewis of a wardrobe for young men” – they passed through its door into somewhere far out.
Vince and his boys supplied flagrant colour, untweedy texture, tight fit and low cut to a theatrical and artistic clientele, and many followers of camp. But these were not the only customers for that “certain ambiguity”: pink hipsters walked out of the shop on heteros, too.
Veronica Horwell. “John Stephen,” on The Guardian website Mon 9 Feb 2004 [Online] Cited 29/05/2023
Bill Green (Vince) Monotosh Roy c. 1950s Courtesy Rupert Smith Collection
Bill Green – ‘Vince Man’s Shop’
In the 1940s, Bill Green was a local photographer who specialised in artistic images of ‘muscle men’ and male wrestlers. His models wore fairly revealing (for the time) homo-erotic garments that were mainly designed by himself due to the lack of availability of commercial items. He decided to develop this business and by 1950 was selling them through mail-order catalogues appealing mainly to the gay community. Following European trips in the early Fifties he expanded his portfolio to include the ‘existentialist’ look that was popular in France and Italy and was the first to introduce British men to ‘Beatnik’-style fashions.
With the continued success of his mail-order business, and aware of its popularity with the gay community, he opened Vince Man’s Shop in 1954. The establishment was located in Newburgh Street, an intelligent business decision as this was right at the heart of London’s gay community and very close to Marshall Street Public Baths which was a well-known and popular meeting area for gay men. One of the earliest advertisements featured a muscular Sean Connery in a ‘matelot’ vest and skin-tight jeans.
His colourful and unconventional designs, which included velvet and silk materials and pre-faded denim, quickly widened its appeal by attracting younger members of the Bohemian and Thespian fraternities who frequented the West End of London. The window displays were provocative for the time, often featuring mannequins wearing outrageous fashions including briefs and pink hipster-style slacks, and his wide range of clientele included the likes of George Melly, Peter Sellers, Sean Connery, Pablo Picasso and even the King of Denmark!
The fashions in the establishment were not cheap, and were generally out of the normal price range of ordinary teenagers, but this brought a certain ‘respectability’ to the informality and flamboyance of new styles and were certainly one of the catalysts in the major changes that were to take place in the fashions appealing to young males in the Sixties. As the decade progressed, and ’boutiques’ started providing a progressively fast-moving outlet for cheap fashion clothing, Vince’s came under increasing financial pressure and the establishment was forced to move to a less expensive location in North London. Bill Green closed the shop for good in 1969, subsequently becoming the manager of a Soho restaurant.
Anonymous. “Carnaby Street,” on the Sixties City website Nd [Online] Cited 29/05/2023
Montosh Roy (1916-2014)
Monotosh Roy (1916-2014) was an Indian bodybuilder, who held the Mr. Universe title in Group III Amateur Division in 1951. Roy was the first Indian and Asian to be awarded the Mr. Universe title. …
In 1939, he competed in his first bodybuilding competition, but did not fare well. He resolved for success and engaged himself in further practice. In 1939, he won the East Indian Bodybuilding Championship. In 1947, he won the All India Bodybuilding Championship.
In 1951, Roy travelled to the United Kingdom and participated in the Mr. Universe competition. He won the Mr. Universe title in Group III Amateur Division category. The audience at the competition were mesmerised by his muscle display. They queued up for his autograph and even waited up to two and half hours for his autograph. Following his victory at the Mr. Universe competition, he was felicitated at the India House by the Indian High Commissioner.
After his return to India he acted as a trainer in many physical culture clubs. He used to train fitness and yoga to celebrities. He founded the Indian Bodybuilding Federation in 1958. He was also the founding member of Asian Bodybuilding Federation. He also taught at the Calcutta University and the Law College. He became a featured columnist in periodicals on health and fitness. He also wrote a few books on Yoga. He conducted bodybuilding programmes that were telecast in the Doordarshan. He set up several bodybuilding and yoga centres in Kolkata.
Bill Green (Vince) Vince advertisement Health and Strength, 29 May 1952
In 1951, Green was advertising posing briefs in the Daily Mirror. They were made by shortening and over-dyeing Marks & Spencer underwear. This advertisement was shot at the Serpentine Lido. In 1954, Green opened the first men’s fashion boutique, Vince Man’s Shop, on Fouberts Place, Soho; it was the start of the peacock revolution and Carnaby Street as a fashionable retail destination.
Bill Green (Vince) Vince Man’s Shop catalogue, model Sean Connery Spring/Summer 1957 Courtesy Alistair O’Neill Collection
Vince Man’s Shop was the first boutique to sell imported men’s fashion such as American workwear jeans and Italian suiting and shirting. It catered to homosexual men and benefited from its proximity to the Marshall Street gym, Soho’s coffee bars and Piccadilly Circus. The cover model here is aspiring actor Sean Connery, better known at the time as a bodybuilder and artist’s model
Cecil Beaton (British, 1904-1980) ‘Narcissus of 1967’ (Gervase Griffiths) c. 1967 Gelatin silver print
Marylebone
‘The City of Quebec’ pub in Marylebone is supposed to be London’s oldest gay pub. It opened in 1946 and was popular with gay RAF men. Bill Green learned photography and wrestling in the RAF and in 1946 set up Vince Studio at 46 Manchester Street, soon establishing a name for ‘physique photography’. He advised beginners to use a little oil to help highlight the contours of male musculature.
In 1954 Green opened a men’s fashion boutique in Foubert’s Place, Soho. In 1956 his assistant, John Stephen, opened another fashion store. According to the exhibition’s curator, Alistair O’Neill, Professor of Fashion History and Theory at Central Saint Martins, these sparked ‘the peacock revolution’ in men’s fashion. They helped turn Carnaby Street into the centre of modern fashion.
Artist Patrick Prockter also had a studio on Manchester Street. He took photos as preparatory studies for paintings, especially of his boyfriend Gervase Griffiths. He cultivated an artistic circle which included painter David Hockney, fashion designer Ossie Clark, and physique model Peter Hinwood. The veteran photographer Cecil Beaton was attracted to this young group of openly queer men. The exhibition includes sets of colour photos of Griffiths on a beach, and two by Beaton which are among my favourites, not because they’re nude, camp or gay – simply because they’re beautiful.
Basil Clavering (British, 1910-1973) (Royale, Hussar, Dolphin) Mail order Storyette print late 1950s Courtesy Rupert Smith Collection
Basil Clavering ran the Cameo Royal cinema on the Charing Cross Road, and the Cameo Poly (now Regent Street Cinema). He built a studio in the basement of his home on Denbigh Street, Pimlico, with his friend, John Charles Pankhurst, both of whom had served in the navy. In their studio Basil & John recruited military men to model in authentic uniforms, and Clavering innovated the ‘storyette’ where the catalogue sheet of photos available to order would set out a narrative drama like film stills from a motion picture.
Basil Clavering (British, 1910-1973) (Royale, Hussar, Dolphin) Photograph from Storyette EX FJSS 1950s Courtesy Rupert Smith Collection
“Clavering and Parkhurst’s work reflects in both imagery and subject matter the drawings of Tom of Finland (Touko Laaksonen, 1920-1991). Laaksonen met Clavering during a visit to London and Studio Hussar commissioned a series of 17 panel drawings from him entitled The Thieving Cowboy (1957). No other photographers of the time were extracting so much visual drama from the clothed male figure. Other physique photographers were viewing the legal restrictions of the time as a challenge, whereas Royale and Hussar embraced them as an opportunity to produce magnificent risqué images.
Clavering and Parkhurst both served in the Navy, and their experience and connection to their subject matter is evident in the way clothing and partial undress was depicted, reflecting an insider’s comprehension and understanding.
Many of the models were also active military personnel, who Clavering met in public houses close to Hyde Park and the Chelsea barracks. Consequently, the images are not simply of men dressing up in uniforms, but rather men fully aware of both the purpose and symbolism of the uniform.”
Basil Clavering (British, 1910-1973) (Royale, Hussar, Dolphin) Photograph from Storyette EX FJSS 1950s Courtesy Rupert Smith Collection
Clavering was a successful businessman, and owned the Gala-Royale cinema chain. More as a hobby than anything else, he established a photographic studio in the basement of his Pimlico home, with his friend John Charles Parkhurst (1927-2000). Both men had served in the Navy, and they were drawn to the military men around the Hyde Park and Chelsea barracks, whom they paid to model for them.
The studio operated under two names, Royale and Hussar, and Clavering sold the photographs by mail order. The images are profoundly erotic, despite there being no frontal nudity. Models are occasionally depicted solo, but more often in groups, and scenarios involve uniform, military and naval discipline, wrestling, light bondage and spanking – somehow always in a mood of levity and playfulness. Clavering met Tom of Finland, and several images from a biker series echo the Finn’s work; in 1957 Studio Hussar even commissioned a series of drawings from him.
As far as I know this photograph is not in the exhibition but I like it!
Paul Hawker Spencer Churchill 1951 Courtesy Rupert Smith Collection
The Serpentine
In the 1950s British bodybuilding magazines catered for two audiences, straight bodybuilders and a gay readership. As well as the obvious photos and articles, in their back pages these magazines offered discreet mail order services for ‘original physique studies’. This section features the work of mail order publisher William Domenique (trading as Lon of New York) and gay erotic artist Bill Ward.
Paul Hawker came from Bristol, moved to London, and took photos of young men preening and parading at the Serpentine Open Air swimming pool, another well-known gay haunt. He is represented by some of the photos he took of his friend, body builder Spencer Churchill. Apparently Churchill was one of the first to adopt the American fashion for denim workware jeans as regular casual clothing.
And once you knew, you could purchase. Lots of the images here skirt around the legality of the male nude by being available in bodybuilding magazines, or as a catalogue of physiques for fitness buffs to emulate at home. One amazing image shows Spencer Churchill tensed and glistening while wearing a posing pouch that you could scratch off to reveal the goods beneath. It’s a fascinating portrait of hidden mid-century male desire in London.
But there are ethical questions here too. John S Barrington pretended to be a Vogue photographer to persuade men to pose for him. That’s uncomfortable, exploitative and not really dealt with in the show. Also, lots of the subjects in the exhibition wouldn’t have considered themselves gay or queer either, so framing them anonymously in a queer context totally removes the sitters’ agency.
Then there’s the group of photos of young men lounging around in west London bedrooms and living rooms. They’re amazing images, totally unguarded and joyful, but they were purchased as a box of anonymous negatives from Portobello Antiques Market by Emmanuel Cooper. These men have had no say in their private nude moments being plastered across The Photographers’ Gallery decades after they were taken. This was a time when privacy not only mattered, but had a tangible impact on people’s lives, and this has taken the choice away from them.
So there are issues here and some tricky ethical moments, but there’s still a lot to like. At its best, this show is a celebration of the male form in London from a time when that was an incredibly dangerous thing to celebrate. The thing is, men are hot, always have been, and we should be very grateful that these days we can say that without getting put in prison.
Anonymous photogapher The Portobello Boys Early 1960s Courtesy Emmanuel Cooper Archive The Bishopsgate Institute Special Collections and Archives
Emmanuel Cooper purchased a set of negatives from Portobello Antiques Market in the early 1980s. Cooper was a ceramicist, writer, art critic and gay rights activist. He called this anonymous body of work The Portobello Boys, as he believed they were taken in the north Kensington area in the late 1950s to mid-60s. Taken in an era before gay liberation, they document young men posing, in turns uncertainly and assertively, in states of undress.
Notting Hill
Became known after the war for its combination of bachelor housing and growing immigrant community. In the early 1980s ceramics artist Emmanuel Cooper picked up a set of negatives at Portobello Market. It turned out to be a set of studies of nude or partially clothed young men with an obvious queer vibe taken in the late 1950s and early 1960s in North Kensington. Cooper titled it ‘The Portobello Boys’ and arranged for its publication. They are surprisingly homely, unguarded, intimate studies of everyday life.
Anthony C Burls (Cain of London) Catalogue sheet c. 1968-1970 Guy Burch collection
Anthony C Burls was a photographer who engaged young men to model through street casting. He also ran a coffee shop at World’s End in Chelsea in the 1960s, took casual work at Battersea Funfair and regularly attended a gym in Brixton. He used these contexts to find working-class men to photograph.
White Brixton
Anthony C. Burls was an interesting character. In the 1960s he ran a coffee shop at the World’s End in Chelsea, got odd jobs working at funfairs, and attended a gym in Brixton. In all these settings he asked working class men if he could photograph them and the result is a series of full length, mostly fully clothed studies which I think I liked most out of the exhibition. He named the series ‘The Londoners: Official reports’, including not just the photos but the man’s job description and a pen profile. His first business address was Studio 200 on Railton Road, also home to the South London Gay Community Centre. …
I liked Anthony C. Burls’ set of photos of the rough, dirty, tough-looking young men you get working at funfairs and such, swaggering among the dodgems in tight jeans, unbuttoned shirts and rocker brylcreemed hair. [see photograph at bottom of posting]
John S Barrington (British, 1920-1990) John Hamill c. 1966 Courtesy Rupert Smith Collection
John S. Barrington (1920-1991) was a British physique photographer and publisher. Barrington’s photos of nude or semi-nude men appeared widely in British and American physique magazines, sometimes under the pseudonym John Paignton. Barrington published many of his own physique magazines, including Male Model Monthly, the first in Britain. He also published a number of books related to photography and anthropometry. Barrington was a prolific artist and publisher, and by 1984 was said to have published more nude titles than any other individual in Europe or the United States.
Barrington had frequent sexual encounters with men throughout his life, particularly with the men who modeled for him, though he identified as heterosexual.
Barrington began photographing men in 1938 at the men’s bathing pond at Hampstead Heath. He studied at St Martin’s School of Art and L’Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris. In addition to photography, Barrington was also a visual artist and sculptor.
Barrington began working as a physique photographer in 1948. In 1954, he began publishing Male Model Monthly, the first physique magazine in Britain. From 1954 until 1979, he would go on to publish many more physique magazines in Britain and the US, among the best-known being MAN-ifique, FORMosus, Superb Youth, and Youth in the Sun.
Barrington was known to select models in the “boy next door” mold, with average body types. His photographs were mostly taken outdoors, with models appearing in relaxed, natural poses.
In the 1950s and 1960s Barrington published books on anatomy and anthropometry, ostensibly for the benefit of artists.
John S Barrington (British, 1920-1990) Catalogue sheet c. 1970s Courtesy Rupert Smith Collection
John S Barrington (British, 1920-1990) Catalogue sheet (details) c. 1970s Courtesy Rupert Smith Collection
John S Barrington (British, 1920-1990) Catalogue sheet c. 1970s Courtesy Rupert Smith Collection
John S Barrington (British, 1920-1990) Catalogue sheet (details) c. 1970s Courtesy Rupert Smith Collection
Martin Spenceley Untitled 1980s Courtesy of the Michael Carnes Collection
Martin Spenceley photographed young men in Euston in the 1980s, scouting for Teds, punks and skinheads, persuading them to pose by cheekily lying that he worked for Vogue America.
Martin Spenceley Untitled 1980s Courtesy of the Michael Carnes Collection
Rough trade!
The show is split into different geographical areas of London, each of which had a slightly different character, lending themselves to different types of man and images. We start in the bedsit land of Pimlico. In the 1950s this was home to many single young queer men as well as soldiers living in the two nearby army barracks. We see pictures of many of the young fit soldiers who liked being photographed to earn a little extra money.
We then move on to Hampstead Heath the famous cruising area and home to the men-only Highgate Men’s Swimming Pond. A good collection of sunbathing men from the 1930s is included here. Other areas of London shown include a selection of 1950s male physique photography shot in Marylebone and in Hyde Park and ‘The Portobello Boys,’ an interesting selection of men shot at home in Notting Hill and Portobello in the 1960s. This area of West London was very queer back then.
Then we head south of the river to Battersea and Brixton where pictures range from 1960s fairground and other workers through to queer artists and activists in the 70s and 80s.
Anthony C Burls (Cain of London) The Young Londoners late 1960s – early 1970s
“The show is structured through areas of London that were known for attracting queer communities and related imagemaking practices,” he explains.
“This might be open air sites where men could see and be seen, such as Highgate Men’s Pond or the Serpentine Lido, but it also includes areas that offered furnished rooms for rent that were popular with single gay men, such as Pimlico or Notting Hill.”
Interesting adjacencies are revealed, such as the fact that artist Patrick Procktor had a studio in Marylebone in the same street as physique photographer Bill Green (who traded under the name Vince).
Many of the works in the show are being exhibited at the gallery for the first time, including a set of archetypes, ‘The Londoners’, documented in the late 60s by Anthony C Burls (who traded as Cain of London) and Martin Spenceley’s street portraits, photographed in Euston in the 80s.
It also highlights fascinating historical objects such as an original 1950s posing pouch, which has its origins in the US Athletic Model Guild established by Bob Mizer in 1945, but was widely used by gay physique photographers to show as much of the male body as possible.
In bringing the show to life, O’Neill hopes to demonstrate how this fascinating pocket of queer history has gone on to influence visual culture more broadly. “The movement certainly informed the body consciousness of queer visual culture,” he says, “but I would argue that it’s intertwined history with the emergence of men’s fashion in the 1950s and 60s has played a significant role in contemporary queer style positions, both naked and dressed.”
Anthony C Burls (Cain of London) Untitled (Carnie) 1960s
As far as I know this photograph is not in the exhibition but I like it!
A secret history
All this explains why, as the tools of photography became cheaper and more widely available, from the 1920s and 30s onwards a clandestine visual culture emerged. During the 1930s stunning images of athletic male physiques could be associated with the general social trend towards hiking and healthy outdoor activities. During the Second World War photographers were encouraged to take photos of our brave boys looking butch and manly. After the war publishers gained more confidence but were still liable for arrest and confiscation of stock. It was only really in the later 1960s that, along with so many other social movement, gay men felt increasing confidence in depicting their lifestyles and objects of desire openly.
Throughout the period there is a continual interplay and overlap between licit and illicit ways of visualising the male body: the naked athlete trope ultimately derived from statues of ancient Greek and Roman men. Images of tough soldiers could walk a narrow line between being heterosexual propaganda and gay adoration. Young men sunbathing could be following European models of health and fitness. Models and precedents from heterosexual art and culture were continually being subtly reworked, the borderline between legal art and illegal ‘obscenity’ shimmered and wavered within individual images, different definitions of desire fight in single photographs.
Anyway, the repression gay photos were liable to be subject to at any moment explains why a good deal of this visual culture was underground or hidden. Some gay publications were subscription only, others were available as a sideline in otherwise ‘respectable’ book and art shops. In the 60s and 70s more magazines and specialist shops came out of the closet.
Curator: The exhibition is curated by Kara Felt, assistant curator of art at the Denver Botanic Gardens and a former Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow in the department of photographs at the National Gallery of Art, with the organisational assistance of Diane Waggoner, Curator of Photographs, National Gallery of Art.
Gilles Peress (French, b. 1946) NORTHERN IRELAND. Belfast. Summer evening 1989 Gelatin silver print Corcoran Collection Museum Purchase with funds donated by the Marlin Miller, Jr. Family Foundation and by exchange: John Bryant and Patricia Bauman
I lived through these years in Britain.
Strikes, unemployment, high inflation and economic failure New Right, monetarist ideas and the free market economy The Troubles The Winter of Discontent The queens silver jubilee Glam Rock, punk and then New Romantics; disco and then HiNRG Aston Martin, Triumph TR7, two door Capri and MGB GT Falklands War Charles and Diana 1984-1985 miners’ strike Recession North-South divide Gay Liberation, women’s liberation Clause 28 HIV/AIDS Brixton Riots (September 1985) Racism and the National Front Victorian values and moral behaviour vs the permissive society
and Margaret Thatcher
That one name still sends shivers down my spine.
The photographs in this posting capture the grittiness of those years… and the surreality of the lived experience. From my perspective, I worked really hard and partied even harder at clubs such as Scandals, Adams, Bang and Heaven. I spent as much as I earnt and careered around London in my beloved Mini 1275 GT as fast as I could, listening to David Bowie, Barry White and the Love Unlimited Orchestra, Pink Floyd, and the inimitable Grace Jones.
In black and white, Graham Smith’s Bennetts Corner (Giro Corner), the Erimus Club and Commercial Pub, South Bank, Middlesbrough (1982, below) perfectly encapsulates the depressive, dank mood of the country during these years. The meaning of “Giro corner” in the title references a place where people would go, in this case two pubs, to spend their Giro cheque: an unemployment or income support payment by giro cheque, posted fortnightly.
In colour, Martin Parr’s two photographs of New Brighton, Merseyside(1984, below) reference the absurdity of the British at play: leisure time in “new” Brighton on Mersyside in North West England (many miles from the affluent Brighton on the south coast of England) – eating surrounded by rubbish and relaxing on a hard concrete ramp with crying baby, while other artists capture the isolation of individuals, their working class lives and middle class pretensions.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the National Gallery of Art for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Profound changes in British society in the 1970s and 1980s inspired a revolution in British photography. This Is Britain highlights the socially conscious photographers who captured this moment in time, among them Vanley Burke, Pogus Caesar, Anna Fox, Paul Graham, Sunil Gupta, Chris Killip, Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen, and Martin Parr. The exhibition features some 45 newly acquired prints in the National Gallery of Art’s collection. It brings together works by photographers who explored the national identity as Britain grappled with deindustrialisation, uprisings in inner cities, the Troubles in Northern Ireland, and the controversial policies of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. The exhibition also includes Handsworth Songs (1986, below), a 59-minute film on the uprisings that rocked London and Birmingham in 1985. It was produced by the Black Audio Film Collective and directed by John Akomfrah. The exhibition is organised by the National Gallery of Art.
Text from the National Gallery of Art website
Anna Fox (British, b. 1961) Advertising Agency, Docklands Enterprise Zone 1988 From the series Work Stations Chromogenic print Image (visible): 44.5 x 54.8 cm (17 1/2 x 21 9/16 in.) Framed: 68.5 x 83.8 cm (26 15/16 x 33 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
Anna Fox (British, b. 1961) Conference and Exhibitions Organiser, Euston. Personal Assistant to the Director 1988, printed later From the series Work Stations Chromogenic print Image (visible): 44.5 x 54.8cm (17 1/2 x 21 9/16 in.) Framed: 68.5 x 83.8cm (26 15/16 x 33 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
Anna Fox (British, b. 1961) Cafe, the City. Salesperson 1988 From the series Work Stations Chromogenic print Image (visible): 44.5 x 54.8cm (17 1/2 x 21 9/16 in.) Framed: 68.5 x 83.8cm (26 15/16 x 33 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
Britain experienced profound changes in the 1970s and 1980s, when it was racked by deindustrialization, urban uprisings, the controversial policies of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Photography became a central form of creative expression during this period, supported and disseminated through new schools, galleries, artists’ collectives, magazines, and government funding.
This Is Britain brings together the work of a generation of photographers who were commenting on the deep unrest of these pivotal decades. Vanley Burke, Pogus Caesar, Anna Fox, Paul Graham, Sunil Gupta, Chris Killip, Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen, Martin Parr, and others pictured communities, traditions, and landscapes affected by Britain’s shifting social and economic realities. Together, they photographed a nation redefining what it meant to be British and, ultimately, modern.
Text from the National Gallery of Art website
Profound changes in British society in the 1970s and 1980s inspired a revolution in British photography. This Is Britain: Photographs from the 1970s and 1980s highlights the work of socially conscious photographers who captured this period of unrest. The exhibition features some 45 newly acquired prints by Vanley Burke, Pogus Caesar, Anna Fox, Paul Graham, Sunil Gupta, Chris Killip, Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen, Martin Parr, and others. It brings together photographers who examined national identity as Britain grappled with deindustrialisation, uprisings in inner cities, the Troubles in Northern Ireland, and the sometimes controversial policies of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. On view on the Ground Floor of the National Gallery’s West Building from January 29 through June 11, 2023, the exhibition also features the film Handsworth Songs (1986). The 59-minute film, produced by the Black Audio Film Collective and directed by John Akomfrah, explores uprisings in London and Birmingham in 1985. Reece Auguiste, a member of the Black Audio Film Collective, is the guest curator for an accompanying film program.
Beginning in the 1970s, photography gained its contemporary prominence in Britain, with a rapidly expanding network of galleries, artists’ collectives, schools, and magazines dedicated to promoting the medium. Immigrants and artists of colour, reflecting Britain’s growing multiculturalism, introduced fresh perspectives, as did the many women who entered the field. A generation of young photographers moved from largely black-and-white, documentary styles to more conceptual and often humorous projects in colour in the 1980s. As photographers forged new directions, they pictured a country redefining what it meant to be British and, ultimately, modern.
“This Is Britain tells history on an intimate scale, highlighting stories we may have otherwise missed. The addition of these photographs to the National Gallery’s collection allows us to reflect on two decades of artistic innovation and celebrate the talented, diverse group of creators who captured them. We hope that this exhibition inspires visitors, as they contemplate some of the highs and lows experienced by British citizens in the ’70s and ’80s,” said Kaywin Feldman, director of the National Gallery of Art.
Exhibition overview
This Is Britain: Photographs from the 1970s and 1980s focuses on the work of photographers who recorded ways of life that were under threat or disappearing in those tumultuous decades. John Davies’s expansive view of Agecroft Power Station, Salford (1983) emphasises the displacement of industrial structures. Paul Graham’s elegiac series A1: The Great North Road (1982) examines the shift away from the A1 – a major thoroughfare from London to Edinburgh – to the newer, more direct M1 motorway, resulting in businesses along the former highway to suffer. With their forlorn colours and barren spaces, his pictures challenged the expectation that photography on social themes should be in black and white. Reflecting Britain’s growing immigration and multiculturalism during this period of modernisation, Vanley Burke’s Boy with Flag, Winford in Handsworth Park (1970) pictures a Black youth proudly displaying the Union Jack from his bike.
Many artists in the 1980s continued exploring colour photography, using intense hues inspired by advertising to poke fun at the rise of leisure activities, consumerism, and corporate greed. The series The Last Resort (1983-1986) by Martin Parr, arguably Britain’s most influential living photographer, surveys seaside tourists in New Brighton with acerbic wit. Chris Steele-Perkins’s decade-long project The Pleasure Principle (1980-1989) captures Margaret Thatcher’s England through surreal images, such as Hypnosis Demonstration, Cambridge University Ball. Six photographs from Anna Fox’s Work Stations (1987-1988) signal the competition and stress of London office life in the late 1980s. Sunil Gupta strikes a more polemical tone in his series “Pretended” Family Relationships (1988) by responding to Thatcher’s policy prohibiting the promotion of gay and lesbian lifestyles.
The final room presents Handsworth Songs (1986, 59 minutes), a landmark nonfiction film that connects the civil unrest in London and the Handsworth section of Birmingham in 1985 with Britain’s colonial past, weaving contemporary reports and interviews with historical footage and photographs. The film, produced by the Black Audio Film Collective and directed by the acclaimed filmmaker John Akomfrah, features a soundtrack that mixes reggae and post-punk with industrial noises and voiceovers.
Press release from the National Gallery of Art, Washington
Punk Rock, record unemployment, urban uprisings, Margaret Thatcher, the Troubles in Northern Ireland: profound changes shook British society and inspired a revolution in photography in the 1970s and 1980s. A generation of young photographers used their cameras to comment on the deep unrest of these pivotal decades. With a keen eye for social critique and a spirit of rebellion, they photographed a country redefining what it meant to be British and, ultimately, modern.
Photography during this period became a central form of creative expression, fuelled by a rapidly expanding network of galleries, museum departments, artists’ collectives, schools, and magazines dedicated to the medium. Immigrants and artists of colour, reflecting the nation’s growing multiculturalism, introduced new perspectives, as did the many women who entered the field.
Moving from largely black-and-white, documentary styles toward more conceptual projects in colour, photographers adopted new strategies to examine national identity. In the face of severe economic dislocation, widespread civil disorder, and Prime Minister Thatcher’s controversial policies, these artists declared: This is Britain.
Documenting the Deindustrial Revolution
The decline of British heavy industry in the 1970s led to labor disputes and high unemployment in the early 1980s. As the country prioritised modern technologies and greater efficiency, photographers recorded the communities, structures, and ways of life that were under threat or disappearing. Graham Smith and Vanley Burke portrayed people they had known for decades, while Chris Killip, Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen, and Gilles Peress undertook long-term projects to create intimate yet often bleak photographs of life on the margins of society. Paul Graham and John Davies explored England’s uneasy embrace of the future by showing the people and places being left behind. While these photographers held no real hope of inspiring change, they shared an earnest concern for who and what was being lost as the nation modernised.
Picturing Absurdity in the Thatcher Years
As the leader of the Conservative Party from 1975 and as prime minister from 1979 to 1990, Margaret Thatcher was a polarising figure in Britain. She oversaw the development of an American-style free market economy, the resurgence of British nationalism, and major cutbacks to public spending (famously declaring that “there is no such thing” as society). During the Thatcher years, photographers Martin Parr and Anna Fox used the brash colours of advertising to poke fun at the rise of leisure activities, consumerism, and corporate greed. Combining text and image, Karen Knorr and Sunil Gupta considered how traditional English institutions sidelined women, people of colour, and gay and lesbian communities. Their works openly satirise long-held traditions and question emerging values in British society.
Wall text from the exhibition
Tony Ray-Jones (English, 1941-1972) Butlin’s Holiday Camp, Scarborough 1968 Gelatin silver print Image: 15.8 x 24.8cm (6 1/4 x 9 3/4 in.) Sheet: 35.8 x 28cm (14 1/8 x 11 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
Karen Knorr (American born Germany, b. 1954) A mood of Highly Coloured Naturalism 1983 From the series Country Life Gelatin silver print mounted on board Image: 40.2 x 40.9cm (15 13/16 x 16 1/8 in.) Sheet: 60.7 x 51cm (23 7/8 x 20 1/16 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
Karen Knorr (American born Germany, b. 1954) Newspapers are no longer ironed, Coins no longer boiled So far have Standards Fallen 1981-1983, printed 2015 From the series Gentlemen Gelatin silver print Image: 40.6 × 40.5cm (16 × 15 15/16 in.) Sheet: 61.5 × 50.7cm (24 3/16 × 19 15/16 in.) Mat: 71 × 55.8cm (27 15/16 × 21 15/16 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
Karen Knorr (American born Germany, b. 1954) We owe it to the Free world not to Allow Brutal Forces to succeed. When the Rule of law Breaks down, the World takes a further Step towards Chaos 1981-1983, printed 2015 From the series Gentlemen Gelatin silver print Image: 40.5 x 40.7cm (15 15/16 x 16 in.) Sheet: 60.8 x 50.5cm (23 15/16 x 19 7/8 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
Chris Killip (Isle of Man, 1946-2020) Margaret, Rosie, and Val, Seacoal Camp, Lynemouth, Northumberland 1983 Gelatin silver print Image: 40.5 x 50.5cm (15 15/16 x 19 7/8 in.) Sheet: 47.8 x 57.6cm (18 13/16 x 22 11/16 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
Colin Jones (English, 1936-2021) The Black House, London 1973-1976 Gelatin silver print Image: 33.8 x 49.1cm (13 5/16 x 19 5/16 in.) Sheet: 41 x 50.8cm (16 1/8 x 20 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
Vanley Burke (British born Jamaica, b. 1951) Young Men on See-Saw, Handsworth Park, Birmingham 1984, printed 2021 Gelatin silver print Image: 30.1 x 45.4cm (11 7/8 x 17 7/8 in.) Sheet: 40.4 x 50.5cm (15 7/8 x 19 7/8 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
Vanley Burke (British born Jamaica, b. 1951) Boy with Flag, Winford in Handsworth Park 1970, printed 2022 Gelatin silver print National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen (Finland, b. 1948) Young Couple in a Backyard on a Summer’s Day 1975, printed 2012 Gelatin silver print Image: 36.1 × 39.3cm (14 3/16 × 15 1/2 in.) Sheet: 40.4 × 50.5cm (15 7/8 × 19 7/8 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund Courtesy L. Parker Stephenson Photographs
John Davies (British, b. 1949) Agecroft Power Station, Salford 1983 Gelatin silver print Image: 37.6 × 56.1cm (14 13/16 × 22 1/16 in.) Sheet: 50.5 × 60.4cm (19 7/8 × 23 3/4 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund Courtesy L. Parker Stephenson Photographs
Graham Smith (British, b. 1947) Bennetts Corner (Giro Corner), the Erimus Club and Commercial Pub, South Bank, Middlesbrough 1982, printed 2008 Gelatin silver print Image: 37.4 x 47cm (14 3/4 x 18 1/2 in.) Sheet: 47.7 x 57.4cm (18 3/4 x 22 5/8 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
Paul Graham (British, b. 1956) Café Assistants, Compass Café, Colsterworth, Lincolnshire November 1982 Chromogenic print Image: 19.4 x 24cm (7 5/8 x 9 7/16 in.) Sheet: 27.4 x 35cm (10 13/16 x 13 3/4 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
Tom Wood (Irish, b. 1951) Between Chester and Birkenhead 1989 Vintage gelatin silver print Image: 17.2 x 26.1cm (6 3/4 x 10 1/4 in.) Sheet: 27.9 x 35.2cm (11 x 13 7/8 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
Tom Wood (Irish, b. 1951) Lime Street 1995, printed 1997 Analogue hand print Image: 19 x 25.6 cm (7 1/2 x 10 1/16 in.) Sheet: 19.8 x 27.2cm (7 13/16 x 10 11/16 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
Sunil Gupta on Community and Activism
Sunil Gupta, photographer, curator, writer, and activist has maintained a visionary approach to photography, producing bodies of work with keen social and political commentary. Gupta’s diasporic experience of multiple cultures informs a practice dedicated to themes of race, migration, and queer identity. His photographic projects – born from a desire to see himself and others like him represented in art history – draw upon his own life as a point of departure.
The Arnold Newman Lecture Series on Photography provides a forum for leading photographers, primarily known for portraits, to discuss contemporary issues in the medium. Arnold Newman (1918-2006) is acknowledged as one of the great masters of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries whose work changed portraiture. The Arnold and Augusta Newman Foundation generously supported this series to make such conversations available to the public.
A landmark in nonfiction filmmaking, Handsworth Songs was the first film directed by the Ghanaian-born artist John Akomfrah. It was produced by the Black Audio Film Collective (1982-1998), a group of experimental Black artists who examined the diasporic African and Asian experience in Britain. The film weaves archival footage with scenes, interviews, and pictures from contemporary events, including photographs by Vanley Burke, with a haunting soundtrack that mixes reggae and post-punk music with industrial noises and voiceovers. This layered structure connects Britain’s colonial past with unrest in London’s Tottenham and Brixton neighbourhoods and Birmingham’s Handsworth area in 1985. Today, Handsworth Songs reveals the solidarity shared by Britons of African and Asian descent in the face of inequality as it brings historical perspective to civil disturbances in the 1980s.
This film includes depictions of police violence and the use of racial slurs. Viewer discretion is advised.
Wall text from the exhibition
Chris Steele-Perkins (British, b. 1947) Hypnosis Demonstration, Cambridge University Ball 1980-1989 Silver dye bleach print Image: 25.4 × 38.1cm (10 × 15 in.) Sheet: 30.2 × 40.4cm (11 7/8 × 15 7/8 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
Paul Reas (British, b. 1955) Constable County, Flatford Mill, Suffolk c. 1992 From the series Flogging a Dead Horse Inkjet print image: 41 x 50.5cm (16 1/8 x 19 7/8 in.) Sheet: 50.5 x 61cm (19 7/8 x 24 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
National Gallery of Art National Mall between 3rd and 7th Streets Constitution Avenue NW, Washington
Projects: Ming Smith is organised by Thelma Golden, Director and Chief Curator, The Studio Museum in Harlem, and Oluremi C. Onabanjo, Associate Curator, Department of Photography, The Museum of Modern Art, with the assistance of Kaitlin Booher, Beaumont and Nancy Newhall Curatorial Fellow, Department of Photography, The Museum of Modern Art, and Habiba Hopson, Curatorial Assistant, The Studio Museum in Harlem.
Another fascinating, stimulating, challenging artist finally getting their due.
Music, spirit, transcendence, light, blur, dreams, improvisation, composition, jamming, joy, rhythm, respect, wonder, emotion, African American culture. Conjoined in a mysterious, reverent wistfulness…
“You don’t make art for money, especially as a Black artist. You do it because there is that need to create – and that has been part of my survival; that has helped me survive.”
I feel that too. Creativity has kept the black dog from the door, creativity has helped me survive. I’m sure it does for many artists.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Museum of Modern Art for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“You don’t make art for money, especially as a Black artist. You do it because there is that need to create – and that has been part of my survival; that has helped me survive.”
“My work as a photographer was to record, culturally, the period of time in which I lived – and I recorded it as an artist.”
“Oh no, it’s all discovery, it’s all improvisation. It’s like when jazz musicians solo. They improvise, and photography is definitely that, for me.”
“Whether I’m photographing a person on the street, someone I know, or on an assignment, I’m doing it because I admire them. I like the sense of exchange – they’re giving and I’m taking, but I’m also giving them something back. There were certain people who would understand what I was looking for and would try to give me a photograph by posing. Whatever I’m shooting, whether it’s a portrait or a place, my intention is to capture the feeling I have about that exchange and that energy.”
“I evolved as a photographer with the series Invisible Man [1990-1991], just like a jazz musician who plays the head [the known melody of a song] before they start improvising. Ralph Ellison’s book Invisible Man [1952] was an inspiration, especially the idea of what it means not to be seen, but I didn’t consciously set out to make work about it. I wanted to capture the feeling of painting and make photographs on an artistic scale. Living in a Black environment, the people I photographed didn’t have to put on any airs, they were just living their life. The series was about a feeling, an expression. Anyone could identify it. We were present but we weren’t there. We were visible but also invisible.”
“Living in Harlem was an authentic experience for me, and I was trying to capture that authenticity. I was living and my work came out of my life. I would go out with my camera to shoot events like the Million Youth March [1998] or meet musical figures like Dr. Edward Boatner or academics like Dr. John Henrik Clarke, and even watch Duke Ellington on TV – these people had so much history in them. Some people look at certain areas and only see the depravity and the struggle, but there’s so much love and genius there; there’s warmth. I think that was my motive in photographing Harlem, to communicate that warmth.”
Ming Smith
The Museum of Modern Art announces Projects: Ming Smith, on view in the Museum’s street-level galleries from February 4 through May 29, 2023. A photographer who has lived and worked in New York since the 1970s, Ming Smith has served as a precedent for a generation of artists engaging the politics and poetics of the photographic image. Through a deep exploration of the artist’s archive, the exhibition will offer a critical reintroduction to Smith’s work through her distinctive approach to movement, light, rhythm, and shadow, highlighting how she transforms the image from a document of photographic capture into a space of emotive expression.
Text from the MoMA website
The moody magic of a long exposure photograph | Ming Smith | UNIQLO ArtSpeaks
Photography curator Oluremi Onabanjo examines Smith’s 1991 “Invisible Man, Somewhere, Everywhere,” a poignant image from this series inspired by Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel “Invisible Man.”
Installation views of Projects: Ming Smith, on view at The Museum of Modern Art, New York from February 4, 2023 – May 29, 2023 Photos: Robert Gerhardt
The Museum of Modern Art announces Projects: Ming Smith, on view in the Museum’s street-level galleries from February 4 through May 29, 2023. A photographer who has lived and worked in New York since the 1970s, Ming Smith has served as a precedent for a generation of artists engaging the politics and poetics of the photographic image. Through a deep exploration of the artist’s archive, the exhibition will offer a critical reintroduction to Smith’s work through her distinctive approach to movement, light, rhythm, and shadow, highlighting how she transforms the image from a document of photographic capture into a space of emotive expression. Projects: Ming Smith is organised by Thelma Golden, Director and Chief Curator, The Studio Museum in Harlem, and Oluremi C. Onabanjo, Associate Curator, Department of Photography, The Museum of Modern Art, with the assistance of Kaitlin Booher, Beaumont and Nancy Newhall Curatorial Fellow, Department of Photography, The Museum of Modern Art, and Habiba Hopson, Curatorial Assistant, Permanent Collection, The Studio Museum in Harlem.
As Oluremi C. Onabanjo states, “For Ming Smith, the photographic medium is a site where the senses and the spirit collide. Calling attention to the synesthetic range of her photographic approach, this exhibition highlights how her images collapse the senses, encouraging us to attend to the hue of sound, the rhythm of form, and the texture of vision.” Works featured in the exhibition showcase a wide array of subjects, ranging from finely attuned studies of Black avant-garde musicians and dancers to depictions of everyday life in Harlem and Pittsburgh’s Hill District through photographic series made in response to Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man and August Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle of plays.
Projects: Ming Smith is the fourth exhibition in MoMA’s ongoing Projects collaboration with The Studio Museum in Harlem. It takes up the work of a photographer who is important to the history of both museums. MoMA was the first institution to acquire Smith’s work (in 1979), and the Studio Museum has shown Smith’s work since the beginning of her career, when she was the first female member of the trailblazing Black photography collective the Kamoinge Workshop.
Thelma Golden says, “Almost from the day she arrived in New York City, Ming Smith was at the centre of an extraordinary cultural ferment, contributing to the Black Arts Movement while creating a space for herself within Harlem’s legendary Kamoinge Workshop. Working for over five decades, her contribution to modern photography is deeply significant – she continues to influence countless photographers through her singular documentation of, society’s humanity and pageantry. I’m thrilled that audiences who know her work will have the opportunity to revisit and reappraise her many achievements, and that new audiences will have the excitement of discovering her graceful, stunning images through Projects: Ming Smith.”
Projects: Ming Smith is accompanied by Ming Smith: Invisible Man, Somewhere, Everywhere, a new volume in MoMA’s One on One series, written by Oluremi C. Onabanjo. The book provides a sustained meditation on Smith’s photograph Invisible Man, Somewhere, Everywhere (1991) in MoMA’s collection.
Press release from the Museum of Modern Art
Introduction
For Ming Smith, photography is a site where the senses and the spirit collide through the prism of light. “I’m dealing with all these elements, getting that precise moment,” Smith has said. “Getting the feeling, the way the light hits the person – to put it simply, these pieces are like the blues.”
Projects: Ming Smith offers a critical reintroduction to a photographer who has lived in New York since the 1970s, and whose work has served as a precedent for generations of artists engaging the politics and the poetics of the photographic image in relation to experiences of Blackness. Through her skilful deployment of long exposures – which involves slowing the shutter speed of the camera lens to render movement as blur – Smith dissolves the boundaries between her subjects and their surroundings. Her dreamlike, abstract compositions are led by intuition and perfected through repetition.
The result of a deep dive into Smith’s archive, this exhibition reckons with the crucial position of this artist in the history of photography, and in the institutional memories of both The Museum of Modern Art and The Studio Museum in Harlem. MoMA was the first institution to acquire Smith’s work (in 1979), and the Studio Museum has shown Smith’s work since the beginning of her career, when she was the first female member of the trailblazing Black photography collective the Kamoinge Workshop. Bridging the distance between the present and the past, Projects: Ming Smith creates a photographic portal through which to encounter Smith’s images anew. It highlights how her pictures collapse the senses, encouraging us to attend to the hue of sound, the rhythm of form, and the texture of vision.
Text from the Museum of Modern Art
Installation view of Projects: Ming Smith, on view at The Museum of Modern Art, New York from February 4, 2023 – May 29, 2023 Photo: Robert Gerhardt
Page from Projects: Ming Smith extended labels (photographs below)
The stellar photographer Ming Smith remembers walking past the Museum of Modern Art when she was in her early 20s and telling herself, “I’m going to be in that museum one day.”
Anyone hearing her might have thought: Dream on. This was the 1970s. Smith was Black, female, new to New York City, with zero art credentials of the kind demanded by any museum of even the brashest up-and-comer, which Smith – a self-described low-key loner – was not.
But even then some changes were afoot – a few, isolated, sporadic – for artists and institutions alike. In 1979, in response to an open call by MoMA’s photography department for new work, Smith dropped off her portfolio. (The receptionist assumed she was a courier.) The museum bought two pictures, making her the first Black woman photographer to enter MoMA’s collection.
Forty years later came another landmark. In 2019, when MoMA opened its new Geffen Wing and the Studio Museum in Harlem, where Smith had shown over several decades, closed to build its new home, the two institutions began collaborating on exhibitions at MoMA’s Midtown and Long Island City locations.
The current show, called “Projects: Ming Smith,” installed on the ground floor at MoMA on 53rd Street (which has free public access), is the latest of these joint ventures, and it’s a beauty. With 52 pictures, mostly black and white, several being exhibited for the first time anywhere, it gives a good sense of Smith’s subject range and of her distinctive, self-invented style: improvisatory, multilayered, painterly, shadow-soaked, with images blurred as if shot at very high or low velocity, or viewed through retreating memory, or a volcanic rain.
Born in Detroit, raised in Columbus, Ohio, Smith started taking pictures when she was young – her pharmacist father was an amateur photographer – and learned the formal ropes as she went. While majoring in premed biology at Howard University she took a photography class and was told by the teacher that, given her race and gender, her prospects of a career in that field were next to nil. After graduating in 1971, she moved to New York City, where she supported herself as a fashion model, and kept taking pictures.
She soon plugged into a crucial support system. In 1972 she joined the Kamoinge Workshop, a Black photography collective based in Harlem. Kamoinge’s first female member, she participated in their notoriously hard-hitting group crits and for a while worked closely with one of the originating members, Anthony Barboza, accompanying him on a working trip to Senegal.
As was clear from a traveling survey of Kamoinge artists organised by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in 2020 – it later came to the Whitney Museum – the collective’s original members were eclectic in their styles and interests. But almost all their work adhered to the genre loosely known as “street photography,” grounded in a direct capturing of images, candid and unposed, of everyday life, with results that were documentary in effect and humanistic in intent. Smith’s work basically comes out of this aesthetic too, but also radically, romantically departs from it.
Many of her images, including the 1972 “Raise Your Window High,” the show’s earliest entry, are of city life, which became a long-term subject. A selection of Harlem-related pictures includes shots of the Apollo Theater marquee, a church service in progress, Alvin Ailey’s 1989 funeral, and a fist-pumping rally for the 1998 Million Youth March.
At the same time, much of her urban photography is not event-oriented, or even geographically specific. A series of photos taken in Pittsburgh in 1991, conceived as a visual response to a series of plays by August Wilson set there, could, by the look of them, have been shot in almost any city. A woman and child sit pensively on a Greyhound bus. A man in a pool hall practices cue moves. A dark silhouette of a figure trudges at night down a snow-covered street. Mood, not place or even people, is the real subject here. The title of the snowstorm picture, “Invisible Man, Somewhere, Everywhere,” says as much. So does the fact that the image once appeared in a MoMA show devoted to New York City.
Smith is a longtime jazz and blues devotee. She married a musician (saxophonist David Murray) and has photographed many. A visual equivalent of jazz performance has produced her most experimental work. Applied to street photography’s fairly set subject matter, her use of quick, reflexive shooting, manipulated shutter speeds, and multiple exposure printing opens the possibility for perceptual accident, and for improvisation, to be followed wherever it might lead, which is often in an abstracting direction. In addition, her penchant for framing small areas of light in fields of prevailing darkness gives a bluesy cast to all of this.
The show’s organisers — Thelma Golden, director of the Studio Museum in Harlem, and Oluremi C. Onabanjo, an associate curator of photography at MoMA, working with curatorial fellows Kaitlin Booher and Habiba Hopson – provide a chance to consider a wide and varied sampling of work at a glance in a group of 17 photographs from the 1970s and ’80s, printed large and small, and installed up and across a high gallery wall.
Many of Smith’s favoured subjects are here: city life, performance, travel. A white cloth whips in the wind on a tenement clothesline. The moon, a vortex of brightness, hangs tangled in trees in a Tokyo park. Alvin Ailey dancers flicker like vigil lights in a dark theater. Saxophonist Pharoah Sanders looks rock-solid onstage in New York while another musician, Sun Ra, is clearly an ET about to lift off, his sparkling gold scarf streaming like a comet tail behind him.
There’s a street-level mystic at work in Smith’s art. You sense it in her tremorous cityscapes, especially in her images of people – the primary subject, after all, of street photography. She shoots straightforward portraits, sometimes identifying the sitter by name (composer Edward Boatner; dancer Judith Jamison; writer Amiri Baraka), sometimes not. She makes self-portraits, though they’re hard to read. In one from 1992 called “Womb,” which Smith shot on a trip to Egypt, she appears to be emanating, barely materialised, from a pyramid behind her.
And then there are what I can only call holy pictures in which charismatic figures are transcendentally lifted up. In one, from 1979, titled “James Baldwin in Setting Sun Over Harlem,” Smith, using double exposure, overlays very faintly a photo she took of Baldwin onto a skyscape of light-shot dark clouds. In a second picture using the same technique, she floats above the city the visage of the immortal Harlem photographer James Van Der Zee. Sure, these images are just blatant hero worship. They’re also, like so much of Smith’s art, just wow.
Holland Cotter. “Ming Smith’s Poetic Blur,” on The New York Times website 16 February 2023 [Online] Cited 19/02/2023
“The image is always moving, even if you’re standing still.”
Ming Smith
“I like catching the moment, catching the light, and the way it plays out,” the photographer Ming Smith has said. “I go with my intuition… it’s about always looking at lines and the quality of the movement. It’s about seeking energy, breath, and light. The image is always moving, even if you’re standing still.”1 For Smith, these are the central tenets of her approach to image-making: a practice attuned to bodily movement and spatial relations that maintains a commitment to the poetry of light and shadow.
In the early 1970s, Smith arrived in New York City after graduating from Howard University. She had studied microbiology and chemistry, but took the university’s only photography class to sustain a passion for the image inculcated in her by her father. Supporting herself as a model while shooting on the city streets, Smith spent time in Anthony Barboza’s studio and met photographers such as Louis Draper and Joe Crawford, swiftly becoming immersed in fiery debates about the stakes of photography as an art form.2 In 1972, Draper invited Smith to join The Kamoinge Workshop, a collective of African American photographers who gathered weekly to review and critique each other’s work. Its name derived from the Kikuyu word for “a group of people acting together,” Kamoinge was founded in 1963 and emerged as a shared political and artistic space for photographic improvement and, especially, self-determination. It was a powerful sentiment at a time of pivotal gains for the US Civil Rights Movement and decolonization across the African continent.
Joining Kamoinge was transformational for Smith’s photography and self-perception as an artist. She cut her teeth as a photographer and sharpened her conceptual focus, mining the structural and psychological tensions that animate experiences of Blackness. By turns dense and diaphanous, Smith’s pictures sustain hefty blacks alongside frothy swirls of gray and white. These mercurial, moody scenes resist spectacular clarity or straightforward interpretation. As historian and curator Maurice Berger has said, “Ms. Smith’s subjects are often suspended between visibility and invisibility: faces turned away, or are blurred or shrouded in shadow, mist or darkness, a potent metaphor of the struggle for African-American visibility in a culture in which black men and women were disparaged, erased or ignored.”3 In this way, Smith gives shape to the quotidian idiosyncrasies of Black life.
In an unending oscillation between light and darkness, Smith revels in the emotive elements of her subjects. Key to this is the photographer’s command of the blur, which critic Jessica Lynne succinctly defines as “the technique by which Smith collapses the boundaries between a photograph’s subject and its background.”4 Executed with rhythmic pacing and maintaining an acuity of vision, her engagement with sonic and lyrical forms is particularly notable. Subjects and captions refer to the plays of August Wilson, the words of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), and the music of Marvin Gaye and Billie Holiday, John Coltrane and David Murray. These intertextual references bring forward recognizable figures while affirming the function of these photographs as speculative compositions, shaped through intuition. “In the art of photography, I’m dealing with light, I’m dealing with all these elements, getting that precise moment,” Smith has said. “Getting the feeling, getting the way the light hits the person – to put it simply, these pieces are like the blues.”5
Oluremi C. Onabanjo, Associate Curator, The Robert B. Menschel Department of Photography, 2022
1/ Ming Smith quoted in “A Portrait of the Artist: Ming Smith in Conversation with Janet Hill Talbert,” in Ming Smith (New York & Dallas: Aperture & Documentary Arts, 2020). 15.
In Mother and Child Deciding (1991), a young woman is seated at a diner booth with a child, both bundled in winter jackets. Her body is turned to the right, with her leg hoisted onto the booth’s seat, revealing a worn sneaker; her right elbow is placed on the booth’s table, and her little finger touches her lower lip. Her turned face and her outward gaze into the middle distance indicate that she is contemplating the menu posted on a board, or the photographs hung on the wall above the wood paneling. But her wistful face tells us that her thoughts are occupied by worries that have accompanied her here – worries that she cannot share with the child.
Art Blart _ art and cultural memory archive 
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